(Credit: Hagen Hopkins)

The 2026 Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music laureate is New Zealand-based Canadian composer and cellist Nicholas Denton Protsack. Described by the Canadian Music Centre as a “composer to keep a close eye on,” Protsack’s work explores the connections between sound, ecology, and improvisation, and has been performed across North America, Europe, and New Zealand. Recently, the composer has been commissioned to create works for Stroma, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Toronto Summer Music Festival and Ensemble for These Times.

The work for which he has received Azrieli’s accolade is “Height of Land,” a piece for chorus, orchestra, and solo cello that explores what it means to create “Canadian music” in the 21st century. Among the ideas that the piece contemplates are environmental listening, reciprocity, and renewal.

OperaWire spoke to Protsack about his inspiration behind “Height of Land,” the challenges of creating ecologically-minded music, and his approach to musical language and improvisation.

OperaWire: What is the name of your piece and what inspired it?

Nicholas Denton Protsack: “Height of Land” — for chorus, orchestra, and cello solo (specifically in that order). Although it contains many ecological sources of inspiration, there are a few underlying questions that the work is centred upon: can post-classical “concert music” exist on a reciprocal basis with the natural world? That is, is it possible to create such music that isn’t just about the land, but is created collaboratively with the land, and for its explicit benefit (including both human and more-than-human inhabitants)? If this isn’t yet possible — and one should note there are many Indigenous musical practices in which it is — what can the world of post-classical music do to get closer to achieving this?

OW: Describe the musical language of your piece and how you arrived at it.

NDP: I think, first and foremost, the musical language is centred upon authenticity. It isn’t just depictive or representative of nature: it attempts to work directly with the sounds and materials of nature (including several natural-material percussion instruments). There is a concerted effort to avoid extracting the aesthetically pleasing parts of nature and leaving everything else out, and instead it musically engages with almost everything one might observe in an environment. Many of the soundscapes contained in the work are meant to evoke those I grew up in, in the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia).

Ultimately, it is an immersive musical language that avoids “bringing nature into the concert hall” and instead attempts to break down the walls (both literal and metaphorical) of the concert hall, transforming it into a landscape of its own. In other words, the intention of the language is to bring the concert hall into nature.

I arrived at this language naturally, through the questions I described above.

OW: What inspires your creative process?

NDP: As I have already touched on a bit, my process is highly inspired by the world around me, particularly the more-than-human-world. In my work, I have tried to find as many musical dimensions as possible that can operate on a collaborative basis with the more-than-human world. This is a process I have come to call “musical ecopoiesis” — a term which I developed during my doctoral studies.

In addition to that, I have found that many of my past works are inspired by imposing creative constraints on myself — like writing in palindromes — as well as childhood memories, extramusical things, people and ideas that I find interesting, and references to other works of music as a form of symbolic communication. I also experience a form of synaesthesia in which sound appears as physical shapes and textures in space — color rarely factors in, however.

OW: What were some challenges you experienced while creating this work?

NDP: To serve the purpose of the work, I had to heavily scrutinize what I do as an ecologically-minded composer. Does my work really engage collaboratively with the world around me, or am I just cherry-picking the parts of nature that are aesthetically interesting to me and translating them into music? What are the problems with doing that whilst ignoring the troubling areas where nature has been exploited by people (who in doing so often exploit other people)? How do I even write music about this without being self-righteous or — worse — developing some kind of a saviour complex?

OW: What do you hope audiences take away from the experience of your piece?

NDP: Typically, I am happy with whatever narratives, images, or other things my listeners take from my music, as I think no experience of music is inherently wrong. That being said, I see “Height of Land” ultimately as a work that looks hopefully towards a world in which collective reciprocity with nature (and by extension one another) can exist. A world that recognizes that violence against nature is violence against people, and vice versa. It is not a work that makes any claims about how to “solve the problem,” but rather one that recognizes that while there is much to be done, it is not too late to turn things around.

OW: On a personal note, what inspired you to become a composer? Who are some of the composers that inspire you?

NDP: In some ways, it’s hard to remember any single thing that inspired me to become a composer. I think growing up was a gradual process of realizing that I was always meant to be one. I began with music lessons — I am also a professional cellist — at an early age, and composing and improvising music was always a part of that, and something that I felt compelled to do.

My favourite musical creators often fluctuate and change over time. When I was younger and less in-the-know about living composers, I took a particular liking to Messiaen, Dutilleux, Bartók, and Ligeti. In more recent years, however, I have found a lot of joy and interest in the work of composers like Liza Lim, Pauline Oliveros, Gabriella Smith, R. Murray Schafer, Christophe Bertrand, and composers who can’t really be classified as classical like Björk, Owen Pallett, Raven Chacon, Alex Sopp, St. Vincent or SOPHIE (if I’m feeling upbeat), and, lately, Nick Drake and the early work of Phil Elverum. I also am a big fan of a number of New Zealand composers who I have had the pleasure of collaborating with: Michael Norris, Salina Fisher, Elliot Vaughan, and Tristan Carter to name several.