Jocelyn Morlock
Free Range, Organic Composer, admirer of weird birds, curious, in process of failing to divest from social media. Ugh. She/her.
– Jocelyn Morlock, Twitter/X bio
Jocelyn Morlock (1969 – 2023) was one of Canada’s leading composers. Remembered for music that is at once lyrical, quirky, and deeply rooted in emotion, Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba. She studied piano and composition at Brandon University with Robert Richardson Sr., Gerhard Ginader, and T. Patrick Carrabré, before moving to Vancouver in 1994 to complete her Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of British Columbia with Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel, and Nikolai Korndorf.
In her own words, Morlock’s music was inspired by “birds, insomnia, nature, fear, other people’s music and art, nocturnal wandering thoughts, lucid dreaming, death, and the liminal times and experiences before and after death.” In the early years of her career she performed as a member of UBC’s Gamelan Gita Asmara; the vigorous sound world of Balinese gamelan would inform much of the music she composed thereafter, bringing a rhythmic counterpoint to her expressive melodic writing. Similarly, her love of birdsong would shape her instrumental writing with melodies that were virtuosic, capricious, and delicate.
Morlock first received international acclaim at the 1999 International Society for Contemporary Music’s World Music Days with Romanian performances of her quartet Bird in the Tangled Sky. She would later become the inaugural composer-in-residence for Vancouver’s Music on Main Society (2012 – 14), co-host of ISCM World New Music Days 2017, and composer-in-residence of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (2014 – 19) — the first woman to be appointed to this position. In 2015 the National Arts Centre Orchestra approached Morlock to be one of four composers for their multimedia symphonic suite Life Reflected. Her contribution to this project, the orchestral work My Name is Amanda Todd, was a tribute to the teen from Port Coquitlam, BC, who took her own life due to cyberbullying. This work would subsequently win the 2018 JUNO Award for Classical Composition for the Year.
A prolific composer of vocal, choral and chamber music, Morlock wrote the imposed vocal work for both the 2005 Montreal International Music Competition (Amore) and the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition (Involuntary Love Songs). Her substantial body of vocal music highlights important relationships she nurtured with many Canadian writers and poets, including Alan Ashton, Tom Cone, Bill Richardson, and the Winnipeg writer and comedian Lara Rae, with whom she collaborated for an unrealized opera project. Morlock’s Exaudi (2004), commissioned by the vocal ensemble musica intima for a premiere performance with cellist Stephen Isserlis, remains one of her most beloved and performed works.
Morlock’s music has been recorded by numerous artists and ensembles. Within her lifetime the Centrediscs label released two full-length albums of her music: Cobalt (2014) and Halcyon (2017).
Jocelyn Morlock died suddenly on March 27, 2023. Her memory and legacy are carried on by a team of friends, musicians, and composers who were strongly connected to her life and work.
Contact: jmorlockinfo@gmail.com