A New Westminster composer has been honoured with a Western Canadian Music Award.
John Oliver won the Classical Composition of the Year honour for his orchestral composition Forging Utopia.
In a press release, Oliver said he is "elated" by the win.
"I would like to thank (then) composer-in-residence Jon Siddall and the National Arts Centre Orchestra for commissioning the work and for such a wonderful premiere performance by the orchestra under the direction of American conductor David Allen Miller," he said.
Forging Utopia is from the CD of the same name, performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and released by Centrediscs - the recording label of the Canadian Music Centre.
A music centre press release notes that Oliver came to international attention during 1988/89, when he won six prizes for five compositions ranging from chamber to orchestra to electroacoustic music. He has gone on to create major works in those genres as well as two operas.
Forging Utopia is a collection of Oliver's orchestra music from 1995-2006, featuring works inspired by Haida legend, paintings by Anselm Keefer and Johannes Deutsch, the poetry of Rumi, and Mark Kingwell's book Dreams of Millennium.
"My music typically deals with serious issues, philosophical, moral, spiritual, and existential, and ranges from the dramatic to lyric, ecstatic to placid, tragic to humourous, and can be playful or frightening, cathartic and restorative, restful or stirring, and often invites the listener to reach through a dense and sometimes riotous musical surface to find stillness at the core," Oliver says in an artist's statement. "I write music to intensify the experience of our common humanity."
For more about Oliver and to hear samples of his music, visit his website.
