The closing ceremonies of the Invictus Games will feature a piece of music written by Victoria composer Steven Capaldo, who said he hatched the idea after having “beers and burgers” with the conductor of the Naden Band of Maritime Forces Pacific.
“I was listening to him tell me how he was struggling to find anything Canadian and contemporary for the occasion, and having a bit of a joke about it,” Capaldo said. “That was on a Thursday. By the Sunday, I’d had the fanfare written.”
Conducted by Lt. Ben Van Slyke, the Naden Band will perform Capaldo’s three-minute Invictus Fanfare on Sunday in Vancouver, during the closing ceremonies at Rogers Arena, which also feature performances by Nashville singer and songwriter Jelly Roll and Canada’s Barenaked Ladies.
More than 550 athletes from 25 nations are competing in 11 adaptive sports at the Invictus Games, an international multi-sport event founded by Prince Harry for wounded, injured and sick military service personnel.
It could wind up being the biggest three minutes of Capaldo’s career, but he won’t be in the building to hear it performed.
The University of Victoria music professor, and former member of the Australian military, said he will be watching the live television broadcast at home on CTV and TSN in what he called “absolutely a career highlight.”
“If there is any way I would have wanted one of my pieces to reach the kind of audience that it is going to reach, it couldn’t have been through a better format.”
Capaldo wrote the short, ceremonial tune amid his very hectic schedule at UVic. An associate professor of music education and conducting, he is also the university’s head of music education, ensembles co-ordinator, and conductor of the UVic wind symphony and concert band.
“Time organization is a real challenge, I’ve got to admit,” he said with a laugh. “But I triage very well.”
Performances of works by Capaldo have taken place in Australia, Japan and the United States, but Invictus Fanfare marks the first time he’s tackled something this unique and high profile. “It was a bit of a challenge,” he said.
The piece will be performed when the athletes are entering the stadium. He knows the instrumentation that is often involved in a fanfare — trumpets and trombones up front in the mix, with percussion in the back — but wrote the piece on a hunch, “in the hope it would be fit for purpose.”
He used for guidance the work of film composer John Williams, the second-most nominated person in Academy Awards history. Williams was commissioned to write a fanfare for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and his main title sequence for the film Star Wars is a brassy, fanfare-like affair.
“I’ve done a lot of transcriptions of orchestral for wind ensembles, and have transcribed a number of John Williams works, including Star Wars. So, in a way, I thought: ‘What would John Williams do?’ And from there, the music took shape.”
Capaldo’s time in an Australian military band “was very short, but it was very powerful,” he said. That period of his life guided him during the Invictus Fanfare writing process.
“I certainly wanted to have moments in the music that were respectful of the occasion, and respectful of the sacrifice the athletes had made during their service. To be part of the Invictus Games meant that they had incurred some kind of injury or wound, and I wanted to respect and honour that.”
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