John Abram

Canadian composer John Abram began his post-secondary music training at Keele University in England, where he studied mathematics and music. His composition instructors were Roger Marsh and Peter Dickinson, and Abram also studied recorder under Alan Davis. Graduating with an M.A. for composition in 1982, he worked in London and was part of a new music ensemble named George W. Welch. In 1984, he won the Commonwealth Scholarship, and left to study composition at the University of Victoria with Rudolph Komorous, as well as electro-acoustic music with Doug Collinge. His Ph.D. piece was an anti-opera based on The Aeneid by Virgil. During his studies there, he received a School of Music director's discretionary award (1985) and a President's Research Award (1987). He then went on in 1989 to found a composer's collective known as The Drystone Orchestra in Toronto, which included several fellow former students of Komorous. He has been an active of many new music societies in Canada, where his music is frequently heard on broadcast, as well as in England and Australia. His works cover a broad a broad spectrum of electro-acoustic and chamber music. Startlingly original and meaningful, Abram's music nevertheless seems to conform to the standard tenets of the avant-garde. L.ETHE.R (1990) for bass clarinet, trumpet in C, baroque violin, hurdy-gurdy, electric guitar (with distortion), electric organ (with distortion), and piano is an excellent example. The music is features two enormous soundscapes, with the first one returning after it has been forgotten, as the middle movement consumes the listener's imagination. Focusing on a person's subjective experience of the present, this is music about forgetting, unlike most works based on that idea, with the possible exception of Morton Feldman. Works such as L.ETHE.R (the title combines Lethe, the mythological river of forgetting, and ether) suggest fascinating and unexpected ways of hearing. Abram lives and works in Calgary, Alberta.