CONTOUR

July 4, 2026 · Catherine Steele Atrium, Dalhousie Arts Centre · Halifax, Nova Scotia

CONTOUR concluded Alkali Collective’s sixth season with a program exploring relationships between sound, space, memory, landscape, and connection. Presented in the Catherine Steele Atrium at Dalhousie Arts Centre, the concert brought together works by Canadian and international composers alongside the world premiere of a new Alkali Collective commission by composer and sound artist Holly Winter.

Taking its title from the lines that describe the shape of a landscape, object, or journey, CONTOUR invited audiences to listen for musical contours shaped by grief and resilience, distance and connection, memory and transformation. The program’s works drew attention to relationships between indivicual performers, larger musical textures, and the environments we inhabit.

At the centre of the program was Holly Winter’s landscapes of listening for octet and electronics. Commissioned by Alkali Collective, the work explores physical, political, digital, domestic, and urban landscapes and the acts of listening and communication required to navigate between them. Musicians were spatialized throughout the venue and gradually moved from individual musical fragments toward increasingly collaborative material, with electronics incorporating sounds recorded in Winter’s Vancouver community. Audience members were invited to move throughout the atrium and create their own experience of the work.

Guest Composer: Holly Winter

Composer, writer, musician, educator, and sound artist Holly Winter creates work incorporating visual art, theatre, poetry, improvisation, graphic and animated scores, colour, and gesture. Her work has been presented across Canada, Europe, and the United States. Winter previously appeared in Alkali Collective’s programming when nothing to do with explosions was selected through the 2023 Call for Scores.

From the Artistic Directors

Welcome to CONTOUR. Contours help us understand shape: the rise and fall of a landscape, the course of a river, the edges of an object, or the path of a journey. The works on tonight’s program invite us to listen for contours of a different kind.

Many of these pieces ask us to listen closely to relationships: between performers, between individual voices within a larger texture, and between ourselves and the environments we inhabit. Together, they reveal listening as an active process of discovery where connections emerge over time.

– Megan Thibeault & Shauna DeGruchy