TRACE

Jan 31, 2026 · Peggy Corkum Music Room · Halifax, Nova Scotia

TRACE continued Alkali Collective’s sixth season with a program exploring the traces left by sound, time, systems, and lived experience. The concert featured works by Rebecca Adams and Garrett Niall, selected through Alkali Collective’s 2025/2026 Call for Scores, alongside music by Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Ben Zucker, Aoife King, Texu Kim, and Carmen Braden.

Across the program, works traced experiences of isolation, disbelief, empathy, grief, and resilience. Processes of erosion, recombination, and transformation connected music concerned with bodies, places, memory, and the ways voices and ideas are shaped by their contexts.

At the centre of TRACE were the two works selected through Alkali Collective’s annual Call for Scores. Garrett Niall’s Dance of the Lilies is a tribute to the composer’s grandmother, tracing grief through shifting emotional states and the recurring image of lilies associated with death and renewal. Rebecca Adams’s Prescribed Disbelief explores the experience of a woman navigating a biased healthcare system and being led to question her own experience of pain. The work combines ensemble improvisation with a watercolour graphic score and text drawn from statements made by medical professionals to Adams and other women in her life.

Call for Scores Finalist: Garrett Niall

Garrett Niall (he/they) is an African Nova Scotian composer-percussionist from Punamu’kwati’jk (Dartmouth), Nova Scotia. At the time of TRACE, he was pursuing a Bachelor of Music at the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University, studying composition with Matthias McIntire and percussion with Mark Morton. He had served as principal percussionist of the Dalhousie Symphony Orchestra since 2023, with his works presented by organizations including the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance, Open Waters Festival, Nuovo Contemporary Concert Series, and Dalhousie Theatre.

Dance of the Lilies is a tribute to Niall’s grandmother and reflects his first experience of losing someone close to him. Lilies associated with death become the work’s central image, moving through sinister, jagged, aggressive, and finally gentle states before wilting and returning to the earth.

Call for Scores Finalist: Rebecca Adams

Rebecca Lynn Adams is a Canadian composer from Prince Edward Island, based in Vancouver at the time of TRACE. Her work frequently explores personal identity, human conflict, and mental health, and has been performed by ensembles including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra, and Maritime Brass Quintet. A Dalhousie composition graduate, Adams was completing her Master of Music in Composition at the University of British Columbia and had previously participated in the Winnipeg New Music Festival Composers Institute.

Prescribed Disbelief depicts a woman navigating a biased healthcare system and ultimately being led to question her own experience of pain and perception. The ensemble improvises from a watercolour graphic score incorporating text based on statements made by medical professionals to Adams and other women seeking care for complex and misunderstood conditions.

From the Artistic Directors

Welcome to TRACE. This program brings together works that listen closely to what is left by sound, by time, by systems, and by lived experience. Across the evening, you’ll hear music shaped by processes of erosion, recombination, and transformation.

Several of tonight’s works begin with existing materials or environments and approach them from new angles. Other pieces trace experiences that are less visible but deeply felt, including isolation, disbelief, empathy, and resilience. What connects these works is a shared attentiveness to bodies, to places, and to the ways that voices and ideas are shaped by their contexts. Many of these works exist in states of transition.

This program asks not for certainty, but for presence: an openness to noticing what lingers when we listen closely.

Thank you for joining us for this evening’s concert. We’re grateful to share this program with you, and to continue exploring new music and new ways of listening.

– Megan Thibeault & Shauna DeGruchy