Bekah Simms

"JUNO award-winning composer Bekah Simms hails from St. John's, Newfoundland and is currently based in Glasgow after nine years living and working in Toronto. Her varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music), “visceral contemporary music that enfolds external inspirations with dazzling rigor and logic” (Peter Margasak), and lauded for its "sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity" (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by fascination and terror toward the universe, her work is often filtered through the personal lens of her anxiety, resulting in nervous, messy, and frequently heavy electroacoustic musical landscapes. Recent interests in just intonation and virtual instruments have resulted in increasingly lush and strange harmonic environments.

Bekah's music has been widely performed across North America and Europe. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble - with whom she is currently an artist-in-residence - Riot Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Eighth Blackbird, and l’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal. Bekah has also been the recipient of over 40 awards, competitive selections, nominations, and prizes, including a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2019 Barlow Prize, and the 2023 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Her piece "metamold" was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award. She has received three JUNO nominations for Classical Composition of the Year in 2019, 2020, and 2023. Her chamber orchestra + electronics album Bestiaries was released in 2022 to critical acclaim and was included on several year end best-of lists from the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK. Her music has thrice been included in the Canadian Section's official submission to World Music Days (2016, 2019, & 2021) and in 2023 was chosen for inclusion in the 2024 World New Music Days in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands as an independent submission. In 2016 the CBC included her among their annual 30 hot classical musicians under 30.

Bekah is a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, following previous academic positions at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario. She holds a D.M.A. and M.Mus in music composition from the University of Toronto, and a B.Mus.Ed. and B.Mus in theory/composition from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her principal teachers during academic studies were Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, alongside significant private study with Clara Iannotta and Martin Bédard."

Biography taken from http://www.bekahsimms.com/index.php?id=biography.html.