REVIEWS OF PIECES
Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail, April 12, 2011
...Steenhuisen’s show-closing Supplice & Demand was also the heftiest and most unified, to my ear, even though the piece took off from a wild collage of words by four different authors, including Jorge Luis Borges and Edvard Munch. The music formed around and burst away from powerful tonal centres, often a single note or chord whose energy was somehow enhanced by the more ornamental activity flashing around it. A sustained tone can have tremendous force, and Steenhuisen found endless ways to exploit this primitive power within a sophisticated idiom. The intense beautiful opacity of Erica Iris Huang’s mezzo-soprano was absolutely right for this piece, as it climbed repeatedly from the rocky road of declaimed text into a soaring sung delivery that carried everything along with it.
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
“Information overload hasn't been as much fun since Eric Lyon's "Never Make Fun of a Man's Cooking" and Paul Steenhuisen's "Circumnavigating the Sea of Shit".
Elissa Poole, Globe and Mail
...defined the space's parameters and vivified it...
Pensacola has a wonderful sense of not being about going someplace.
It simply is - rock-solid past, present and future - all one in the same imposing block of marble.
The Record, Kitchener, Ontario
...encapsulates high drama and engineering prowess - an orchestral opus of staggering impact.
Kleine Zeitung, Vienna
Emotion...von vier verschiedenen, kurzen Klangfragmenten aus, um daraus eine viertelstundige Komposition fur Sopran, Tonband und Orchester zu entwickein, die ebenfalls zur grossen Geste und zur grossen Emotion neigt.
reviewVancouver
at turns evocative and haunting. Highly individual, the musical palette was large, the writing for strings profoundly moving, and the determinedly cerebral and abstract qualities of the piece--a meditation on the nature of soul--compelled attention. The writing for the strings shimmered and glowed (Your Soul is a Bottle Full of Thirsting Salt).
Harriet Cunningham blog, Australia
"By the time they got to the finale, Paul Steenhuisen’s Copralite Analysis, my brain had exploded, leaving me staring at the soap bubbles – an integral part of this whimsical, post-modernist score — with childish wonder."
David Gyger, North Shore Times, Sydney, Australia
“The highlights of this concert came last...(Grisey and Steenhuisen). Canadian Paul Steenhuisen’s Copralite Analysis combined Mozart on the piano with percussive intrusions and flirted with the traditionally outrageous trappings of the avant garde by encompassing lots of bubble blowing, both manual and mechanical, paper shredding and consumption of the results thereof and other innovative percussion effects.
Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail
A highlight of the 2003 concert season. (A Book from the Harbour, Chapter III, performed by Jane Archibald, soprano, John Hess, piano).
Neuzeit, Graz, Austria
Hohepunkt des Konzerts war wonder fur orchester, ton-band und sopran. Der Komponist hat aus dem Vollen geschopft und erweckte in Horer den Eindruck einer Vielzahl ubereinan der montierter, in ihrer Farbigkeit und Transparenz genauestens, insgesamt ein wunderbares lebediges und organisches System, dessen Ratsel sich aus ihrer eignen Schonheit von selbst erklaren. Superb.
Winnipeg Free Press
vehement, displayed a fine panorama of sounds not normally heard.
Garth Cheddar, StriderNews, New York
at times gives the impression of some kind of strange, undanceable alien techno.
Robert Rosen, MusicWorks
...a tight interplay of ideas, articulate silences which lead into a mystical but aggressive conclusion.
NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam
...hazardous, daring...strives for intellectual "discussion".
De Ijsbreker Agenda, Amsterdam
an interesting and strange composer. Aggressive, polemical.
Michael Scott, The Vancouver Sun
failed to satisfy.
Georgia Straight, Vancouver
a dense electronic fracas.
Earwaves, Berkeley, California
...brilliant electroacoustic music.
Claude Gingras, La Presse
...saloperie.
Voyage, Marseille
...decouvrir une oeuvre forte...
Macleans Magazine
...jarring, industrial...
Tamara Bernstein, the National Post
succinct, brilliantly orchestrated... full of tension.
Paristransatlantic.com
Milton Babbitt once famously described an LP recording of Tchaikowsky as electronic music - the record itself becomes an objet trouvé, something to manipulate or even downright vandalize(Cage was, not surprisingly, one of the first folk to realize this, long before Christian Marclay and John Oswald). Nowadays, with today's music software, one might add that a CD or an mp3 file of Tchaikowsky is just as susceptible to interference. Paul Steenhuisen's Bread (for 13 instruments and soundfiles) confronts the esthetic of Babbitt's quotation full on when winds and percussion suddenly loop back upon themselves and disappear down an electronic plughole; nothing here but the recordings, as Wm. Burroughs might have said. Wonder pits the computer against a full orchestra and a soprano, while Now is a Creature for trombone and electronics is one of the most exciting uses of real-time transformation I've come across - Steenhuisen demystifies the process and reveals exactly what heâs doing (octave doublings, delays, pitch inversions, you name it) to Benny Sluchin's athletic performance. Elsewhere the composer abandons live forces altogether for spectacular plunderphonics: ‘Poland is not yet lost’ viciously mangles a choral sample (trying to determine what is rather like identifying a charred body after a train wreck, but I think it's a snatch of Parsifal) with all the digital butchery ProTools is capable of. In this piece, as in the imaginatively-titled Circumnavigating the sea of shit, the barriers have come crashing down between "contemporary classical music" and "electronica" - this could easily be the work of Fennesz, Rehberg or those jolly pranksters V/VM. Of course, Steenhuisen's more conventional (?) instrumental pieces (MYCENAEAN WOUND, Ciphering in Tongues) reveal him to be well-versed in straight post-IRCAM techniques, but there's a freshness here that bodes well for the future providing he doesn't allow himself to be locked up in a studio next to the Pompidou Centre.
Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail, April 12, 2011
...Steenhuisen’s show-closing Supplice & Demand was also the heftiest and most unified, to my ear, even though the piece took off from a wild collage of words by four different authors, including Jorge Luis Borges and Edvard Munch. The music formed around and burst away from powerful tonal centres, often a single note or chord whose energy was somehow enhanced by the more ornamental activity flashing around it. A sustained tone can have tremendous force, and Steenhuisen found endless ways to exploit this primitive power within a sophisticated idiom. The intense beautiful opacity of Erica Iris Huang’s mezzo-soprano was absolutely right for this piece, as it climbed repeatedly from the rocky road of declaimed text into a soaring sung delivery that carried everything along with it.
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
“Information overload hasn't been as much fun since Eric Lyon's "Never Make Fun of a Man's Cooking" and Paul Steenhuisen's "Circumnavigating the Sea of Shit".
Elissa Poole, Globe and Mail
...defined the space's parameters and vivified it...
Pensacola has a wonderful sense of not being about going someplace.
It simply is - rock-solid past, present and future - all one in the same imposing block of marble.
The Record, Kitchener, Ontario
...encapsulates high drama and engineering prowess - an orchestral opus of staggering impact.
Kleine Zeitung, Vienna
Emotion...von vier verschiedenen, kurzen Klangfragmenten aus, um daraus eine viertelstundige Komposition fur Sopran, Tonband und Orchester zu entwickein, die ebenfalls zur grossen Geste und zur grossen Emotion neigt.
reviewVancouver
at turns evocative and haunting. Highly individual, the musical palette was large, the writing for strings profoundly moving, and the determinedly cerebral and abstract qualities of the piece--a meditation on the nature of soul--compelled attention. The writing for the strings shimmered and glowed (Your Soul is a Bottle Full of Thirsting Salt).
Harriet Cunningham blog, Australia
"By the time they got to the finale, Paul Steenhuisen’s Copralite Analysis, my brain had exploded, leaving me staring at the soap bubbles – an integral part of this whimsical, post-modernist score — with childish wonder."
David Gyger, North Shore Times, Sydney, Australia
“The highlights of this concert came last...(Grisey and Steenhuisen). Canadian Paul Steenhuisen’s Copralite Analysis combined Mozart on the piano with percussive intrusions and flirted with the traditionally outrageous trappings of the avant garde by encompassing lots of bubble blowing, both manual and mechanical, paper shredding and consumption of the results thereof and other innovative percussion effects.
Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail
A highlight of the 2003 concert season. (A Book from the Harbour, Chapter III, performed by Jane Archibald, soprano, John Hess, piano).
Neuzeit, Graz, Austria
Hohepunkt des Konzerts war wonder fur orchester, ton-band und sopran. Der Komponist hat aus dem Vollen geschopft und erweckte in Horer den Eindruck einer Vielzahl ubereinan der montierter, in ihrer Farbigkeit und Transparenz genauestens, insgesamt ein wunderbares lebediges und organisches System, dessen Ratsel sich aus ihrer eignen Schonheit von selbst erklaren. Superb.
Winnipeg Free Press
vehement, displayed a fine panorama of sounds not normally heard.
Garth Cheddar, StriderNews, New York
at times gives the impression of some kind of strange, undanceable alien techno.
Robert Rosen, MusicWorks
...a tight interplay of ideas, articulate silences which lead into a mystical but aggressive conclusion.
NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam
...hazardous, daring...strives for intellectual "discussion".
De Ijsbreker Agenda, Amsterdam
an interesting and strange composer. Aggressive, polemical.
Michael Scott, The Vancouver Sun
failed to satisfy.
Georgia Straight, Vancouver
a dense electronic fracas.
Earwaves, Berkeley, California
...brilliant electroacoustic music.
Claude Gingras, La Presse
...saloperie.
Voyage, Marseille
...decouvrir une oeuvre forte...
Macleans Magazine
...jarring, industrial...
Tamara Bernstein, the National Post
succinct, brilliantly orchestrated... full of tension.
Paristransatlantic.com
Milton Babbitt once famously described an LP recording of Tchaikowsky as electronic music - the record itself becomes an objet trouvé, something to manipulate or even downright vandalize(Cage was, not surprisingly, one of the first folk to realize this, long before Christian Marclay and John Oswald). Nowadays, with today's music software, one might add that a CD or an mp3 file of Tchaikowsky is just as susceptible to interference. Paul Steenhuisen's Bread (for 13 instruments and soundfiles) confronts the esthetic of Babbitt's quotation full on when winds and percussion suddenly loop back upon themselves and disappear down an electronic plughole; nothing here but the recordings, as Wm. Burroughs might have said. Wonder pits the computer against a full orchestra and a soprano, while Now is a Creature for trombone and electronics is one of the most exciting uses of real-time transformation I've come across - Steenhuisen demystifies the process and reveals exactly what heâs doing (octave doublings, delays, pitch inversions, you name it) to Benny Sluchin's athletic performance. Elsewhere the composer abandons live forces altogether for spectacular plunderphonics: ‘Poland is not yet lost’ viciously mangles a choral sample (trying to determine what is rather like identifying a charred body after a train wreck, but I think it's a snatch of Parsifal) with all the digital butchery ProTools is capable of. In this piece, as in the imaginatively-titled Circumnavigating the sea of shit, the barriers have come crashing down between "contemporary classical music" and "electronica" - this could easily be the work of Fennesz, Rehberg or those jolly pranksters V/VM. Of course, Steenhuisen's more conventional (?) instrumental pieces (MYCENAEAN WOUND, Ciphering in Tongues) reveal him to be well-versed in straight post-IRCAM techniques, but there's a freshness here that bodes well for the future providing he doesn't allow himself to be locked up in a studio next to the Pompidou Centre.