Biography

Brian Harman, born in 1981, received his Doctor of Music in Composition from McGill University in 2012. Most recently, he worked with Georges Aperghis on a new work at Impuls 2013, and was a featured composer in the Soundlab podcast series. His orchestral work Supposed Spaces was selected to be part of Canada’s 2013 submission to the ISCM’s World New Music Days. In 2011, he was a winner in the ISCM International Vocal Music Competition, resulting in a commission from Vienna’s Wiener Jeunesse Kammerchor, and in the same year he received an honourable mention in the CLC’s 60th Anniversary Composition Competition for Gregarious Machines. In 2009, he was a finalist in the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra Composition Competition for his work Dialectics.

Brian’s music is frequently inspired by extra-musical elements, such as architecture, dance, human speech and concepts of ritual, and he has written for a very wide variety of mediums, often collaborating with artists in other disciplines. His music has been performed by such ensembles as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal+, 5-Penny New Music Ensemble, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with various festivals and organizations such as Nu:Nord (Montreal/Oslo), Cluster Music and Integrated Arts Festival (Winnipeg), Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, and Conservatory Canada, developing a composition workshop for young pianists (Orillia).