When I was a kid, like many kids, the stories I loved best were the ones with talking animals, from Louis the swan in The Trumpet of the Swan, to the rabbits in Watership Down, to a certain frog named Kermit. There’s something undeniably magical about looking at the human world through the eyes of animals.
Now that I’m all grown up, I’ve noticed that apart from being fantastic and enchanting, and, well, anthropomorphic, all those stories have something else in common. They all somehow manage to strike at something deeper about nature and humanity and the cycle of life. (Yes, even Kermit.)
I loved all those stories, but I had one clear favourite: Fantastic Mr Fox, by Roald Dahl. But long before Fantastic Mr Fox was a glint in Roald Dahl’s eye (much less Wes Anderson’s), another talking fox was at the heart of another story, a story for grown-ups: The Cunning Little Vixen, the opera by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček.
It’s just as enchanting and just as powerful, and I’m lucky to get the chance to present it this Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, August 21, on CBC Radio 2, in a production from Florence with the glorious Isabel Bayrakdarian in the starring role. I’ll also be celebrating the life of the late Australian conductor and Janáček champion, Sir Charles Mackerras, who died this past July.
I first started suffering from tinnitus about seven years ago. I’ve learned how to live with it, mostly. It usually affects me the most when I’m in a very silent environment, like somewhere in the wilderness.
Gordon Hempton is someone who knows all about very quiet places and so I thought he might have some insight into how I might learn to listen to them again despite my tinnitus. He’s a Grammy-award winning sound recordist and acoustic ecologist based in Port Angeles, WA, and he’s also the founder and caretaker of One Square Inch of silence in Washington’s Olympic National Park – the quietest place in the USA.
When we spoke, he said some very interesting things about how society is sort of suffering from a collective temporary hearing loss – and how he believes that learning how to listen again could help us take better care of the planet we live on. I mixed his words from that conversation together with some of my recordings of human and environmental sounds to create this short radio piece:
Temporary Hearing Loss
This piece originally ran a few weeks ago on CBC Radio’s excellent summer series The Bottom Line with David Suzuki. (If you haven’t heard it yet, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s on every Sunday at 11 am for the rest of the summer.)
This Saturday, August 14th, I’ll once again have the pleasure and the privilege to fill in for the inimitable Bill Richardson on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio Two.
This week’s featured opera is L’Étoile, or The Star, by 19th-century French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. It’s been a fun opera to get to know – and although it’s mostly remained obscure since its premiere in 1877, it seems to have gathered steam over the past decade with productions popping up all over the place. It’s light and frothy; the characters have ridiculous names, there are mistaken identities and plot twists of all kinds, and lots of pretty tunes.
Just over a year ago, I composed an audio artwork commissioned by the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art. I’m excited to share it as the first audio I’m posting here on my new website (now that I’ve figured out how to post audio).
It’s called Ode to the Salish Sea and it premiered in Toronto on May 30, 2009 in octophonic surround sound at the Wychwood Art Barns, during the Radio Without Boundaries conference. It was broadcast that month across Canada on the venerable and undeservedly discontinued CBC program Outfront, and has since been broadcast on KUOW in Seattle.
Ode to the Salish Sea
At the time of the production of the piece, the Salish Sea was a proposed name for the inland waters that run from Olympia, WA, north to Campbell River, BC. Last November, it became an official name in the USA, to be used on all new maps. I later produced a documentary for CBC’s The Current called The Sound and the Sea, based on Ode to the Salish Sea. (I’ll be posting that here too in a little bit, but if you like, you can hear it here now.)
A very long-winded description of the Ode, written during production, follows below.
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These days my tinnitus is pretty bad. It’s a ringing in my ear that I notice most frequently at night, when all else is quiet. It used to be just in my left ear, but lately my right ear has been acting up.
Recently I wrote about how tinnitus has altered the way I think about noise, and about silence. You can read my thoughts in Issue # 2 of BoulderPavement, the Banff Centre’s new online literary journal.
Once in a while I’m lucky enough to get to keep Sheryl MacKay‘s chair warm while she’s off on holiday.
This weekend on NXNW on CBC Radio 1 I’m thrilled to get the chance to listen to some of my favourite music and share it with folks listening across BC. On July 24th I’m revisiting a feature interview I did with Bill Henderson from the band Chilliwack a couple of months ago. I didn’t grow up in Western Canada so I wasn’t really aware of Chilliwack – I mean, they were on my radar, but only as a faint blip. Now that I know their music a bit better, I think they’re underrated in the rest of Canada. This was a great band, and some of their work in the 1970s was pretty groundbreaking.
On July 25th I’m delighted to have the chance to sit down with Aidan Knight. He’s my favourite new artist of 2010, hands down. Every song on his debut album Versicolour speaks to me in some way. His voice and his melodies are beyond reproach, his songwriting and his arrangements are intelligent and beautiful, and he’s a skilled lyricist to boot. What a treat.
Also on the 25th, I’ll speak with author Adam Lewis Schroeder whose new novel In the Fabled East just finished blowing me away about an hour ago. (Now what do I do? The downside of coming to the end of a great novel.)
Feeling pretty lucky.
I’ll soon be uploading some of my audio productions here. There’s a nifty audio plugin which is really handy to use and I’m excited about sharing some of my work online.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing something I’ve produced, head on over to The Nerve at its CBC home. They offer streaming of all six episodes on their website.
