What's in a name?

Well today was the final day of the composer's residency. I reworked my piece late at night and it was as ready as it was going to be.

We started off the morning talking about the business end of composing, about SOCAN, copywrite, publishing, royalties, not-for-profit societies, online sales, writing grants, Canada Council and so on. I've heard the talk up here before, but some parts of it are much more relevant for my current career stage.

I had a growing uneasiness during the seminar, as I really wanted to have my piece ready to go. Unfortunately, my laptop was giving me a lot of grief, another annual Banff ritual. What should have taken a couple of minutes took about 3 hours. Typical with computers, the techno-screwup is directly proportional to urgency of the printing job. Without Ken Hoffman's and Lorae Farrel's help, it never would have printed at all. I could have done it by hand in a fraction of the time.

After lunch, we ran through everyone's compositions, ten in all, with the aim of recording them during a live performance in the evening. I missed a good portion of it dealing with printing issues and my piece had to be moved from #2 to #9 on the order list.

Rehearsing all of the pieces proved to be quite tiring as everyone was pushing their compositional boundaries, trying things that might or might not work. I for one was not happy with how the group improvisational aspects of my piece worked. In the end, I noted with some irony that I wrote the piece with chord changes and flowing melody and Marianne wrote the graphic score, a total reversal of roles.

One other thing happened during the rehearsing of my piece. First Marianne, then a couple of other people laughed when they say that I had misspelled my own name on the chart. I was rushing, it was in teeny tiny font, blah, blah, blah. Steve Bagnekk - so I missed by one key on the keyboard. I thought it would be fine as long as Mike Herriott didn't find out, and right then, right behind me, he started howling. I had served up the pitch and he hit it out of the park. BAGNEKK! He dubbed me "Gooch" with his trombone, a word with filthy connotations, at least in Mike's equally filthy mind. He was most pleased with this turn of events, and I had myself to blame.

No worries, I was pretty tired after the afternoon's proceeding. Marianne and I took a walk by the Bow River before supper. It was nice to get outdoors finally, but it really wasn't enough. I want to take a big hike and we noted with a bit of regret that the snow is still pretty far down the mountains, so we won't be able to do any serious vertical hiking.

Jeremy Price arrived at dinner, as did a couple of other Vancouver musicians, as they started rolling in for the Jazz Orchestra Workshop which starts tomorrow.

We had to be back at Rolston Recital Hall for 7:30 to get ready for the recording. First off, was a piece we had not yet rehearsed and I had to sight read it for the two takes each of us got. There were some serious tuning issues with the other player (heaven forbid, not me out of tune!). I kept adjusting but it didn't help.

For some reason, people kept asking me to play their pieces, even if I hadn't been at all of the rehearsal that afternoon, so I did a lot of playing and sight reading while tape was rolling.

By the time we got to my piece, I was fried. I made the necessary adjustments and they worked reasonably well, but my conducting sucked. Mike Herriott was actually really helpful during the recording. He is always that way, he respects the music but once the playing is over, it's game on again. I know I could have done a better job, but I'm sure the results will be satisfactory. Sometimes you just need to put a little time between the recording and the listening.

So now it's off to the wrapup party and the real work starts tomorrow. And now on top of all of the playing, I have my major piece to write, not to mention the song room piece. Well, that's just the way it is here.