Dave Pierce’s My Stampede Story

Before he won an Emmy for his work scoring the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Winter  Olympics in Vancouver, or worked as a composer on Broadway shows, Calgary composer Dave Pierce was just another recent grad of a prestigious U.S. music school. Then a phone call eventually led to a gig as musical director of the Stampede Grandstand Show, a position he held for nearly 10 years.

It turned out that working as musical director for the Stampede Grandstand Show was perfect training for Pierce's dream gig, the Olympics.

"The scale of it is so overwhelmingly large at the Olympics that it has a similarity to the (Stampede) Grandstand Show," Pierce says. "The (Stampede) Grandstand Show is the largest outdoor show of its kind - definitely in North America, if not internationally. It takes an enormous amount of organization, a massive push by all the theatrical people that work in Calgary, as well as the volunteers that work for the Stampede."