.png)
For Nikki Pet, the idea for animating one of Igor Stravinsky’s greatest masterworks came from her friends in her undergraduate degree at Columbia University.
“I had a lot of non-musician friends, and they would come to my regular recitals and sort of be like, ‘I’m here to support you,’” she recalls, “and then I would make eye contact with them when I performed and the lights would not be on upstairs. They were fully there because they’re my friend – they're not there because they were particularly engaged.”
The one time this changed was during a performance of Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat – A Soldier’s Tale – when a friend told her that the piece had really resonated with them and that they understood the story.
“I think as an artist and as a musician, you always want to share your story and your perspective,” says Pet. “And for me, there’s nothing more fulfilling than to have that story land and have that come across.”
Pet – a clarinetist and computer scientist – set to work animating the story of A Soldier’s Tale in the hopes that others could understand the music and the story. She really on the snappiness and jazziness of Stravinsky’s score for inspiration but also found her time at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to be where the images started coming to life in her mind.
“There was this whole idea of interplay and working with different people and trying to bring, I think, as cohesive and varied experiences to performances as possible,” Pet remembers. “This just felt like a way – with animation – that [you] not only can do it in live settings with projections, but also this most recent project is the digital production that came out.”
The creation of this edition of A Soldier’s Tale existed in two phases: animating to the performance of the music, and then the post-production for the digital release. The initial sketches of animation were created at the Banff Centre in June of 2024, with the final performance with the animations taking place that December at the Yale School of Music. The animations were enhanced by AI-integrated software designed by her sister that listened to the performers and adjusted the speed of the animation accordingly.
Pet hopes that people who engage with A Soldier’s Tale are inspired to talk about conflict in a more open and frank way. “With the story of A Soldier’s Tale, there’s a veneer of, you know, very storybook, very outlandish,” she says, “but there’s also a very, I think, real pain in there. It's a very ugly ending that feels a bit too real life to be storybook. Working with that interplay – those two sides of things and how to navigate that – I think that was really a big way that Banff showed up in the work.”