It is such an amazing feeling to sit back and listen and watch and absorb students completely engaged in making music together. Improvising, deciding on bass lines, making their own arrangements, and also laughing and trying things they have never tried before. This first month after moving to Oberlin, Ohio I was completely immersed in my first ever Winter Term - AS A PROFESSOR. I decided to put a course together called Intro to Folk and Baroque, or sometimes, I like to call it Folk and Barolk - except I get so many people trying to correct my spelling! We dove into all kinds of baroque music and folk music from around the world. We discussed continuo playing, chords, rhythmic structures, melodies from around the world - and so much listening. One of my favourite parts about being a student at Oberlin all those many years ago was the amount of music we would listen to, and be introduced too. So many listening parties, rooftop dancing, jam session, and deep listening sessions. I even discovered Reggaeton at Oberlin. 

The students doing this project worked on Bulgarian music, Klezmer music,  Irish, English, Spanish, American, Canadian, German, Serbian, and more. It was so unique to see all of their eyes open wide every single day when we listened to, and started learning folk, traditional, baroque, classical music from around the world. 

Tonight I feel extra warm and fuzzy because the concert where they performed all the music from the class was just fantastic. Their friends filled up the room, a new concert space at the Conservatory called Stull Hall. They introduced the pieces themselves, asked questions, facilitated a discussion - it was just amazing. I only joined them for one tune - one of my favourites - CANCRO CRU - thank you Anxo Pintos for letting us borrow this gorgeous piece. 

I also was able to take the students on a small field trip to see Hawktail, a new American folk band based in Nashville that I believe is doing some really special original folk music. Complex arrangements, harmonies, and improvisation - and the students loved it. I also would like to personally thank the band, each of them - Dom, Brittany, Jordan, and Paul for meeting the students, being so kind, and putting on an amazing show after probably being on tour themselves for months and months and months already! 

I'm so grateful for Oberlin for creating a space for these young minds, for my students, for all of my colleagues that have inspired me throughout the many years of playing already - and many more to come. THANK YOU!!!!

Well, thanks to Jae Cosmos,  I have been spending the last couple weeks thinking of 10 albums that really influenced me in my life... and looking at them now, what a strange mix! I think it says a lot about how I grew up, with tapes, CDs, and CBC radio playing every day at home. My sister, Linden Huizinga, was also a huge part of my musical upbringing, and lets just say Amanda Marshall for example, is simply something I got hooked on from my sister, but hey! It counts, and I definitely learned every single word of all her songs, at least, for a time. Also Nickel Creek was a huge album for me and my love for fiddle, as was the Leahy family in Canada... and Nigel Kennedy's album of Vivaldi, wow... never mind his VHS tapes, but that's another story. Anyways, this is a bit of an adventure into my past, my passions, my story, and my family... I also absolutely had to include Suzuki tapes, because every since I was a kid, I memorized every single note on every single one of those tapes, and until this day, I can basically play every single piece on any of those tapes from memory, although sometimes I need a little nudge or reminder. 

Thanks mom, and dad, and sister, for sharing your music, for introducing me to some of these tunes, and yes, I also found some of these on my own too :) 

Fun project - thanks Jae!!! I cannot wait to play more music with you again sometime soon I hope.

​Edwin 

It's hard to explain the feeling when you walk on stage holding an absolutely invaluable instrument, and you are in the presence of three really great musicians that have spent their lives playing this repertoire. James Dunham, my new inner voice hero - told stories of being a member of the Cleveland Quartet, and so much more - his perception for the detail, the subtleties, the rhetoric, Ken and his incredible giant brain of knowledge and skill, Marc for his human - ness, that might not be a word, but I describe him like this, a sense of understanding much, in the music and outside, enjoying the pleasure of this music very deeply. It was an interesting team, as I stepped in for my past teacher, Marilyn McDonald as she heals from a car accident, where she was not wearing a seatbelt. WEAR A SEATBELT EVERYONE!!! She is doing well, and we are in touch, and her spirit was with us this week in DC. 

It was a strange thing for me, growing up on a farm in rural Ontario, walking around the giant capitol building of the United States everyday, and working in a museum that had serious metal detectors, and hundreds and thousands of kids and people visiting everyday. Our rehearsal/concert space had a double paned window into a hallway so we often were being watched as we rehearsed, with people taking our pictures, I wonder if they thought we were literally an exhibit - I'm not saying we are all that old, but it crossed my mind, and made me smile.

Performing Beethoven Opus 59 number 1 for the first time this week was an absolute dream. We also performed Haydn Opus 50 number 6 and Mozart K 387... all incredible pieces, but the Beethoven is a monster in the repertoire, and goes really really deep. It was just a fantastic experience, and one for the books. I look forward to continue my hunt for a string quartet of my own -  I would love to be part of one, however, it has to be at the right time, under the right circumstances, with the right people, sound familiar?!?

with admiration to these gentlemen,

Edwin
​

some words from our friend Kevin Healey 

Dark Watchers is a full-length ambient collaboration between experimental musician Jonas Bonnetta and virtuoso violinist Edwin Huizinga, written and recorded in situ during the pair’s seclusion at Big Sur. 

Working among the coves and meadows that furrow the coast, Huizinga and Bonnetta fashion an album in which composition and field sounds dissolve into something like transcription. Crackling fire fades into a thicket of electronics, glassy piano blooms into the dawn chorus of the rare yellow-breasted chat, each delicate note plucked out and ramified into melody. Bass tones are braided into the patter of brook and tidal eddy, the harmony of light on the water decanted into the sound of Huizinga’s violin. 

In Dark Watchers, the pair bend to their task like scriveners, as if the intricate arrangements of wind and surf and the convocated ghosts of the Santa Lucia mountains were notes which could be transposed, if only one might learn the tuning. Cut off from the outside world, away from the smog of social media and centrifugal mania of digital life, Bonnetta and Huizinga look for the music of tangible things. 

The album is a reckoning of spaces in transition – the coast, the dusk, the final eclipse of life – and its two sides preserve the same formal tension. Side A draws on the haunted solitudes of Big Sur in the fading light, études of color rendered in circuits and strings; Side B invokes an oceanic darkness, bottomless and familiar. There, fragmentary voices rise in a murmur of half-remembered poems, rumors of speech like shapes seen through the surface of the sea. 

The poetry of Robinson Jeffers in particular hovers over the record, his work a faithful companion during its creation. Jeffers lived his life on the coast, building a home called Tor House with his own hands in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The environmental music of that house, recorded there on the anniversary of the poet’s death, is woven through the album like a soft tattoo, the composers seeking, as Jeffers put it, “the wind-struck / music man's bones were moulded to be the harp for.” 

In the legends of the Santa Lucia mountains, the Dark Watchers are shadowy figures, half-glimpsed and penumbral, that stand among the high peaks that slope into the sea. They must never be looked at directly. In the instant they are seen, they disappear into the landscape of which they are a manifestation. Dark Watchers is a record of the composers’ attempt to surrender completely to the same landscape, if only fleetingly.For in that moment one might see the filaments, wavering at some hidden pitch, by which each thing is fastened to every other. 

-Kevin Healey  creditsreleases March 3, 2020 

Jonas Bonnetta-piano, electronics, synthesizers, clarinet, lloopp 
Edwin Huizinga-violin, upright bass 
Nicholas Leahy-pedal steel 

Written and arranged by Jonas Bonnetta and Edwin Huizinga at Rancho Rico and Glen Deven Ranch in Big Sur, California in January 2018 

Additional recording at Port William Sound in Mountain Grove, Ontario

Mixed at Port William Sound by Jonas Bonnetta 
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Mastering 

Photography by Lane Meyers and Edwin Huizinga 
Album layout by Josh Daignault 

Recordings in the field made on a Sound Devices Mixpre10-T with a pair of DPA 4060's, a Sennheiser MKH-416, and an Aquarian H2A hydrophone. 

Made with the very generous support of the Big Sur Land Trust. 

Many thanks to Lygia Chapellet, Todd Farrington, Nicholas Leahy, Caylie Runciman, Big Sur Land Trust, Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, Lana Weeks, Douglas Mueller, and Kevin Healey. 

I'm looking forward to sharing some more projects with you all shortly... it's been an incredibly busy start to the new year, and I cannot believe how much time flies... The photo above was taken at the very beginning of January, when I was lucky enough to spend a week in Big Sur with my friends William Coulter, and Ashley Broder in making a new album we are going to call Partita Americana. We have a short tour coming up in May and June, and are making sure the album will be ready when we hit the stage for those shows!!!

Next week, on February 21st,  I will be performing the North American premiere of my new Cantata, The Angel Speaks, a stages piece for two singers, a small chamber ensemble made up of Tafelmusik Orchestra Musicians, and dance. I will also be performing, and on the same program, Tyler Gledhill and I will resurrect our piece; Inception, that we created together. This performance is made possible by the Ontario Arts Council, and Opera Atelier. 

I look forward to writing more as these exciting projects see the light of day, and come to be. Thank you for riding this wave with me, I am forever grateful. 

Sincerely,
Edwin

​For the past three years, we (Edwin Huizinga and William Coulter) have been performing concerts around the world as Fire & Grace.  One of our most exciting arrangements is The Liquid Gold Suite - a fusion of Baroque and Irish dance music. In 2017, we toured Ireland with a filmmaking team and captured over 100 hours of footage of music, art & culture throughout County Kerry.  As we head into post-production, our dream is to create a breathtaking visual story of our journey for all to experience.