Every Freeze Is Different

The inaugural event in a new series, Sharing Our Voices: Bringing Story, Song and Sound to the Community, will take place at 7:30pm on January 22, 2025 in the Desautels Concert Hall. Sharing Our Voices is a project created by two faculty members at the Desautels Faculty of Music (DFOM), Dr. Jacquie Dawson and Victoria Sparks. The series is supported by the 2024-25 Strategic Initiatives Support Fund (SISF) and the 2024-25 Community Engagement Fund.

Every Freeze Is Different will provide an opportunity to experience music in new ways, incorporating multimedia, narration, visual art, and singing, outside the norms of traditional classical performance. This music will not only bring people together, but will stimulate the senses and the imagination. It is a highly collaborative event, with participation of the Winnipeg Chamber Winds Collective, directed by Jacquie Dawson, including local musicians, students, and faculty from both the Desautels Faculty of Music and the School Art.

The title of the inaugural concert, Every Freeze Is Different (2017) is from a composition on the program by Yellowknife-based composer, Carmen Braden. Braden was inspired to write the work as she watched snow falling and noticed ice forming on lakes, while some leaves fell from trees and others remained clinging, still green, to their branches. She realized how the repeating cycles and seasons of all parts of life have infinite variations to be explored and celebrated. Also on the program is Stone’s Throw (2018), by Manitoba-born Jocelyn Morlock, who was one of Canada’s leading composers. This piece was inspired by Ann Southam’s music, much of which refers to the repetitive nature of so-called women’s work—such as weaving and washing dishes—with a joyful, sunny nature. The Great Flood (2024) references the Cree Creation story and is part of a body of oral literary stories of the Northern Cree, shared with Metis writer and Indigenous Culture Carrier Joyce Clouston by Elder Stanley McKay. Clouston’s text was set to music by Manitoba-born composer Karen Sunabacka. This work was commissioned for the opening of the Desautels Concert Hall and is the most recent of a series of works created by the mother-daughter team of Clouston and Sunabacka. The concert will open with American composer Paul Lansky’s Threads (2005), featuring DFOM students in the UofM Percussion Ensemble, directed by Victoria Sparks, along with the UofM eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE), directed by Gordon Fitzell.

The Desautels Faculty of Music is deeply committed to community engagement and sharing stories and musical experiences. The Sharing Our Voices series will welcome the local community into DFOM’s state-of-the-art facilities at the UofM campus and will also bring music to more remote communities. Upcoming programs in the Sharing Our Voices series include Tales from the North, student outreach concerts that explore stories from Korea to Canada and Turtle Island. These performances will take place on campus on January 29, in St. Laurent on February 3, and in Selkirk on February 10, 2025.

Every Freeze Is Different, created as part of the ReSound Community Concerts in partnership with Winnipeg’s New Music Festival, starts at 7:30pm and will be held at Desautels Concert Hall at 150 Dafoe Road. A reception will follow. The event is free of charge but your seat must be reserved. For more information, see: https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/music/event/re-sound–every-freeze-is-different/.

DFOM Communications