Don Wright Faculty of Music

Omar Daniel describes the pieces he composes as ‘like looking into an endless well.’

As a boy, John O. Hess was expected to sing in the church choir his mother directed. His family also sang before meals and sang on car trips.

The loud, belting sound of brass fills a classroom at Jack Chambers Public School and spills over into the hallway. The fingers of several players move up and down on clicking valves to recreate the fluttering melodies and plodding march of John Philip Sousa’s Transit of Venus.

Howling wind and cold rain stream through a broken window in a small greenroom, but Robert Kubica is focused on only two things – his hands and the guitar they hold. Kubica is backstage trying to warm up for a performance, and the weather conditions are not helping much. It’s a December night that Kubica, 48, can now recall with humour.

Miranda Wickett is convinced she was born to dance.

“The worst crime I can commit is to bore my audience.”

James Grier has a passion for music you can feel. The shelves of his small Talbot College office are lined with CDs and books as an aging boom box sits on a corner shelf waiting to be used. He does not own an MP3 player.

You hear Theodore Baerg before you ever see him.

Norma Coates’ first powerful childhood memory is a quick glimpse of the Beatles performing at Shea Stadium in 1965 on her TV.

Don Stephenson sums himself up in seven words: “I like pianos and I like people.”

In the quiet halls of the Don Wright Faculty of Music building, a female soprano voice reaches for the high notes. A piano accompanies the singer and each time it pauses, a second, stronger voice shows how it should be done. Then the other tries again.

Dressed in black, 16 musicians of Western’s Early Music Studio fill von Kuster Hall with the slow strains of a Baroque era song. Seated behind the other string musicians, the group’s sole guitar player skillfully strums the baroque guitar she crafted with her own two hands.