Volume 25 Issue 4 - December 2019 / January 2020

December’s
Child is
Brian Current
I’m so grateful that my parents
made me practise – I still use the
piano in my work every day.
Composer and conductor Brian Current is co-artistic director,
along with Robert Aitken, of New Music Concerts and has been
composer adviser for the RCM’s 21C Music Festival. He’s the
director of the New Music Ensemble at the RCM Glenn Gould School,
and the main conductor for Continuum Contemporary Music.
As a conductor he leads a wide range of 20th/21st century repertoire,
and is the champion of close to a hundred works by Canadian
composers including commissioned premieres by Linda Catlin Smith,
Brian Harman, Christopher Mayo, Bekah Simms, So Jeong Ahn,
Andrew Staniland, Alice Ho and many others.
Current’s compositions are programmed frequently by major
professional orchestras, opera companies and ensembles across
Canada and internationally. The Naxos recording of his opera Airline
Icarus won the 2015 JUNO Award, Classical Composition of the
Year. He was the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commissioning
Competition in 2016. Current’s 2017 opera, Missing, with Métis
playwright Marie Clements, is about Canada’s missing and
murdered Indigenous women. Missing has just completed a tour
of Victoria, Regina, and Prince George and was featured on our
November 2019 cover.
Current was born in London Ontario, and grew up in Ottawa
with his older brother Grant and younger sister Catherine. “Both my
parents and siblings are very musical. My parents still sing in the
Ottawa Choral Society. They may be its longest-serving members. My
Dad played Gershwin and Chopin at our living-room piano, and my
Mom still plays piano in retirement homes around Ottawa.”
If a friendly child asks what your job is? I draw the music so people
know what to play. I also wave my arms so people know when and
how to play it.
Where did hearing music fit into your life, growing up? In the car
with my parents. Listening to my 80s cassette Walkman while delivering
The Globe and Mail (before 7am! Ottawa winter!) as a teenager.
Your very first recollection of making up music yourself? Trying
to fake out my mom by pretending to practise Mozart and Beethoven,
but rather attempting (poorly) to improvise in that style. She knew.
First instruments other than your own voice? Piano, guitar and
euphonium.
A first music teacher? I’d go to the home of Karen Sutherland who
was a fantastic local teacher with a half-dozen children of her own.
Early collaborative experiences? My first ensemble experience was
as a choirboy at Christchurch Cathedral where the starting salary was
$2.10 per week.
After high school? I didn’t know that formal composition as an art
form was a thing, but I nevertheless somehow convinced my parents
that I should study piano and composition, rather than commerce,
at McGill.
When did composing music arise? I knew before high school that I
wanted to compose but didn’t know about any existing practices until
John Rea inspiringly introduced the composition world to us in a third
year undergrad introduction class at McGill.
When did you first conduct? I wrote a piece for tenor, bassoon,
overtone singing, bowed banjo and piano and needed to put it
together for a concert, and just did it. The first time conducting professional
musicians was the National Arts Centre Orchestra in my 20s
and it was terrifying but a huge learning experience.
Experiences that formed your adult musical appetites? When I
was in the Ottawa Youth Choir, we performed Michael Colgrass’ The
Earth’s A Baked Apple which was like music from another planet at
the time, and in retrospect was a fantastic introduction to contemporary
music.
When did you began to think of yourself as a career musician?
I still don’t know about this. It remains a struggle. We should all ask
ourselves every five years if this life is for us.
Ever think you would do something else? My secret other fantasy
job is to be a political journalist in foreign countries for Harpers, The
Atlantic, NPR.
Music-making in your own family today? My three kids take piano
and violin, but I don’t push them to be professional musicians. More, I
would just like them to get a glimpse of the world that I work in daily
and love. When the kids were little – one still is – we would listen to
Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, or the Goldberg Variations every night
as they went to sleep. We would listen to the same pieces for years and
not get tired of them.
What should we say to parents/grandparents hoping their young
children will grow up to love and make music? They won’t regret it if
they take music lessons, or if they are introduced to great works.
UPCOMING
Brian Current is a proud Toronto resident who bikes around to
rehearsals. He has three kids, a ridiculously accomplished wife
and a small white dog. Outside of music he enjoys time with his
kids, reading, travel and playing (but not watching) hockey.
For January 19 (21C Festival at Mazzolini Hall), and
February 13 (New Music Concerts at Harbourfront), please see
“Congratulations to our Winners!” on page 77
On May 7 we bring the Glenn Gould School ensemble to the
movies, performing with an orchestra alongside projected film
and moving images, in collaboration with the Toronto Images
Festival. It’s free!
Look out for a new opera about Glenn Gould climbing along the
inner wall of The Royal Conservatory, way up in the air, as part of
the 21C Festival in January 2021.
There has been some OAC funding and other interest in producing
a recording of my oratorio The River of Light, a full evening
work for choir, orchestra and soloists that premiered in Vancouver
last May. It looks at Dante’s vision of “light in the form of a river”
from the point of view of writers across Canada from different
backgrounds: Jewish, Chinese, Indigenous, secular, Christian,
Islamic and Hindu. We’re planning to record it with the Amadeus
Choir and a local orchestra.
78 | December 2019 / January 2020 thewholenote.com