Mind Games
Karen Hoag
The Daily Herald
It's time for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Wayne Musgrave has the music to go with the winter sports in his newly released CD, "The Competitive Spirit."
He's gone inside the heads of figure skaters, downhill and cross-country skiers, bobsledders, and hockey players and produced the rhythm of the sport with synthesizers. "Speed skaters go slow and gradually increase," Musgrave said. "If they go too fast they won't finish."
He composed music to go with the swirls, downbeats and upbeats of each winter sport. He said the idea came to him a few years ago because of the Sybervision Sports films he's produced.
"It just seemed natural to do the Olympics," said Musgrave, a long-time road musician. "Instead of the 'hurray' types coming out, I wanted to take the scientific point of view.
"The athletes experience something you and I never feel. What's going on inside their heads at the time of performance? It's music."
Musgrave said Olympic athletes are being fed music that they use as a road map and land perfectly on the downbeat, "but they have their own compositions going on inside their heads, too."
Recording the album was like "scoring a film. There's a rhythm. I composed the music to help motivate our athletes and hope it moves them," he said.