Jocelyn Morlock, Composer

With a discography of nine CDs, and numerous performances and broadcasts throughout North America and Europe, Jocelyn Morlock is fast becoming known as one of Canada’s leading composers.

With its “shimmering sheets of harmonics” (Georgia Straight) and an approach that is “deftly idiomatic” (Vancouver Sun) Morlock’s music has received numerous national and international accolades, including: Top 10 at the 2002 International Rostrum of Composers; Winner of the 2003 CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition; and a nomination for Best Classical Composition at the 2006 Western Canadian Music Awards.  In 2008, Morlock was a winner of the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Vancouver.

Morlock’s international career was launched at the 1999 International Society for Contemporary Music’s World Music Days with Romanian performances of her quartet Bird in the Tangled Sky. Since then, she has become the composer of record for significant music competitions, including the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition and the 2005 Montreal International Music Competition, for which she wrote Amore, a tour de force vocal work that has gone on to receive more than 50 performances and numerous radio broadcasts.

Highlights of the past two seasons’ premieres include: Cobalt, a double violin concerto for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, with soloists Jonathan Crow and Karl Stobbe, conducted by Alain Trudel; the imposed pieces for the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition; the score for the award-winning documentary film Children of Armageddon; music for Vancouver New Music’s multi-media project, Marginalia – Re-visioning Roy Kiyooka, (winner of the 2007 Alcan Performing Arts Award), and Theft (Water-Clocks, Insomnia) for Too Strange, Standing Wave’s exploration of magical realism in music.

Recent recordings of Morlock’s work include Fringe Percussion’s eponymous debut album, Kathleen McLean and Erica Goodman’s Nightsongs, Tiresias Ensemble’s Delicate Fires (nominated for a 2008 Western Canadian Music Award), Trio Verlaine’s Fin de Siècle and the Canadian Music Centre’s So You Want To Write A Fugue (“the most exciting disc of new Canadian music in years” – The Toronto Star).  During 2010, new releases from pianist Rachel Iwaasa (Cosmophony) and vocal ensembles musica intima and the Canadian Chamber Choir will all feature Morlock’s music.

Upcoming projects include a large-scale collaboration with the Aeriosa Dance Ensemble to be premiered during the 2010 Winter Olympics plus new works for the Agassiz International Chamber Music Festival, the Parisot Cellofest, the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival, and flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor.

Jocelyn Morlock completed a Bachelor of Music in piano performance at Brandon University, studying with pianist Robert Richardson.  She received both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia. Among her teachers were Pat Carrabré, Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel, and the late Russian-Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf.