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top: Andrew MacKelvie (white sweater) and fellow New Hermitage members perform an improvised score for the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Carbon Arc cinema in Halifax, Nova Scotia in October 2023. bottom: A photo in MacKelvie's home in Halifax. The late drummer and Creative Music Workshop founder Jerry Granelli is third from the right. opposite page: MacKelvie holding the score for Treize Treize, his guide for a group improvisation. 32 musıc works #147 | winter 2023/24 spirit in Jerry Granelli, and successfully applied for a grant to fund a mentorship with the elder musician. As MacKelvie describes it, the partnership is what built him back up. “[He had] this really holistic way of teaching: The body is the first instrument, the mind is the first instrument. And if that’s not functioning, how can anything else function?” Part of that had to do with Granelli’s personal experience with addiction. He mentioned at one point that before he found meditation, he didn’t even know how to cross the street without being hammered. “He said, ‘If you’re suffering mentally, you need to figure that out,’” MacKelvie says. The lessons were intense and bred a deep trust between the two musicians, as well as revealing to MacKelvie what it takes to build that kind of trust. The mentorship was akin to an old-school apprenticeship. He gained access to Granelli’s studio and wisdom and assisted Granelli in return, doing everything from moving drums and grabbing sandwiches to transcribing charts. It wasn’t always or even frequently glamorous. But he was in the room, privy to the intimate details of how the drummer worked and thought. Granelli made sure MacKelvie was paying attention when things were happening. They eventually began playing together. “The first time I played with him, it was like I was hit by a tidal wave,” MacKelvie says. “If you weren’t there with him, he was going to leave you behind. I had never played with anyone where [that H O R S E M A N M A T T B Y P H O T O S

happened]. It was incredible.” In 2015, MacKelvie was an integral part of Granelli’s album What I Hear Now. In the summer of 2021, Granelli passed away at home in Halifax at the age of 80. More than a decade of mentorship and friend- ship had primed MacKelvie to take up the torch that Granelli held in his community—one that burns for a better understanding of creativity, relationships, and how they are interconnected. New Hermitage functions under the guidance Granelli provided. When MacKelvie was first considering the project in the mid-2010s, he knew he wanted to share his listening process with people, and he set out to find them. In late October 2023, in the fourth instalment of an annual Halloween series that has seen the ensemble create scores for the silent horror films Nosferatu, Faust, and Häxan, New Hermitage collaborated with Carbon Arc, Halifax’s only independent cinema, to present an improvised score for two screenings of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dressed in costume—MacKelvie opted for a wool sweater and a simple mask to turn himself into a lamb—the quartet built the eerie 1920 German classic into an appropriately strange and unsettling experience by watching, listening, and reacting, breathing life into the film’s fantastical and distorted sets and the ghostly, heavily made-up faces of actors Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt. The music of each screening had its own feel and flow, each spooky in its own special way. The following weekend saw the cozy, warmly lit Ramblers packed for New Hermitage & Friends, which featured a collaboration with pianist and AI researcher Sageev Oore, who had stepped in at the last minute to replace Special Costello (Halifax musician Jeremy Costello). The flow of the shows depends on the guest artists and what they’re ready for; previous “friends” have included violin whiz Rachel Bruch, who performs as Blue Lobelia, and R&B powerhouse Lance Sampson, aka Aquakultre. Oore’s night was expansive, high-energy, frequently raucous and groovy, and never less than thrilling. Several participants from the Creative Music Workshop were in the audience, taking things in, listening, learning. While these two small-scale, accessible, and intimate events illustrate how MacKelvie and New Hermitage are building community through music, the Creative Music Workshop takes that role much further. “The nice thing about this is that once you’re a part of it, you also own it. It’s a community. We don’t own this knowledge,” MacKelvie says. “Even when I was doing [the CMW] years ago, we would meet on Sundays, and there was a group of us who [thought] we would like to do this more—just on our own. So we’d get together on Monday mornings and rehearse, just practise. We’d guide ourselves.” On a Sunday afternoon in early November, I took in one of the CMW's Creative Process Sessions. In a large hall behind Saint George’s Round Church, which is located in the north end of the city, participants milled about until it was time to take a seat in a circle winter 2023/24 | musıc works #147 33

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top: Andrew MacKelvie (white sweater) and fellow New Hermitage members perform an improvised score for the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Carbon Arc cinema in Halifax, Nova Scotia in October 2023. bottom: A photo in MacKelvie's home in Halifax. The late drummer and Creative Music Workshop founder Jerry Granelli is third from the right. opposite page: MacKelvie holding the score for Treize Treize, his guide for a group improvisation.

32 musıc works #147 | winter 2023/24

spirit in Jerry Granelli, and successfully applied for a grant to fund a mentorship with the elder musician. As MacKelvie describes it, the partnership is what built him back up. “[He had] this really holistic way of teaching: The body is the first instrument, the mind is the first instrument. And if that’s not functioning, how can anything else function?”

Part of that had to do with Granelli’s personal experience with addiction. He mentioned at one point that before he found meditation, he didn’t even know how to cross the street without being hammered. “He said, ‘If you’re suffering mentally, you need to figure that out,’” MacKelvie says. The lessons were intense and bred a deep trust between the two musicians, as well as revealing to MacKelvie what it takes to build that kind of trust.

The mentorship was akin to an old-school apprenticeship. He gained access to Granelli’s studio and wisdom and assisted Granelli in return, doing everything from moving drums and grabbing sandwiches to transcribing charts. It wasn’t always or even frequently glamorous. But he was in the room, privy to the intimate details of how the drummer worked and thought. Granelli made sure MacKelvie was paying attention when things were happening. They eventually began playing together. “The first time I played with him, it was like I was hit by a tidal wave,” MacKelvie says. “If you weren’t there with him, he was going to leave you behind. I had never played with anyone where [that

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