The Haiku Project
For 200 days during COVID lockdowns, I created and posted daily art projects based on original haiku. What started as a simple hobby project quickly escalated into increasingly elaborate conceptual territory: time-lapse videos, songs, puppets, epic long-form linked haiku, and many, many craft projects. The results can be seen on Instagram @isaiahisaiahisaiahisaiahisaiah, and I sell prints of some of the highlights as handmade greeting cards, and in a photo book. The songs also appear in Let Us Turn Aside.
PROJECTS
Some recent and ongoing projects, most involving a combination of music, writing, and theatre
A fully staged solo theatre show, co-created with director Sean Guist, based on my words and music. The Book of My Shames has been presented all over Canada in cabaret, chamber, and orchestral arrangements.
The Book of My Shames
For 200 days during COVID lockdowns, I created and posted daily art projects based on original haiku. What started as a simple hobby project quickly escalated into increasingly elaborate conceptual territory: time-lapse videos, songs, puppets, epic long-form linked haiku, and many, many craft projects. The results can be seen on Instagram @isaiahisaiahisaiahisaiahisaiah, and I sell prints of some of the highlights as handmade greeting cards, and in a photo book. The songs also appear in Let Us Turn Aside.
The Haiku Project
An unorthodox recital based around Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 39. The Schumann cycle is interwoven with folk songs, art songs, and original music on themes of distance and alienation, longing and return. This project involves piano-voice music as well as a few numbers with non-piano instruments that I play, and a fun four-hands piano duet. It’s a carefully constructed, colourful, intimate through-composed piece (just over an hour long) that works beautifully in small halls — we’ve even done this as a house concert.
The Traveller
This wild project, commissioned by Victoria Baroque in 2023, has already been brought back twice by popular demand (once to Early Music Vancouver, and once as a Victoria Baroque encore). Based on a concept by Victoria Baroque’s Soile Stratkauskas, I built this raucous event for and with colleagues Benjamin Butterfield and Timothy Carter (tenors) and music director/harpsichordist Mark McDonald. It’s anchored around some of Henry Purcell’s bawdier catches, and it also features music from some of Purcell’s contemporaries, as well as some surprising modern music — all threaded together by a depraved common sensibility. I have never experienced so much laughter at a classical music event…
Banned from
the Concert Hall
An experimental program built around Erik Satie’s Socrate. The movements of Satie’s “monodrama” are offset by work from other composers (including a few songs of my own) that shares its sensibility — a way of being present in the world that has been called ‘haiku consciousness’, and which I manifest here in a music-embodying physical language.
Let Us Turn Aside
My original translation and modernized, queer adaptation of Poulenc’s La voix humaine, set in a shuttered theatre during COVID. A semi-staged version was filmed for City Opera Vancouver in 2020. It’s a musically idiomatic English translation that I’m very proud of, and a piece I would love to produce and perform live.
La voix humaine
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