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In the over-nine decades since the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity has been in operation, one of its core artistic pillars has been chamber music. That pillar is being maintained this month by new collaborations between faculty and students from the Interplay program on beloved pieces of the Western classical music canon and new commissions that will see their first performances at the Banff Centre.
It’s precisely this blend of inspiration and experience that first gave the Banff Centre its reputation for excellence, not only for trumpeter Joel Brennan who runs the chamber music program for Interplay, but for the rest of the faculty as well. “I feel like musicians worldwide are aware of the Banff Centre just as a general concept,” he says, “because it’s just so renowned everywhere for being kind of a spiritual hub for art and art-making.”
An associate professor of music performance at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in Australia, Brennan is well familiar with the value of the Canadian arts scene having spent time on the faculty at Brandon University. It was his connections there that brought him to the Banff Centre for the first time in 2024.
“Particularly for this program, Interplay, everybody is coming with a very open mind,” says Brennan. “We have the interplay between the vocalists and the instrumentalists, but also, we as instrumentalists tend to get stuck in our normal instrumentation type groups. We take it a step further and we really start to have interplay between the instrument groups.”
“It’s like the movie Inception,” he chuckles. “It’s a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. This is Interplay on so many different levels.”
Brennan observes that although the participants in Interplay come from all over the world, they take away something distinctive for having participated in culture-making at the Banff Centre that goes beyond music. “One of the really special things about the Banff Centre is its connection to the traditional owners of the land where we now work,” he says, “and the real commitment to reconciliation and a knowledge of the fac that art has been made here for many generations prior to our arrival.” This acknowledgement is highlighted by the commitment to sharing chamber music by Indigenous composers not only from Canada, but from places like Hawaii and Australia as well.
“One of the really nice things of bringing people together from around the world is that hopefully we each bring something here and we also bring some of it back,” smiles Brennan.