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Allison Cameron's music beguiles. It asks. It opens into the sides of sounds, delighting in toyful extras, and things left behind. It is a warm, personable and curious music, sure in its lengths and swaths, in its lined spaces, and elongations of melody. It waits itself into small entanglements, seeping inwards and outwards, beside and along, and yet it never completely fills the middle. In this way, listening to Allison's music is an invitation to fall, and there is a dedicated group of listeners and musicians in North America and Europe who have been falling for years.
Allison's music is affected by ideas of ornamentation. She is interested in the ways that folk songs change when they move between groups of people in very different places. Additionally, she speaks about the impact that the Scottish Highland bagpipe practice of Ceol Mor piobaireachd had on her and Martin Arnold when, as young composers, they would travel outside of Toronto to listen to bagpipe competitions on numerous occasions. Particularly, Allison looks for ways in which ornamental variation can be reconsidered – not as embellishment, but as the point of the work itself. As Martin Arnold wrote in the liner notes to her CD Ornaments (2000):
To need the ornament, to make its particularity – its detail – the focus of attention, is to celebrate the extraneous, the tangential, the deliriously digressive (‘delirium’ coming from the Latin ‘to swerve from a furrow’).
I met up with Allison Cameron at Array Space, Toronto's experimental music hub, in January 2018. While we were talking in the lobby, we were accompanied by George Stimpson tuning the piano for that evening's concert of new works. Array's House and Production Manager, Kelly Mitchell, came in to change the garbage bags. Former Artistic Director and percussionist, Rick Sacks, rushed in to investigate a leak at the back of the studio. Later, Artistic Director and composer Martin Arnold arrived to begin loading in equipment.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in North Vancouver, right at the foot of Grouse Mountain. My backyard was Lynn Canyon park. My Mom always wanted me to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing and I really got hooked on composition when...