Owen Pallett fansite

“Welcome to Kelowna” is a piece by Owen Pallett commissioned by the CBC Radio Orchestra. It was performed at the orchestra's final concert before it disbanded, on Nov 16, 2008 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Kelowna is another city in British Columbia.

"I've always had a very idiosyncratic view of the way I want new music to be written. All the music that I've written in the past has been very post-modern and conceptual with these big geek concepts attached to them. When I was a student at U of T, all my exposure to post-modern music was completely uninformed by actual post-modern theory and made me want to try and explore that language. With this piece that I wrote, called 'Welcome to Kelowna,' it was such a failure."

"I took about 40 different jingles from different commercials from Olympic sponsors. Most of them were contemporary, but some were older. The most prominent one was the Air Canada one (sings it). And the Bell one, which was pretty ubiquitous at the time. I combined them all into a mish-mash, and it was meant to be reflective of the fact that this was the final concert of the CBC Radio Orchestra. There was some idea about the viability of the orchestra as a method of sponsorship and advertising. That's what the piece was about. Then I heard a recording of it, and the orchestra played it so lyrically. I thought, don't you get it? It's a collage! I didn't get a chance to go to the performance, but it made me think that I can't write this kind of music anymore, and I have to think much more carefully about it." —Owen [source]