March 24, 2024 • 26 mins
Dr. Karen Sunabacka joins Brianna to talk spoken word in instrumental music, navigating complex issues through music, and transforming the Manitoban environment to sound.
Featured music:
Hiding for solo piano (1999)
Mama's Painting - Louis Riel's Dream
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Hello and welcome back to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know our local
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Canadian musical talent.
Today I am here with Dr. Karen Sunabacka.
Huge thanks to Karen for joining me today.
Oh great, it's so great to be here.
Let's jump right in.
So first and foremost, I'd love to get a little bit of a glimpse into your background.
So where in Canada do you call home and what are the places that really hold a special
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place in your heart?
Great, yeah, that's an interesting question because I currently live, I guess my home
is currently in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, but the special place in my heart of course
is Manitoba and in particular Winnipeg as well as just north of Winnipeg in a place
just kind of around Selkirk, Manitoba, which is where my my Metis grandmother's farm was
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and my Metis family really were established in that part of the world.
So I feel very close to that part as well.
I spent a lot of time in my childhood as well as even in my adulthood in that area.
Beautiful.
Well, how did you first start composing?
Yeah, it's funny.
I mean, my uncle on my dad's side, so he's a Swedish-Finnish settler, he was a composer
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and so I never really thought much of it, but I used to go to some of his performances,
I thought his music was weird, but my cousin and I, we used to spend time together and
we would kind of like just improvise, like we would make these little tape pieces and
like improvise together and then or record, like we'd secretly record like sounds in the
house and things like that.
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So I think it kind of because it was kind of in the air and I was a cellist growing
up while I started playing cello when I was six and we always played music in the house.
So it was kind of a house where we were always kind of a little bit creative, but it really
wasn't until university that I really took it seriously.
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I started, I was at the University of Manitoba and there was the theory program there was
using a textbook called Harmony Through Melody and it was really creating, like learning
about theory through composing.
So we composed minuets and we composed romances and we composed cantuses, right?
So we kind of learned about tonality through composing, which is actually the same textbook
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I use now to teach theory.
I mean it has to be theories getting, I have to do it in three terms instead of four, those
kinds of things.
But so I started kind of composing that way sort of tonally and then I just like, of course
when you're doing an undergraduate degree your theory courses, the core theory courses
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are done after two years and I just didn't want to stop composing.
Like I just found that I loved it so much and I started seeing like sort of older like
people that were in the composition program and I thought like I could do that, that looks
really fun.
So I started and my first year, like the first year doing it, so it was my third year of
my undergrad.
I mean I was still doing cello, like that was kind of my main instrument, but I ended
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up like doing this first year and it was honestly, it was so fun.
And I remember at the end of my, that jury after my first year of composition, you know
presenting all my pieces and one of the profs there who had been teaching the Baroque music,
his name was Richard Burleson, he was like, you know Karen Sunabaka, I think you found
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your thing.
And he was right, like I had like, I just, it was so fun and it was so fun to share what
I'd done and it was just so fun to explore sound in that kind of a way.
So that's really how I started.
So I feel like I started quite late in some sense because I was like in my early 20s at
that point.
But it just, that's just kind of how it happened.
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And after that I just never stopped studying composition really.
Like it was a little sprout and it just kept growing and growing.
Yeah, it's really true.
Would you recommend a piece for first time listeners?
Like maybe a piece that really encapsulates your musical style?
Wow, like one of my own pieces.
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You know, one of the first pieces I wrote, it's on my recent piano album that I, I guess
it's from two years, almost two years ago now.
But it's called Hiding.
And I wrote it in my, I was already, I had been composing already for a year then, but
it was really early on.
That's like my second or maybe my third year of composing.
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And that I think more than any other piece, because it was kind of me experimenting and
I love so much what I did there that I do like my piano music kind of sounds a little
bit like that all the time.
So that's kind of an early one.
I wasn't really exploring my own heritage in my music at that point.
It was just, it's pitch class sets.
Like that is a piece if someone wants to like do an analysis of it, I use two pitch class
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sets and that's how I wrote the whole piece.
And it's fun and I play it to my students now in composition every once in a while.
And every time I play it, I think, goodness, this is a really cool little piece.
Like it's four minutes long.
But it was, I kind of did some really good explorations of the piano and of like non-traditional
harmony because it's pitch class sets, right?
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So it's a really fun little piece that I think I grew out.
Like I've grown more from that, but it really showed kind of my early experimentation, but
also my playfulness and my fun and I kind of put a little waltz in there.
So it's kind of a fun little piece.
Yeah.
That sounds so intriguing.
Yeah.
Like you started to mention, now your music seems really deeply rooted in your multicultural
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heritage, particularly Metis and mixed European backgrounds, I believe.
So how do these diverse cultural influences shape your creative process and the themes
that you explore in your composition?
Yeah.
It's so, it's funny at the time, like in my undergrad, like even my friends that were
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really close didn't really know I was Metis.
And it wasn't that I was hiding it.
It's just something that we just didn't talk about.
And I really had at that point in my life, really kind of separate, like my grandparents
farm was the Metis place and that's where I fiddled.
Like I could actually fiddle on a violin, even though it was a cellist, right?
And I could like fiddle a bit on my cello.
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So but it was kind of separate.
So that was kind of the folk music world and the world of my Metis family.
And then like my dad's side of the family, which is Finnish, Swedish, he was very serious
about like basically Western art music, right?
And so then I took all my cello lessons through that way of looking at the world in some sense.
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And he also loved to play like hymns and things because he was very, a very serious churchman
as well as I think that's funny to say it that way.
But his family was really rooted in the Baptist tradition, which is not the tradition that
my mom's family was nor the Metis family, which were more kind of Anglican, which is
the English Metis, various French Metis would have been Catholic, but we were Anglicans.
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So I do find, and I write this in my bio a lot, that there is sometimes you end up in
this place where there's kind of a clash because I think for a long time, I really felt like
the music that my grandparents played and my grandfather was a fiddler and my grandmother
like courted on the piano.
And I was fascinated by that because there we'd sit at the piano and play from like the
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fake book or whatever it was called, you know, and so that was what my grandma had on the
piano.
They didn't have classical music there in the house.
Although she did, my grandparents' family, they did make them all take piano lessons
and things, right?
So even my mom did some piano.
But I really had this separation that real music and serious music was, you know, European
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Western art music.
So I really didn't mix the two until probably 10 or 15 years ago.
And I feel like the way that we approach music now is so much better than it was when like
20 years ago when I was a student, because there's a much more openness.
And it's kind of my generation and those that are following that have started to say, well,
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why don't we study popular music or why don't we study folk music?
And so it used to be really segregated to ethnomusicology.
But now it's composers even are kind of bringing in folk music.
Now I'm going to step back a second because the composers that I love to look at, like
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and were composers that were already kind of bringing folk music.
I mean, think about Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Like she did some, like she studied a lot of it.
Her music was sometimes very experimental, but also she really fell in love with American
folk music.
But like Bartok, Stravinsky, like they were all bringing in folk music.
And those were the composers that I was always drawn to.
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And so now as I got older and as I started to say, well, what is, when I'm writing about
my grandmother, I can't write.
And I was starting to like think about like honouring my grandmother and her, my Meiji
grandmother and all of her painting and everything that she did.
And so then I was like, but my memory of the music is this folk music.
So the first thing I did, and this is 2000, so it's just a little over 10 years ago now.
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The first thing I did is kind of, I kind of outed myself publicly with a commission by
the Mount of a Chamber Orchestra and I decided to honour my grandmother.
And I took a fiddle tune that I had played with my grandmother and my grandfather on
the fiddle, right?
It's called the Old French.
And so I brought it in and out.
Like, so I kind of use this as a memory, but there's, it's quoted.
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I have like the whole kind of jump, you know, jumpy piano part, like oompa oompa kind of
in there at times.
And so that whole, and it's a string orchestra piece and I kind of make it so it kind of
comes and goes.
So I can use my, I feel like this piece is a really good demonstration of kind of what
I do is I can bring kind of this folk music in and then I can experiment with it in the
ways that the Western art music would experiment with it.
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So taking it apart, putting it back together, putting it off like a la shnitka.
I also love shnitka, like taking something and moving them so apart so that it's like
totally dissonant and then they kind of come together again.
So it's like this kind of in and out of focus type of a thing.
So that's kind of, I feel like I'm always like in this cross-cultural place where I'm
kind of pulling from both traditions, which I use then to tell stories, which I think
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is part of my Métis side that there is so much storytelling happening at the farm, but
also I just am very drawn to it.
So I often tell stories in my music too.
So it's a kind of a place where I'm comfortable, but I think it can sometimes expose, well,
especially if I'm exploring a difficult topic, I can get pretty angry about things.
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So I am exploring serious topics sometimes in terms of like a more recent one too was
called The Place Where We Create Arrests.
And in that one, we're looking at Métis and Mennonite relations.
And that was a commission that someone said, hey, like, let's look at this.
And I thought, oh, that'll be fun.
Like, I know there's Mennonites in Manitoba in Treaty One, and I know so many Mennonites,
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but then to actually learn the history was pretty hard because then you just hear like,
oh, my family, I know the history of my family and we actually did suffer from losing our
land a bunch of times.
And the Mennonites came in and just took it.
Right.
But it wasn't, it was kind of the government imposing this anyways, it just got very complicated.
So my, you know, so those kinds of things like in the composing, it can start getting
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them.
Sometimes it brings up some deep issues and you think, oh, I guess I thought I was okay
with this stuff.
And now I'm re-evaluating everything from my childhood through the music that I'm writing.
So it ends up kind of getting rooted in the music a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Could you discuss a little deeper the role of storytelling in your music?
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Like you touched on already.
How do you weave these narratives and personal experiences into your compositions and what
do you hope that us audiences and listeners obtain from these stories?
Yeah.
I am, I often tell stories through spoken texts.
So I have found, like my mom's a writer, so we've tended to be, to collaborate.
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And I've found that I, I like telling stories through speaking and then having the music
there.
So I actually will tell stories through speaking and then having the music then kind of fill
in the gaps between, or basically that you have the text and then music and then text
and music.
So that, that is the kind of way that I do it.
And then sometimes I settle things down and the text happens while there's some music
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happening.
And that's something I started again, almost 10 years ago when I went further with my,
about my Métis grandmother and it's called Mama's Painting, Louis Riel's Dream, which
I'm hoping to put on an album soon.
So that's my next album project because that's a very, it's been played a lot of places that
piece.
So that's tends to be how I do it is through spoken word.
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And it started with my own family stories.
Now I have done pieces where it's a stories in the background and it's in the program
notes, but there's no text actually in the piece itself.
And so that's how I approach that.
And often I take tunes or I to try to, to try to, so I'm quoting.
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So sometimes it's like a bit of a collage where I'm pulling different tunes to, to get
different kinds of feelings to the music.
Right.
So I like to do that.
That's a, but also, and I actually do that a lot, but also then just this, the actual
speaking, a really great example is a piece that's about to come out on an album that
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Alation Paul's has done.
And that piece is called Jack the Fiddler.
And so again, another story about one of my family members this time, instead of going
to my woman ancestors, I've actually gone to my settler grandfather who married my Métis
grandmother.
But it's about how he was a settler lived in the middle of this really strong and healthy
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Métis community who they kind of reestablished their community.
So it's, so what I'm hoping in this one is probably my best way to answer the second
part of your question is I'm kind of hoping for people to hear the stories of Canadian
history in a way that that is fun and fun to listen to, but also, you know, deals with
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like what happened to the Métis people.
But look at even this strong Métis community actually still helped the settler, this young
settler boy who was from a quite an abusive family.
Right.
So it's kind of telling a different side of the story so that we kind of expand our ideas
of what it means to be Indigenous, what it means to be Canadian, right, what it means
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to be Manitoban.
So that's, so you could look out for that one, Jack the Fiddler it's called, and it's
been performed a few times and will be in the years to come.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Now, you're, I think you have a piece called hashtag dry cold conversation.
I believe this was inspired by Manitoba winters.
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Yes.
So could you delve into how the natural beauty of Manitoba and the prairies influence your
music and creative vision?
Like for example, in this piece, I think it had a really innovative use of sound and space.
So could you dive a little deeper into that?
Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a really fun piece.
It was commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for the new music festival back
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in 2018.
So I love, so people tell, even in Jack the Fiddler actually, Alation Pauls, who is the
violist in that, she said, you just have this, you have a lot of space in your music, right?
And I think I have like both harmonic space, but also time space.
So I do like kind of these slow builds and slow openings to try to depict like when you're
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sitting in Manitoba or driving in Manitoba or looking, you know, around it's, I didn't
realize it growing up there, but it's rare to have a landscape that is so flat.
Like Manitoba is just so flat and spacious and you can see the Northern Lights right
in the winter and like, or actually not in the winter, but in the fall, late summer,
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early fall.
So, but also there is something like a winter's night in Manitoba when there's lots of snow
and it's minus 30.
There is a sound to that that is different from a minus 10 in a wet area like Kitchener
Waterloo, right?
Like there is this kind of stillness that also has like almost like this, it's almost
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like a shiny sound, right?
Like this kind of a high, so I kind of hear it as these high, I can't even explain it,
explain the sound very well.
Because it's so crisp, like there's like a crispness to a minus 30 middle of January
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kind of a sound.
But then you get the sounds of walking, like the sound of walking on snow when it's minus
30 is a different sound than any other sound that I've had.
So in that piece, I actually sat at my cello to try to find a way to make that sound.
And so I call it like it's, so I have a video on my website that shows it, but it's kind
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of instead of pulling the bow, like, you know, horizontal left and right, they actually do
kind of a twisting motion.
So they're pulling it kind of up, but it's not straight up and down.
It's kind of up on one string down on the other.
So it's like this like, so it's, I call it my crunchy snow sound.
So those are the kinds of sounds I was trying to get in to that piece.
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But the whole shape of the piece, as is usual for me, I'm very busy.
I'm, you know, trying to write pieces and all this kind of stuff.
And when I, when I thought of this, when I got this commission and it was like, okay,
dried cold conversations, because it was called, and we had the title first actually, hashtag
dry cold conversation.
It was in conversation with the WSO.
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I was like, I need to hear what other people think of, of Manitoba, right?
Like, is it just me?
And so I just had, it was, and it was this time, like, I feel like social media was used
a little bit more than it is even now.
But I went onto Facebook and I said, like, tell me your memories or specific sounds of
Manitoba, like any time, you know, any time of the year.
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And I got so many responses from Manitobans, from people who are no longer in Manitoba,
but from Manitoba, or people who are newly in Manitoba.
Like I just got all these responses to that.
And so then I took that.
I also actually at one point talked to some very new Canadians.
They had been there for not even a year yet.
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And so then heard, and these were Syrian refugees, essentially at that time, since 2018.
And so I recorded his impressions of Manitoba, which was very interesting because it was
a young, it was actually a boy at the time who was, I think he was about 14.
And then his father who couldn't speak any English.
So I'm speaking to the son.
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And then anyways, I recorded it too, which was really cool.
But then I also spoke to my Métis, one of my Métis great aunts, who then talked about
some of the winters and anyway, so I took all those things and then arranged the piece
in a way that kind of followed, well followed through all the different themes of the words.
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And so in that piece, I wish I had it right in front of me, in that piece, I actually
do have text in certain parts that can be, that sometimes can be put on a screen.
So in the premier, we actually put the text on the screen of what some people said.
But then I'm trying to mimic different things.
So at one point I'm even mimicking like a train because that's what someone said, talked
about a train or the sound of a car trying to start, you know, in the middle of winter,
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which is a very specific sound.
It's so cold.
And if a car is not plugged in, it can be like, it can be this hard start.
I mean, it's kind of a bit subtle in the piece.
But then just like playing on snow, like on snow drifts and things.
So it was kind of taking these conversations and then putting them into groups, of course,
getting Northern Lights in there.
And just for me, like making these big wide chords based out of fifths or from the harmonic
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series, I often do that to create these big wide kind of, and especially with an orchestra,
because it can be just so huge, right?
And then I think I know if it's my signature, but I often bring like little bird songs or
bird calls.
So I'll sit and listen to birds and try to put that in just here and there.
And especially in the flutes, oboes and clarinets, like up there in the tweety section of the
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to get, yeah, just to get those kind of the kind of busyness of those calls.
Yeah.
That's so beautiful.
I love that element of like conversation and then how you really incorporated your audiences
perspectives of Manitoba into that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Looking ahead, are there any future projects or collaborations that you're excited about?
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And how do you envision your music evolving in the coming years within Canada's diverse,
I guess, musical landscape?
Yeah.
You know, so I'm really excited.
I'm working on a piece right now that, of course, I'm feeling behind on.
And it's for the opening of the University of Manitoba, the Faculty of Music at the University
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of Manitoba, they're opening a new hall.
So I got I was commissioned to write a piece and we wanted it in particular to be Indigenous
themed.
So I think I maybe shouldn't confirm the title, but I think we're going to call it The Great
Flood.
And it's based on the recreation story that my mom, who worked a lot with elders, she
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was told this years and years ago, and it had a profound effect on her.
So in our Metis family, my grandmother had all these values.
And it's only been in the last 10 years that I've really realized that I'm like, oh, those
are Metis values.
Like, you know, you just kind of grow up with these values.
And I used to think, well, why doesn't everybody think like this?
Like, I don't understand how that person can do that, because we would never do that.
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Right.
And I started to realize that it's made it these these values were actually Cree, Swampy
Cree Indigenous values.
And it's getting and getting to know some of these Cree stories were like, oh, that's
where this comes.
Like there's this.
So there's this disconnection that my grandmother had.
And there's times when she was actually quite angry because of, I think, this disconnection.
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And she was very involved in the Indigenous community.
But my mom also became very involved in terms of writing down stories.
And so this story about the flood, the Great Flood and Wasakachuk building a raft and then
basically him not having any, Wasakachuk didn't have any soil or mud in order to create the
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land.
And so he had to send, he sent down first the beaver to try to go down.
Like, you know, you're in a flood, they're on a raft, you know, there's no land in sight.
And so he sends beaver down.
Beaver can't make it down far enough to get the soil.
Sends otter down.
Otter can't get far enough to get the soil.
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And they're all like, what's going to happen?
And we need soil in order to have land in order to survive.
And so finally, this little muskrat says, well, I can try.
And of course, muskrats are the smallest of all these water animals.
And the muskrat tries and works hard and tries and gets soil.
And so it's kind of this story.
So then, you know, soil brings up the soil and Wasakachuk from that can and different,
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different Indigenous groups have different ways of the land forming.
So some they put it in a pot and it boils over.
The one that was told to my mom, Wasakachuk blows on the soil and it creates land around
them.
And then sends out wolves to see if the land is big enough for everyone until eventually
it's big enough and it's what is now Turtle Island, right?
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So North America on which we live.
So it's this kind of creation story of this land that we live on, right?
And each Indigenous group has some blood story of some kind.
And most of the ones in Canada or a lot of them have this story of these three exact
animals.
Like there's some different things around it, but it's that the muskrat is the kind
of the littlest that that that kind of keeps trying and does actually save everyone.
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Right.
So this, this, this, you know, even the smallest can contribute to the community.
Right.
And then there's the other things.
So we are doing this story.
I'm in the middle of composing it.
Again, it's a collaboration with my mom who has taken the text and of course expanded
it and made it work in English.
Although we're bringing in some Cree words as well for this.
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And it'll be presented.
It's for choir and concert band at the University of Manitoba and will be presented in September.
So hopefully, I mean, I have to get it done soon.
I was hoping to have it done by now and it's not done now.
Yeah.
So, so that's what I'm working on right now.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
But then I have a bunch of little projects.
So I'm starting to do a bit more projects on.
(25:44):
I haven't done a lot of like voice and piano type pieces.
So that's been kind of what I've been asked to do more recently.
So I have a few of those actually two projects coming up to do that, which I'm excited about
too to work with both my mom again.
So some will be with my mom, but I think some of them are going to be with other with other
text and we'll see.
So one is with an Indigenous singer from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, actually.
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So I'm excited about that one.
And then one is actually another sort of in Winnipeg, which kind of in early stages of
talking about it.
So that's that's coming up too.
And then of course, an album project.
So to record, that's the other thing that I'm super excited about.
But those are pieces that have already been written.
So awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I always stuff on the go.
(26:30):
So I think that's pretty much everything.
So that pretty much wraps up today's episode.
Thank you so much again, Karen, for sharing such incredible pieces of your art and heart.
Until next time, folks, keep listening for the Notes of the North.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Hello and welcome back to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know our local
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Canadian musical talent.
Today I am here with Dr. Karen Sunabacka.
Huge thanks to Karen for joining me today.
Oh great, it's so great to be here.
Let's jump right in.
So first and foremost, I'd love to get a little bit of a glimpse into your background.
So where in Canada do you call home and what are the places that really hold a special
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place in your heart?
Great, yeah, that's an interesting question because I currently live, I guess my home
is currently in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, but the special place in my heart of course
is Manitoba and in particular Winnipeg as well as just north of Winnipeg in a place
just kind of around Selkirk, Manitoba, which is where my my Metis grandmother's farm was
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and my Metis family really were established in that part of the world.
So I feel very close to that part as well.
I spent a lot of time in my childhood as well as even in my adulthood in that area.
Beautiful.
Well, how did you first start composing?
Yeah, it's funny.
I mean, my uncle on my dad's side, so he's a Swedish-Finnish settler, he was a composer
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and so I never really thought much of it, but I used to go to some of his performances,
I thought his music was weird, but my cousin and I, we used to spend time together and
we would kind of like just improvise, like we would make these little tape pieces and
like improvise together and then or record, like we'd secretly record like sounds in the
house and things like that.
(01:41):
So I think it kind of because it was kind of in the air and I was a cellist growing
up while I started playing cello when I was six and we always played music in the house.
So it was kind of a house where we were always kind of a little bit creative, but it really
wasn't until university that I really took it seriously.
(02:04):
I started, I was at the University of Manitoba and there was the theory program there was
using a textbook called Harmony Through Melody and it was really creating, like learning
about theory through composing.
So we composed minuets and we composed romances and we composed cantuses, right?
So we kind of learned about tonality through composing, which is actually the same textbook
(02:28):
I use now to teach theory.
I mean it has to be theories getting, I have to do it in three terms instead of four, those
kinds of things.
But so I started kind of composing that way sort of tonally and then I just like, of course
when you're doing an undergraduate degree your theory courses, the core theory courses
(02:49):
are done after two years and I just didn't want to stop composing.
Like I just found that I loved it so much and I started seeing like sort of older like
people that were in the composition program and I thought like I could do that, that looks
really fun.
So I started and my first year, like the first year doing it, so it was my third year of
my undergrad.
I mean I was still doing cello, like that was kind of my main instrument, but I ended
(03:11):
up like doing this first year and it was honestly, it was so fun.
And I remember at the end of my, that jury after my first year of composition, you know
presenting all my pieces and one of the profs there who had been teaching the Baroque music,
his name was Richard Burleson, he was like, you know Karen Sunabaka, I think you found
(03:33):
your thing.
And he was right, like I had like, I just, it was so fun and it was so fun to share what
I'd done and it was just so fun to explore sound in that kind of a way.
So that's really how I started.
So I feel like I started quite late in some sense because I was like in my early 20s at
that point.
But it just, that's just kind of how it happened.
(03:55):
And after that I just never stopped studying composition really.
Like it was a little sprout and it just kept growing and growing.
Yeah, it's really true.
Would you recommend a piece for first time listeners?
Like maybe a piece that really encapsulates your musical style?
Wow, like one of my own pieces.
(04:18):
You know, one of the first pieces I wrote, it's on my recent piano album that I, I guess
it's from two years, almost two years ago now.
But it's called Hiding.
And I wrote it in my, I was already, I had been composing already for a year then, but
it was really early on.
That's like my second or maybe my third year of composing.
(04:39):
And that I think more than any other piece, because it was kind of me experimenting and
I love so much what I did there that I do like my piano music kind of sounds a little
bit like that all the time.
So that's kind of an early one.
I wasn't really exploring my own heritage in my music at that point.
It was just, it's pitch class sets.
Like that is a piece if someone wants to like do an analysis of it, I use two pitch class
(05:01):
sets and that's how I wrote the whole piece.
And it's fun and I play it to my students now in composition every once in a while.
And every time I play it, I think, goodness, this is a really cool little piece.
Like it's four minutes long.
But it was, I kind of did some really good explorations of the piano and of like non-traditional
harmony because it's pitch class sets, right?
(05:22):
So it's a really fun little piece that I think I grew out.
Like I've grown more from that, but it really showed kind of my early experimentation, but
also my playfulness and my fun and I kind of put a little waltz in there.
So it's kind of a fun little piece.
Yeah.
That sounds so intriguing.
Yeah.
Like you started to mention, now your music seems really deeply rooted in your multicultural
(05:46):
heritage, particularly Metis and mixed European backgrounds, I believe.
So how do these diverse cultural influences shape your creative process and the themes
that you explore in your composition?
Yeah.
It's so, it's funny at the time, like in my undergrad, like even my friends that were
(06:06):
really close didn't really know I was Metis.
And it wasn't that I was hiding it.
It's just something that we just didn't talk about.
And I really had at that point in my life, really kind of separate, like my grandparents
farm was the Metis place and that's where I fiddled.
Like I could actually fiddle on a violin, even though it was a cellist, right?
And I could like fiddle a bit on my cello.
(06:29):
So but it was kind of separate.
So that was kind of the folk music world and the world of my Metis family.
And then like my dad's side of the family, which is Finnish, Swedish, he was very serious
about like basically Western art music, right?
And so then I took all my cello lessons through that way of looking at the world in some sense.
(06:53):
And he also loved to play like hymns and things because he was very, a very serious churchman
as well as I think that's funny to say it that way.
But his family was really rooted in the Baptist tradition, which is not the tradition that
my mom's family was nor the Metis family, which were more kind of Anglican, which is
the English Metis, various French Metis would have been Catholic, but we were Anglicans.
(07:16):
So I do find, and I write this in my bio a lot, that there is sometimes you end up in
this place where there's kind of a clash because I think for a long time, I really felt like
the music that my grandparents played and my grandfather was a fiddler and my grandmother
like courted on the piano.
And I was fascinated by that because there we'd sit at the piano and play from like the
(07:37):
fake book or whatever it was called, you know, and so that was what my grandma had on the
piano.
They didn't have classical music there in the house.
Although she did, my grandparents' family, they did make them all take piano lessons
and things, right?
So even my mom did some piano.
But I really had this separation that real music and serious music was, you know, European
(07:59):
Western art music.
So I really didn't mix the two until probably 10 or 15 years ago.
And I feel like the way that we approach music now is so much better than it was when like
20 years ago when I was a student, because there's a much more openness.
And it's kind of my generation and those that are following that have started to say, well,
(08:21):
why don't we study popular music or why don't we study folk music?
And so it used to be really segregated to ethnomusicology.
But now it's composers even are kind of bringing in folk music.
Now I'm going to step back a second because the composers that I love to look at, like
(08:41):
and were composers that were already kind of bringing folk music.
I mean, think about Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Like she did some, like she studied a lot of it.
Her music was sometimes very experimental, but also she really fell in love with American
folk music.
But like Bartok, Stravinsky, like they were all bringing in folk music.
And those were the composers that I was always drawn to.
(09:04):
And so now as I got older and as I started to say, well, what is, when I'm writing about
my grandmother, I can't write.
And I was starting to like think about like honouring my grandmother and her, my Meiji
grandmother and all of her painting and everything that she did.
And so then I was like, but my memory of the music is this folk music.
So the first thing I did, and this is 2000, so it's just a little over 10 years ago now.
(09:27):
The first thing I did is kind of, I kind of outed myself publicly with a commission by
the Mount of a Chamber Orchestra and I decided to honour my grandmother.
And I took a fiddle tune that I had played with my grandmother and my grandfather on
the fiddle, right?
It's called the Old French.
And so I brought it in and out.
Like, so I kind of use this as a memory, but there's, it's quoted.
(09:50):
I have like the whole kind of jump, you know, jumpy piano part, like oompa oompa kind of
in there at times.
And so that whole, and it's a string orchestra piece and I kind of make it so it kind of
comes and goes.
So I can use my, I feel like this piece is a really good demonstration of kind of what
I do is I can bring kind of this folk music in and then I can experiment with it in the
ways that the Western art music would experiment with it.
(10:13):
So taking it apart, putting it back together, putting it off like a la shnitka.
I also love shnitka, like taking something and moving them so apart so that it's like
totally dissonant and then they kind of come together again.
So it's like this kind of in and out of focus type of a thing.
So that's kind of, I feel like I'm always like in this cross-cultural place where I'm
kind of pulling from both traditions, which I use then to tell stories, which I think
(10:37):
is part of my Métis side that there is so much storytelling happening at the farm, but
also I just am very drawn to it.
So I often tell stories in my music too.
So it's a kind of a place where I'm comfortable, but I think it can sometimes expose, well,
especially if I'm exploring a difficult topic, I can get pretty angry about things.
(10:57):
So I am exploring serious topics sometimes in terms of like a more recent one too was
called The Place Where We Create Arrests.
And in that one, we're looking at Métis and Mennonite relations.
And that was a commission that someone said, hey, like, let's look at this.
And I thought, oh, that'll be fun.
Like, I know there's Mennonites in Manitoba in Treaty One, and I know so many Mennonites,
(11:19):
but then to actually learn the history was pretty hard because then you just hear like,
oh, my family, I know the history of my family and we actually did suffer from losing our
land a bunch of times.
And the Mennonites came in and just took it.
Right.
But it wasn't, it was kind of the government imposing this anyways, it just got very complicated.
So my, you know, so those kinds of things like in the composing, it can start getting
(11:41):
them.
Sometimes it brings up some deep issues and you think, oh, I guess I thought I was okay
with this stuff.
And now I'm re-evaluating everything from my childhood through the music that I'm writing.
So it ends up kind of getting rooted in the music a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Could you discuss a little deeper the role of storytelling in your music?
(12:03):
Like you touched on already.
How do you weave these narratives and personal experiences into your compositions and what
do you hope that us audiences and listeners obtain from these stories?
Yeah.
I am, I often tell stories through spoken texts.
So I have found, like my mom's a writer, so we've tended to be, to collaborate.
(12:26):
And I've found that I, I like telling stories through speaking and then having the music
there.
So I actually will tell stories through speaking and then having the music then kind of fill
in the gaps between, or basically that you have the text and then music and then text
and music.
So that, that is the kind of way that I do it.
And then sometimes I settle things down and the text happens while there's some music
(12:49):
happening.
And that's something I started again, almost 10 years ago when I went further with my,
about my Métis grandmother and it's called Mama's Painting, Louis Riel's Dream, which
I'm hoping to put on an album soon.
So that's my next album project because that's a very, it's been played a lot of places that
piece.
So that's tends to be how I do it is through spoken word.
(13:10):
And it started with my own family stories.
Now I have done pieces where it's a stories in the background and it's in the program
notes, but there's no text actually in the piece itself.
And so that's how I approach that.
And often I take tunes or I to try to, to try to, so I'm quoting.
(13:31):
So sometimes it's like a bit of a collage where I'm pulling different tunes to, to get
different kinds of feelings to the music.
Right.
So I like to do that.
That's a, but also, and I actually do that a lot, but also then just this, the actual
speaking, a really great example is a piece that's about to come out on an album that
(13:52):
Alation Paul's has done.
And that piece is called Jack the Fiddler.
And so again, another story about one of my family members this time, instead of going
to my woman ancestors, I've actually gone to my settler grandfather who married my Métis
grandmother.
But it's about how he was a settler lived in the middle of this really strong and healthy
(14:13):
Métis community who they kind of reestablished their community.
So it's, so what I'm hoping in this one is probably my best way to answer the second
part of your question is I'm kind of hoping for people to hear the stories of Canadian
history in a way that that is fun and fun to listen to, but also, you know, deals with
(14:37):
like what happened to the Métis people.
But look at even this strong Métis community actually still helped the settler, this young
settler boy who was from a quite an abusive family.
Right.
So it's kind of telling a different side of the story so that we kind of expand our ideas
of what it means to be Indigenous, what it means to be Canadian, right, what it means
(14:57):
to be Manitoban.
So that's, so you could look out for that one, Jack the Fiddler it's called, and it's
been performed a few times and will be in the years to come.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Now, you're, I think you have a piece called hashtag dry cold conversation.
I believe this was inspired by Manitoba winters.
(15:18):
Yes.
So could you delve into how the natural beauty of Manitoba and the prairies influence your
music and creative vision?
Like for example, in this piece, I think it had a really innovative use of sound and space.
So could you dive a little deeper into that?
Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a really fun piece.
It was commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for the new music festival back
(15:42):
in 2018.
So I love, so people tell, even in Jack the Fiddler actually, Alation Pauls, who is the
violist in that, she said, you just have this, you have a lot of space in your music, right?
And I think I have like both harmonic space, but also time space.
So I do like kind of these slow builds and slow openings to try to depict like when you're
(16:06):
sitting in Manitoba or driving in Manitoba or looking, you know, around it's, I didn't
realize it growing up there, but it's rare to have a landscape that is so flat.
Like Manitoba is just so flat and spacious and you can see the Northern Lights right
in the winter and like, or actually not in the winter, but in the fall, late summer,
(16:30):
early fall.
So, but also there is something like a winter's night in Manitoba when there's lots of snow
and it's minus 30.
There is a sound to that that is different from a minus 10 in a wet area like Kitchener
Waterloo, right?
Like there is this kind of stillness that also has like almost like this, it's almost
(16:58):
like a shiny sound, right?
Like this kind of a high, so I kind of hear it as these high, I can't even explain it,
explain the sound very well.
Because it's so crisp, like there's like a crispness to a minus 30 middle of January
(17:18):
kind of a sound.
But then you get the sounds of walking, like the sound of walking on snow when it's minus
30 is a different sound than any other sound that I've had.
So in that piece, I actually sat at my cello to try to find a way to make that sound.
And so I call it like it's, so I have a video on my website that shows it, but it's kind
(17:40):
of instead of pulling the bow, like, you know, horizontal left and right, they actually do
kind of a twisting motion.
So they're pulling it kind of up, but it's not straight up and down.
It's kind of up on one string down on the other.
So it's like this like, so it's, I call it my crunchy snow sound.
So those are the kinds of sounds I was trying to get in to that piece.
(18:03):
But the whole shape of the piece, as is usual for me, I'm very busy.
I'm, you know, trying to write pieces and all this kind of stuff.
And when I, when I thought of this, when I got this commission and it was like, okay,
dried cold conversations, because it was called, and we had the title first actually, hashtag
dry cold conversation.
It was in conversation with the WSO.
(18:24):
I was like, I need to hear what other people think of, of Manitoba, right?
Like, is it just me?
And so I just had, it was, and it was this time, like, I feel like social media was used
a little bit more than it is even now.
But I went onto Facebook and I said, like, tell me your memories or specific sounds of
Manitoba, like any time, you know, any time of the year.
(18:45):
And I got so many responses from Manitobans, from people who are no longer in Manitoba,
but from Manitoba, or people who are newly in Manitoba.
Like I just got all these responses to that.
And so then I took that.
I also actually at one point talked to some very new Canadians.
They had been there for not even a year yet.
(19:08):
And so then heard, and these were Syrian refugees, essentially at that time, since 2018.
And so I recorded his impressions of Manitoba, which was very interesting because it was
a young, it was actually a boy at the time who was, I think he was about 14.
And then his father who couldn't speak any English.
So I'm speaking to the son.
(19:30):
And then anyways, I recorded it too, which was really cool.
But then I also spoke to my Métis, one of my Métis great aunts, who then talked about
some of the winters and anyway, so I took all those things and then arranged the piece
in a way that kind of followed, well followed through all the different themes of the words.
(19:55):
And so in that piece, I wish I had it right in front of me, in that piece, I actually
do have text in certain parts that can be, that sometimes can be put on a screen.
So in the premier, we actually put the text on the screen of what some people said.
But then I'm trying to mimic different things.
So at one point I'm even mimicking like a train because that's what someone said, talked
about a train or the sound of a car trying to start, you know, in the middle of winter,
(20:21):
which is a very specific sound.
It's so cold.
And if a car is not plugged in, it can be like, it can be this hard start.
I mean, it's kind of a bit subtle in the piece.
But then just like playing on snow, like on snow drifts and things.
So it was kind of taking these conversations and then putting them into groups, of course,
getting Northern Lights in there.
And just for me, like making these big wide chords based out of fifths or from the harmonic
(20:46):
series, I often do that to create these big wide kind of, and especially with an orchestra,
because it can be just so huge, right?
And then I think I know if it's my signature, but I often bring like little bird songs or
bird calls.
So I'll sit and listen to birds and try to put that in just here and there.
And especially in the flutes, oboes and clarinets, like up there in the tweety section of the
(21:10):
to get, yeah, just to get those kind of the kind of busyness of those calls.
Yeah.
That's so beautiful.
I love that element of like conversation and then how you really incorporated your audiences
perspectives of Manitoba into that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Looking ahead, are there any future projects or collaborations that you're excited about?
(21:33):
And how do you envision your music evolving in the coming years within Canada's diverse,
I guess, musical landscape?
Yeah.
You know, so I'm really excited.
I'm working on a piece right now that, of course, I'm feeling behind on.
And it's for the opening of the University of Manitoba, the Faculty of Music at the University
(21:54):
of Manitoba, they're opening a new hall.
So I got I was commissioned to write a piece and we wanted it in particular to be Indigenous
themed.
So I think I maybe shouldn't confirm the title, but I think we're going to call it The Great
Flood.
And it's based on the recreation story that my mom, who worked a lot with elders, she
(22:16):
was told this years and years ago, and it had a profound effect on her.
So in our Metis family, my grandmother had all these values.
And it's only been in the last 10 years that I've really realized that I'm like, oh, those
are Metis values.
Like, you know, you just kind of grow up with these values.
And I used to think, well, why doesn't everybody think like this?
Like, I don't understand how that person can do that, because we would never do that.
(22:37):
Right.
And I started to realize that it's made it these these values were actually Cree, Swampy
Cree Indigenous values.
And it's getting and getting to know some of these Cree stories were like, oh, that's
where this comes.
Like there's this.
So there's this disconnection that my grandmother had.
And there's times when she was actually quite angry because of, I think, this disconnection.
(23:01):
And she was very involved in the Indigenous community.
But my mom also became very involved in terms of writing down stories.
And so this story about the flood, the Great Flood and Wasakachuk building a raft and then
basically him not having any, Wasakachuk didn't have any soil or mud in order to create the
(23:25):
land.
And so he had to send, he sent down first the beaver to try to go down.
Like, you know, you're in a flood, they're on a raft, you know, there's no land in sight.
And so he sends beaver down.
Beaver can't make it down far enough to get the soil.
Sends otter down.
Otter can't get far enough to get the soil.
(23:45):
And they're all like, what's going to happen?
And we need soil in order to have land in order to survive.
And so finally, this little muskrat says, well, I can try.
And of course, muskrats are the smallest of all these water animals.
And the muskrat tries and works hard and tries and gets soil.
And so it's kind of this story.
So then, you know, soil brings up the soil and Wasakachuk from that can and different,
(24:09):
different Indigenous groups have different ways of the land forming.
So some they put it in a pot and it boils over.
The one that was told to my mom, Wasakachuk blows on the soil and it creates land around
them.
And then sends out wolves to see if the land is big enough for everyone until eventually
it's big enough and it's what is now Turtle Island, right?
(24:31):
So North America on which we live.
So it's this kind of creation story of this land that we live on, right?
And each Indigenous group has some blood story of some kind.
And most of the ones in Canada or a lot of them have this story of these three exact
animals.
Like there's some different things around it, but it's that the muskrat is the kind
of the littlest that that that kind of keeps trying and does actually save everyone.
(24:58):
Right.
So this, this, this, you know, even the smallest can contribute to the community.
Right.
And then there's the other things.
So we are doing this story.
I'm in the middle of composing it.
Again, it's a collaboration with my mom who has taken the text and of course expanded
it and made it work in English.
Although we're bringing in some Cree words as well for this.
(25:22):
And it'll be presented.
It's for choir and concert band at the University of Manitoba and will be presented in September.
So hopefully, I mean, I have to get it done soon.
I was hoping to have it done by now and it's not done now.
Yeah.
So, so that's what I'm working on right now.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
But then I have a bunch of little projects.
So I'm starting to do a bit more projects on.
(25:44):
I haven't done a lot of like voice and piano type pieces.
So that's been kind of what I've been asked to do more recently.
So I have a few of those actually two projects coming up to do that, which I'm excited about
too to work with both my mom again.
So some will be with my mom, but I think some of them are going to be with other with other
text and we'll see.
So one is with an Indigenous singer from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, actually.
(26:08):
So I'm excited about that one.
And then one is actually another sort of in Winnipeg, which kind of in early stages of
talking about it.
So that's that's coming up too.
And then of course, an album project.
So to record, that's the other thing that I'm super excited about.
But those are pieces that have already been written.
So awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I always stuff on the go.
(26:30):
So I think that's pretty much everything.
So that pretty much wraps up today's episode.
Thank you so much again, Karen, for sharing such incredible pieces of your art and heart.
Until next time, folks, keep listening for the Notes of the North.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
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