Finished a new chamber music miniature for Toronto's Array Music. It's the first new work that I've done since coming home, and while the writing process wasn't as smooth as I had hoped, I think the piece crystalizes some of the ideas I've been working on for the last few years. I've been trying to connect the techniques of contemporary music with my own experience as a member of the South Asian diaspora, without falling into the trap of exoticising my heritage, or writing music that, while well constructed and expressive, did not reflect who I was.
Without getting too technical, Stockhausen found a way to adapt the methods of the Darmstadt school of composers to create something close to ragas of Indian classical music. The tone of this change is Stockhausen's music borrows from his teacher Olivier Messiean, and Stockhausen in turn passed on this outlook to his Canadian pupil Claude Vivier.
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