Composer
Creator Heather Taves integrates digital technologies, live acoustic music, and multiple genres in her collaborations, compositions, and improvisations. The hallmark of her voice is her repurposing of classical music to spark social and environmental transformation.
Painted Dances
Heather Taves works with visual artist Julea Hope Boswell to create interdisciplinary works growing out of their lived experience as islanders on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Their installation Intertidal was exhibited in 2025 at Turning the Tide: Island Imaginaries & Interdisciplinaries in Climate Change, the 3rd International Conference on Small Island States and Subnational Island Jurisdictions.
Heather and Julea
In their collaborative work Painted Dances, 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
Photo by Andrew Balfour
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 21st 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.