Canadiana

Today was our day off, allegedly. Basking in the glow of a great concert, Sunday was the when I had to complete my piece.

And except for a short jaunt into town, I spent the entire day and evening doing just that, skipping dinner in the process. At the present moment, I am over 90% done. The graphic and scored segments are individually completed. Monday morning, well later on Monday morning as it is just past 1:00am right now, I have to combine the segments and photocopy them. Normally I would scan and combine them in Photoshop, but that ain't gonna happen here this year, so I'm working on the analog cut and paste system.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with my piece. I did write a very long convoluted melody for one section, which I may have to toss out if it doesn't sound any good in rehearsal.

I also wrote a part for pandeiro and as of yet I haven't found anyone who can play one. They're all afraid of it, perhaps because it's an instrument that is played to exceptional levels in Brazil, to the point of people playing no other instrument in their lives and changing their names to pandeiro, the most famous of these being Jackson do Pandeiro. Hopefully someone will step up. I can play it as it's a simple part but I need to conduct.

So my only diversion was the hour I spent in town. It's a short walk down the hill from here, but it's a world away. I've been up on the mountainside for over a week now and I've gotten acclimatized.

Walking down Banff Avenue, it struck me as a cookie-cutter sort of Canadiana. Low grade maple syrup sold in vials like it was liquid gold, all sorts of souvenirs of Canada (mostly made in China), gaggles of tourists, giggling Japanese couples whose idea of living on the edge in a foreign country is crossing the street against the traffic light... well you get the picture. The main street of Banff is copied across the country from Historic Properties to Gastown and it all looks oppressively the same to me. I decided that my reaction to this was largely due to my current paradigm of being in an overcharged artistic environment for the last 8 days. Perhaps if I was visiting the town with my own family, some other artist from up the mountainside would probably be judging me just as harshly.

There were a couple of things that caught my eye as I walked into town, which would have amused me regardless of my mindset. The first was a huge inukshuk on somebody's front lawn that look to be an exact replica of the 2010 symbol. I know it's been there for quite a few years, but I couldn't help imagining them getting a knock on the front door in the middle of the night from the VANOC logo goons. The other thing that tickled me was the license plate on a huge pickup truck from the heartland of America: 1GSUS

Heaven help us all.