Composition

The following is a reverse-chronological non-exhaustive list of more recent works, with links to recordings where available.

Please use the Contact form for a complete list of works, or to obtain a PDF of a score or for prices.

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Upcoming Works

This Nocturne Went Summer

Song Cycle for soprano and piano composed for Brittany Rae on text by poet Liz Howard, written on a grant from the Canadian Art Song Project

Premiere date and venue TBA

Work for solo violin, title TBA

Composed as part of a composer in residence project at McGill University, under mentorship of Violaine Melançon

Concerto for Piano Left-Hand and Orchestra

Composed as my thesis composition, the final big project for my doctorate at McGill

Trio for soprano, cello, and piano, title TBA

Commissioned by Muzewest Concerts for a chamber music concert on May 9, 2024, where I will perform it with my friends and colleagues Melody Courage and Ariel Carrabré, alongside music by Jocelyn Morlock, Debussy, Ravel, and Patrick Carrabré

Past Works

Following Comprehensive Analysis (2023)

Instrumentation: sopranos (2), clarinet, accordion, cello

Duration: ca. 14’

This short chamber opera was concieved as part of the OpéRA de poche project; a shared initiative between the Université de Montréal and the Opéra de Montréal in which five teams were selected to take part in a seminar on current trends in opera and cocreation led by Ana Sokolovic. The work done in the seminar led to the commission of a professional project, set to release in the spring of 2024. I was very fortunate to be able to work on this project with the Cole Hayley as the writer, and Léa Demarez Cadol and Emmanuel Campeau who worked wonders for every single other aspect of the project. The two singers for the project are Maud Lewden and Léa Jourdain. Details about the launch will be posted here when available.

Duet for Solo Piano (2023)

Instrumentation: Piano

Duration: ca. 2’

This work was composed in the wake of the death of Jocelyn Morlock, one of Canada’s finest composers and a friend and mentor to me. It is a duet for one player between the call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (Jocelyn always adored bird song) and an invented response.

Quintet (2023)

Instrumentation: Piano, Percussion (4)

Duration: ca. 9’

This work was composed for the McGill Percussion Ensemble under the mentorship of Kristie Ibrahim, and was premiered by myself and the ensemble on March 22, 2023 in Pollack Hall at McGill University.

Recording coming soon!

Forma Divina (2023)

Instrumentation: orchestra: 2222, 2200, timp+1, strings

Duration: ca. 5’

Forma Divina was composed for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra as part of their Composer Fellowship program, under mentorship from their composer in residence Abigail Richardson-Schulte, who I came to appreciate very much as a person and as a composer through this process. The first aria that is sung in the opera Aida by Giuseppe Verdi is sung by the character Radames wherein he extols the beauty of the captured princess Aida with the line Celeste Aida, forma divina (“Heavenly Aida, divine form”). Aida is not only the name of one of my favourite operas, but also one of my favourite creatures on this earth: my now one year-old border collie/chocolate lab. When she first came into my home I used to sing her that aria (transposed down an octave: I am not a tenor!) to go to sleep, and it worked every time. In this work I wanted to write a musical portrait of this wonderful dog – a short, sweet, silly, and sometimes wild toccatina-scherzetto-etude for orchestra in which the sounds of her cries, barks, and footsteps zipping through the snow are interwoven with the beautiful melody of Verdi’s opera that is her namesake.

Recording coming soon!

Dowland Arrangements (2022)

Instrumentation: baritone and lute

Duration: ca. 14’

These arrangements of four of John Dowland’s works (Come Heavy Sleep, Sorrow Stay, A Dream and In Darkness Let me Dwell) were commissioned by and written for Jonathon Adams. In Darkness Let Me Dwell was premiered by Jonathon Adams and Lucas Harris for Muzewest in Vancouver, BC in February 2021. The full set was premiered by the same musicians for Cecelia Concerts in Halifax, NS in January 2022.

L'épaisseur du silence (2022)

Instrumentation: soprano and piano

Duration: ca. 30’

L'épaisseur du silence is a monodrama that was born when Brittany Rae and I met Thomas Ayouti during a residency at the Banff Centre in 2019. The three of us got along so well we decided to make some projects together and we are still friends and collaborators to this day. This particular piece was proposed to Codes d'accès, which they accepted for partial funding and their regular season, and the rest of the project was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts (for which we were very grateful). The full work was premiered in a concert presented by Codes d'accès in Sala Rossa in Montréal, and an extract was presented by Chants Libres in a chamber version later that same year.

Thomas, Brittany, and I are looking forward to remounting the entire work in 2024 in staged work which will also feature Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine.

Sextet (2021)

Instrumentation: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion

Duration: ca. 10

The Sextet was composed as part of Continuum Contemprary Music’s Hatch! mentorship program. This was a moment of deep Covid-19 lockdown, and my mentorship sessions with Hope Lee and Martin Arnold were all done online, but the experience was beautiful and I was very grateful for it. This work was composed during the summer of 2021 during which several mass graves of of horrifying size were discovered across Canada, found to contain the remains of Indigenous children - products of the residential school system. This piece continually refers to the drum beat which accompanies the funerary rites of many tribes of Indignous people across Canada, including those of my own people. This piece was premiered online in a presentation by Ottawa ChamberFest in August, 2021.

Music for Lost Boys (2020)

Instrumentation: string quartet

Duration: ca. 9’

This quartet was a project composed in the summer of 2020, in the deepest moment of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Montréal we even had a curfew! It is written in memoriam all those LGBTQI2SA+ people whose path led them to feel that they had no recourse but to end their own lives, and with loving kindness for those of us who survive them to forge a more caring world for those who will survive us. The quartet it was originally composed for has since disbanded, but it will go out into the world when the time is right.

ὀμφᾰλός (Omphalós) and μαζί (Mazí) (2019)

Instrumentation: piano solo (Omphalós) or piano, soprano, and chamber orchestra: 1111, 1111, perc, strings (Mazí )

Duration: ca. 18’

Omphalós and Mazí are two versions of the same works, where the orchestrated version closely followed that for piano solo. The original version was premiered at the Eckhardt Grammaté Competition in Brandon, MB, and the version with ensemble was premiered in Montréal in December 2019 featuring soprano Virginie Mongeau and led by Evgenii Sakmarov.

I had ancient Greek ideas on my mind as 2018 had marked 10 years of the passing of my step-grandfather Alex Divlakovski (himself a Macedonian), who despite not being related by blood had an enormous positive influence on my entire family. In ancient Greek ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós) means the navel and is used to speak of the center of the world, and also the centre of the self. The two sections share exactly the same techniques and materials, but take completely different paths, as twins separated at birth might grow up in different ways. The first part takes a difficult branching path, in which small phrases and silences interrupt and are interrupted and try to find their way to completion. The path of the second part is somewhat clearer: it’s a big love song constructed in the proportions of Bernoulli's logarithmic spiral.