Audio engineer Emma Laín (left) and musician Georgy Tchaidze, in the booth in Rolston Recital Hall. Photo: Kim Williams.

Being an audio work-study at The Banff Centre, you get to work with some of the most talented musicians in one of the most inspiring locations. This week I’ve been engineering a CD recording with Russian pianist Georgy Tchaidze, music by Russian composers Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Medtner. Beautiful music, but especially, beautiful playing!

Rolston Recital Hall has complex acoustics, so finding the right sound takes some time. For the audio guys, this is usually a pleasure – we enjoy the challenge and getting involved in the technical and audible details. But for a musician, this requires some patience. Georgy worked with us to achieve a sound we’re all happy with, that we hope will bring his playing to life for the listener.

We started with the fourth sonata of Prokofiev: very dark, moody Russian music, played by a Russian pianist, while just outside the window the Canadian spring sunshine was heating up. It was quite surreal…only in Banff.

Recording sessions are always hard for musicians, especially with an approach like Georgy’s: “I am looking for perfection“ he would say. More than once he would jump up from his piano stool and grasp his hair in middle of a take. He would come to the control room to listen to his playing and say “This is trash, and that is trash….” Then he would go back to the piano and play an outstanding take.

A frequent visitor in the session was Bert Picknell, The Banff Centre’s piano technician. Pianos have a life of their own, but during long recording sessions they seem more alive than ever. If it’s not a tone that’s out of tune, it’s a note that’s lost brilliance. Every couple of hours doctor Bert comes by with his tools and makes sure the piano is happy.

Rolston Recital Hall, with its curtains pulled back on a view of Cascade Mountain, has inspired many musicians, and Theresa Leonard, who produced the session, always looks for the “goose bump effect“ when recording. This scene, this sound, and Georgy’s inspired playing certainly delivered.

Emma Laín was born and raised in Madrid, Spain. She graduated in 2011 from the Tonmeister program at the University of Music in Detmold (Germany). She did her first session in The Banff Centre’s Audio work study program in 2008, and in the last two years has freelanced as a recording engineer and editor for labels including BIS (Sweden) and Audite (Germany). She’s currently back at the Banff Centre as a Music Producer work study.

As the panoramic views of the Bourgeau Mountain Range were embellished by the bright blue sky, I met Natalie Doonan, Joanna Neborsky, and Megan Morman – and I asked them a little about themselves.

Megan Morman (left), Joanna Neborsky, and Natalie Doonan in Vistas.

We are: visual artists and writers here for the Visual Arts thematic residency. It starts with Life is Beautiful, but you should look up the full name.

We are from: Montreal, New York, and Saskatoon

I came to The Banff Centre because: Megan: I make art about artists, specifically stories about the arts community and gossip about artists. I’ve always wanted to come to The Banff Centre because of the stories I’ve heard. I’m interested in the crazy things that happen when you get a bunch of artists together in a high-intensity, creative environment.

This morning: Joanna: I had a morning meeting where we rehearsed the schedule for the week. I then had a bit of studio time before lunch.

My after-lunch plans: Natalie:  I have a studio visit with a residency faculty member. We have three faculty members who we each meet with individually to discuss what we’re planning on doing during the residency and how it fits in to the general body of our work.

First impressions of Banff: Natalie:  There’s a lot going on. I’m still working on juggling my personal artistic objectives with all of the planned activity of the thematic residency.

Before I leave the Centre I want to: All: Visit the hot springs!  

The best item on today’s menu: The macaroni and cheese.

“A good photo essay must be able to tell a story, even without text,” Don told us, after the finishing this year’s jury process. “Each image should be strong enough to stand on its own while at the same time it should blend with the other images to create something that’s even stronger or more interesting. Similar to a written story, there should be a strong start and finish, with the images in the middle working to fill out the essay, and just because a maximum of seven images are allowed, that doesn’t mean that seven images should be used if five will tell the story.”

Don shared a selection of several of the really strong finalists in this year’s competition:

Brent Kearney, technology manager for the Banff International Research Station.

The automated video production system set up for the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) is my brainchild. As technology manager for BIRS, I create and maintain custom software, the BIRS website, internet services, photography, videography, and day-to-day technical support for staff in Vancouver and Banff, and for the 40 weekly incoming scientists. I began the research for this project of automating lecture recordings in 2005. As a publicly funded research institution, part of the BIRS mandate is to share the research that takes place here.

Lectures in the main lecture room in the TransCanada Pipeline Pavilion can now be automatically recorded. This empowers the scientists who speak here to make high quality recordings and live broadcasts of their lectures at the touch of a button. The videos are automatically encoded and posted on the BIRS website minutes after the lecture is completed. The whole process is fully automated and requires no human involvement other than pressing a “start” and “stop” button. Since it went into operation, BIRS has been publishing about 25 videos per week.

The automation of video production uses proprietary technology developed over a couple of decades by a programmer from New Jersey. He spent two weeks here in January setting it up. It controls high-definition robotic cameras, and an audio-video mixer to create a production that, in some ways, rivals what a human crew could do. Some professors who have used the new system have commented that it is “the classroom of the future”.

The rest of the new system, which involved electrical upgrades, custom woodwork, installing a large amount of wires, audio-video gear, and computer and network equipment, was installed with the help of The Banff Centre’s carpentry department, electrical contractors, an A/V company from Calgary, and plenty of overtime from me!

As BIRS Scientific Director Nassif Ghoussoub says, “BIRS alone will be broadcasting 25-30 lectures per week for 49 weeks of every year. Each lecture has the potential to open up new threads for research. Future authors working with these ideas will be empowered to provide precise citations to video archives of lectures inspiring their research. The citations to video lectures that appear in subsequent publications will contribute to a biblio-metric metadata stream demonstrating research impact. BIRS will be collaborating with the other institutes to define a unified video capture, video streaming, video archiving, and video storage service for all interested mathematical institutions.”

Podcaster Camara Miller speaks with former CBC host Eric Friesen about the Gryphon Trio. Photo: Don Lee.

Quartet for the End of Time, by Olivier Messiaen, is a powerful and spiritual piece of chamber music; recounting the point of view of a man who had no idea whether he was living through the end of the world, as he knew it. A haunting, but not hopeless impression left by the French composer and soldier.

It was first heard on a bitterly cold January evening in 1941, by a group of prisoners and guards in Stalag VIII-A, a POW camp in Germany. Wednesday night, people at The Banff Centre and around the world got hear the piece live from the Rolston Hall.

The Gryphon Trio, along with clarinetist James Campbell, have returned to work on their latest recording at the Centre and were rounding off the trip with an intimate concert. This isn’t the first time they’ve come to create an album up on the hill. Having played together for 20 years, they’ve stopped by many times before to play and teach.

Former CBC host Eric Friesen was also here for the concert. His time at the CBC gave him an excellent chance to get the know the players over the years, and he’s host and facilitator for the evening as the quartet plays the repertoire from their new album.

Friesen took a few minutes to chat about the Gryphon Trio, as well as the haunting details about the premiere of this piece, in an interview earlier in the week.

The live stream sounded great and was enjoyed by many both online and at the Rolston. If you missed it, a podcast of the show along with an interview with Eric Friesen will be up soon.

Choreographer Aszure Barton and composer Curtis Macdonald. Photo: Don Lee.

“Sound is vibration, vibration is movement … and movement is dance,” Curtis Macdonald says. “It’s all connected.” He’s talking about his latest project, collaborating with internationally acclaimed choreographer Aszure Barton to compose music for her new work, PROJECT XII.

Both of them have been in Banff for the past few weeks. Macdonald is an alto sax player, composer, and sound artist, and he’s been here with Aszure and dancers from her company, Aszure Barton & Artists, working six days a week on the new work, which is backed by The Banff Centre and a who’s who of partners, including The CanDance Network Creation Fund, National Arts Centre, Danse Danse, Canada Dance Festival, Le Grand Théâtre de Québec, La danse sur les routes,  and the Canada Council for the Arts.

“There’s a subtle energy in the mountains that helps bring things to life,” Macdonald says. He’s been able to mix environmental recordings made at Lake Minnewanka and along the Bow River into the soundscape for PROJECT XII. He meets regularly with Barton and the dancers. “I sketch something, and bring a recording to their studio. They listen as they rehearse, which gives them a chance to absorb it, and then we have a dialogue about how it’s working. It’s a very organic process.”

PROJECT XII will premiere on June 8 at the 2012 Canada Dance Festival , but those of us in Banff will have the opportunity to attend a special late-night sneak preview on Saturday, June 2.

Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing and Tom Wilson from Blackie and the Rodeo Kings at the Eric Harvie last week. Photo: Kim Williams.

Whether it was the familiar faces, familiar scenery, or delirium from being on tour, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings had some fun as they took a few moments before their show to chat about being back in Banff and their latest album.

Stephen Fearing and Tom Wilson talked about breaking up the boys club while recording the collaborations for their 2011 album, Kings and Queens. For each track they paired with talented women like Amy Helm, Serena Ryder, Lucinda Williams, Roseanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, and many others.

First came the songs, and then Colin Linden had to match each tune with potential vocal collaborators.

Without its queen, here’s the track Black Sheep, recorded during last week’s show in the Eric Harvie Theatre. Before the show, Stephen Fearing also gave me some insight into the dynamics of this record.

To hear Black Sheep with it’s reigning monarch, Serena Ryder, visit Blackie and the Rodeo Kings’ website.

Stay tuned: we’ll be posting the full interview with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings as a podcast.