Jessie Leov Music

New zealand

String quartet ‘threads’ – premiere

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I was lucky enough to have my string quartet piece ‘threads’ performed as part of the final concert of the annual Nelson Composer’s Workshop run by the Composers Association of New Zealand, held at the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts in July this year. It was a super interesting experience getting to see the musicians rehearsing my piece – seeing which bits were tricky and needed tweaking, what came together quickly, and how the piece came across in general when performed live.

I’m looking forward to having my orchestra piece ‘the wilds’ workshopped by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the end of November as part of the annual NZSO Todd Corporation Young Composer Awards.

Incredible week at the Canadian Rockies!

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Only two days after my flight across the world to an unknown land, I embarked upon a very exciting trip to the CANADIAN ROCKIES! Prepare yourselves for an onslaught of photos of magnificent landscapes.

I went on this trip with a fellow UBC exchange student, Erica from Belgium, who I had met the day before…. but we had organised the trip through Facebook the week before. Ah, the joys of the internet!

After a 13-hour bus trip to Banff and a very deep sleep, the highlight of our first day was Sulphur Mountain. I quickly developed a love-hate relationship with this mountain. It’s extraordinarily steep and I nearly died walking up it…… but at the top was the MOST STUNNING view I had ever seen in my life. Little did I know what the rest of the week would bring…

The view of Banff township from the top of Sulphur Mountain

That night we got our rental car, which involved a little drama but luckily everything worked out, drove to our Lake Louise campground and spent our first glorious night (of four) sleeping in the car. It was COLD. Note to self, next time bring extra blankets even though it’s summer..

The next day we did a massive 6-hour hike at Lake Louise to the Plain of 6 Glaciers via Lake Agnes.

This hike was full of ups and downs (geologically and mentally), rain and shine, a lot of sweating uphill climbing, but best of all – beautiful and awe-inspiring nature. The struggle is all part of the journey and there was definitely a lot of struggle but each time we reached a milestone it felt so so worth it. Pictured below is our view of Lake Agnes after walking right around it and then up a steep incline. It felt SO GOOD to reach that point. Pictured just above  is us feeling triumphant after finally arriving back at the Lake after our long hike.

Down below is Lake Agnes….. had to include the magical rainbow shot <3

We then high-tailed it to Lake Moraine before we lost our motivation to move. We did a lovely short hike along the side of the lake, as pictured on the right of the picture below. At this point the post-Lake-Louise-hike endorphins were starting to drop but I told Erica to take her time as she still had muchos energy to take pics of the wonderful view!

One of Erica’s many stunning shots taken on her magical iPhone
A very wet morning visit to Takkakaw Falls

The next day, we rose early after a delightful night of sleep in the car and drove down to Yoho National Park to explore. As seen to the right, our first stop was Takkakaw Falls…. very wet :P

We also visited the beautiful Emerald Lake as seen below and did the loop hike around the Lake. It had stopped raining by this point which was a bonus. To be quite honest, it was bringing down the mood a little!

Finally we did a short hike to the Wapta falls that day, before making our way through the Icefields Parkway to Jasper.

Emerald Lake

To the left you will see our sleeping arrangements in the Whistlers campground on our second to last night. This is basically what all four of our camping nights looked like :P

Our Jasper day turned out to be absolutely MAGNIFICENT as you can see from the panorama below! It started out cloudy and we first visited the Mt Edith Cavell and then did a hike to the Maligne canyon and back. We certainly managed to fit in a huge amount of activities into the 5 days we had… mainly thanks to Erica, adventurer extraordinaire!

The captivating view from the top of Old Fort Point in Jasper.

With our pal Ken who we gave a ride through the Icefields Parkway to Lake Louise village.

Our last day consisted of the drive back through the Icefields Parkway to Banff for our overnight bus back to Vancouver. We picked up a cool hitch-hiker called Ken who came along with us as we stopped at various spots along the way. We (or me, at least) were a little worn down by this point – a long bus ride, four nights of (minimal) sleep in the front seat of a car, and a LOT of physical activity! But truth be told, by the time we got back to Banff, I did not want to leave. I REALLY did not want to leave this magical place.

NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: As fate would have it….. this would not be the only trip to the Rockies that I took to the Rockies that year! I went again in winter in December and had a White Christmas and it was incredible <3

Post-Vegas competition recap!

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Hey all,

My final exam of the year is over and I will soon be heading back to Nelson for the summer! Very excited about it! Feels like a lifetime since I’ve been home even though it’s only been nine weeks. I’ve worked extra hard this semester, especially since I had time off from uni when I travelled to America, and I’m hoping the work will pay off when I get my final grades back.

Just in case you’re wondering – I do have two more years of university before I’m finished!

I’ll graduate in 2018 with a Bachelor of Music majoring in Composition and a Bachelor of Arts majoring in French. My current plans involve spending one of my remaining two years studying on exchange in Canada, but more about that at a later date ;) In Nelson I’m looking forward to spending time with my family, doing some gigs and going on some more hiking trips and getting back to this amazing scenery. Although the snow may be gone by now! Photo credit: LifeformLabs.

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It’s been about a month since I returned from my trip to Las Vegas where I competed with Greater Auckland Chorus at the Sweet Adelines International Convention! The chorus achieved a score improved by 120 points since they last competed internationally and improved their world ranking by one place so overall it was a very successful experience.

I spent 9 days there and witnessed some truly incredible performances – the highlights being the days of the quartet and chorus finals. I did have a bad case of the flu for the majority of the trip unfortunately so I was holed up in the hotel most of the time! I didn’t let it ruin the trip though and I’m so stoked I got to go and have my first international convention experience with Greater Auckland Chorus this year. Bring on the next one!! In the meantime check out the little gallery below with some great shots which captured the fun memories of us having a blast on stage! Thanks to Read Photography.

A massive thanks again to everyone who helped me get to America! Your contributions are the reason I was able to make it over there and I am so grateful for that! The ladies of Nelson Bays Harmony Chorus in particular were a big help in getting me to Vegas – and of course my Mum, who is my biggest supporter, was the mastermind behind the major fundraising event we held. Mums are the best! 

My most recent barbershop experience was doing a gig earlier this month with Molto! Quartet – the 2015 Sweet Adelines NZ champion quartet who also competed in Vegas! I was their replacement tenor as theirs is currently overseas. It was a great performance opportunity for me and good experience singing with different voices in a quartet! My own quartet ZEAL Quartet is competing for the first time at the NZ National Convention in 2016 in Wellington in May and also at the Under-25 Rising Star Quartet Contest in July in Auckland! Very exciting times – lots of hard work ahead!

Gig with Molto 7th Nov
Molto + me after our gig singing at a dinner function for the Women Judges of the High Court!

I know I say this every time but I will endeavour to actually do a blog post at least once a month from now on. So much stuff is going on in my life and it’s quite nice to be able to write it all down and fully appreciate the awesome things I get to be a part of! I’m going to make the most of this summer to be productive and get some exciting projects underway. More updates to come :)

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Jessie Xx

 

 

I need your help!

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Hey all!

Been a while since I’ve been active on my website/facebook page! Many exciting things have been happening in my life. For one thing – I now study a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Music conjoint majoring in French and Music Composition respectively. It’s pretty full on but I love it. I’m nearly halfway through my third year of university now, and have two years to go after this one.

Buuuut the big news at the moment is…. I’m going to Las Vegas in October to attend and compete at the International Sweet Adelines Convention with the Greater Auckland Chorus! GAC are the 2014 NZ Women’s Barbershop Chorus Champions and we recently sung at the Aotea Centre in May in preparation for competing in America on the international stage. This is a huge deal for me – barbershop has been a big part of my life for a long time and I’m very excited to take it further and keep pursuing these new opportunities.DanChilds_1505020770

The trip to Las Vegas has been budgeted at $4000 minimum, and unfortunately I don’t have access to that amount of money, so some major fundraising activities are being put into action! I have applied for and received a $1000 grant from the University of Auckland from the Vice Chancellors Arts Support Fund so this is a fantastic contribution which I’m really thankful for!

The Nelson Bays Harmony Chorus – my ‘mother’ chorus who I was a part of from age 13 to 19 – are very kindly organising and hosting a fundraiser evening in Nelson on July 7th at The Boathouse called ‘Las Vegas Cafe’. I’ll be doing some solo performing there along with some other special guests. We’re hoping to get as many people there as possible – there’ll be dinner and dessert provided! A great evening for friends and family to catch up, have good food and be entertained. Here’s the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/360914837415387/.

Huge thank you to NBHC for all their support!

In addition to the evening event we have a fundraiser Give a Little page for people who would like to donate in this way: . Every dollar is SO much appreciated and helps me on my journey to the international stage!

I hope you’re all doing well – thanks so much for sticking around and reading about what’s been happening in my life at the moment!

You’ll hear from me again soon I hope :)

Jessie x

 

On the radio TWICE in a week!

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Hey everyone!

First of all, if you haven’t heard my new song ‘Vows’ please head over and have a listen here!

It was super fun to make, very hard work and took about 3 or 4 ENTIRE days to finish. It’s the first song I’ve ever fully done on Ableton so it was a learning curve but hey gotta start somewhere.

So the first exciting radio-related event happened on the 25th March, when I got a txt from a friend saying that one of my songs was playing on KIWI FM! I was pretty stoked and managed to tune in and hear the end of it – it was my song Divine from the 2012 Play it Strange Songwriting Competition CD. So that was pretty awesome!

Then just last Friday (3 days later), I was woken up by a call at 7:30am saying I was on the shortlist for the ‘Sowing the Seeds of Success’ contest and I may or may not be rung by Mike Hosking within the hour. I had applied for this the week before, just coz you know you have to do these things just on the off chance, and written a huge page long, essentially like, biography of my life relating to music. And then I listed all the musical gear and equipment that I had bought to ‘support my career’, and I listed the few items I could think of at the time that I was really really wanting to get to help me record better music. These being fancy studio headphones, a midi controller keyboard, Logic Pro and Ableton Live Suite (recording/production softwares).

So long story short, Mike called me, we talked for a bit on air, he played some of my a-capella song See You Again (!!) And then I won all the gear I’d asked for! Needless to say it took me quite a few hours to calm down and become a normal person again after this happened. The adrenaline was pumping big time. So a huge thank you to Newstalk ZB and ASB Bank! I’m just waiting on a call from the bank and then I can hopefully head out and get my gear! I’M SO VERY EXCITED!

You can listen to the interview below:

I can’t believe we’re already up to the 5th week of the semester – only a couple of weeks to go before I head home for mid-semester break. I’m so happy to be back at it though, fully immersed in the music world and spending lots of time with my amazing and talented friends in Auckland!

I will be keeping you updated with new songs, other exciting events that may occur, etc etc, throughout the year! We are off to a good start.

Oh yeah, SONG OF THE WEEK below. I am in love.

Peace and love,

Jessie x