Jessie Leov

The International Society for Contemporary Music holds an annual  festival, World New Music Days, hosted by a different regional branch of the organisation each year. The Composers Association of NZ (CANZ) recently put out a call for submissions of works by NZ composers from which six are chosen to be sent on to the ISCM for potential programming in the 2024 festival, taking place in the Faroe Islands.

My creative collaborator Garling Wu and I submitted a work from our current project, earthworks, which we have been working on since earlier in the year thanks to funding from Creative New Zealand.

We are stoked that our piece has been selected by CANZ and passed on to the ISCM for consideration alongside works by fellow Kiwi composers Jesse Austin-Stewart, Leonie Holmes, Hanzhong Kang, Victoria Kelly, and Erin Voice.

At least one work out of this selection will be programmed in the festival, and the composer will receive financial support to attend. It sure would be exciting if our work is chosen but either way we are really looking forward to seeing who will be representing Aotearoa at this pretty special event!

 

Unbelievably excited to have been selected as the NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence for 2024!

Over the coming months I will be writing a full orchestral commission for the NYO to perform in 2024.

Feeling grateful and looking forward to exciting times ahead. You can read more about the opportunity here.

More info to come as things progress x

UPDATE: Tickets are now live for the NYO’s 2024 Concert Series, NYO Victory. The three works on the programme will be conducted by the amazing Tianyi Lu. If you’ll be in Wellington on the 5th July or Palmerston North or the 6th July, I would love to see you there.

Kia ora whānau,

I recently had the honour of having my work Let My Country Awake, for mixed voices, performed by award-winning chamber choir KC Vitas, based in the USA. Their name stands for the Kansas City Vibrating Internal Thyroarytenoids and their mission as a group is to ‘promote the continued creation and performance of “contemporary-classical” vocal music’.

After submitting my piece in a Call for Scores in December 2021, it was a lovely surprise to hear from them. My piece was included in their Spring concert series, with two concerts taking place on May 19 and 21 2023. They did a truly beautiful performance and I’m so grateful they chose to perform my work!

You can read through the full concert programme here which featured a selection of works from the USA, as well as one from South Korea in addition to my work representing Aotearoa.

Feel free to listen to the performance at the link above!

x Jessie

I recently had the privilege of performing at the Auckland Writers Festival Poetry and Music event, held at the Limelight Room in the Aotea Centre on 21 May. This collaborative event featured the shortlisted works of poetry from this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, pairing the four finalist poets with four musicians from the 2023 Ockham Collective.

Working with poet Joanna Cho was a wonderful experience – together we put together a nine-minute performance intertwining two of her poems with original music that I performed on the piano. The event ended up being sold out and it was a really inspiring evening. Watch the video of our performance here (apologies for the recording quality).

You can read more about the event here. 

I’m beyond thrilled to share that my recent application for a CNZ Arts Grant, in collaboration with sonic artist Garling Wu, was successful! We will be working together over the next 12 months, composing approximately 40 minutes of genre-bending new music which explores our respective backgrounds in contemporary classical and sonic arts as well as wider musical infuences.

As emerging artists this is a huge milestone in our careers. We put a huge amount of work into the application and we are so grateful to have been given this funding. I’ll be sharing more details as things progress so watch this space.

You can check out the full list of grant recipients here.