Just received noticed that I’ve been accepted to perform my piece S(h)immer at the 21st Century Guitar conference/festival, which will take place in Ottawa from Aug 22-25 and looks to be a fascinating event. I will also be playing as part of a teleconferenced improvisation with William Beauvais and will give a lecture on my compositional work for guitar on the 25th. Here’s a video of a pretty loose first performance of S(h)immer from last spring. It should be a lot tighter this summer!

Details have been announced for ONMC’s Cowan-Cicchilitti Guitar Duo concert on October 13. The event will take place at 8 pm at the Cube Gallery at 1285 Wellington St. W. My new composition Warp (completed yesterday) will be performed. It is written almost entirely for harmonics on two guitars in different tunings that allow for every pitch class to be sounded as a natural harmonic, with emphasis on the fifth harmonic (14 cents flat, relative to equal temperament) at cadences. Adam and Steve sounded great when we workshopped the piece.

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/288533808406078/

A preliminary programme is up for the AMS/SMT joint conference in San Antonio in November here.

Melvin Backstrom and I are scheduled to present our analysis of the Grateful Dead’s “Blues for Allah” on Thursday, Nov 1, in an SMT panel titled “Floyd and the Dead” (!), chaired by John Covach (!!).

The authors of the programme seemed to have shifted both of our locations one major city to the east, however, placing Melvin in Quebec City and myself in Montreal.

The updated, ad-free version of this site has now been registered for its own domain at: https://sundarsubramanianmusic.com

I have finally shelled out and upgraded my WordPress plan. You will no longer be subjected to ads when you visit!

I just recently found some reviews from February of this year. Surprisingly, Owen Maxwell of Ottawa Life Magazine positively reviewed the 1996 tape by my teenage screamo/lo-fi/noise-rock band the Skies Beg to Differ as a new release.

Kevin Jagernauth’s summary: Well, it took 22 years, but the first thing I ever recorded and released into the world — The Skies Beg To Differ debut album — has finally been reviewed, somehow, as a new release (thanks Bandcamp algorithms I guess?).

Mostly, I’m pretty pleased to read something I’ve played on described with the words “guttural blues-scream.”

Also, Jonathan Blumhofer of Arts Fuse reviewed the Hub New Music concert from Clark. He was not entirely convinced by my piece Songs of Friction but I appreciate that he listened closely and critically.

I just received word from Ottawa New Music Creators that I was selected to compose a piece for an upcoming concert by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Guitar Duo. The concert will take place on October 13 at a location that has yet to be determined.

A lot of students are saving their work for release on their own pages or via other services but I’m proud to share two pieces from Dylan Tovey’s MUSC270 (Senior Computer Music Tutorial) portfolio:

From MUSC142 (Recording Practice and Audio Art), Ethan Moncur’s “Don’t Talk”:

I put together this short Youtube playlist of my guitar/laptop performances from Ottawa and Edmonton in Spring 2018.

Here is the proposal that Melvin Backstrom and I submitted to the Society for Music Theory that was accepted for the November conference in San Antonio – “The Grateful Dead’s ‘Blues for Allah’: Syncretic Composition in Mid-1970s Rock Music”. This includes the abstract and supplementary diagrams.