BIO
CORY HARPER-LATKOVICH is a cellist who balances his musical life between experimental musics of many genres. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Cory moved to Toronto in 2007, where he studied composition, improvisation, and performance at York University. There he formed Clarinet Panic, a band described as “scrappy chamber rock.” Infusing minimalism, free jazz, and noise music, Clarinet Panic became Cory’s main platform for composition for several years. The band played frequently in Toronto, toured Canada and the United States, and was featured in the Toronto Music Gallery Emergents series in 2015.
Clarinet Panic disbanded in 2015 and subsequently, Cory has worked to diversify his practice. He has participated as a composition fellow in many contemporary music programs, such as the Array Music Young Composer Workshop, Toronto Creative Music Lab, Montreal Contemporary, and the Neif-Norf Summer Festival. He has been invited/commissioned to work with ensembles in Canada, the USA, and the UK. As well as developing a compositional practice within contemporary chamber music, Cory has an active solo practice involving cello, film, photography, and text.
Cory’s current composition plays with delicate densities, quiet noise, and fragile tones that carefully dismantle semiotic melodic structures and encourages careful listening and performer vulnerability.
Cory is the band leader of Jelly Ear, a creatively open early-music music group. Playing the rebec, a medieval fiddle, he is joined by a rotating cast of Toronto’s creative musicians. Each iteration of the band offers new interpretations of music from medieval Europe, including 11th-century mystic motets, 12th-century secular love songs, meandering 13th-century polyphony, and the knotty cryptic experimentation of the 14th-century. Decidedly anti-historic, Jelly Ear instead respects this music as a living art form, using playful improvisational explorations to collapse time and affirm the inventive humanity of composers and performers regardless of which century they may hail.
