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Canadian composer Emilie Cecilia LeBel is active in the music community in various capacities: composing, teaching, curating, and organizing.  Described as having a “deft compositional hand, unwilling to hurry ideas”, and “impressively subtle and sensuous”, Emilie’s artistic practice is currently concerned with connections between visual and sonic worlds that engage with notions of memory, nostalgia, and place.  She is presently the TD SoundMakers Composer-in-Residence where she is collaborating on a project with Soundstreams Canada and Jumblies Theatre.  Emilie is a member of Blue Moss Ensemble with composers Anna Höstman and Mitch Renaud.

Emilie was the 2015 RBC Emerging Composer-in-Residence for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.  The commissioned work,monograph of bird’s eye views, was performed in Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary, and is featured on the NYO’s 2015 album.  During 2015, Emilie was named winner of the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award.  In 2014, with support from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, Emilie undertook private composition studies with Juliet Palmer, Christopher Butterfield, and Michael Finnissy.  Emilie completed her doctorate in composition at the University of Toronto in 2013.  Her thesis, under the guidance of Gary Kulesha, was an orchestral work exploring the variances of light in the photographs of Josef Sudek.  Her research, under the guidance of Robin Elliott, focused on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian composers, examing the role of CBC Radio in the development of contemporary Canadian art music.  During her graduate studies Emilie was awarded the Canadian Music Centre Toronto Emerging Composer Award (2012), and the Canadian Federation of University Women Elizabeth Massey Award (2012). Read her full bio.

Q&A with Emilie on our blog

Read it here.

SoundMakers Composer in Residence

Find out about her work as SoundMakers Composer in Residence here.

Videos