Today, Feb. 7, 2013, we continue Tom Allen's Shift interviews with this year's Canada Reads authors. Canada Reads is staging a turf war for 2013, with the five competing books each representing a different region of the country.
Those five books will be defended by five celebrity champions and battled down to one winner — the book all Canadians should read.
Each author has provided us with a playlist of songs that accompanies their book. This week, Tom will sit down with each author, play their chosen songs on Shift and delve into their books.
The Douglas Gibson playlist, on behalf of Hugh MacLennan
Douglas Gibson is a Canadian publishing legend and was a close lifelong friend of Hugh MacLennan, the author of Two Solitudes, which is representing Quebec. It's being defended by actor Jay Baruchel.
AudioPress play to listen to the full interview and musical picks of Douglas Gibson with Shift host Tom Allen.
Here are the details of Gibson's five-song playlist:
1. King's College Choir, “O God, our Help in Ages Past” by John Wesley in Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1737), sung to the tune St. Anne (attributed to William Croft).
"Verse four reads: 'A thousand ages in thy sight/ Are like an evening gone/ Short as the watch that ends the night/ Before the rising sun.' This verse gave Hugh MacLennan the name for his first novel, The Watch That Ends The Night."
2. Joseph Haydn, "Et resurrexit" from Haydn's Mass for St. Cecilia.
"Hugh wrote an essay about it, linking its beauty with the brutality of the contemporary Captain Bligh."
3. Jacques Labrecque, "Rossignolet Sauvage," an anonymous French folk song.
"It’s overheard in the final scene of part one of Two Solitudes and Hugh MacLennan makes an ornithological oversight."
4. Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, "Blue Bonnets, 4 Step," traditional Scottish bagpipe music from the album High Cut Above.
"It’s played as the returning troops from the Great War march through the streets of Montreal at the start of part two."
5. Oscar Peterson, playing Cole Porter's “In the Still of the Night.”
"Hugh enjoyed and wrote about jazz, and his Montreal jazz scene included Oscar and another jazz pianist named Johnnie Gallant, briefly married to Hugh’s friend Mavis."
You can contact us at Shift with your ideas, questions or anything else by sending us a message on our Facebook page. Through email, you can reach show producers Alison Howard (alison.howard@cbc.ca), Alex Redekop (alex.redekop@cbc.ca) or Pete Morey (peter.morey@cbc.ca ).
Related:
The David Bergen playlist
The Richard Wagamese playlist
The Jane Urquhart playlist
Canada Reads website
posted by
Pete Morey
on Feb 07, 2013