Being a young composer on the verge of starting a professional career can be a daunting proposition. Getting your name and compositions out into the world can seem like a precarious feat where there are a myriad of unknowns and the prospect of making a living can been extremely daunting.
With the dawning of 2025 we here in Winnipeg have a new organization that aims to make contemporary music more accessible for modern audiences while promoting contemporary music written by Manitoba composers under 35.
Called The Contemporary Music Interactive (CMI), this new innovative group will hold a series of concerts in May highlighting some of the latest music being written by Manitoba composers.
The CMI is the brainchild of violinists Sophie Reimer-Epp and River Sawchyn.
Coming up this Friday, January 3rd at 7:30pm at Fort Garry Mennonite Fellowship, the Contemporary Music interactive will be holding a fundraising concert that features Sophie Reimer Epp and River Sawchyn alongside pianist Everet Hopfner. They will be performing works by Sophie Carmen Eckhardt- Gramatté, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Mark O’Connor, as well as music composed by River Sawchyn himself.
This is going to be an exceptional concert that will hopefully ensure that the CMI flourishes and has a robust inaugural year.
The Contemporary Music Interactive’s official concert series is starting out small with two concerts on May 23rd and 25th at CMU’s Laudamus Auditorium. This concert on Friday, December 3rd will help raise money for overhead costs, such as paying for the hall, paying the musicians, and giving the composers a small compensation for their works.
The seed of the idea for CMI was planted when Sophie Reimer-Epp was a student in the Pre-Professional Program of The Rosamunde Summer Music Academy for Strings that is held here in Winnipeg every summer. As she explains, “I have always loved contemporary music, ever since I was a young teen competing in the Winnipeg Music Festival. With that swirling in my head, I was at Rosamunde, and they were saying in a session ‘there is no better time to start a project that you are passionate about than now. Do not wait years until you feel more established. Start it now.’ All of this came together in my head... I felt that Winnipeg’s audiences could really learn from a concert series that is orientated towards not only the performance of contemporary music from local composers, but a series that is focused on education and diving in deeper to the music itself.”
Once the idea took shape over about a year and half, Sawchyn and Reimer-Epp reached out to some mentors for help. As Sawchyn explains, “We knew we needed to reach out to mentors to get some support for this project. A mentor we reached out to was David R. Scott the composer, who just stepped down as the Artistic Director of GroundSwell. He made us aware of this GroundFloor Initiative, which is for GroundSwell to promote and mentor young up-and-coming contemporary music projects. We submitted a portfolio with all our ideas and plans, and they thankfully took us on as part of this project.”
The concert on Friday, December 3rd will feature music by Sophie Carmen Eckhardt- Gramatté, Ravel, Mark O’Connor, and a piece written by Sawchyn. Reimer-Epp and Sawchyn will be joined by 2013 Eckhardt- Gramatté competition winner Everett Hopfner.
This is sure to be a wonderful way to ring in 2025, while at the same time helping to ensure that the next generation of Manitoba composers and performers have an opportunity to have their compositions performed and heard by a wider audience.
The concert takes place this Friday, January 3rd at 7:30pm at Fort Garry Mennonite Fellowship which is at 150 Bayridge Avenue.
