Vancouver composer John Oliver spent hours studying events like freestyle skiiing, speed skating, and, of course, hockey to create his new work.

Staring at the computer screen with almost forensic intensity, John Oliver watched freestyle skier Jennifer Heil’s every move. A stopwatch in one hand, he timed her run down the steep, bumpy slope, noting exactly when she chose to launch into a flawless 360-degree spin and just how long she was in the air. But Oliver isn’t one of Heil’s trainers, and he wasn’t trying to determine why the odds-on favourite to win February 13’s Olympic women’s moguls competition had to settle for second place. Instead, this scene took place several months ago—and, strange as it might seem, Oliver was writing music.

The Vancouver composer debuts his new Chamber Concerto at the Vancouver Playhouse Wednesday (February 24), on a bill that will also see the Turning Point Ensemble perform Arnold Schoenberg’s influential Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 and John Adams’s hard-driving Son of Chamber Symphony (which is also the title of the event). Given that Oliver’s piece is a Cultural Olympiad commission, it’s not surprising that he decided to explore a winter-sports theme. But rather than write an anthem for the Games, he’s delved deep into the physics of five different sporting events, each the subject of its own separate movement.

“There was a kind of preplanning idea where I said to myself ”˜I’m going to take the sports that Canada does well at,’ ” he explains in a telephone interview from his home. Consequently, Chamber Concerto opens with an aural impression of curling, before going on to tackle speed skating, skeleton, freestyle skiing, and, of course, Canada’s national sport.

“The final movement is inspired by hockey, and it’s just a blast,” says Oliver. “I’ve got this big fugal thing where the winds and the strings are the two teams, and they’re both coming onto the ice, as it were. There’s just a big chord building up as they do that—but once the puck is dropped, it’s this super-high-energy gestural music that’s just hilarious and fun and really makes a great ending for the piece.”

Elsewhere, Oliver plays some sonic and conceptual games of his own. The skeleton-inspired third movement, for instance, doesn’t bear much resemblance to what you’d hear if you were standing on the slopes of Whistler.

“People who watch the Olympics on television are going to get the idea that skeleton is this incredibly noisy event,” he says, noting that the convention when broadcasting luge events is to stick a microphone on the frame of the sled, just above ice level. “Of course, even the guy on the sled isn’t going to hear that; nobody’s hearing that except us watching TV. There’s this total artifice of microphone technology that I just find hilarious, so I re-created this incredible noise with the orchestra.”

Composers, it seems, get to have a lot more fun than athletes, whose single-minded dedication—as demonstrated so tragically in the run-up to the Olympics—can sometimes literally be a matter of life and death. In other regards, though, their pursuits might not be that far apart.

“I’ve always had a feeling that sports and music are brothers,” says Oliver, who’s played hockey and curled on an amateur level. “Whether it’s people moving on the ice or on a ski run, sports are a lot like dance or making music—and that’s why it’s fun to write a piece of music that just goes for it.”