
25 January (Saturday)
2:30 pm | Walter Hall
Free admission
Curated by Nolan Hildebrand
Program
A Sheep Afloat
Yike Zhang
Strength to Climb
Steven Banks
The last Sunset of August
Menelaos Peistikos
Orbit
Kotoka Suzuki
Drone, Wolf, Skronk
Nolan Hildebrand
Biographies
Yike Zhang (b. 1993 in Wuhan, China) is a composer active in Toronto and New York. In 2024, Zhang received her Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Toronto, where she was composer in residence for the University of Toronto symphony orchestra. She also received degrees from the Manhattan School of Music (MM) and Wuhan Conservatory of Music (BM). Her music synthesizes the different worlds she was interested in from a young age — Western classical music and traditional Chinese concepts — organically combining those elements consciously and subconsciously. The fluidity and resonance that are the vitality of her music come from influences of impressionism and post-spectralism.
Menelaos Peistikos (22 August, 1995) is a Greek composer and pianist currently based in Toronto, Canada. His music is inspired by an extreme variety of musical genres, ranging from baroque and renaissance music to contemporary classical and cinematic music, as well as from folk Greek to Japanese, Tibetan and Indonesian Gamelan music. A very critical element in most of his compositions is his influence by other disciplines of Art (like fine art, literature, philosophy, poetry and photography) especially by the oeuvres of Plato, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alan Watts and Edward Hopper.
Kotoka Suzuki / 鈴木琴香 is a composer focusing on both multimedia and instrumental practices. She has produced several large-scale multimedia works, including spatial interactive audio-visual work for both concert and installation settings, often in collaboration with artists and scholars from other disciplines. Her work engages deeply in the visual, conceiving of sound as a physical form to be manipulated through the sculptural practice of composition. Her work often reflects on life, breath and wind.
Nolan Hildebrand is a composer and noise artist based in Toronto, Canada. Nolan’s music explores conceptual and physical extremities to create intense and engaging music. His compositions span classical ensembles and electroacoustic music, and performance in an experimental solo noise project dubbed BLACK GALAXIE.
As a performer and composer, saxophonist Steven Banks (b. 1993) is striving to bring his instrument to the heart of the classical music world. He is driven to program and write music that directly addresses aspects of the human experience and is an active and intentional supporter of diverse voices in the future of concert music. Rick Perdian of Seen and Heard International has said “one senses that Banks has the potential to be one of the transformational musicians of the twenty-first century.”