photo: Liam Jaeger

David Jaeger is a music producer, composer, and broadcaster. He joined the CBC in 1973 as a radio music producer for various series including Music of Today, which included 10 broadcasts he produced in 1974 with Glenn Gould, in celebration of the centennial of composer Arnold Schoenberg. Jaeger and Gould remained friends and collaborators until Gould’s death in 1982. Jaeger created “Two New Hours,” an important contemporary music series in Canada which was heard on the national CBC Radio Two network from 1978 to 2007. During that time he commissioned over 300 original musical works for presentation on air, and broadcast more that 3,000 world premiere performances. 

He supported the creation of important new music festivals, such as the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s long running new music festival, broadcasting hundreds of live concerts. 

From 1974 to 2002 he served as the CBC Radio coordinator of the CBC/Radio-Canada National Radio Competition for Young Composers, encouraging the establishment of a new wave of Canadian composers.

In the early 1970s Jaeger established a digital sound synthesis facility at the University of Toronto, one of the first in Canada. In 1971 he co-founded the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE), the longest running live electronic ensemble in the world. With the CEE he commissioned dozens of new works for live electronic performance. In 2002 Jaeger was elected President of the International Rostrum of Composers, and was the only non-European ever to be named to this post. He served as President for six years.

Jaeger’s compositions range from chamber music to vocal and choral works and opera, as well as orchestral and electronic music. His works for the piano form a large portion of his canon, most of it added since his retirement from CBC in 2013. Since that date, Jaeger has concentrated increasingly on compositions for solo instruments and voices, often based on literary texts. His Nocturnes, written between 2020 and 2023, are all based on poetry he compiled from several authors who he has collaborated with: David Cameron, Seán Haldane, Bruce Whiteman, and his pianist collaborator, Christina Petrowska Quilico. Jaeger won numerous broadcasting awards, including the CBC President’s Award in 2009. He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2018.

Albums

Games of the Night Wind

Release Date: May 10, 2024
Catalog Number: NV6630
21st Century
Solo Instrumental
Piano
Described by the Oskar Morawetz Award jurors as a “legend” of Canadian musicians, Christina Petrowska Quilico joins lauded composer and champion of new music David Jaeger on GAMES OF THE NIGHT WIND, a dreamy musical landscape premiering 12 of Jaeger’s original nocturnes in addition to seven 20th century solo piano works. Each nocturne invokes a different spirit of the night: deception, memory, redemption, realization, and many more, each brought to fruition by Petrowska Quilico’s evocative musicality. Sharp staccato and an increasingly startled momentum drives the image of an encounter with the shadows in Nocturne 11, The Alarm Bell, a weighty contrast to the deep rubato and heaving nostalgia in Nocturne 1, In Memory Of — yet both hail from the same thematic darkness that expands across the entirety of the album. These sensations are ever present in Tōru Takemitsu’s starry Les yeux clos, Alexandre Tansman’s complex and lyrical nocturnes, and two works by Górecki, whose Lullaby sings GAMES OF THE NIGHT WIND off to sleep. GAMES OF THE NIGHT WIND plays to the unfettered wildness of the night, a force of nature encapsulated in every aspect of Petrowska Quilico and Jaeger’s musical and poetic collaboration, an elegant exploration for the night owl in us all.

David Jaeger: Chamber Works for Viola

Release Date: June 9, 2023
Catalog Number: NV6528
21st Century
Chamber
Piano
Viola
Voice
CHAMBER WORKS FOR VIOLA from composer David Jaeger gathers together some of Jaeger’s most defiantly creative compositions and demonstrates the vast possibilities of the viola and the chamber music genre as a whole. The album includes pieces like Diptych for viola and piano, lamenting at one moment and brazen the next. Six Miniatures on poems by David Cameron, for solo viola brings to life the poetic works of David Cameron, winner of the 2014 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry. The album features the tasteful virtuosity of violist Carol Gimbel and pianist Cullan Bryant. Jaeger’s music will surely remind listeners—and perhaps even some other composers—of the rich tonal palate the viola offers.

Vintage Americana

Release Date: November 19, 2021
Catalog Number: NV6384
21st Century
Solo Instrumental
Piano
Hailed by the New York Times as a “promethean talent,” Canadian pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico performs compositions from six American composers on VINTAGE AMERICANA. In an exhilarating show of virtuosity, Petrowska Quilico steps unflinchingly from tonality to atonality and back again. While the solo piano is the unquestioned star of the album, moments of electronic manipulation and other unexpected instrumentation offer surprising new textures. In VINTAGE AMERICANA, Christina Petrowska Quilico reimagines what this centuries-old instrument is capable of. The result is a captivating collection of masterfully-performed works from some of America’s most gifted composers.