Monica Pearce: Textile Fantasies Monica Pearce Various Artists

• Monica Pearce (b. 1984): Toile de jouy:
• 1 Pearce: Toile de jouy 07:57
• Leather:
• 2 Pearce: Leather 08:31
• Chain maille:
• 3 Pearce: Chain maille 08:00
• Houndstooth:
• 4 Pearce: Houndstooth 07:49
• Silks:
• 5 Pearce: Silks 10:24
• Velvet:
• 6 Pearce: Velvet 08:49
• Damask:
• 7 Pearce: Damask 08:52
• Denim:
• 8 Pearce: Denim 08:16
• Total Runtime 01:08:38

Info for Monica Pearce: Textile Fantasies

Texas-based Canadian composer Monica Pearce's debut full-length release presents a series of keyboard and percussion-driven chamber works each paying homage to the form and feel of a specific textile. Though she employs smaller instrumental forces throughout it, Textile Fantasies manages to showcase Pearce's uncanny ability to produce striking and evocative sonorities that seem to maximize her resources and impart an undeniable atmosphere to each composition. In addition to Pearce's abilities, this recording also features performances by leading Canadian musicians such as keyboardists Cheryl Duvall, Wesley Chen, Barbara Pritchard, and Joseph Ferretti, tabla player Shawn Mativetsky, as well as renowned ensembles TorQ Percussion and SHHH!! Ensemble.

The opening composition, toile de jouy for solo harpsichord, shows Pearce putting the ancient instrument to an unorthodox and decidedly modern use. Its delicate, staccato sound is conventionally associated with contrapuntal music, but here Pearce scores it to generate rough-hewn, opaque blocks of fortissimo dissonances. The piano and percussion duet leather, a heavily rhythmic work, similarly creates an almost unpitched-sounding lower register rumble with the piano, which Pearce sets into contrast with the bright timbres of gongs and other metal percussion. Velvet, for percussion ensemble, takes cascades of notes and repeated motifs on mallet percussion and places them against a background hum of thickening and thinning density. Perhaps the most novel combination of instrumental voices occurs in damask for tamboura, tabla, and toy piano.

Monica Pearce, piano

Monica Pearce
originally from Prince Edward Island, is a Brownsville, Texas-based composer of new classical/contemporary music with a particular affinity for solo and chamber music, opera, and works for toy piano. After completing her Bachelor of Music at Mount Allison University with a focus on piano and composition, Monica completed her Masters of Music in Composition at the University of Toronto. She currently studies composition independently with Linda Catlin Smith. She recently relocated to Brownsville, Texas after a couple of years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Monica co-founded the emerging composer collective the Toy Piano Composers in 2008 with Chris Thornborrow. From 2008 to 2018, the Toy Piano Composers presented over 120 new works and released their debut album Toy Piano Composers.

Pearce’s work has been performed and commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, International Contemporary Ensemble, New Music Detroit, Chamber Cartel, Array Ensemble, Talisker Players, Essential Opera, Bicycle Opera Project, New Fangled Opera, TorQ Percussion Quartet, junctQín keyboard collective, and Thin Edge New Music Collective, among others. She recently won the Harry Freedman Award for her harpsichord work toile de jouy, commissioned by Wesley Shen. She was named winner of the Heliconian Choir and Orchestra’s New Music Competition for Emerging Female Composers for her piece You Know Me. She also received the Canadian Music Centre’s Toronto Emerging Composer Award Honourable Mention for her project it plays (because it plays). She received the honourable mention for her toy piano solo work clangor, which was premiered by Margaret Leng Tan at the UnCaged Toy Piano Festival in New York City. She was the composer-in-residence for the O.K. Quoi?! festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she created a community soundscape project entitled Sounds of Sackville. Most recently, her work The Flag was chosen as winner for the Creative Women at the End of the First World War Composition Competition. She had been featured on I Care If you Listen for her works chain maille and damask. Her operas have been performed across Canada and the United States, and toured across Ontario, and her toy piano works are frequently played internationally. She is working on a multi-work piece entitled Textile Fantasies which includes chain maille (percussion quartet), houndstooth (solo piano), damask (toy piano/tabla), denim (two toy piano/two percussion), velvet (for marimba quartet), leather (piano and percussion), toile de jouy (harpsichord), and silks (solo piano). ​

In addition to her work as a composer, Monica is active as a librettist, and recently served as a librettist for LooseTEA Music Theatre’s modern re-envisioning of Carmen, as well as for composer Bekah Simms’ how to, for tenor and percussion, and LooseTEA Music Theatre's Singing Only Softly with Cecilia Livingston, which was nominated for Outstanding New Opera with the DORA Awards. Monica’s written works have been performed by Loose Tea Theatre, Bicycle Opera Project, Opera Nova Scotia, Vocalypse Productions, Caution Tape Sound Collective, and the Toy Piano Composers.

This album contains no booklet.