Martin Arnold
Assistant Professor Martin Arnold
BMus (Alberta), MMus, PhD (Victoria)
martinarnold@trentu.ca
Scott House 211, Traill College
705-748-1011 ext. 1771
Dr. Martin Arnold holds degrees in Music (Composition) from the University of Alberta (BMus), and the University of Victoria (MMus and PhD). He also studied Royal Conservatory in the Hague and the Banff School of Fine Arts.
Martin's notated music has been performed nationally and internationally by many prominent artists including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, Apartment House, Philip Thomas, Silvia Tarozzi, Jürg Frey, Anton Lukoszevieze, Opera Aperto, Eve Egoyan, Mira Benjamin, Angharad Davies, Sharron Kraus, Joshua Abrams, GGRIL (Grand Groupe Régional d'Improvisation Libérée), the Eybler Quartet, Continuum, Helen Pridmore, Motion, Cléo Palacio-Quintin, Lori Freedman, Ensemble Kore, the CalArts Experimental Music Ensemble, Roger Admiral, Sound Pressure, Hemispheres, Marc Sabat, Stephen Clarke, Les Coucous Bénévoles, Strange Companions, Elissa Poole, Aventa Ensemble and Arraymusic.
And these performances often occur as part of national and international festivals/concerts series including Tectonics (Glasgow), Spazi d'ascolto (Vignola), Frequency Festival (Chicago), of-the-now Martin Arnold Festival (Victoria), Riga International Biennial (Riga), DNK DAYS (Amsterdam), Ostrava Days Festival (Ostrava), Music We'd Like to Hear (London, UK), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (Huddersfield), Radical Simplicity (Tokyo), Cluster New Music+Integrated Arts Festival (Winnipeg), Suoni per il Popolo (Montréal), Moments musicaux (Aarau), OK.Quoi?! Festival (Sackville), Evenings of New Music (Bratislava), Klangraum (Dusseldorf), SOUNDart & ARTsound (Brno), Images Film Festival (Toronto), November Music (‘s-Hertogenbosch), Interface (Berlin), Ny Musik (Borås), Crash Festival (Dublin) and the Eclat Festival (Stuttgart).
Martin is also an active member of Toronto’s improvisation and experimental jazz/roots/rock communities performing on live electronics, banjo, melodica, electric guitar, and hurdy-gurdy. In particular, he has performed and recorded with Eric Chenaux in a number contexts and for 20+ years he has been electric guitarist in the Ryan Driver Quartet/Quintet/Sextet.
Martin performs on a number of internationally distributed recordings released by labels such as Constellation, Tin Angel, Fire, CMC, Beniffer Editions and Rat-drifting, and has three albums entirely devoted to his compositions in print: Tam Lin on Autumn Records (Bennington, Vermont), Aberrare on Collection QB/DAME (Montréal), and The Spit Veleta on Another Timbre (Sheffield, UK). Another Timbre will be releasing another collection of Martin's work in November 2020 and has commissioned him to write a 70 minute solo for pianist Philip Thomas to be recorded and released in late 2021.
Martin's music and aesthetic politics have been discussed in books, journal articles and dissertations including Thick Relationality: Microtonality and the Technique of Intonation in 21st Century String Performance (Mira Benjamin, 2019), “Across the Great Divide: New Experimental Music From Canada” (Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2017), “Tuber, Rhizome, Tendril and Corm: On the Music of Martin Arnold” (Anna Höstman, 2016), Experimental Music Since 1970 (Jennie Gottschalk, 2016), “Listening Aside: An Aesthetics of Distraction in Contemporary Music” (David Cecchetto and Eldritch Priest, 2013) and Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Eldritch Priest, 2013).
As a writer of text, Martin has had articles/essays on both music and visual art published in periodicals such as Sound American, C Magazine, Canadian Art and Musicworks. He has also written catalogue essays for monographs on the work of Marla Hlady and Daniel Olson, the introduction for Volumes, a catalogue involving ten years of Canadian sound art (which he also co-edited with Christof Migone), and a chapter in the book Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays On Canadian Culture.