Kevin Morse

Associate Professor — Composition
Office
MC 226
Office hours
By appointment

Biography

Composer Kevin Morse teaches in the Department of Music at Mount Allison University, where he held a Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fellowship from 2013 to 2015. He is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and serves on the CMC’s Atlantic Regional Council. Dr. Morse is very involved in musical life on campus and is, among other roles, Chair of Mount Allison's Performing Arts Series. A committed and engaging educator, Dr. Morse was awarded Mount Allison University’s J. E. A. Crake Teaching Award for the Faculty of Arts in 2015. He regularly adjudicates regional composition competitions and serves on competition juries.

Dr. Morse’s composition portfolio includes music for a wide range of diverse ensembles. His recent orchestral composition, Moth to Flame (2014), was premiered by the Prince Edward Island Symphony Orchestra and subsequently presented by New Brunswick’s Musica Viva orchestra.  Dr. Morse was a Musician-in-Residence at The Banff Centre for five weeks in the winter of 2015, undertaking revisions to his latest opera project, A Modest Proposal: a flesh-eating fable (inspired Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay of the same name), which was presented in a public workshop performance in Toronto several months later. Morse’s portfolio also includes two short operas commissioned by Canada’s leading contemporary opera company, Tapestry Opera. The Shaman’s Tale, for singers and 10-foot-tall puppets (with librettist Krista Dalby) and The Colony, about the Queen of the Amazon Ants and her nemesis, an exterminator (with Governor-General’s Literary Award nominee Lisa Codrington) both premiered at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in 2008.

Kevin Morse was recently awarded a New Brunswick Arts Board Creation Grant for his ongoing art song project, The Canadian Wild: Songs of Lakes and Rivers, the first song of which was premiered in 2013 and toured on programs in New Brunswick and Ontario. Invocation for Solo Flute (2011) was toured throughout New Brunswick and in Sweden as part of an interdisciplinary program combining music and live visual art. Other works by Morse have been presented by The Canadian Contemporary Music Workshop’s Composers’ Orchestra (Toronto), contemporary music group Motion Ensemble, early music ensemble ¡Sacabuche! with noted soprano Suzie LeBlanc, as well as by numerous other solo and duo artists. 

Dr. Morse teaches courses in Composition, Orchestration, Arranging, Music in Canada, and World Music.

Education

  • PhD, The University of Western Ontario
  • MMus, The University of Western Ontario
  • BMus, Mount Allison University

Teaching

Current and recently-taught courses:

  • MUSC 2141 Composition & Music Technology I
  • MUSC 2151 Composition & Music Technology II
  • MUSC 3141 Composition & Music Technology III
  • MUSC 3151 Composition & Music Technology IV
  • MUSC 3121 Orchestration
  • MUSC 3161 Arranging
  • MUSC 3001 Introduction to Music in Canada
  • MUSC 2021 World Music

Grants, awards & honours

  • J. E. A. Crake Teaching Award, Faculty of Arts (2015)
  • Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fellowship, Mount Allison University (2013-15)
  • Creation Grant, New Brunswick Arts Board (2013-14)
  • Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, SSHRC (2009-2011)