| With help of Roch Carrier, composer sets The Hockey Sweater to music
To perform her most recent piece of music, Ontario composer Abigail Richardson will rely on the strings, the brass and the organ, as well as a pile of ceramic tiles. Richardson, now 36 and living in Dundas, Ont. "At school, at that point, there was so much rivalry between the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers," she said. The commission, a long dream of Toronto Symphony director of education Roberta Smith, includes narration by Carrier himself. "The hardest thing was how to put in the text," she said. Richardson's immigration, however, proved the making of her musical career. She started music lessons late - "My parents did not put me in it, for obvious reasons" - but took up the flute in Grade 6 and couldn't be separated from a neighbour's piano. Justine with the author last summer, saw the home he grew up in, played the local church bells and asked him what sound he remembered most from childhood. Still, she was planning to become a doctor until first year university. " Sure enough, within a few months in Canada her hearing returned. It was a scary thing. "It was quite traumatic," she recalls. "I was sitting in biology class one day and a light bulb went on. The loss was so gradual she had unconsciously learned to lip read, and did not believe the doctors who told her she had lost her hearing. When her engineer father was relocated to Calgary, her family was asked to prove she would not be a burden on the Alberta health care system and British doctors were marshalled to give three separate diagnoses that the six-year-old Abigail had no hope of recovering her hearing. But she also picked up some Quebec fiddling for her introduction, borrowed some brass from the Canadiens' and the Leafs' own theme music, and, of course, added the sound of those tiles. She travelled to Ste. The third doctor, a family friend, did offer some hope: "Calgary is a dry climate. "He said, 'Ah, the sound of the blades on the ice,'" she said. With help of Roch Carrier, composer sets The Hockey Sweater to music |
Saturday, 12 May 2012
With help of Roch Carrier, composer sets The Hockey Sweater to music
