Playback

Playback is a 45-minute guided tour of Chalmers House experienced through headphones. It invites listeners to explore Canadian concert music while walking through Chalmers House. When I first started the creation process, I aimed to create a site-specific piece about the Canadian Music Centre since its headquarter is situated at Chalmers House. As the piece developed, I realized that the CMC has less to do with its site at 20 St. Joseph Street, but is enlivened by people coming together to play, learn, and talk about Canadian concert music. Chalmers House is a place of connections where the public connect with Canadian composers and their music. In Playback, I bring the composers' perspective on music, composing, and Canadian culture.

A common preoccupation in the Canadian experience is questioning one's cultural identity, and we often find glimpses of the answers between two terms, in the interstices, the hyphens. As a nation, we are hyperaware of the plurality under the umbrella of Canadian culture, and for the most part, we celebrate these differences. In the case of concert music, these differences are heard. To me, Canadian concert music is a stately term with a fluid definition and in this way, it is like Chalmers House. Though the outer facet of Chalmers House remains untouched, the interior has gone through many renovations. By compiling stories, and music together throughout the tour, Playback weaves together invisible architectures within the physical structure of Chalmers House, highlighting both the present and the absent, the physical and the abstract.

In March, 2016, Nancy created her second large-scale audiowalk Playback unpacking the notion of Canadian music, its history and its future. Taking form as a 5 unique and synchronized parts, Playback contextualizes archival research with interviews with more than 36 Canadian composers at the headquarters of Canadian Music Centre. This piece weaves through the Canadian music, its socio-cultural histories, and its contemporary practices that when physicalized by the audience footsteps become a fugue-like choreography.