Taylor Brook

Taylor Brook (born 1985) is a composer of contemporary classical music who currently resides in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Education Brook was born in Edmonton but grew up in Toronto, where he attended Etobicoke School of the Arts, a specialized arts-academic public high school. His studies included guitar and violin. He then studied at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, where he completed his Bachelor of Music degree in 2007 and earned his Master's Degree in Music Composition. For his thesis he composed Mitya, a piece for solo clarinet with 18 musicians and live electronics. It premiered on April 14, 2010, with Mark Bradley of the Portmantô Ensemble as soloist and Denys Bouliane conducting the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble. His teachers included Brian Cherney, Denys Bouliane, Luc Brewaeys, Ana Sokolović, John Rea, and Sean Ferguson.

Career and compositions In 2008, he spent two months in Kolkata studying at Bhattacharya School of Universal Music with Hindustani musician Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, studying raga on the chaturangui, a many-stringed slide guitar of Bhattacharya's invention. The piece won the 2010 Lee Ettelson Composer's Award from Composers, Inc., whose artistic director is Robert Greenberg.

Another 2009 composition, Murder Ballad, won the coup de cœur prize from le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. (The phrase Les trains où vont les choses is a play on words — "le train de choses" is an idiom for "the way things go" or "that's how it goes." The title is pluralized to reflect the grid of images in the video. The double meaning is from the fact it is filmed from a train window.)

His 2011 composition Against the Morning was commissioned by the Banff Centre. It was inspired by the third movement (Summer Morning by a Lake) of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra.

Brook was a finalist in the 2012 American Composers Forum Finale National Composition Contest September 14, 2012. His entry Arrhythmia was described as "a strikingly modern re-imagining of Mahler’s ninth symphony, lush and ethereal"

He is the technical director of TAK Ensemble, a quintet that performs contemporary classical music, including Brook's. Garden of Diverging Paths (New Focus, 2016) Ecstatic Music: TAK plays Brook (New Focus, 2016) Virtutes Occultae (Self-release, 2017) Engage (New Focus, 2018) Old Fires Catch Old Buildings (New Focus, 2018) Streya (New Focus, 2018) The Privacy of Domestic Life (Centrediscs, 2018) A Howl That Was Also a Prayer (New Focus, 2020) Star Maker Fragments (TAK editions, 2021)