Rick Maddocks’s Blue Horse Opera brings a spaghetti western song cycle to the Pi Theatre stage
Inspired by Spanish desert and old Italian soundtracks, the writer and composer calls on a creative group of friends to help realize his multidisciplinary vision
Rick Maddocks.
Maria Avila.
Pi Theatre has postponed Blue Horse Opera to September 19 and 20
LIKE A STORY OUT of a spaghetti western film, the creation of Blue Horse Opera has been a winding, unexpected journey for Vancouver-based writer and composer Rick Maddocks. What began as a short interlude gradually evolved into a collection of songs and music juxtaposing climate emergency with the desert landscape.
On June 13 and 14, Pi Theatre is set to present the live premiere of Blue Horse Opera at Vancouver Opera’s Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall. As the composer of this 17-track song cycle, Maddocks has been anticipating this moment for over a decade, ever since the first piece of music came to him against the backdrop of Almería, Spain.
“I'm feeling quite excited about it, and really curious to see how it's going to manifest itself, because it has been in my life for quite a while,” Maddocks says in a Zoom call. “I was in southern Spain where they shot a lot of spaghetti westerns back in the day, so that landscape filtered into the process. I wanted to do something that had different takes on the desert, but then it got more specific and vivid, and that’s probably a good thing.”
Thanks to an artist residency and access to an acoustic guitar, Maddocks wound up spending more time on music than on the novel he intended to write during his time in Spain, which he calls “a happy accident”. He notes the soundtracks used by Italian spaghetti western filmmakers like Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima, and Sergio Leone, as being instrumental in Blue Horse Opera’s musical development.
“There’s a song early on called ‘Blue Horses’, which is a childhood memory,” Maddocks notes. “There’s a main character in the song cycle who goes on to become a modern-day oil baron. He had a red shirt with blue horses on his first day of school. As the songs progress, he grows up and is not as innocent, more cynical and cutthroat. Horse opera is an old term for a western film. Something about blue horses just kept coming back into the frame.”
Experimenting with music, storytelling, and stage performance is nothing new for Maddocks. He wrote and performed in the experimental opera The Meal, as well as the multimedia novel-album project Cabalcor: An Extracted History, with his interdisciplinary group Sun Belt. Following his creative voice, as a writer or a musician, has allowed him to remain steadfast yet unrestrained in his body of work.
“With Blue Horse Opera, I had a lot of excess energy left over, even though it took so long that I started writing a novel that was connected to the songs I was writing,” says Maddocks. “It became this little intaglio, but other times, it’ll just be a work of fiction, and that’s what it wants to be. No matter how much I try to have it [be] interdisciplinary, it’s wearing its own clothes, and it doesn’t want anything extra.”
Born in Wales, Maddocks moved to Canada in the early 1980s. Alongside his musical endeavours, he is known for his short-story collection Sputnik Diner, which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. He also served as the editor of the literary magazine Event, published by Douglas College, where he teaches creative-writing courses. Even as he found success in the literary world, music “kept banging on the door.”
“I remember being in high school and picking up a friend’s guitar, and playing John Lennon the first time I picked it up,” Maddocks recalls. “Soon, I was writing little songs, and then I wanted to have stories fleshed out around the songs. I got into fiction quite seriously in terms of short fiction and publishing, but the music always kept coming back. I couldn’t shut the door, so I wanted to answer it.”
Blue Horse Opera brings together an eclectic set of sounds and traditions, and a talented lineup of local musicians and artists for its live premiere. Joining Maddocks onstage is a mix of long-time collaborators and seasoned talents, including flamenco dancer Maria Avila, Feven Kidane on the trumpet, bass guitarist Wynston Minckler, Jon Wood on the electric guitar and lap steel, Stephen Lyons on drums, and vocalist Dory Hayley. Although he describes the project’s early process as a lot of working alone, he credits his community of musicians and artists for supporting the vision.
“Certain people, like directors, have their repertory group, and I’m very lucky that I have a group I can keep coming back to, like Steven Lyons and Jon Wood,” Maddocks says. “Working with these people, who I’ve known for years as friends, we have a shorthand, and they are very patient with me. I’ll bring this beast to the table, and they are so creative and open and collaborative that they can bring it to life. Even in these soundtracks, which were such an inspiration in how I created the musical palette, the word collision kept coming to mind. We have these pure soprano vocals against this spiky, twangy guitar, for example. Those ingredients coming together make some really interesting results.”
Although the music for Blue Horse Opera was finalized before COVID-19, the pandemic ultimately shifted plans and left the project with an uncertain future. Maddocks credits Richard Wolfe, the artistic and producing director of Pi Theatre, for staying curious about the project and choosing to present it as part of Pi Theatre’s Provocateur Series. The live performances are set to feature most of the songs from the forthcoming album, which will be released some time this year.
The live performances are “going to be an exciting process of discovery, and it’s going to continue,” says Maddocks. “It’s expansive, and if you come to witness it, it might be fun as a listener to look out for the motifs that keep coming in throughout the cycle. For me, creatively speaking, that was one of the most nutritious things to do.” 
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