Contact | Website
*  Composer
*  Educator
*  Performer

Michael Horwood was born in Buffalo, New York, on May 24, 1947 and currently resides in Cowley, Alberta, Canada. He studied music composition and theory at the State University of New York at Buffalo with Lejaren Hiller, Lukas Foss, and Istvan Anhalt, receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees (1969, 1971). In 1971, he moved to Canada and between 1972 and 2003 was a professor of music and humanities at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario, where he taught music theory, composition, conducting, music history, led various ensembles and pioneered a variety of music elective courses for non-majors. During the latter half of the 1970′s, Horwood also played piano and percussion as part of Convergence, an improvisation ensemble he formed and directed and which was very active in the southern Ontario area.

His more than 60 compositions constitute a kaleidoscope of the traditional and the avant-garde. He has composed in a wide variety of contemporary idioms including jazz, theatre pieces, and electroacoustic (both live and pre-recorded) and for many imaginable ensembles from choral music, brass quintet, and symphony orchestra to percussion groups, jazz bands, and incidental music for the theatre. His most successful works have been those which are based on extra-musical concepts such as his chamber works Birds (1979) and Nervous Disorder (1988), the electroacoustic work Motility (1986), and the orchestral works Amusement Park Suite (1986), National Park Suite (1991), and Symphony No. 2 Visions of a Wounded Earth (1995).

Horwood seems content writing in any style and, similarly, feels a composer today should be able to adapt and create in a variety of styles. For all the deliberate variety in Horwood’s music, a few personal traits have tended to emerge. One of these is an acute sense of sonority, the knack of exploiting the unique ranges and timbres of his instrumental forces, whether in solo or combinations. This “theatrical” use of instrumental sound is occasionally coupled with an overt sense of theatricality or humour, even in his non-theatre works.

During the 1990s, Horwood’s compositions have seen a return to his original interest in Romantic period music. Thus, the more global interest in Neo-Romanticism is seen by Horwood as not only welcome, but concurrent with his own creative goals. In 1995 he completed a major co-commission from four Canadian symphony orchestras (through the Canada Council) for his most ambitious work to date – a 50 minute choral symphony, Symphony No. 2 Visions of a Wounded Earth, with texts from eight Canadian poets on the subject of the environment. 1996 saw the commissioning and composition of the short chamber orchestra piece on the theme of “morning”, Do You Live for Weekends?, as well as the Symphony No. 3, Andromeda. His major 1997 project was another multiple orchestral commission, a piano concerto titled Intravariations, for pianist Mary Kenedi, under a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Its world premiere was in April, 1998, with the Sault Ste. Marie Symphony. Later that year the Festival of the Sound (Parry Sound, Ontario) commissioned him for Quartzite Dialogues, a work for narrator and wind quintet, which premiered in July, 1999. In October, 1999, he wrote the short piano work, T + I = Ewigkeit, based on a theme by Wagner. In 2000, he adapted three of the interludes from his second symphony as an independent orchestral work, Three Interludes. In 2003, a substantially revised version of his Concerto for Double Bass & String Orchestra was issued.

(adapted from an earlier article by Michael Schulman)

Downloads

Works
 

Back to Tonus Vivus Members’ Biographies – Index