Composer

Painted Dances

She is currently immersed in a new interdisciplinary work titled Painted Dances, envisioned as an art intervention to boost joy. She is having a wonderful time working with painter and former professional dancer Julea Hope Boswell.

Heather and Julea

In the first stage of the process, Julea worked with the diverse-ability contemporary dancers of Propeller Dance in Ottawa, creating 12 large paintings. A wheelchair wheel was used to create circular shapes. The paintings were used in the staging of Propeller Dance events. In the second stage of Painted Dances, Heather has created 12 electronic audio tracks and 12 piano scores for live performance.

Propeller Dance with Julea’s paintings as backdrop

People Living with Parkinson’s Disease

Heather’s classical song cycle, As Through a Glass Darkly, is featured on the Juno-nominated album Notes Towards, produced by Timothy Corlis. Heather set this music to poetry written by her father Victor Toews about his struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Because her father had been an avid amateur singer as a tenor, the work is written for tenor and piano. It was premiered by Canadian singer Brandon Leis in 2008, who also recorded the work together with Heather.

Creativity in Classical Music

During Heather Taves’s 30-year career as a keyboard professor, she has made a pioneering contribution to diverse student creativity in piano performance education. Her influential legacy has been documented by Dr. Diana Dumlavwalla in The Applied Studio Model in Higher Music Education, edited by Kelly A. Oarkes and Ryan Daniel (2024).

At Wilfrid Laurier University, Heather developed an innovative Creative Projects model, about which she was invited to give a TED-style talk at the Summit on 21^st Century Music Education of the College Music Society.

Heather’s own compositions for pianists include such works as her Prelude and Fugue on the K’naan Olympic anthem “When I Get Older” in 2015.

Stories of Prince Edward Island

Since 2021, Heather has been making music with Black singer-songwriter, Order of PEI artist, and former Island high school buddy, Scott Parsons, to perform, improvise, and make arrangements of his music documenting Black history on Prince Edward Island.

With the Scott Parsons Band, 2023

Four Preludes to Burnt Church

Her first-ever publicly performed composition, Four Preludes to Burnt Church (2001) for spoken word and piano was premiered at the Elora Festival, narrated by actor Colin Fox and recorded for CBC Radio. In this work, she grappled with the injustices she had witnessed as a volunteer observer during a notorious Indigenous fishing crisis at Esgenoôpetitj in Mi’kma’ki.

Narrator Colin Fox, Esgenoôpetitj community members in 2001