Change Maker: Andrew Mosker of the Cantos Music Foundation

The sound of drums thumping, a piano-like clanking of a xylophone and the occasional outburst of laughter fills the Cantos Music Foundation in downtown Calgary as a class of elementary school students bang around on a few of the more than 1,100 musical artifacts in the museum’s collection.

In a meeting room next door, Cantos executive director Andrew Mosker taps his foot to the offbeat musical ruckus.

“I’m a hardwired music fan,” he says. “I like to do things that other people are afraid to do; things that they find impossible.”

Mosker is the man behind a $100-million initiative that’ll refurbish the historic King Edward Hotel in the East Village and build the neighbouring National Music Centre. The Music Centre will house a world-class museum, two recording studios, a live music venue and will act as the new headquarters for Cantos when it opens in 2012. What’s more, Mosker says, the project will have a renaissance-like effect on the East Village, turning it into a music and cultural hub.

“Music is a powerful medium for transformation,” he says. “There are examples of this throughout the world — Soho, New York, was just abandoned warehouses until artists came in and started using those spaces. Now, it’s totally revitalized. We have a similar vision — we want to be a catalyst of change in Calgary through music.”

In 2005, Mosker was saddled with the task of coming up with a new strategic direction for Cantos. At the time, the eight-year-old non-profit was little more than a glorified keyboard museum that few Calgarians had ever heard of, let alone visited. However, it was believed those limitations could be overcome with a new space that the organization could grow into, expanding both its collection and the scope of its programs, which now include daily interactive music exhibits for kids, tours of its instrument collection, a lunchtime concert series and open jam sessions for the public.

Mosker looked at 15 to 20 sites across Calgary and came to the conclusion that the King Eddy, known for decades as a renowned blues club, was the best fit for the organization’s new vision.

“People have very fond memories of the music they heard there when it was operating as a blues venue,” he says, “and the building itself is a piece of Calgary’s history because it is part of the original downtown.”

A vital part of the Cantos expansion, the King Eddy will act as both a historic centrepiece and as an A-list live music venue. Meanwhile, the Music Centre next door will include expanded music exhibits, as well as interactive displays similar to those found in science museums. “You’ll be able design a ringtone for your iPhone that you played on instruments from our collection,” Mosker says of one exhibit.

Established and emerging musicians will also be brought in to run music clinics. “We’ll have an interactive series that goes on with Canadian artists on how they create their music which starts with how they write their lyrics, then moves onto the process of when they pick up an instrument to make a melody,” Mosker says. “The whole interchange will be a powerful learning tool.”

According to Mosker, all of the revamped exhibits will be geared toward a very simple goal: “We want to shed that stuffy museum image and be a museum of the 21st century.”