Artist description Contemporary composer of opera, ballet, modern dance, mixed and multimedia works. Experimental yet based on solid technical training. Interested in querying assumptions about harmony, melody, rhythm, counterpoint, etc. to make unexpected discoveries.

Music Style Contemporary Classical

Musical Influences The B's Avant-Garde India Rock Jazz

Similar Artists Ligeti Berio Reich Britten Beethoven

Artist History Over 150 productions around the world. Works for "les Ballets de Monte Carlo", "The Dance Theater of Harlem", "les Ballets Jazz de Montreal", "the Canadian Opera Company", "Ballet British Columbia", "Chandralehka", "Menaka Thakkar", "Roger Sinha" to name only a few.

Group Members Timothy Sullivan, Composer

Instruments Keyboards Guitars

Press Reviews Quotations from the PressOpera FlorenceFlorence: the Lady with the Lamp [is] one of the more successful Canadian operas of recent vintage. Few enough of the operas written in this country are given a first hearing; Timothy Sullivan’s had clearly earned a second. -William Littler Toronto StarAt its best, Florence had the structure and flow of compelling music drama. -Robert Everett-Green The Globe and MailFriday’s sold-out world premiere revealed a venture of astonishing and diverse power, one that relied on rare artistic chemistry to blend its visual, vocal, instrumental and dramatic elements.On stage they [Florence and Smithurst] never literally connect, yet are mystically bound in spirit through the sheer magic of Anne McPherson’s text and Timothy Sullivan’s imaginative, challenging score. -Pauline Durichen Kitchener-Waterloo RecordTimothy Sullivan’s Florence was absolutely and utterly riveting, RIVETING! -Paula Citron CFMX Radio...a warm and genuinely satisfying production..a blended sequence of short scenes which Sullivan could clothe in evocative and at times compelling music. This atmosphere was greatly enhanced by Sullivan’s music scored for a decent small ensemble...which gave substance to Linda Maguire’s Florence... -Ronald Hambleton Toronto StarDream PlayTim Sullivan’s Dream Play was in a class of its own. The musical, dramatic, and vocal elements more finely tuned, concise and coherent than in either of the other two works [C.O.C. composers-in-residence]. The libretto was very skilful and effective and Sullivan made full use of his vocal and instrumental resources. The work is lyrical, magical, musical and memorable and should become part of the contemporary repertoire. -Catherine Kentridge Opera MonthlyThe piece charts the earthly encounters of Agnes, a daughter of the god Indra. Its dramatic structure has been handled quite well by Sullivan, who has not overloaded his score to compensate for the episodic nature of the piece.Sullivan is a clever enough maker of theatre to know that to hold fire at the right time can make for a more meaningful effect than to strain for the main chance every moment. -Robert Everett-Green Globe and MailSullivan’s vocal lines are conciliatory and he creates haunting sounds in his small instrumental ensemble, especially with a synthesizer. -Bill Zakariasen New York Daily NewsA condensation and adaptation of Strindberg’s play of the same name, portraying a goddess’ descent to earth to experience how the other half lives, it boasts a complex score, full of overlapping metres, but there is in it an understanding of how to set words so they can be heard and how to give shape to a musical argument so that each character emerges with an aurally perceivable identity. -William Littler Toronto StarTo have seized upon this material, recognized its lyric potential, and compressed it into a self-enclosed, dramatically coherent libretto, is already an achievement of distinction. But Timothy Sullivan has done more. Without destroying the dreamlike quality of the original, he has created scenes that seem to follow emotionally if not always logically, reduced the vast list of dramatis personae to a few fundamental types capable of being managed by the same six singer-actors, and set the whole to music that bears the stamp of an original, creative, mind.Much like Alban Berg, who fashioned from Büchner’s fragmentary Woyzeck a tightly woven mesh in which the music not only underlies the words but pervades the entire spiritual fabric, Mr. Sullivan has created an idiom which may or may not be permanently recognisable as “his” but which accurately reflects Strindberg’s oneiric obsessions. Like Wozzeck, Dream Play is through-composed, in a style that alternates between a highly rarefied chromaticism(with an occasional not toward minimalism) and sudden, welcome lurches into tonality. These tonal surprises act like the Wagnerian leitmotif; they serve as characterising devices, not however of the persons so much as the illusion in which each of them is trapped. If he resembles Berg in some of his formal procedures, his deeper affinities lie with Benjamin Britten, whose long chromatic vocal lines and deft handling of instrumental combination his own practice recalls, though at a remove of two generations. -Michael Kowal Queen’s College, BrooklynSullivan has kept to the basic intent of Strindberg’s original, in which the latter used the characters to propel different psychological themes through the play like musical themes in a symphony or fugue. The dream, of course, is life itself, and Sullivan effectively condenses Strindberg’s three-hour play into a 70-minute chamber opera that uses only six singers and an instrumental quintet. Sullivan’s Dream Play starts with Indra, the god of gods in East Indian mythology, sending his daughter Agnes into the world to investigate the suffering of human beings. Thus begins an aural and visual collage in which a multitude of life’s scenarios are enacted, each fading, unresolved, into the next. This is not mere tantalization, though, because the scenarios probe deeply into the human psyche. -Robert Jordan Vancouver StraightIf you can relax and enter into the surreal often disjointed world of the dream and its breathtakingly bold music, you’ll find Dream Play a rewarding adventure. The characters move in and out of each other’s lives, overlapping musically and dramatically and telling their stories with solo voices and in intricate harmonies that range from jarringly atonal to hauntingly mesmerizing. Surrender the part of your brain that expects everything to make sense and demands music with singable melodies, and you just might expand your consciousness. -Barbara Crook Vancouver SunIt [Dream Play} begins with thunder and the god Indra (Bremner Duthie), who sends his daughter Agnes (Rosalind Beale Dala) to Earth to check out why he hears such cries of pain and suffering. She takes on the mantle of earthly form, experiences motherhood and poverty, searches for beauty, longs for freedom, acknowledges that being human is, well, tough, before returning to heaven.I may not be the easiest piece to follow (or to perform, for that matter) but the 70-minute production, presented on a shoestring, has considerable charm and humor, some fine singing, interesting staging by [Tammy] Issacson, good set and lighting by Stephen Allen, good costumes by Lana Krause and deserves at least as much attention as last season’s Vancouver New Music production of Star Catalogues. -Renee Doruyter Vancouver ProvinceeTomorrow and TomorrowTomorrow and Tomorrow returns to the original intentions of opera’s creators more than 300 years ago. Thus, this one-character, one-act stage work by the young Canadian Timothy Sullivan put words first and then created music to serve them.Mr. Sullivan’s piece is an episodic interior monologue on the subject of contemporary loneliness. It is sung, spoken and acted (all splendidly) by Suzan Hanson. The composer, who is his own librettist, introduces us to the suicide by hanging of a woman whose “crossing over” into another, more peaceful world begins with the recapsulation of her unhappy life from childhood on.Miss Hanson’s character uses many styles - from declamation to parlando to set arias in her secure and handsome soprano voice. The music beneath her is deftly done. Its mixes of woodwinds, mallet percussion and light string textures are arresting in themselves but are also sufficiently reticent when there are words to be understood. -Bernard Holland New York TimesBalletAdrian (Angel on Earth)The work emerged as a polished piece of dancemaking, full of sophisticated partnering, and smoothly tied-together phrases, set to an austerely minimalist, slightly jazzy and highly contrapuntal keyboard score by Canada’s Timothy Sullivan. -William Littler The Toronto StarThe piece is set to Timothy Sullivan’s classical but jazzy score encompassing a spoken exchange between the hero and his spiritual parnters. Ann Holmes The Houston ChronicleThe program was more satisfying musically, with Purcell for “Moor’s Pavanne”, Timothy Sullivan’s intriguingly idiosyncratic piano score for “Adrian” and Holder’s own Trinidadian potpourri for “Dougla”.- George Jackson The Washington PostTimothy Sullivan’s two-piano score is intriguing and occasionally mesmerizing as it bolts between academic steriity and lush cascades of sound. -David Lyman The Detroit Free PressNaida Cole and Ju-Ying Song were the fine pianists in the pit, engaged in a sprightly dialogue set up by “Two Pianos”, by the Canadian composer Timothy Sullivan (there is a wonderful sustained trill). -Anna Kisselgoff The New York TimesIn The Course of SleepingTimothy Sullivan’s melodic score, with its light and dark, is echoed in the duets, while the male dancing is more athletic... -Anna Kesselgoff The New York TimesThe Don Juan VariationsThe Archeology of KarlTimothy Sullivan’s original score followed suit, fitfully scoring real points on its Beethoven originals, a pair of late string quartets. Bravo to Alleyne, for having the guts to put his fine young company on such a potentially rich track. -Robert Everett-Green Globe and MailThe resulting ballet resembles a book of quick sketches rather than a plotted scenario, with all the looseness that implies. Such glue as held it together was provided by the sustained quality of Sullivan’s score. -William Littler Toronto Star In his program notes, Sullivan observes that Beethoven uses generic musical elements in startling ways. The same might be said of Alleyne’s choreography; he reinvents familiar ballet figures and forms in a way that compliments Sullivan’s variations of Beethoven’s music. -Chris Dafoe Globe and MailThe most anticipated work of the evening, John Alleyne’s The Architecture(sic) of Karl...A Romantic Adventure, came at the end of the program, and it was well worth the wait. In the program notes, Alleyne and composer Timothy Sullivan write that they approached Beethoven’s late string quartets as if they were doing an archaeological dig. Sullivan chose to “dismantle, transform and reassemble many of the generic elements [of Beethoven’s music] in his own way”. Alleyne and the dancers worked collaboratively to explore the social, emotional and artistic elements of the composer’s life. -Shannon Rupp Georgia StraightToronto composer Timothy Sullivan -- who has used two late Beethoven string quartets as the catalyst for his score -- has approached the exercise as an “archeological dig.” He’s deconstructed the musical elements making up these masterworks and stretched out the pieces into long soundscapes embroidered with his own electronic musings and solo passages by a violinist and a cellist. The impression one is left with is that of an examination of Beethoven (an by implication, Western music) both scientific and romantic. -Adrian Chamberlain Victoria Times-ColonistDanceLa Zone d’OrThis is a collaborative creation, with vitality and class to spare, integrating music by Timothy Sullivan, a photographic environment by photographer Cylla von Tiedemann, costumes by Jane Townsend and lighting by Jean Philippe Trépanier.None of the artists dominates. Rather, their work resonates with a playful collective intensity that ebbs and flows. Abstract as the work is, none of the individual resources detracts from the intimacy of the whole. There’s a poetic continuum as one of the elements begins a transition, only to dissolve, layered over by the impression of another.This is a bold undertaking, with a healthy respect for all the artists concerned. And it’s not merely inspired eclecticism. In this remarkable work, nothing is random, and yet, nothing is entirely explicit either. An essential component is that you let the cycles wash over your sensibilities.Sullivan’s sound design is a real aural pleasure. It’s an electroacoustic sound score, skilfully textured with sound and transformed sound. It takes the audience through different acoustic spaces (square, bapistry, duomo, belltower) and sustains our rapt attention for 40-plus minutes. -Philip Szporer Dance ConnectionApolloThe movement is accompanied by Timothy Sullivan’s synthesized orchestral sounds, some of which seem to be reminiscent of the howl of a wounded animal. -Tracy Pfeifer Dance ConnectionAutographNew dance was represented by William Douglas’s complex Autograph (1993) to a score by Timothy Sullivan, which begins as a series of repeated movements before the curtain that eventually opens up to reveal a blackened stage. -Paula Citron Toronto StarUntitledAn electro-acoustic score by Timothy Sullivan echoes and supports this meeting of dance worlds and provides the right rhythmic impulse to send Thakkar’s cast of eight women rolling, spinning and scudding across the stage in tight formations or smaller juxtaposed groupings. -Michael Crabb Toronto StarNo First StoreyThe stunning use of voice in the first section results from [Tedd] Robinson’s collaboration with opera composer Timothy Sullivan. Robinson and Sullivan met at the three-week National Choreographic Seminar held last summer [1991] at Simon Fraser University.In No First Storey, the dancers first had to be taught basic singing skills, and Sullivan had to take into consideration the constraints that movement can place on vocalisations. He learned to incorporate into his creation what the individuals could do, as he says, “to put sound on the choreography the way Tedd puts choreography on the dancers.” -Beverly LeBlanc Dance Connection

Location Toronto, Ontario - Canada

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).