A community celebration of art song mixed with friendly competition is coming to Winnipeg for the first time.
Flipside Opera & Art Song Collective is teaming up with the Dream Big Collaborative Piano Conference to present songSLAM, a one-night-only event at the West End Cultural Centre where teams of composers, singers and pianists share an original art song composition and compete for cash prizes. The competition is the latest iteration of an event created by the New York-based collective Sparks & Wiry Cries, which has shared versions of this competition all over North America.
“We’ve wanted to do this songSLAM for a really long time,” says Judy Oatway, co-artistic director of Flipside Opera. “So many amazing art songs have come out of it, so it’s such a joy to get to see what people in our area want to contribute.”
Battling with world premieres
Laura Loewen with the Dream Big conference notes that Winnipeg will be just the second Canadian city to host a songSLAM event after Toronto. The event will welcome performers of all ages and experience levels to apply with their composition ideas, using either original or public domain poetry that must be less than five minutes long and never have been performed before.
“It’s really fun to work on new pieces because there’s no preconceptions of what it should be and what it shouldn’t be,” says Loewen. “When you’re playing pieces that were written and that have been performed for hundreds of years, you’ve got a lot of recordings and you listen to them and that’s a really rich history and trove of information, but ultimately, you’re fitting into a world that has already been figured out in some extent. This is just like anything. You are the first person ever doing this.”
The songSLAM culminates in the actual event with the audience determining the winners. First prize at the event will win $700 for the team, with second and third place teams earning $500 and $300, respectively.
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Oatway hopes that the competition will spawn new songs that reflect the community in a thoughtful and tangible way.
“We are a very diverse and multicultural place,” she says, “so I’m excited to see where people feel inspired to bring the words from, because that could be a big part of what music gets performed.”
Oatway adds that Winnipeg’s geographical isolation will likely result in compositions that could not be created anywhere else because of the necessity to innovate with fewer resources on hand. “We can’t go anywhere, so we have to make it here,” she explains. “I have no doubt that we’ll see stuff that feels inspired by the elements that we have here in the prairies, too.”
“I think it would make me feel proud if we got something that felt Manitoban.”
Applications for songSLAM will officially open at 6 p.m. on October 23 and will be open until twelve teams are confirmed. The finals for the competition will be held on January 29 at 8 p.m. at the West End Cultural Centre. More information can be found at Sparks & Wiry Cries’ website.