Jocelyn Morlock

Bio

JUNO® Award-winning composer Jocelyn Morlock's music is hailed as being "airy but rhythmic, tuneful but complex" with "uncanny yet toothsome beauty" (Georgia Straight.) “A lyrical wonder, exquisite writing” with “an acute feeling for sonority” and an approach that is “deftly idiomatic” (Vancouver Sun), her music is recorded on 24 CDs, including newly-released Halcyon, and Cobalt, whose title track, a concerto for two violins and orchestra, won the 2015 Western Canadian Music Award for Best Classical Composition.

Jocelyn Morlock was the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Composer in Residence from 2014 to 2019, after completing her term as the inaugural Composer in Residence for Vancouver’s groundbreaking series, Music on Main. She had an unusually successful 2018, winning a JUNO, a Western Canadian Music Award, the Jan V. Matejcek New Classical Music Award (SOCAN), and the Barbara Pentland Award for Outstanding Contributions to Canadian Music (CMC). Other accolades include the Mayor's Arts Award for Music in Vancouver (2016), a 2011 JUNO® nomination for Classical Composition of the Year, Top 10 at the 2002 International Rostrum of Composers, a total of six nominations and two wins at the Western Canadian Music Awards, and winner of the 2003 CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition.

Pieces include Lucid Dreams, a cello concerto for Ariel Barnes and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, O Rose, for Bramwell Tovey’s final concerts as VSO Music Director, Io, Io! written in celebration of the Vancouver Cantata Singers' 60th anniversary, and Stone’s Throw for Vancouver-based new music sextet Standing Wave.

CD releases featuring Morlock’s work include her Centrediscs orchestral CD, Halcyon; the National Arts Centre Orchestra's Analekta CD, Life Reflected; Duo Concertante's Marquis Music release, Incarnation, and Chronos Vocal Ensemble's Fresh.

Much of Jocelyn’s music is inspired by birds, insomnia, or a peculiar combination thereof.