In Map of the City/Map of the World, images of Kamloops, a small city in the interior of British Columbia, become the inspiration for poet Robert Kroetsch’s exploration of mapping. The sights, sounds, forms, patterns, and repetitions in the daily life of Kamloops come together to create a map of the city. Though each city’s map is unique, small cities share many of the same characteristics and qualities, and so each map is also a variation of the daily lives of other small cities around the world. In this short work for spoken voice and orchestra, a single melodic and harmonic idea, heard in the first refrain, is used as the basis for a set of variations and refrains that merge the energy and colours of the orchestra with the spoken word to vividly amplify the images in Kroetsch’s poetry — the sound of the coyotes, the noise of the traffic, the cheers from the arena, the flash of headlights cutting through the night, and the twinkling of stars in the sky.
Map of the City/Map of the World was commissioned by the Kamloops Symphony with funding from the British Columbia Arts Council and the CURA program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
