Daniel Brandes has been a faculty member at the Victoria Conservatory of Music since 2015, where he has worked and taught in a number of areas. He teaches theory and ear training courses and lessons in the Postsecondary and Music Technology & Creativity program areas, as well as the Creative Impulse, a course focusing on cultivating creative practices. Additionally, Daniel is the program director and lead choir director for the VCM’s ChoirKids program delivered tuition-free through VCM Children’s Music Outreach into underserved schools in the Capital Regional District. As of July 2021, Daniel is the Artistic Director of the VCM’s School of Music Technology and Creativity.
In addition to his teaching work at the VCM, Daniel has also been partnering with the Canadian Music Centre as an outreach educator since 2012. Over the last decade Daniel has led Composer in the Classroom workshops at numerous schools throughout Victoria and beyond, helping students discover and explore new ways of creatively working with sound and music.
As an experimental music composer/performer, Daniel’s musical practice aspires to create, and inspire, spaces that are predicated upon gentleness and receptivity as first principles, and that honour and bear witness to our shared human vulnerability. His work offers spaces to pause and to be—and, through that pausing, to hold open the possibility of glimpsing a better world.
In 2012, Daniel and his partner Laura founded A Place to Listen, a home for experimental music in Victoria, BC. Daniel is also a founding member (piano, melodica, voice) of the A Place to Listen Ensemble, a community of friends and musicians that has grown and evolved over the course of the A Place to Listen series.
Daniel’s music has been performed around the world. He is grateful to the amazing community of artists that has given his music a home, including: The Wandelweiser experimental music community at large, A Quiet Night In (UK), Atalier Jaku (Japan), Dogstar Orchestra (USA), Extradition Series (USA), KLANGRAUM (DE), Klan dim dach (DE), Redshift (CA), the Quatuor Bozzini (CA), Duo 1010 (CA), Same Ensemble (RU), Antoine Beuger (DE), Dante Boon (NL), Cheryl Duvall (CA), Odeya Nini (USA), Leo Svirsky (USA/NL), Andrea Young (CA), and many others.
Daniel is an active member of the Wandelweiser experimental music community and his scores are available from Edition Wandelweiser.