The Yamaha grand piano, a gift to the West Vancouver Youth Band in 2010, is cleaned every day at its berth in the music room hall inside the West Vancouver community centre.
As for maestro Macaulay, the 52-year-old is in year 26 of an original three-year commitment to the West Vancouver band, a job he took reluctantly and one he immediately wondered how he could get out of. Baker said it just so happened a song had come to him recently. Some call it song catching, the music coming back from the Creator or ancestors while paddling in a traditional canoe, catching salmon or, in Baker’s case, while painting some walls at Park Royal.The conductor took the song, Gathering of Eagles, to Vancouver composer Robert Buckley and asked him to reimagine it as a piece for the West Vancouver Youth Band’s symphonic band.
Campbell is one of 16 hereditary chiefs of the Squamish Nation but he’s speaking for himself, not the First Nations band. He described the collaboration as being an example of “reconcili-action.” “We’ve commissioned an enormous number of things from him,” Macaulay said. “He’s written for Celine Dion, he’s written for everybody, but he also writes for us.”
When Penelope Neocleous, a former band piccolo and flute player, headed to McGill University, Macaulay put her in touch with another former student of his at the Montreal campus. Through that connection Neocleous was invited to join I Medici di McGill, an orchestra normally limited to students and faculty from the school of medicine.
IN THE BEGINNING …Macaulay grew up in a military family and moved around, but he’s been a Lower Mainlander since he was seven and he graduated from North Delta Senior Secondary before studying music at Capilano College and then UBC.