Music community reeling from news that celebrated Vancouver composer Jocelyn Morlock has died
“National treasure” and former VSO composer-in-residence remembered for kindness, love of nature, skills as an educator, and lyrical expressivity in music
Jocelyn Morlock
VANCOUVER’S MUSIC COMMUNITY and the wider Canadian arts scene are expressing shock and an outpouring of grief over news that celebrated local composer Jocelyn Morlock has died at 53. She is survived by her longtime partner, composer, trumpeter, and Hard Rubber Orchestra leader John Korsrud.
“The impact that Jocelyn Morlock has made on our School, students and music community is immeasurable,” UBC School of Music posted today. “We will miss her beautiful spirit, sense of humour and brilliance. We hold Jocelyn’s loved ones in our hearts. She will be deeply missed by all of us.”
The National Arts Centre has announced it is flying its flags at half mast to honour the artist.
She was the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence from 2014 to 2019 and won a 2018 Juno Award for classical composition of the year for her moving and powerful “My Name is Amanda Todd”. She was also the inaugural composer-in-residence for Music on Main from 2012 to 2014.
In 2018 she earned a Jan V. Matejcek New Classical Music Award—a prize for a top composer in contemporary-classical music, handed out at the SOCAN Awards. In 2016, she took home the Mayor’s Arts Award for Music in Vancouver.
Her works were performed far and wide. Cobalt, a concerto for two violins and orchestra, was her first commission for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, in 2009. Among the groups that have interpreted her work: Vancouver Cantata Singers; Pacific Baroque Orchestra; Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; the Saskatoon Symphony; the Niagara Symphony; and the trio of baritone Tyler Duncan, soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen, and pianist Erika Switzer, which premiered her Perruqueries, written with Leacock Award–winning humorist Bill Richardson, at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival. Just this past February, the Vancouver Bach Choir’s Behind the Keys event featured a work by Morlock.
The Canadian Music Centre posted that she was “an important composer for contemporary music in Canada, music educator, mentor, inspiration, dear friend to so many. May her memory be for a blessing.”
”Jocelyn was a national treasure, an inspiration, someone whose laugh lifted the spirits of everyone near, and whose deep and profound commitment to enlightened values was exemplary,” Sean Bickerton, BC director at the Canadian Music Centre said in a statement today. “She made an invaluable contribution to Canadian music, to this nation’s cultural and social fabric, to our collective love of birds, to the countless friends who loved her, to the students she inspired, and the colleagues she influenced and with whom she explored the boundaries of the world.”
“Far too soon the wonderfully kind, empathetic, beguilingly fun and brilliant artist that was Jocelyn Morlock has left us,” said Alexander Shelley, Music Director at the National Arts Centre today. “I cannot help but smile as I recall her charm, wit and quirky humour, her generosity, her razor sharp mind and her x-ray like perception as we worked together at the NAC on ‘My Name is Amanda Todd’. That beautiful, special work, which has contributed so much to the conversation around cyberbullying and for which she justly won the JUNO award for best composition, now has another layer of tragedy etched into its contours.”
Morlock’s music was known not only for its lyricism and emotional expressivity but its deep engagement with nature; Oiseaux Bleus et Sauvages, off her album Cobalt, began with beautiful twitterings; Golden, off the same album, conjured a Manitoba swimming hole so rich in iron pyrite that bathers emerged dusted with gold; The Jack Pine was a piano piece that riffed gorgeously on Tom Thomson’s famous painting of a Northern Ontario tree, outlined in the crimson glow of a late summer evening.
As she put it on her webpage, she was also inspired by “nocturnal wandering thoughts, lucid dreaming, death”. In the award-winning piece based on the Amanda Todd story, she spoke of strings that would build and “vary and proliferate”, inspired by the way the tragedy had become a positive force for change.
Music on Main artistic director David Pay posted in a long tribute here:
“I think of Jocelyn’s 2004 work ‘Exaudi’ as a masterpiece.
“‘Exaudi’ was written for the vocal ensemble musica intima and cellist Steven Isserlis. Jocelyn said that the piece was written out of love for her then-recently deceased grandmother whose husband had died at an early age: ‘As the music progresses, the cooler, ritualized aspects of the music are transformed into awe and terror, which gradually recede into something more calm.’
Listening to ‘Exaudi’ today, I hear that love, that awe, and an eventual, cathartic calm.”
Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, pursuing her Bachelor of Music in piano performance at Brandon University, and both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia. Most point to the 1999 International Society for Contemporary Music's World Music Days, with Romanian performances of her quartet Bird in the Tangled Sky, as her big international break.
A dedicated music educator, she taught music composition at the UBC School of Music for many years.
“I am so deeply saddened by Jocelyn’s passing. I will treasure my memories of her, as a friend, a colleague and a former student,” T. Patrick Carrabré, director of the UBC School of Music, said in a statement today. “Jocelyn and her music impacted so many people and the depths of her feelings were there for all to experience. From serious to silly, she made the world a richer place.”
Longtime music writer Alexander Varty reflected today: “I'm just shocked and very sad to hear this news. More than simply one of Canada's greatest composers, Jocelyn was also a warm and funny friend, always willing to pose in an absurd hat while discussing the life cycle of squid, the hidden beauties of Renaissance polyphony, or our shared struggles as very amateurish brass players. Saying that she will be missed is an enormous understatement.”
No cause of death has as yet been released, and no plans for a memorial have yet been made public. Stir will continue to update this story.
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