part of the Emergents Series curated by Chelsea Shanoff

This season, the Emergents Series deviates from its usual format of two artists per concert into differently structured events. The first edition of the series presents four song cycles of contemporary Art Song created by The Sounds Of Silence Initiative.

Founded just last year, SOSI has already brought together over 50 composers, poets, and musicians to collaborate and create new Canadian Art Song that tells the story of a diverse Canadian cultural identity. SOSI serves as a platform for discussing issues of representation in Canadian arts culture.

SOSI strives to ensure the involvement from underrepresented communities in the Greater Toronto Area. In particular, all poets involved in SOSI identify with Indigenous, immigrant, Black, refugee, and LGBT communities with varying degrees of intersectionality. SOSI hopes to provide a platform on which their unique and powerful voices can been heard.

Tonight is the premiere of 4 song cycles resulting from the collaboration between SOSI and artists Kolby Zinger-Harris, Aparna Halpe, Charlie Petch, Banoo Zan, Alex Sandoval, and Yilun Liu. Each cycle tells a story of the journey of finding one’s identity and place in the world.

Daniel Robinson is the founder and director of The Sounds of Silence Initiative. As a current graduate fellow at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music he is researching voice therapy interventions for transgender women as well as the effects of presbycusis on resonance perception.