A Day in the Life of Acclarion...

The adventure continues to unfold now that Acclarion has relocated to the Northwest Territories.  Life in northern Canada is quite different from growing up in a mega-sized city like Toronto.  We are adjusting to a small town not unlike the Cheers bar..."where everybody knows your name" (and a lot of other things about you!)  There are of course, the unique challenges of adapting to the cultural and philosophical differences that exist between northerners and southerners, but at the end of the day, the people here are wonderfully warm and friendly, if not a little too laid back.  There's an expression that seems to be the mantra of everyone in the north:  "relax, it's the north...it will get done when it gets done!"

Maybe it's not that life moves slowly up here, but rather than life moves too quickly back home.  Of course, once winter sets in, with virtually no daylight, we'll probably feel more like the locals and enjoy relaxing indoors with a cup of hot chocolate sitting by the warm and cozy fireplace (which we don't have).  

Onto matters of music!  In an era when the CBC has all but given up on broadcasting classical music, it was a thrill for us to discover our recent featured performance on CBC Radio's North By Northwest.  They broadcast our rendition of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata.  This wonderful piece of music was a challenge for us to record, due to the differences between the instruments for which it was originally scored and the accordion and clarinet.  In spite of this, we're glad to have gambled on this piece because art is constantly evolving and offering a different perspective on a musical gem like this sonata is most rewarding.

We're only one week away from our debut on the west coast.  Friday, October 23, we perform as part of the Valley Concert Society's twenty-seventh season.  As the season opener, we're thrilled to bring our brand of light-hearted classics to the stage at the beautiful Matsqui Centennial Auditorium.  The challenges of traveling with expensive (and heavy) musical instruments and equipment is not the highlight of our chosen profession.  Things will be even more difficult as the flight from the Northwest Territories to Edmonton is on board a very small commuter plane.  We leave for British Columbia on Friday morning, arriving in Edmonton with just enough time to hop on to our flight to Abbotsford, BC.  Because we're flying in to Edmonton on a small, privately owned airline that doesn't have it's own space at the airport, we are responsible for collecting our luggage and running halfway across the airport to re-tag it for the second half of the trip.  It is never a fun experience explaining to airline security and check in clerks the nature of our work.

Things will be far more challenging in November, when we embark on our week-long tour with four concerts in Minnesota and Iowa.  We're often told how exciting it must be to travel and tour with our music.  It's true, that being on stage is a rush like none other and sharing our passion together is one of life's greatest pleasures.  However, until they invent a way to magically beam people from one location to another, the hazards and stresses of air travel will always put a damper on the festivities.

We just bought an iPod Touch and had some fun using its voice commands.  By speaking into the headphone mic, you can instruct it to play a specific artist.  Naturally, we wanted to see if it would play our own CDs which are available on iTunes (buy yours today!).  We instructed it to "play albums by Acclarion" and sure enough it started playing our music!  Well, we took the test further and asked for specific pieces of music.  "Play song, "Kenortango."  The iPod responded with "Now playing song_____" (fill in the blank with any artist and song you can imagine...any song but the Kenortango).  Yes, it played Michael Jackson, German accordionist Hugo Noth, Andrew Lloyd Weber, but it would not play the Kenortango.  Oh well, I guess they'll just keep tweaking their voice recognition technology in future generations of the iPod.  In the meantime, we'll have to make do playing the Kenortango live, with our own instruments.  Sigh...

Check back for a full rundown of our Abbotsford concert in two weeks.  Until then, be well and enjoy the music!

David and Becky

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We will be updating our blog as often as possible while we're on the road with photos and videos, so please check in regularly.  For those of you that are reading this after attending one of our concerts, we would love to hear from you! 

Playing for Mayor's Dinner

Our Concert-Wedding

Montmagny, Quebec

Klangwerks Concert

Huntsville

Quadratone in Oshawa

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