Harmony of the herd

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2018 (2913 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The bison might seem an unlikely subject for a musical composition, but for Eliot Britton, the mighty brown beast was a natural topic.

“It was my favourite animal growing up,” says the Manitoba-born composer, who co-directs the local Cluster New Music and Integrated Arts Festival. “There was a period where I left Manitoba and I kept coming back and it was probably at the peak bison imagery in the mid-2000s, with MTS going hard with Morty (an animated mascot who appeared in the telecommunications company’s ads) and there’s all the bison branding around the University of Manitoba… I was working at the U of M for a year and started to see them everywhere — furniture stores, cleaning services, transportation companies — and you only really notice when you leave and come back.”

Britton, who is an assistant professor of composition and music technology and digital media at the University of Toronto, started collecting incongruous images of bison in an Instagram account. Soon his friends were also sending him pictures of logos and statues of the imposing ungulate, often made to look cute and harmless.

“Then I got trapped in a bison herd when I was back-country camping,” recalls Britton, who graduated from the U of M and earned his PhD in music history from McGill University in Montreal. “I remember thinking how hilarious people’s experience and cartoonish vision is of this animal compared to when they have you trapped and you can’t get to your water source and you’re crouching under a picnic table just waiting for them to go.”

That conflict between the bison’s PR-friendly image and its status as a dangerous wild animal inspired Heirloom Bison Culture, a composition for orchestra and electronics that he presented at the Winnipeg New Music Festival in 2017.

Run, Freddy, Run!, the second instalment in Britton’s bison series, will have its première as part of Camerata Nova’s season-ending concert, Red River Song, held Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at Église Précieux-Sang (200 Kenny St.)

He credits Facebook with providing part of the spark for the piece; it’s apt that a composer who mines the internet for his work should find inspiration via social-media algorithms.

“So Facebook doesn’t know where I live because I will not commit to a city, but Facebook absolutely knows that I like bison,” says Britton. “So Facebook is working very hard in trying to serve up bison images, and the one that it did send, the one that is related to this piece, was a couple of news stories, first in French, then in English, from Lorette.”

Britton was immediately taken with the story of Freddy, the name townspeople have jokingly given a headstrong bison who will not stay in his enclosure. Visitors to the community, just southeast of Winnipeg, are encouraged to keep an eye out along Highway 405, and one enterprising soul has made hoodies featuring a bison logo and the words “Run, Freddy, Run.”

The news item also jogged Britton’s memory about another wilful animal — this one from a 1911 article in the New York Times about a Montana ranger who was killing off a group of bull bison that were obstinately refusing to be rounded up with the rest of their herd. These “outlaw” animals escaped being loaded on boxcars with 700 other animals headed to Alberta, where repopulation and conservation measures were underway; after 1890, it was believed there were no bison left in Canada.

“I just thought it was so funny, the idea of this rebel bison, still at it after 100 years,” Britton says.

In a weird twist, some of the bison slain by that ranger (known as the Pablo Herd of Outlaw Buffalo) ended up at a Manitoba taxidermy shop and from there, the Manitoba Museum — a fact that pops up in Britton’s work.

“The inspiration for this piece is pretty specific: the idea of time disparity and consistency; the idea of that news story from the New York Times in 1911 and then Run Freddy Run from 2018. I had this big time gap, so then in music, I thought, ‘I’m going to combine Renaissance choir, early music, with speech synthesis and then use an algorithm to mine text fragments from the intenet.

“So it’s all of these tiny strange text fragments, like ‘Y’know, we’re really thinking Freddy should have his own webcam to let us know what he’s up to’ or ‘Um, y’know, I don’t want to be insensitive, but all bison look the same.’ These little funny fragments, in French and English, get set in the style of (Renaissance polyphonic composer) Palestrina. And then there are bits that the speech synthesizers are giving the ‘internet voice’ to, ‘cause there’s this old story and new story juxtaposed, and there’s this twinge of nostalgia, where there’s a fragment that talks about the bison heads that are left over from the last herd of wild bison that are somewhere in the museum.”

There will also be more concrete displays of nostalgia at Camerata Nova’s show. The concert from the local vocal group — known for combining the ancient with the avant-garde — is celebrating the music of Louis Riel’s Manitoba, with a strong Métis focus. Violinist/fiddler Claudine St-Arnault and fiddler Alexandre Tétrault, a descendent of Riel, will perform, along with traditional dancers Julien Beaudette-Loiselle and Marcus Merasty. The choir will perform songs about the buffalo hunt and the Battle of Seven Oaks by Métis fur trader and songwriter Pierre Falcon, and conductor Mel Braun’s Ode to the Red River Cart, a suite of Métis songs.

Britton’s Run, Freddy, Run! is more cutting-edge than Old World, but the 35-year-old composer says there’s a definite musical nod to his Métis roots.

“There’s a fiddle player who’s going to be bridging the gap between the vocal Renaissance parts and the speech synthesis parts, because the violin is neat in that it can sound like a speech synthesizer and a human,” he says. “In the electronic part, there’s a bunch of sampled fiddle material from my great-uncle, who was a Métis fiddle-maker.”

The concert will end with musicians, jiggers and audience all coming together for a big kitchen party featuring traditional songs.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier