Biography of Allison Cameron

Allison Cameron is a composer of mostly chamber works that have been performed throughout Europe and North America; she is also active as an experimental performer.

Ms. Cameron studied with Louis Andriessen, Gilius van Bergeijk, Per Nørgård, Frederic Rzewski and Walter Zimmerman in Europe, and Rudolf Komorous, Michael Longton, David Mott and James Tenney in Canada.

Her works have been performed at numerous festivals, including Bang on a Can (New York), Emerging Voices (San Diego), Evenings of New Music (Bratislava), the Festival SuperMicMac (Montréal), the Newfoundland Sound Symposium, New Music across America, and the Rumori Dagen (Amsterdam) as well as several in Toronto.

Numerous ensembles have commissioned and/or performed her works, including the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Contact Ensemble, Continuum, Les Coucous Bénévoles, Ergo, Ensemble Kore, the Ives Ensemble, the Maarten Altena Ensemble, Opera Aperta, Orkest de Volharding, the Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, and the Veni Ensemble. Pianists Eve Egoyan and John Tilbury, electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans and bass clarinetist Ronda Rindone have also played her music.

She co-founded the Drystone Orchestra in 1989 and founded the Arcana Ensemble in 1992, both dedicated to the performance of experimental music in Toronto. During 2000-2005, she was the artistic director of Arraymusic where she created the Scratch! festival for experimental music. Allison is also a member of the Association of Improvising Musicians of Toronto (AIMT) and since 2000 has been performing on small amplified objects in collaboration with Eric Chenaux, Rob Clutton, Ryan Driver, Stephen Parkinson, Gert Jan Prins, Mike Hansen, Mauro Savo, Ken Aldcroft, Joe Sorbara, Wilbert de Joode, and Doug Tielli among others.

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The Allison Cameron Band

Allison Cameron - banjo, harmonica
Eric Chenaux - acoustic guitar, harmonica
Stephen Parkinson - electric guitar, harmonica
Listen on Myspace

This trio began playing in the winter of 2007, working on Allison Cameron's compositions based on traditional folk music. Some of the music borrows tablature notation from traditional English folk tunes in a non-conformist manner, using re-tuned guitars and banjo, new rhythm, free rhythm and sometimes no rhythm to re-invent and create new pieces out of the old work. Similar to the definition of a palimpsest: a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. The group combines approaches to composition and improvisation often found in rock and jazz bands with that of contemporary music composition.