Moe Touizrar: Winner of the John Rea Travel Award in Composition
This year’s John Rea Travel Award has been awarded to doctoral candidate Moe Touizrar. Established in 2016 by Prof. John Rea, the prize is awarded each year to a student in composition who is travelling during the summer to broaden their cultural experience and depth of knowledge.
Moe Touizrar’s work over the last few years, both artistic and scholarly, has been oriented toward the use, history and analysis of orchestral timbre as a metaphor for the experience of light. To learn more about how composers understand and manipulate sound, Moe will travel to Finland, Romania and New York City this summer to interview composers and conductors about their experiences with 'light' in music. In addition to these interviews, Moe will present his ongoing research at conferences and invited lectures as well as receive a premiere of a new work for cello sextet at a summer festival. In a recent email exchange, Moe expressed his gratitude for the award as “the combination of these activities over the course of three months would not be possible without the generous support of the John Rea Travel Award.”
Moe’s research has been supported by, among others, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology (CIRMMT) and the Music Perception and Cognition Lab (MPCL) at McGill University. He was also the winner of the inaugural Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize in Orchestral Composition. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Music Perception at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University under the co-supervision of composer John Rea and experimental psychologist Stephen McAdams.
