Rose Bolton

Biography

Sample Works

Rose Bolton holds a Master of Music degree in composition from McGill University. Her teachers have included composers Denys Bouliane, John Rea, Alexina Louie, Peter Paul Koprowski and Jack Behrens. She earned her Bachelor of Music at the University of Western Ontario.

Ms. Bolton has received several awards, including the H.C. Aitken prize of the 1995 New Music Concerts' young composers' competition and two prizes in the 1999 SOCAN awards for young composers. She is an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.

She has been commissioned to write works for a number of performers, including Continuum Contemporary Music, Arraymusic, the Burdocks, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble and accordionist Joseph Petric. Recently Ms. Bolton was one of five young composers who participated in the Génération 2000 project directed by conductor Veronique Lacroix which involved six performances by L'ensemble contemporain de Montréal in a cross-Canada tour. Her works have been performed on Toronto's Massey Hall New Music Festival and Montréal's Super MicMac event. In spring, 2001, her work Incidental Music of my Mind was performed by Toronto's New Music Concerts, conducted by Robert Aitken.

She has participated in several workshops, including the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, symposium, directed by Brian Fernyhough; the Domaine Forget New Music Symposium hosted by Montréal's Nouvel ensemble moderne, where she participated in master classes with Magnus Lindberg; and the International Young Composers Meeting in Apeldoorn, hosted by Louis Andriessen.

Among Ms. Bolton's sources of inspiration is the sonic environment. Having spent many summers camping and canoe tripping in northern Ontario's Canadian Shield regions, the natural sounds of the forests have made a permanent impression on her. Her early compositions were for tape, in the tradition of the musique concrète composers; and although she now writes mainly for live media, her compositional style reveals her first interest in the musique concrète. Some of her works, such as Incidental Music of my Mind(1998), are inspired by the sonic environment of the city; and lately, although these "sonic" themes are still present, her compositions are beginning to venture beyond simply the imitative, becoming inwardly contemplative. A recent work, Orion's Quilt, is a reaction to the image of the starry night sky, while Killbear Music is about the soundscapes at Killbear, a provincial park close to Parry Sound, Ontario.

2001

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