Fisher, Alfred Joel – Biography
Posted on: July 13, 2009 by: WebmasterContact
* Composer
* Educator
Canadian composer, Alfred Fisher is an independent voice in the international new music scene. Entirely dedicated to the primacy of musical engagement and communication, Fisher eschews stylising in favour of a music rooted in philosophic/literary soil that continues to yield basic challenges of language, coherence, personal expression, historic precedent and continuity.
His record as a composer includes commissions from Radio Telefis Eireann, Wayne State University, the Cork International Choral Festival, the International Suzuki Association the Canadian Music Centre, the Canada Council, CBC and others. His works have been performed in Canada, the U.S., Central America, the U.K., Republic of Ireland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan.
His compositions have been presented by such artists as David Burge, Peter Vinograde, William Tritt, Bruce Vogt, Arthur Rowe, Ernesto Lejano, Sandra Munn, Jorge Suarez, Norman Nelson, Michael Bowie, Thomas Rolston, Claude Kenneson, Paul Pulford, Tanya Prochazka, Claire Carberry, Rivka Golani, Michel Szczesniak, Giselle Dalbeck, Robert Riseling, William Street, Stephane Lemelin, James Ehnes, Walter Precztawski, Dina Namur, Bruce Kelly, Harold Wiens, Stan Fisher, Mary Morrison, Hsu-yi Lin, Thomas Linde, Kimberley Enns-Hildebrand, the Orford Quartet, Silesian Quartet, Penderecki Quartet, New Arts Quartet, Symphony of the Irish Radio, Edmonton Symphony, Calgary Symphony, Kingston Symphony, Pro Arte Singers, the National Chamber Choir of Ireland and others. Recent performances have included Dark Forest, presented by the National Chamber Choir of Ireland at the International Choral Festival, Il Fabricatto di canto in Milan, performances of At winter’s End by New York pianist, Peter Vinograde, and the recent premiere of the CBC commissioned work Two Tableaux on the Life of Isolde for Saxophone, piano, percussion and dancer.
Maintaining a balanced commitment to scholarship and creative work, Fisher has lectured widely at universities in Canada, the USA, Europe, and at meetings of a number of learned societies. He has published in Perspective of New Music, Ethnomusicology in Canada, Canadian Journal of Ethnic Studies, Canadian University Music Review, Journal of Native Studies, Journal of Sociology, and European Judaism. Recent invited lectures have been at the International Sefer Conference in Moscow and the Conference on Central and East European Jewish Culture in Minsk, Belarus. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Institute for Art, Culture and Communication at the State University of Belarus.
Currently Professor at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Fisher teaches in both the School of Music and the Programme in Jewish Studies. He is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
Fisher says: “It used to be easy to talk/write about my music and to define myself as a composer. To have asserted that my music was serial, or aleatoric, or a mixed-media event, broad as these categories may be, was to establish, if only for my own purposes, a technical/ compositional frame of reference and to suggest a certain set of aural expectations. I am increasingly finding discussion of such matters as “aesthetic position” or “intent” to be awkward and unsatisfying. Now, even though I believe my work of the last ten years to be developing along far more consistent lines, a definition of its structural or stylistic dimensions has become problematic.
In an important sense, my present work reaches back to embrace worlds I thought I had abandoned forever. My involvement with the music of Bach, Schubert, Mahler and others is no longer, as I once thought, an expression of respect, but a vital link with models of great heuristic power. But it is more than this. It is profound nourishment and a stimulus for my work. It has made possible the development of a theoretical/methodological matrix that is both comprehensive and flexible. Through this, I have discovered that, though my musical language may be of considerable complication, it may be secure in its coherence and internal logic without burdening or inhibiting freedom of expression.
Contradiction and self-delusion abound in the world of new music. No doubt, I have a distance to travel before emerging from these shadows. I am beginning to think, however, that this freedom — a freedom that seems so boundless and absolute, may be within my reach.”