A week after a great time in Lunenburg, NS, I find my self bumming around in Montreal waiting for my bass to be repaired (nothing catastrophic - just the wear of several harsh Winnipeg winters, a few thousand air miles, and too long since having the fingerboard planed). Sampling the new beers and coffee shops of the old stomping grounds, I can’t help but reflect on how great of a time the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance provided me.
I had visited LAMP once last summer during a cross-country road trip, being drawn there by their Canada Day festivities and the promise of a new music concert presented by my friends, the Iris Ensemble. The town immediately reminded me of Banff, because if its raw natural beauty, supported by offerings of excellent food and great entertainment: a truly winning trifecta. The obvious problem was that I didn’t have enough time to try all the fish’n’chips and chowders in town, so when I was invited to be the house-bassist for the festival this summer, I jumped at the chance to return for a longer period of time.
The LAMP is set up in a historic building, the Lunenburg Academy, which was one of the first (and now the last from that era) multi-room schools in Canada. The building, completed in 1895, is surrounded by the town cemetery sitting atop the highest hill in town, Gallows Hill, notable because that kind of land is usually reserved for churches. The first floor of the building is apparently still used as the primary school for the town, though I saw little evidence of children from where I spent my days, in a beautiful studio on the top floor. The story, as it was told to me, is that several years ago plans were made to tear the academy down, and that’s when the power of the arts once again came to the rescue. Burt Wathen, now the artistic director of LAMP, pitched the creation of the academy to the town, and thus created a much-needed centre for classical music on the east coast. Not only that, but it seems that this artistic intervention also guaranteed the survival of this Victorian architectural gem in a UNESCO world heritage site, nestled in an important town where the Bluenose (check out the boat on your 10-cent coins) was crafted, and the place where, during the height of the Canadian fisheries, held the highest per-capita GDP in the country.
My comparison to Banff goes a little further than beautiful sights, smells, and late nights in fresh air. The existence of LAMP is, in my opinion, a huge deal that should not be kept secret. During my school years, I spent two summers at the Banff centre in the Rocky Mountains during what seemed to be the height of its development into a modern state-of-the-art artistic haven, only to later see it crumble into basically an over-priced hotel and conference centre taking up some of the best real-estate on the planet. The music residencies and artist training programs are a joke compared to what they used to be, and while the centre certainly still employs excellent artists, it comes nowhere close to what it used to in terms of offering experiences and opportunities to emerging artists, particularly classical musicians. If you’re in doubt, please go to the Banff Centre website and look for programs in orchestra, opera, new music, dance, and artist training - you may find that other than their (admittedly fantastic) string quartet competition, there is not much there. To temper my comparison, I will say that LAMP is nowhere close to the luxury and sophistication of facilities that Banff is, but that is perhaps it’s greatest strength: a new artistic haven that is small, intimate, rooted in community, and managing to keep our classical (including modern) music relevant. For me, the greatest things that happen in music are caused by the right people being in the same room at the same time - serendipitous collaborations, the lifeblood of a good festival, something that the size and intimacy of LAMP encourages.
During my two weeks in Lunenburg, I had a manageable schedule of chamber music rehearsals, meetings with composers, coaching sessions with Z4 (up-and-coming piano quartet from McGill University), concerts, and plenty of time for personal practice. Most evenings had either public concerts, lecture-concerts from visiting artists, or music reading parties followed by the usual festivities. On our one free day, the academy rented a ketch for everyone to spend the afternoon on, a perfect activity to build fellowship among the artists present.
I had a few great conversations on the boat with the students and teachers participating in the Composition Academy, which I thought was a particularly interesting program. The program had the young composers working all day, almost every day, sharing their ideas and presenting their compositions to each other for discussion. Out of these presentations, an entire concert was devised on the spot, based around a piece for solo violin and electronics by Matthias McIntire, and supported by various works from other artists present - again, the perfect kind of thing to happen at such an intimate festival (this concert, by the way, was put together in about four days and brought enough people to fill the concert venue at LAMP). The student composers were also all tasked with writing a piece inspired by a set of paintings that were hung around the academy, three of which I performed in, and all of which were presented on the final night of the festival. Not only was the concert completely sold-out, but every piece was met with heartfelt appreciation and worth hearing again, something that is unheard of for new music concerts.
Let me emphasize that: every piece was met with heartfelt appreciation and worth hearing again. In five years of new musical festivals at the Winnipeg Symphony; summers spent at the new music and composition academies of Banff, Domaine Forget, and Orford; and years of attending concerts and festivals like Ground Swell, the TSO's New Creations, and McGill New Music Ensemble, I have never been to or played in a concert that presented such a high caliber of composition and maintained it throughout the night. Except for one recent WSO concert where we presented a Canadian premiere of Philip Glass' 11th Symphony with him present (spoiler alert - it sounds a lot like his others), never seen a sold-out contemporary music concert. I don't mean to put those other programs and festivals down, they all have interesting things going on with them, and perhaps this comparison is too broad, but my aim is to stress as deeply as possible how incredible the LAMP is doing at providing high-caliber music experiences and training for artists and community alike. I really do believe that this program should be on the radar of anyone who cares about new music, and especially those hoping to pursue a career in composition.
It was also a load of fun to get together with my dear friends in the Iris Ensemble and do a reading of Dvorak's String Quintet, Opus 77; and the Schubert Trout Quintet and Vaughan WIlliams C Minor Quintet with the Z4's. We bassists don't have a lot of chamber music works to choose from, but we're lucky that the ones that do exist are really great pieces of music. These sessions bring me back to my time in Banff in those glory years, being thrown a sheet of music from Jens Lindemann just before walking on stage for a concert to play as a duet encore with him, probably because I had lost to him at darts the night before; or banding together with Mira Benjamin, Barry Shiffman, Todd Palmer, Tara Helen O'Connor, and Desmond Hoebig for Golijov's Lullaby and Doina, all because the right instruments happened to end up eating at the same table.
So, if you are looking for a place to catch a few concerts next summer, or send you students to, or go an spend some time working on your own skills (the faculty and visiting artists there are awesome - visitors have included Mark Fewer, Elinor Frey, Martha Argerich, Joel Quarrington, Uri Caine, Guilio Zappa...) do yourself a favour and look up the LAMP - festivities run almost year-round.
Grateful acknowledgement to the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support of my participation in this residency.
