
Composer Ricky Ian Gordon in the Valentine Studio, Leighton Artists' Colony. Photo: Kim Williams.
It’s tricky to leave home when you love your life. As someone who lives in Banff, I understood completely when Ricky Ian Gordon told me this in our conversation in the Leighton Artists’ Colony, as he rounded out his third week of his Fleck Fellowship residency. Although life is grand in New York, a chance encounter with Kelly Robinson, director of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre, brought Gordon to Banff.
“You need to extract yourself from your particular distractions and look at your work in a new way,” he says. “This place is very different. Usually there are small groups of artists. You aren’t sharing a dining room with 200 people. It’s so spectacular and beautiful here. It’s both intimate and epic.”
Following the success of his 2007 opera The Grapes Of Wrath, Gordon was invited into an opera commissioning program launched by Metropolitan Opera General Manager Michael Gelb, and he’s connected with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, composing music for an opera version of her play Intimate Apparel. She’s writing the libretto. “I sent Lynn a Facebook message to see if she had any desire to do it, and she did.”
Gordon has been working on the Met material here in Banff. “I was struggling for the first few days trying to find my voice. Lynn is not done with the libretto, but she told me it starts with a Cakewalk,” he says (Cakewalk is an early-20th century popular music and dance form that originated on Southern slave plantations). Writing that piece of music was his Banff breakthrough.
Working on a few projects, meeting artists from other disciplines, and doing an impromptu live performance in the Club has given him a few ideas. “If I come back to this place, and I would like to, I think it would be in a different capacity, possibly supervising a workshop or working with Kelly.”















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