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Cecilia Livingston can mark the moment her music changed. Instead of making bread and practising yoga through the worst of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, Livingston was hard at work writing what would prove to be a watershed moment in her creative life, setting the words of writer Anne Michaels to music. The quiet time necessitated by the lockdowns enhanced not only the music’s development but Livingston’s awareness of her needs as an artist. That project, luna premit, is set to première in May 2023.
Livingston completed her studies at the University of Toronto, where she was a member of the Opera Student Composer Collective in 2010. She holds a doctorate in composition from the school, where she was awarded the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition. In summer 2022, she joined the faculty at Banff Centre’s Opera in the 21st Century program, a performance-based, collaborative training experience for emerging opera professionals, and she returned to U of T as adjunct professor.
The Banff program is led by acclaimed stage director Joel Ivany, who is also artistic director of Against the Grain Theatre. Whether or not Livingston and Ivany collaborate on any future projects remains a mystery, but the range of Livingston’s achievements is undeniable.
WITH ARTISTS OF TAFELMUSIK, REHEARSING FOR THE PREMIERE OF ‘GONE WITH THE WINDS’, 2020
She is vice-president of the Canadian League of Composers, associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, and has won numerous awards, including the Canadian Music Centre’s 2018 Emerging Composer Award, the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, and the 2018 Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes for female opera creators in Canada. She has also worked with some big names, including composer Steve Reich (at the summer festival for New York-based contemporary classical music organization Bang On a Can) and writer Anne Michaels. Her work has been presented by Tapestry Opera, Soundstreams, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, the Vancouver Chamber Choir, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Deutsche Grammophon’s Digital Stage. She was part of the Soundstreams Emerging Composer Workshop and completed a two-year fellowship (2015-2017) at The American Opera Project in New York before becoming composer-in-residence at the famed Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2019-2022) in England.
Near the end of her residency, Livingston was part of Balancing the Score, Glyndebourne’s development scheme for female composers. Together with three other composers, the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin was recast into a snappy one-hour format, Pay The Piper (2022), which featured the talents of Glyndebourne Youth Opera. Livingston was also heard on harpist Angela Schwarzkopf’s detach (Redshift Records), which won the 2020 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year; “Garden,” the album’s third track, is a 12-minute opus of call-response lyricism with a strong motivic structure. The work showcases Livingston’s thoughtful, melody-driven approach—one she says was further honed during her time at Glyndebourne.
“I was around vocal excellence all the time there,” she recalls. The experience sharpened her awareness of the connections between breath, line, and melody. “I have come to understand, in my own work, that melody is the spine, and that all the timbre, tempo, and harmonic colour hang from this spine, like a string of lights. There’s a human, responsive quality I’m looking for through all of my writing; it’s the reason I lean toward voice in the first place.”
WITH PETER OUNDJIAN, TSO ‘LEAP OF THE HEART’ PREMIERE, 2017
That human quality has found inspiration and expression via the words of Anne Michaels. The celebrated Canadian poet and novelist explores themes of history, love, loss, morality and grief through her range of award-winning novels and poetry collections. “Anne’s writing is about very big, difficult things, and things that are small and intimate, like family, memory, childhood—but those things are also enormous,” says Livingston, “and those are recurring themes in my own work.”
Livingston connected with Michaels through seeing her poetry displayed on Toronto transit as a teenager. It was part of the Transit Commission’s Poetry On The Way, a cultural initiative which ran from 1998 to 2012. Featuring a range of Canadian literary talent (including Irving Layton, Archibald Lampman, and Afua Cooper), Poetry On The Way offered transit readers something to ponder amid lines of advertisements. “I’d read other poetry, but it hadn’t reached in and twisted my heart in my chest,” Livingston says. “I took my allowance and bought a book of (Michaels’s) poetry. I still have that book on my shelf; I read it at least five times a year.” At the end of her studies at the University of Toronto, Livingston wrote to Michaels directly and asked if she would ever consider working together. “Anne checked out my music and the partnership flourished from there.”
Their collaboration came to a fascinating fruition. Soprano Hera Hyesang Park performed Breath Alone, featuring Livingston’s music and Michaels’s words, at a recital at Carnegie Hall in March 2023.
HERA HYESANG PARK AND KATELAN TRÀN TERRELL PERFORM THE PREMIÈRE OF
‘BREATH ALONE’, CARNEGIE HALL’S ZANKEL HALL, 2023
More fulsome is the upcoming song cycle luna premit for tenor and piano. Presented by Canadian Art Song Project (CASP) on May 7, the concert will feature CASP founders, pianist Steven Philcox and tenor Lawrence Wiliford. The composition came about as a result of the first lockdowns necessitated by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, when Livingston was still residing in the U.K. “It felt like an intense period of work,” she recalls. “I would write for three hours, have lunch, write for three more hours, go for a run through London’s deserted, strange, post-apocalyptic landscape, have dinner, go to bed—that routine is always when I do my best work, and it flourished. Even though there were a lot of challenges presented to everybody, that time also allowed for a creative growth I am grateful for.”
The combination of work, time, and opportunity marked a turning point for the composer. “I look back at everything I wrote up to that point (of the lockdowns) and then after, and I see this incredible shift in my vocabulary, in my technique, in the way I write for the voice, instruments, and fragmentary texts.” Along with the CASP song cycle is an upcoming recording featuring Michaels’s texts performed by soprano Park for Deutsche Grammophon. The concentration afforded by extended weeks of isolation led to Livingston contemplating her role within a wider context. “One of the things classical can do well—as can many other art forms, but this is my language—is to ask big questions of the human experience, and to present work that has moral and emotional weight. Anne and I come together in our work because of our interest in those things. There’s a weight to everything she writes.”
The same could be said of Livingston’s compositions. Singing Only Softly, her acclaimed chamber opera, with libretto by fellow Canadian composer Monica Pearce, was inspired by the original unedited diaries of Anne Frank. The piece, commissioned by Loose Tea Music Theatre and presented in 2019, was nominated for two 2020 Dora Mavor Moore awards (Toronto’s theatre awards) and subsequently made into a short film.
In 2021 the music of Livingston, together with that of English composer Donna McKevitt, was part of Garden of Vanished Pleasures, a digital music theatre piece presented by Soundstreams and part of the company’s 2021 Digital Residency at the Toronto-based Crow’s Theatre. Inspired by the life and work of artist and gay-rights activist Derek Jarman, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1994, Garden featured just four voices and three instruments. At the time of its release, director Tim Albery said he sensed Livingston was “a woman of the theatre” while journalist Jenna Simeonov noted the degree to which the work possessed “many Britten vibes.”
The famous British composer is indeed one of Livingston’s favourites. “There are definitely composers I come back to, Britten being one,” she says. “I think Peter Grimes is one of the very greatest works, and certainly it’s been one of the most influential on me.” Along with Britten, Livingston cites the music of Debussy, Chopin (“I learn so much about melody from him”), Steve Reich, and John Adams, particularly his 1987 opera Nixon in China. She also loves British rock band Radiohead. “I have listened to the song ‘Present Tense’ (from A Moon-Shaped Pool, 2016 / XL Recordings) at least a hundred times in a row. Sometimes I’m looking for technical things, sometimes it’s structure or timbre,” she explains. “There’s a gravity to their writing I really admire, and the economy of the writing as well.”
In September 2022, Livingston became composer-in-residence with the Canadian Opera Company (COC), which will involve a variety of projects, although she can’t go into specifics. The COC’s artistic team confirmed that the composer will be working with artists of the Ensemble Studio (the company’s program for young singers, pianists, and vocal coaches) to create pieces for both the company’s main presentation space—the vast Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto—and the more intimate Canadian Opera Company Theatre, which has hosted a number of chamber works.
Livingston’s song “Penelope,” often presented in recital by Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, is on a June program of new works presented by the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Later in the month, Livingston will be a mentor to a young composer in a program run by Canadian Art Song Project, followed by work at Songfest-Sorel (a U.S.-based music festival and training program dedicated to song), in which she takes the position of 2023 Sorel Composer. Further events in 2023 include the premières for Opera 5 and TorQ Percussion Quartet, and mark, presented by Soundstreams.
Amid the many projects, does she ever feel the doubts which can haunt so many creators? “I definitely have my three-o-clock-in-the-mornings,” she laughs, “and I think: ‘Maybe I’ll never be able to write a thing ever, ever again!’—but part of being professional is making peace with that when you confront the blank page.” For now, the upcoming premières are “daunting, and kind of terrifying, but terrifying-exciting.”
Playlist
Cecilia Livingston’s new song cycle luna premit
premières May 7 at Heliconian Hall in Toronto.
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