Graphic Scores and the Visual World of Creative Music-Making w// Olivia Shortt

Event Details

Event type: All Ages

(They/He/She - only if used in rotation, otherwise ‘They’// Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation // ireland + canada) Olivia Shortt is a weirdo, noisemaker, video artist, wannabe fashion icon, curator, and troublemaker. Shortt's work is inspired by their love of camp, drag, and gender expression and its relation to Indigeneity. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine.

Highlights include Shortt’s world premiere performance of ‘For Olivia Shortt’ Pulitzer Prize that Diné composer Raven Chacon wrote for Shortt (as part of Chacon’s series ‘For Zitkala-Ša’ featured at The 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC); their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut playing percussion in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble (Shortt is NOT a percussionist FYI); their film debut in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB, a Neutrino laboratory in Sudbury, Canada; and performances of Raven Chacon’s music at The Holland Festival in Amsterdam and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC).

Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, winner of NUMUS’ 2019/2020 Emerging Curators Competition and was named and awarded one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times Emerging Queer Awards. 

In 2023-24 they were the Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University’s Music Department and the University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, as well as the Indigenous Curator-in-Residence at Hamilton Arts Inc. Their favourite song is ‘House of the Rising Sun’, they love glitter, drinking coffee and hanging out with their cat Violet. www.oliviashortt.com

Let's compose music and find fun and exciting ways to express it through graphic notation, images, collage, text, and visual formats. These formats can express some of the many aspects of music making such as time, rhythm, feelings, sonic colour, emotions among other ideas for the interpretation of music. An open concept class exploring an alternative method of disseminating music through examples, discussions in class and making our own scores. This method of creating and composing can allow for a broader range of performers to interpret your music and allow us to feed the multi-disciplinary parts of our art-making through this physical and visual composition method. Anyone with a creative mind, an interest in arts and crafts, and an open heart who loves creating music is invited to attend. 

Event Link: More Info