Bio

Vancouver based composer, Angela So writes for a variety of ensembles and her pieces have been featured in multiple showcases including the Canadian Music Center, Orpheum Annex, and festivals such as Sonic Boom. Her works have been played by groups such as the Borealis String Quartet, Nu:BC Collective, and the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra. Her background as a classical pianist ignited a passion for composition that carried through an initial career in dental hygiene, eventually prompting her to go back to school, studying with Owen Underhill and Sabrina Schroeder at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Her recent collaboration, Habits, with choreographer, Yian Chen, was premiered as part of Ascension 2017. Multiple performances of her string quartet, Water Dances, have been featured by the Borealis String Quartet.

Currently, Angela is exploring the connection between instruments and the creation of different sound worlds, with interesting harmonies and timbres. Her piece Ice Drifter, was featured live at the Vancouver Maritime Museum to celebrate the RCMP St. Roch's 90th Anniversary; it crafts an evocative image of the ship traversing the Northwest Passage, through rough waves and ice. Angela’s music is described as tuneful with lush and vivid imagery drawn from nature, drawing on feelings of yearning and nostalgia.

Artist Statement

I am a composer who grew up in Vancouver, surrounded by its beautiful lakes, mountains, and trees, so it is almost instinctual that much of my acoustic music is an extension of the natural world. Much of my work combines the aspect of movement and mood in nature to create lush and vivid imagery, reminiscent of impressionism. Water has been an inspiration in many of my previous works, where I have experimented with interesting timbres and tone clusters to create a tapestry of colour in representing the liveliness of the sea, to the pulsation of water in a pond. 

To me, intuition is the most important aspect in arranging musical aspects into form. I believe that nature grows out of some sort of intuition, such as how plants instinctually grow towards light, and that the representation of nature through sounds should move towards whatever feels natural, as opposed to adhering to strictly planned structures. My pieces often use extended techniques with traditional instruments to create new textures and timbres, and I’ve lately been interested in incorporating structured improvisation in notated pieces to give the performer some freedom in interpreting my pieces.