Local composers give voice to Ottawa buildings

Adam Saikaley is a composer and musician based in Ottawa. His assignment for Electric Fields’ Polytectures was to compose a piece of music inspired by St. Andrew’s Church on Kent Street.

Adam Saikaley: I received a document that laid out historical facts and some architecture content and so I used that for the brainstorming and then I visited the church a couple times. And in the past, I’d been there a few times, not for any religious reasons but for musical reasons, for the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival. So I just tried to grab all the, everything that I had with me and I guess when I started to write the music the first thing I wanted to do was just make sure the piece was gonna sound nice in the room itself, in the building itself. While keeping within the framework that I was given of, you know, applying these architectural concepts to it.

And the architectural concepts, were they inside concepts as well as outside concepts?

We didn’t really stick so much to symbolism, like anything religious. The closest thing to it is that, there’s something interesting about the building and that is there’s a connection between church and the Department of Justice of Canada. They share, the church’s headquarters share a building with the Department of Justice. So I found that really interesting. So that was the only thing that’s really symbolic in the piece and that is these sort of two, how do I explain it, these two musical features continuously kind of going on top of one another, back and forth.

How did you translate that musically?

What I used for sound was basically things that were in the church itself. I didn’t actually go up and play the organ and record that or play the piano and record that, but I only used piano and organs for the recording and then lots of post effects, so there’s like, so there’s a lot of reverb to mimic what church does to sound. And for the Department of Justice, because I want to make it have a little bit of an authority to it, so I added, so I just gained it and sort of distorted the sound. To give it like a thicker, harder, black-and-white feel.

Something else I really like about the church was that there’s three, there’s these three big windows. So I used that to lay out the harmonic progression and I used the piano, the piano does three chords, or plays three chords, over and over and over again, and actually the whole piece follows that chord progression. And that was just from those three windows. I had to find a way to incorporate that feature.

Have you ever done anything like this before?

On my own. I was never asked to do it for something. But when I write music I’m usually writing music that’s around my environment or my city, so it was very natural. When I write my own music sometimes I’ll just go up to a high point in Ottawa and listen to the city, and then you get a lot of ideas for how to write long-form music or drone music. So I was used to just, I was pretty used to going to a place and just listening very attentfully. And then the music kind of lays itself out.

Did it speak to you right away, or did it take a little while for that to come?

No actually, when I was asked to do this project I was hoping to get a church. So because I had an idea of what I would’ve wanted to do. So I didn’t struggle with it, and that’s really, so the composition actually didn’t’ take that long. The only, the part that took a little bit of time was just tweaking in post-production and being neurotic and – laughs. You know, very specific with the sound. That was really it, but the actually piece itself was a joy to put together.

What I really liked about this project is that it has people thinking about space, spaces, and how that translates into music. And I found something that really helped in my musical writing process or development was realizing that, that architecture is so, has a lot of similarities to music. And so there’s music all around us, all the time, and we don’t necessarily have to go to shows to listen to, well to hear a performance is fantastic, but there’s music happening all the time around us and the buildings we’re in are playing music for us whether it’s conceptual or actually acoustic on a very small level. But I hope when people, I hope when people listen to this piece, and all the other pieces in this project, that they’ll have a, they’ll be, I don’t know, they’ll listen more when they’re going about their day. Maybe listen to their iPod a little less.

Cellist Andrée Préfontaine composed a piece inspired by the architecture of the Government Conference Centre, as well as its initial incarnation: Ottawa’s central train station. While Prefontaine says she prefers to speak about her work in French, she patiently answered OpenFile’s questions in English.

Andrée Prefontaine: I took audio, field recording. So field recording is a capture, the sounds from the environment. So I did that and because I want to hear the acoustic of the place, what are the sounds. And then I got back with my sounds.

Were you able to go inside the centre, or were the sounds from outside?

It’s the sounds from outside, yeah. The inside is very…I tried to contact people and it was a bit hard to have information. I got, I just got general information for the centre and I went on the website also trying to find historical audio things. Then I had my own ideas also, because I’m a, as a cellist, I was thinking of doing sounds that would refer to the train. And I, so I had collections of sound from this place. I tried to work with them and I got, I just took one or two of the collection I have, then I try to build, I try to build with my own ideas with what I have, also.
I heard from the direct, when I was doing a field recording it was really noisy around the place. It has like a hiss sound, like a very high note just close ot the building so it’s like if, and I translate that in like a fuzzy or interference sound. You understand?

Yep, I do.

So, like outside the building there’s like interference with, it’s very hard to approach the building. It’s not accessible. So I have some of those sounds, like glitch, fuzzy sounds, that accompany the reference to the train sound.

So my cello, I went in a studio and I did like a motif of the train, would refer to the train, and I had different speeds. So as I worked in time with the, and I wasn’t in the – surround by the idea of the train, I got deeper in this in time and I went, I felt what it was like to be in the 1960 or in the 19 – before that. The time was a bit, a bit slower. Time was not so fast as now so that’s why I started the piece with a slower, slower speed with the cello reference to the train, then I went to the other, higher speed and in that one I brought the real sound of the train at the end of the piece.

Electro-acoustic Ottawa band Kingdom Shore had the task of composing music to represent the architecture of the similarly designed Confederation and Justice buildings. OpenFile spoke with band member Simon Guibord, while the five remaining members of Kingdom Shore include Nathan Medema, Ryan Hough, Jasmine Landau, Gerg Horvath and Mark Molnar.

Simon Guibord: We did go on the site and then did the walk. So we went there I think three times and we sort of, I guess at the beginning we sort of started with the systematic approach using the contour of the buildings as raw material to compose the piece. The building itself, or the trajectory of the walk, so we used say the length of the walls for duration and the, let’s say the grid-like windows and start us for the rhythm.

Have you ever written anything for architecture, or inspired by architecture, before?

Mmm, no, I don’t, no.

Okay, how did you find the process for you guys?

Oh I quite enjoyed it. In a way it was, I thought it was almost setting limitations in a way, or a sort of perimeter that you play around, yeah.

And were you trying to say anything political with your piece, or were you letting people kind of read it as they take it?

Nothing truly political. The only, we tried to go inside and visit the buildings, but of course you need a special authorization to get in but we learned that most of these two buildings are actually empty. So on the first floor there’s a nursery and except from that these buildings are mostly empty and not used so we did try to get a sort of an empty feeling in our piece, you know?

(ed. note: Neither Confederation Building nor Justice Building are empty. They house the offices of a big chunk of our federal representatives on Parliament Hill.)

Okay, and were there any other building feelings that you were trying to translate with the music?

Well, we, I think we started in a very systematic way, just using like I was saying the contours to guide us, but after that we sort of used just a general feeling of the space and the surrounding to create the music. We also, all of our visits were at night, so I guess the night, you know the dark surroundings, also informed us.

Ottawa post-rock band My Dad vs. Yours was assigned the Supreme Court of Canada for the soundwalk project. Jose Palacios, one of the band’s guitarists, spoke to OpenFile of the process for this composition, as created by Palacios and bandmates Tom Herbert, Arturo Brisindi and Jason Redmond

Jose Palacios: Well, that day that we went there we were standing in the front lawn of it, and we were kind of just trying to picture what we saw, like both the statue of truth and justice and that kind of started giving us ideas. And just by looking at the building, it didn’t seem very inviting, you know, it’s sort of from the bottom, well, from afar, like as you’re kind of walking up to it ...it’s inviting you in, but it’s the closer you get it’s like it’s more, it feels like closed and not inviting.

But yeah, pretty much, we went into the studio with all those things and, yeah, I came up with a guitar riff and kind of went from there. The guitar riff kinda had this sort of anxious feeling to it and we kind of built the first half of the song through that as a person is approaching the building. This anxiety is kind of developing as, or unfolding as someone is walking, approaching the building. And then I guess the part where, I guess because people don’t go into the building they just kind of walk right up to it and then turn right and kind of move away. And so the second half of the building, uh, second half of the song is, yeah, it’s a little bit more, it’s lighter than the first half but there’s still that kind of sense of, not anxiety but urgency, sort of.

We weren’t really trying to get political about anything. I mean, that’s naturally gonna happen for the person because I find it’s pretty subjective, right? So it’s a part of—we didn’t really have any intention of making it political. I find that we wanted to kind of let the person who is approaching, listening to the music and doing the soundwalk, kind of let the person kind of come up with their own idea of how they feel, and I find if—usually you can do a good job of just being kind of, yeah, just making music without kind of putting those political overtones and, I mean, I find because of the song that we have, like the first half of it the anxiety might kind of lure someone to feel that way about the Supreme Court, but you know that’s up to the listener who’s doing the walk. And that’s kind of neat. I like being kind of in the middle and not making it too obvious. I like for people to kind of make up their own ideas about the music and how they feel about how the music makes them feel.