As Blackwood, award-winning composer and pianist Peter-Anthony Togni and bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly, cover a lot of ground on their upcoming album, Lost and Found. It’s a collection of compositions, crafted both individually and collectively, over a period of two years, but the experiences contained in them draw from two lifetimes; from the power of dreams, the birth of children and grandchildren, and the natural world… all the way to medieval plainchant. More impressively, this is all done as an instrumental.
Released today, the album’s second single and titular track, “Lost and Found” is Jeff Reilly’s tribute to his twin daughters, which immediately raises the question: how does a person —let alone a set of twins—get translated into music?
With any instrumental piece, it’s easy for us to default back to the lessons of Walt Disney’s production of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. We can imagine Reilly’s daughters being portrayed, respectively, by the piano and the bass clarinet—no doubt having already thoroughly argued over who would be portrayed by which, but Reilly explains that the track is actually representative of the relationship that exists between parent and child, and its paradoxical nature.
The composition was crafted during a two-week-long residence in Banff while Reilly was acting as a faculty member of the Artist in Residence program. By great coincidence, both of Reilly’s daughters were there—one in the film practicum program and the other in the athletics department. Separated for six months, the two weeks spent together were fortunate at the time, but the special occasion also highlighted the otherwise great distances between them. It’s that paradox of parenthood and seeing your child grow up that is central to the song; hence its title, “Lost and Found.”
“I was thinking about how lucky I was to have this happen and I wanted to write a piece for them,” explains Reilly. “When this one started to take shape, I noticed it had some simple, melodic sections and also some wider, darker, moody, and exploratory sections. The contrast between these two moods felt to me like the feeling you have as a parent; sometimes you feel very close to them, as if you’ve ‘found’ your relationship, and other times you feel distant from them—like you are trying to connect, like in adolescence! It really is an exploration of these paradoxical feelings of being a parent. The distant feeling is, of course, the ‘lost’ part.
“It’s really about these contrasting feelings and the contrasting moods of the piece. It opens with a gentle melody, then goes to a more intense improv section, and then back to melody, then back to intense. It’s these contrasting moods that remind me of the feelings of being a parent to these two wonderful human beings as you watch them grow and learn to be in the world. Sometimes you feel so lost, and other times so connected and ‘found’.”
Recorded at Trinity St-Stephen’s Church in Amherst, Nova Scotia, the location naturally lends its pristine acoustics to the song—though Reilly attributes a good deal of the credit to recording engineer Rod Sneddon. “Lost and Found” provides a beautiful opportunity to show off the warmth and range of Reilly’s bass clarinet.
As the album’s title track, “Lost and Found” holds a certain place of honour. It was the song’s simultaneous senses of both logging and awareness that Reilly and Togni felt best summarized the album. It stands out with a title that could be open to wide interpretations, along with a really solid performance. Not to mention how awkward it would be to explain to Reilly’s daughters that their song hadn’t quite nailed the spot.
“It’s not necessary their musical genre… but there were delighted and touched by the dedication. One of them is a filmmaker and uses my music in her films, which is nice,” says Reilly. Coincidentally, Devon Pennick-Reilly’s short film Thinking of a Place will be screening at the Atlantic International Film Festival in Halifax on September 19.
Blackwood’s album, Lost and Found, complete with its title track, will be having an album release concert on September 24 at St David’s Church in Halifax. Tickets can be purchased here.