Glenn Buhr

I first connected with Glenn as a composer on a CD project I produced for the wind ensemble The Wellington Winds called An Artist’s Neighbourhood. The brain-child of conductor/composer Michael Purves-Smith, all of the works were written by composers who make (or made) their home or workplace in the Waterloo region. Glenn wrote two works, one of which was strongly influenced by rock and roll idioms, and included an electric guitar solo… not generally considered a usual wind ensemble instrument! Glenn has a drive and energy that encourages you to reciprocate with the same, and so I looked forward to another opportunity to work with him.

A year later, I attended a workshop in Winnipeg, and I dropped by Glenn’s residence the next day (he held dual citizenship in both Winnipeg and Waterloo), in the hopes of encountering him there. A hard man to catch in one location, he was not there, so I left a note and CD sampler on his doorstep, and heard nothing more. That is, not for another year, when I received a phone call wondering if I would be available to record a performance of Glenn and his wife Margaret Sweatman’s innovative work-in-development musical, Flux, with the KW Symphony.

That was an amazing experience, fraught with challenges from a recording perspective, but an eye-opener to a project that is close to Glenn’s passion. The work, an antiwar musical comedy set in the surreal landscape of medieval Scotland featuring six main solo characters, incorporates some of the ideas that Glenn used for the Wellington Wind CD, and judging by the concert version that was presented by the KWS and a concert version with reduced musical forces presented at Summerworks in Toronto this past summer, will most certainly engage and delight audiences when it is presented in its full version.

-earl.