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Christopher Butterfield is a composer and performer. Born in Vancouver in 1952, he was educated in the UK, Canada and the USA; he lives in Victoria, BC. His music has been performed by leading ensembles across Canada, including Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver; Banff Summer Festival; Aventa Ensemble, Victoria; New Music Concerts, Arraymusic and Continuum New Music, Toronto; SMCQ and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Montreal; he’s also been performed in Russia, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Holland, Finland and the United States. Over the years he has collaborated with choreographers Jennifer Mascall, Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux, and with visual artist Sandra Meigs. In 2015 Wakefield Press of Cambridge, MA published his translations of three plays by French writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Recent CDs of his music are available on the Collection QB and Red Shift labels; also a CD of performances of works by Dutch sound poet Greta Monach on Edition Wandelweiser. He taught composition at the University of Victoria from 1992 to 2023.

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I was born in Vancouver, BC, in 1952. After schooling in the UK and Canada, I studied composition with Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria, BC, and Turkish-American composer Bülent Arel at Stony Brook University, NY. As a student, in 1973 I helped organize the first Canadian performances of Erik Satie’s ±18 hour piano solo Vexations, first at UVic and then again a week later at Victoria’s Open Space gallery.

I moved to Toronto in 1977. In 1978 I lived in Montreal, where I directed myself in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, performing it in Montreal, Toronto, and Fredonia, NY. Once back in Toronto I played in the rock band Klo, conducted, and gave performances of sound poetry and performance art. In 1988 I was music director of The Greatest Show, by R. Murray Schafer, in Peterborough; that fall I spent several weeks at the Leighton Artists Colony at the Banff Centre, working on Project for an opera of the twentieth century G.S.: something that happened once and it is very interesting (retitled Zurich 1916). Jappements à la lune, my settings of sound poems by Claude Gauvreau, was performed at the ISCM World Music Days in Zurich in 1991.

I was appointed assistant professor of composition at the University of Victoria in 1992. Notable events over the last 32 years include conducting Pierre Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître at the Hornby Island Festival in 1995; touring in the US and Europe in 1996/97 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company performing Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem Ursonata (review); composer/performer, The Return of Buffalo Bill, dir. Boye Ladd and Bill Coleman, New Dance Horizons, Regina, in 1996; conducting the UVic Faculty Chamber Ensemble in Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto, University of Victoria, 1997 (CBC-FM radio broadcast); the production of my opera Zurich 1916, on a libretto by Toronto writer John Bentley Mays, at the Banff Summer Festival in 1998 (review); composer-in-residence of the Victoria Symphony 1999-2002; the premiere of my choral/orchestral score for choreographer Bill Coleman’s dance epic Convoy PQ17 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2001 (preview); mounting Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers, a text/sound installation at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2004; two years later, a performance of Madame Wu said..., a very long work-in-progress for piano trio, also at the AGGV.

In 2007 I spent four months as a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. In 2012 I sang Erik Satie’s monodrama Socrate at Gallery 345 in Toronto, accompanied by pianist Stephen Clarke; attended the first complete performance of my settings of French poet Jacques Prévert’s Contes pour enfants pas sages by Continuum Contemporary Music and Choir 21, also in Toronto; judged the International Gaudeamus Composition Competition in Utrecht; coordinated and curated the Cage 100 Festival in Victoria, BC, celebrating John Cage’s centenary (which included Cage’s only sound installation, Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, at Open Space, as well as an exhibition of visual work and artifacts by Cage and his associates at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria). In 2014, Victoria’s Aventa Ensemble and Toronto percussionist Rick Sacks toured five cities in Canada and the USA with parc, for vibraphone and ensemble. In August 2015 I gave a talk at the Ostrava Days Festival, Czechia, where I was invited to return as a lector in 2017.

My translations of The Emperor of China, The Mute Canary and The Executioner of Peru, three plays by Paris Dada Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, were published by Wakefield Press of Cambridge, MA, in January 2015. In 2017 Collection QB released the cd Trip, a collection of five pieces for strings composed over 22 years, performed by Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini. Also in 2017 I collaborated with visual artist Sandra Meigs to create the sound for Room for Mystics, an audio/visual installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, which ran for three months. Our most recent collaboration, The Warblers, opened at the Audain Gallery at the University of Victoria in October 2021, and later showed at VivianeArt in Calgary, Alberta, in March 2022 (review).

In 2020 I completed string quartet arrangements of five Nocturnes for piano by Erik Satie for Quatuor Bozzini, premiered by them in March 2021. A cd of Dutch artist Greta Monach’s sound poems, Fonerga, was released on Edition Wandelweiser in January 2022, performed by me, Cathy Fern Lewis, Laura Brandes and Daniel Brandes. That March I collaborated with choreographer Livona Ellis of Ballet BC on a brief piece for dancers, electronics and voice. Souvenir, a cd of four large ensemble pieces written between 1996 and 2013, performed by Aventa Ensemble, was released on Redshift Records early in 2023.

I retired from the University of Victoria in 2023, after teaching composition in the School of Music for 31 years.

Home page photo by Daniel Laskarin