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Pallett, a Polaris Prize-winning solo artist in his own right, is one of a handful of New Creations composers with a foot in the pop music world for whom classical composition holds a special appeal. Among them are Sigur Ros collaborator Daníel Bjarnason, Montreal’s Nicole Lizée, a veteran of indie bands now achieving international renown for her boundary-stretching work, and the Toronto-based Jean Martin, who plays drums with Tanya Tagaq – and whose harrowing work Qiksaaktuq was performed by the throat-singer with the TSO on Saturday.

Qiksaaktuq is Martin’s first composition for orchestra, and it’s something he says he has wanted to do “for years and years and years; I’m a music producer, so I am always interested in combinations of sounds. When I go to see an orchestra, I sit at the top, so I can actually see: ‘Oh, that’s what a piccolo and a bassoon with three cellos sounds like.’”

For Lizée, an orchestra is like a mixing board: “I can move up the fader by saying, ‘Please play that louder, or slow it down.’” But the live element changes the piece every time, as the players react to the conductor, to the acoustics in the hall, and to one another’s playing. Lizée’s piece Black MIDI will be performed by the Kronos Quartet with the TSO on March 11th, and even though it’s named after a cult genre of electronic music in which computers play notes as fast as inhumanly possible, she retains a commitment to working with human performers who bring her compositions to life together in real time. “Classical music is about getting the piece out there with the intention of lasting for centuries – not in recorded form, but because it’s written down for people to interact with.”