Rosemary Mountain's life has been characterized by exploration. She has spent much of her life in teaching, administration, and research, but remains a composer at heart, and left her job in music at Concordia University in 2014 to devote her time to finishing a couple of books and returning to creative work in the calmer atmosphere of small-town Nova Scotia. Her musical output is varied in style and ensemble, including electroacoustics and mixed works as well as occasional collaborations with other art forms (film, dance, theatre), performed in Canada & Europe. Early exposure to Indian music led her to appreciate the importance of timbre, temperament, rhythm and form which drove her to expand her listening repertoire far beyond the Western canon, leading also into electroacoustics, and to developing more appropriate analytic and pedagogical tools – outlined in her 2021 e-book Conversational Musicology. Her Ph.D. in music at the University of Victoria in 1986 launched a lifetime investigation of auditory and temporal perception research, summarized in her latest book A Musician's Guide to Time (2022). Her interest in links with visual arts led to her inventing and developing (along with Harry Mountain, sculptor and historian) a platform known as IMP-NESTAR which investigates music and multimedia analysis and terminology, and helps communication between potential collaborators. Current creative projects include a new piano work, a set of pedagogical works for violin, some short electroacoustic works using snippets of earlier sounds, and plans for a string quartet (she is a violinist by training).
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