Simon Martin
Simon Martin
Founding director of Projections libérantes
Simon Martin (b.1981 in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec) is a composer of contemporary concert music. He lives in Montreal.
His concert-length works have been performed, through his own creative organization Projections libérantes (2011), by the world-renowned ensembles Quatuor Bozzini (2015), Zinc & Copper (2017), and Ensemble Musikfabrik (2019, 2021). In 2016, Simon Martin won the Opus Award for Best Composer with a $10,000 grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. He is currently completing a three-year (2019-2022) postdoctoral internship in research and creation at Concordia University’s matralab centre with support from Fonds de recherche du Québec.
Simon Martin’s music, imbued with interiority, makes us witnesses to a mystery that questions us. The narrative of his work/concert is chiselled directly from the subject matter, leading to a quest for the perfection of harmony which simultaneously becomes a wellspring of beauty and drama.
Artistic statement
Behind the patterns of organization lie the phenomena that underlie them. Similarly, on the level of understanding, we can consider music as the negation of sound in favor of its organization. Yet a sound that is completely abandoned to its autonomy, rather than collected as material for a poetic facture, would return to the rumor of nature. In other words, to be perceived aesthetically, sound needs music just as much as music needs sound.
This dialectical tension is found at the heart of natural harmony, whose material – proportions of whole numbers – corresponds to the exact measure of the phenomenon. A balance becomes possible between music and sound; between order, necessary for the emergence of complexity, and chaos, with its infinite creative potential. – Simon Martin