Scottish cellist turns kids' thoughts, stories into personalized songs at Vancouver International Children's Festival
Greg Sinclair’s A Piece of You is a private, interactive concert all about you over Zoom
Edinburg-based musician Greg Sinclair uses expressive graphic notation to write a song on the spot in A Piece of You. Photo by Lucas Chih-Peng Kao
The Vancouver International Children’s Festival features Greg Sinclair’s one-on-one performances of A Piece of You June 5 and 6 via Zoom. The festival runs May 31 to June 13 online.
GREG SINCLAIR WAS just seven years old when he first plucked a cello, using a half-sized instrument to fit his school-age frame. The Edinburgh-based musician, performance artist, and composer immediately fell in love with it for reasons that might come as a surprise.
“It’s a really appealing instrument to lots of people,” Sinclair says in a video interview with Stir. “It’s a very beautiful sound, but I think right from the word go I was really interested in all the weird sounds it could make as well.
“It’s so low, and you can play it in so many different ways: you can use a bow, you can pluck it, you can knock on the wood…” he says. “At any early age, I was really interested in all the weird possibilities just as much as the beautiful ones.”
Sinclair focuses mainly on performances geared to young audiences, this niche bringing him to the 2021 Vancouver International Children’s Festival. A virtual affair this year, it is the longest running professional performing arts festival for young audiences and the first of its kind in North America and Europe.
Sinclair will present A Piece of You, a one-of-a-kind performance that grew out of a work he created several years ago for BUZZCUT, an internationally recognized Glasgow-based festival of live art and experimentation. It was a one-to-one piece where Sinclair would ask the listener a few questions about themselves and turn their answers into a piece of music using graphic notation.
The show was a hit and got picked up by events like the Edinburgh International Book Festival and National Museum of Scotland’s Edinburgh International Children’s Festival. Then came the pandemic—and A Piece of You picked up new life.
Through Zoom, Sinclair realized, he could reimagine the work and connect with people all over the world. He has presented the customized digital performance to audiences everywhere from Ireland to Norway to Australia. Geared to children aged seven and up and their families or caregivers, the show begins with Sinclair asking the kids a series of questions.
“The questions are the same every performance starting from the fairly mundane, like ‘How are you feeling?—which actually can be quite profound—then it goes a little bit deeper about their fears and their loves and their wishes,” Sinclair explains. “So I get a little glimpse of this personality, what makes that person tick.”
As the young’uns give Sinclair their answers, he’s writing them down on sheet of music paper. Then he draws expressive pictures, lines, shapes, and words in coloured pens—images that form the graphic notation from which he creates and performs a personalized song right then and there. “The reason I use it is it breaks down that hierarchy of who can read the music,” he says. “Because the child can see me notating in this way, they understand why I’m making those marks, and it doesn’t become this code they don’t understand.”
Sinclair is always amazed at how some kids can be nervous or timid at the beginning of their time together then end up so enthusiastic by the end of it.
“It’s fascinating seeing the differences in the way people respond to same set of questions,” he says. “I’m having an absolute ball doing it. Even though I’m not leaving my hometown, it does feel like I’m getting little glimpse of the world.”
With the virtual voyaging we’ve all been doing over the last year and a bit, it could well be that A Piece of You remains in the digital realm. “Without leaving Edinburgh, I can connect internationally, but I already had been considering the implications of international touring before COVID struck,” Sinclair says. “What does it mean for me to tour to different places when we’re in the middle of this climate crisis? The pandemic happened to coincide with this global awareness of international travel. For me to be able to do a live performance that doesn’t feel it’s compromised in any way…really interests me.”
For more information, see Vancouver International Children's Festival.
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