About Us

Connecting Calgarians through exploratory music, sound, and interdisciplinary performance.

Our Mission

We cultivate curiosity by elevating and sharing exploratory music and interdisciplinary art with wide-eared artists, performers, and listeners in Calgary and beyond.

Our Values

· We support the creation of exploratory music, and cross-disciplinary artistic expression.

· We work with a spirit of exploration, curiosity, and openness.

· We embrace relationality, building a sense of fascination and belonging through music and community connection.

· We strive for artistic integrity in all we do.

What do we mean by ‘exploratory’ music?

Music that is cultivated with an experimental ethos, but isn’t limited to any one culture, tradition, or genre. While New Works Calgary has historically presented new music in the classical tradition, we are consciously choosing to shed this label as we strive towards the creation of a more inclusive, diverse, and equitable listening culture.

Our history

New Works Calgary (NWC) was created when artist John Snow commissioned a composition by Allan Rae and discovered there were no performance opportunities for the piece.

Surprised by this, the Snow family held a concert of new music by Calgary composers and musicians in April 1984, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Music Centre. That concert, held at the Pleiades Theatre, was sponsored by John and Kathleen Snow.

The success of this concert encouraged Snow and co-founder Quentin Doolittle to start concert series that featured new works by Calgary composers. As a result, the New Works of Art Calgary society was established in the fall of 1984 and has maintained annual concert seasons ever since.

“New paintings are easily seen by everyone, even if it is only by looking in the window of an art gallery. Written works are almost as easy being available from libraries, magazines, books, and many radio programs. More difficult are works for the theatre and most difficult of all is to have the opportunity to hear new music.”

John Snow

“Our general goal has been not only to present contemporary Canadian music in all its diversity but also to explore the rich collaborative possibilities between Canadian composers and poets, writers, video and performance artists, visual artists, dancers, actors, and musicians.”

Quenten Doolittle

Our Team

Rebecca Bruton
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Website • Soundcloud

rebecca bruton is a composer, songmaker, and vocalist living just north of Moh’kinsstis; the place where the Bow and Elbow Rivers converge; the place where the world began (Siksiká). She creates work that moves in the narrow space between sorrow and celebration; her interests include the pace of trekking through the Rocky Mountains, land/blood memory, the choreographic, multi-species kinship, and the malleable nature of time itself.

rebecca creates across several musical mediums, including experimental chamber music, song, film scores, and free improvisation. Her chamber compositions are widely performed, having been commissioned by Ekmeles vocal ensemble (NYC), Quatuor Bozzini (Montréal), Quasar Quatuor de saxophones (Montréal), Arraymusic (Toronto), Ultraviolet Ensemble (Edmonton), and more. In 2023 she will premiere The Faerie Ribbon, a new work for expanded string quintet performed by Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective (Toronto). The Faerie Ribbon will be released as one side of a collaborative LP of music for expanded string quintet, a multi-year project she devised and co-led with Toronto-based composer Jason Doell.

rebecca is an avid collaborator, especially across disciplines. In the fall of 2021 rebecca performed in the premiere of ‘We needed to be rescued’, a collaborative movement and music work she co-created with choreographer and dancer Heather Ware (produced by Dancers Studio West). She also tends to a long-term collaborative friendship with multidisciplinary artist Angela Rawlings, having set Angela’s 2017 book si tu to microtonal music for four voices (I n s t i t u, 2021), and collaborated with Angela in the polyvocal duo Moss Moss Not Moss (Tectonics Glasgow 2016). In Autumn 2022 rebecca premiered a shimmering ornament of silt, an electro-acoustic multi-channel installation she co-created with Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir (Sphere Festival, National Arts Centre CAN).

'...music that’s experimental but also simple, with a sensuousness and a weirdness to it.' - Sarah Constant, Musicworks

'All expectations were detourned by the presence of Rebecca Bruton...Positing an avant-garde tradition on the same country path k.d. lang once trod down...' - Joe Strutt, Mechanical Forest Sound

Ado Nkemka Marketing Coordinator

Ado Nkemka is a multi-disciplinary writer and musician/teacher based in Calgary, on Treaty 7 Territory. She has a Bachelor of Sociology from Mount Royal University and course work in Digital Marketing from the University of Calgary. She has written for Avenue Magazine, Summit Magazine (forthcoming), artsUNITE, Best Health among other publications. Her writing explores identity development, neurodivergence, and arts and culture.

She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Mount Royal University’s Trico Changemakers Studio, working with The Alcove Centre for the Arts, to increase accessibility to the arts. She is also preparing for the release of her first official pop-rock project (@mybedroomstage ).

photo credit: Francis A Willey @neopictorialist

Board of Directors:

Kristin Flores, President
Julian Iafelice, Secretary
Kayra Caner, Treasurer
Christina Milinusic, Director
Lydia Pineau, Director
Michael Gray, Director
Steve Russell, Director