BIOGRAPHY

David Ogborn was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1977 and immigrated to Canada when he was seven, arriving first in Halifax in 1984 and later settling in Winnipeg. After a period of studies at the University of Mary, he continued at the University of Manitoba, where his composition teachers were Michael Matthews and David Scott. He completed a doctoral degree in composition at the University of Toronto in 2006, studying composition with Christos Hatzis, Chan Ka Nin and Gary Kulesha. An active composer, guitarist and electronic sound artist, Ogborn’s work involves electronic media and acoustic instrumental techniques. His compositions have been presented by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, New Adventures in Sound Art, and the net-label angelusnovus.net, of which he is a founding member. He is currently the chair of the Discourses in Music in editorial board.

SCORE PDF (Adobe Acrobat required)

PROGRAM NOTES

Programme Note, Second Nature

Toronto's Tommy Thompson Park is a manmade spit that snakes its way from where Leslie Street meets Lake Ontario to a lighthouse out beyond the Toronto islands. This work is based on field recordings made in the park, a location I first discovered in 2001, sometime during my first year living in Toronto. It became a place towards which I gravitated - not just as a place to escape the bustle of the city, but as a heightened example of what one might call "second nature" - nature as a construct of mankind, as a reflection of mankind's activity.

Credits: David Ogborn
Creator: David Ogborn
Subject: Second Nature
Date Created: 2006

INTERVIEW

Interview, Ogborn’s Cultural Influences: Australia to Canada

“Music is tied by a thousand threads to music made in entirely different places and times. This makes the life of a sound artist very exciting and rewarding – as one travels these threads, both physically and virtually.” – D.O.

Ogborn credits the fact that he moved frequently in his youth to a feeling of restlessness and to feeling neither Australian (where he was born) nor Canadian (he moved here at the age of seven), but rather as a ‘traveler’. He writes that “the bare fact of our family’s travel to different places had a more direct impact on me than the specifics of the places we traveled to. I always felt that I came from somewhere else.”

Ogborn’s musical identity is the result of an eclectic mix of pop and classical music, particularly founded on the classical piano learned in his youth, heavy metal and jazz guitar music he played later, and his listening habits of Indian classical music, electronic dance music and early classical repertoire. However, in his electronic and soundscape compositions Ogborn believes that the western classical tradition retains overall control wherein the placement of pitches and sounds are mapped out and distributed through time, with an ear towards not repeating too soon or too much. You can glimpse some of this ‘planning’ in the two sketches of his work on Second Nature that are included in this website. The juxtaposition of different sounds and rhythms, locations and activities perhaps is a response to his experience as a ‘traveler’.

Credits: Dr. Mary Ingraham
Creator: Dr. Mary Ingraham
Subject: David Ogborn | Second Nature
Date Created: 2007

PHOTO GALLERY

Photograph, Torontoscape

The Toronto skyline, as seen from Tommy Thompson Park.

Credits: Trevor Haldenby, Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 2.0
Creator: Trevor Haldenby
Subject: Tommy Thompson Park | Toronto
Date Created: 2004-11-05

WORDS

AUDIO

Field Recording, Tommy Thompson Park (200 KB)

Duration: 00:00:13

About this field recording, Ogborn says that it "... is the original source material for what I would come to call 'block 13.' But don't let the numbering mislead you – because this is the material that would become the beginning of the piece. The original field recordings for block 13 (done with a special portable multichannel microphone boom designed by Charlie Fox and Wade McGregor) were made by holding the microphones very close to a large piece of broken concrete (approximately one hundred pounds in weight) as it was dragged over another piece of concrete."

Credits: David Ogborn
Creator: David Ogborn
Subject: Concrete sounds | Tommy Thompson Park
Date Created: 2005-08