Select Page

Lucas Oickle – composer

Lucas Oickle received his B.Mus. in composition from Acadia University where he studied under Dr. Derek Charke and Dinuk Wijeratne. He subsequently completed his M.Mus. at the University of British Columbia where he studied with Dr. Dorothy Chang, Dr. Keith Hamel, and Dr. Stephen Chatman.

His accolades include being a 2014 recipient of the 2011 Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award (a monetary award of $10,000 for “utmost commitment, promise, exceptional technique, talent, and the highest achievement of excellence” in music composition), a 2015 SOCAN Foundation award (for his Three Songs on Poems by Vancouver Downtown Eastside Poets), a Nova Scotia Talent Trust scholarship (for a 2014 study intensive in Bandung, Indonesia), winning the Canada-wide 2014 Penthelia Singers Canadian Folk Song Arranging Contest (for his arrangement of Farewell to Nova Scotia), and winning the 2013 edition of the international TEMPO New Music Ensemble Call for Scores. Additionally, he has been a composer-in-residence for the Bathurst Chamber Music Festival, was the inaugural ‘Featured Student Composer’ of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra’s 12/13 season, and was the only winning Canadian submission for the Green Dot Journey Composer Competition (a $1500 prize). Recent commissions include a piece for the Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble and a fanfare for the centennial celebrations of the University of British Columbia. For up-to-date info, please visit < lucasoickle.com >

PM 2.5 programme note:

My parents-in-law reside in Shanghai, and at the time of writing this I’ve been teaching students online at schools in Beijing. Seeing pictures in the news of the smog in Beijing, hearing my students comment on it during the worst days, and seeing it firsthand in Shanghai, can be unbelievably sad; to see a beautiful country like China have it’s innumerable historic temples and incredibly impressive architectural creations be swept up in ugly blankets of poisonous grey haze is possibly one of the most dramatic examples yet of our deteriorating global environment due to man-made pollution. Obviously it is not just China: we see similar things in other countries around the world, including North America. This piece is a reflection on what I believe is already a catastrophe; I don’t know what the solution is, but I can’t help but write about it. – Dec. 2015