Paolo Griffin

Paolo Griffin is a Peruvian-Canadian composer living and working in Toronto. 

His recent musical preoccupations include notions of focused and unfocussed listening, microtonality, and non-traditional scoring. Pieces such as Within a Space (2020), explore how varyingly dense and seemingly unfocussed lines of sound can be used to draw the attention of listeners to single or multiple aspects of a sound world. His expanding series of works for two violins, Acts of Intimacy, more directly explore microtonality. He also creates text scores and hybrid text and notation scores as a means of performative expression – examples of such works being Quatre Vignettes de Surrealité (2018) and Pack(2017). 

Paolo’s music has been featured in concerts and on the radio by the Resident Orkest (NL), The New European Ensemble (NL), Avanti! Chamber Music (FI), Duo Holz (CA), Freesound (CA), and more. 

Paolo is the Artistic Director and conductor of Freesound, an ensemble and concert series in Toronto that consists of a core group of the city’s most adventurous performers and interpreters of contemporary music. Freesound present concerts throughout the year with an interest in emerging composers from Canada and abroad. 

Paolo holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague where he studied with Peter Adriaansz and Martijn Padding. Other teachers have included Juhani Nuorvala, Chaya Czernowin, Mayke Nas, Matthew Whittall, Jukka Tiensuu, Nobert Palej, Huba de Graaff, Jan van de Putte, Ana Sokolovic, Hans Abrahamsen, Peter Ablinger, Christopher Theofanidis, Dmitri Tomozco, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Chen Yi.