Patrick McGraw  

Bio

Patrick McGraw was born in the United States but has made Canada his home since 2001. An early interest in the sciences led him to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, but the pull of his other great love, music, proved irresistible.  He returned to school to study composition.  His teachers have included David Mott at York University and Gary Kulesha and Alexander Rapoport at the University of Toronto.  His music occasionally draws direct inspiration from his physics background, but more often the influence is subtle, reflected in a concern with the relationship between music's underlying logical regularity and the jagged contingency of its surface manifestation. He was awarded the Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music in 2014 for his string quartet Glass,  and has won competitions including the first annual Cecilia String Quartet Composition Competition and the University of Toronto Wind Ensemble Composition Competition.  He was chosen as a guest composer by the Toronto-based Toy Piano Composers collective for their third annual "TBA" concert.  His works have been performed in the U.S. and Canada by TorQ Percussion, Reverb Brass, the Cecilia String Quartet, the University of Toronto Wind Symphony, the Toy Piano Composers Ensemble and others. He is a member of the Canadian League of Composers and an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.