Alexina Louie

Canada's Alexina Louie is among her country's most widely performed and honored composers, writing music in a variety of genres. Some of her operas have a comic flavor, including a group of "mini-operas" composed for television or radio. Louie was born July 30, 1949, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She studied piano with Jean Lyons at Vancouver's Jean Lyons School of Music in Vancouver and earned a diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto when she was 17. Louie attended the University of British Columbia, studying music history and graduating in 1970. Switching to composition, she went south to the University of California, San Diego, earning a master's degree in 1974. For several years, she taught at various schools in the Los Angeles area; during this period, she wrote piano music, some of which had electronic components. Louie moved to Toronto in 1980 and began to create compositions that were heard in high-profile situations. Her choral piece O Magnum Mysterium: In Memoriam Glenn Gould remains one of her most popular works, and she wrote the opening music for the Expo 86 fair in Vancouver. Louie's orchestral works have been commissioned by leading Canadian orchestras; The Eternal Earth was written for the Toronto Symphony. Her 1984 work, Songs of Paradise, brought Louie the first of several Juno Awards in 1989. She has written chamber music and, with her husband, conductor and composer Alex Pauk, several film scores. Her operas are a varied group, including The Scarlet Princess (2002), based by librettist David Henry Hwang on an erotic ghost story inspired by kabuki theater, and Mulroney: The Opera, a satirical treatment of the career of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. She has composed nine comic "mini-operas" with libretti by Dan Redican, less than ten minutes long, for television and radio; one of these, Toothpaste (1995), has been broadcast in more than 12 countries. Her 2013 orchestral work Bringing the Tiger Down from the Mountain was performed by Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra on tour in China. Violinist James Ehnes commissioned Louie's violin-and-piano work Beyond Time in 2014 and has played the work on tour internationally. Three times, Louie has received an award from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada as the most-performed Canadian composer of the year. Among her many awards was her designation as Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian award, in 2005. More than 20 of Louie's works have been recorded, and the Centrediscs label issued Music for a Thousand Autumns, a collection of her chamber music. Take the Dog Sled, a Louie work for Inuit throat singers, appeared on Centrediscs in 2020, with graphics and notes in English and Inuktitut.