The Composer Narrative

As a composer myself, I am intrigued by how composers are portrayed in the mass media. Of course, they aren't given much space these days, but occasionally we get a glimpse. Such was the case this week as Toronto's Globe and Mail published an extensive piece on Andrew Balfour, an up and coming choral composer. Canada has a pretty strong choral tradition, especially in Ontario where the Mendelssohn Choir is well over a century old and a major musical institution.

Journalism has been described as the "first draft of history" and as such it is interesting to have a look at how the story of a composer is told in 21st century Canada (though the narrative is one that certainly is not limited to Canada). Here is the link to the story. If you are blocked for some reason, try searching for the headline: Choral maestro Andrew Balfour pursues his Indigenous identity through music.

Read the whole piece and then let's look for the salient themes. The first paragraph gives us the generic picture of a classical music composer: early signs of talent, exposure to ensemble playing and devotion to classical rather than popular music. This is just to set up the ways that Mr. Balfour departs from the generic picture. He is of Cree descent and as part of a government policy referred to as the "Sixties Scoop" was removed from his indigenous family and raised in a middle-class family of Scottish descent.

The Sixties Scoop refers to a practice that occurred in Canada of taking, or "scooping up", Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or adoption. Despite the reference to one decade, the Sixties Scoop began in the late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s. It is estimated that a total of 20,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and fostered or adopted out to primarily white middle-class families as part of the Sixties Scoop.

This controversial policy, along with the residential school system, abandoned in the 80s, was designed to "educate Aboriginal children in Euro-Canadian and Christian values so they could become part of mainstream society." Perhaps one should note that living conditions on indigenous reserve communities are often very poor and certainly offer little or no opportunities for education or advancement, which goes some way to explaining why these kinds of policies were instituted.

Balfour says:

As a child of the Sixties Scoop, he considered himself lucky. He’d been adopted when he was six months old by a family with Scottish roots that he describes as loving and supportive. His parents shared their passion for music with him – his father, the minister at All Saints’ Anglican Church in Winnipeg, encouraged his choral singing, and played trombone. His mother was a violist.

But as Balfour grew older, he’d struggled, and become conflicted and confused about his identity. Attention-deficit disorder made focusing on schoolwork difficult. He dropped out of Brandon University after a year, plagued by growing pangs of isolation. His parents had relocated to British Columbia, and the move intensified feelings of abandonment that gnawed at him when he thought about his Cree background and his separation from his birth mother.

So his musical gifts likely were fostered and developed as a result of his adoption. But he increasingly felt deracinated from his core identity. As a result he went through a difficult period of drug and alcohol abuse, part of which was spent in jail. As a result of exploring his identity as an indigenous person he experienced a vision:

It felt like a near-death experience, he says, in which he was visited by people he’d known throughout his life, who spoke to him. None of it made sense at the time, and he still struggles to articulate what transpired exactly, but he’s certain about this: “It was another power, another spirit … something telling me that life was going to be okay. And from then on, that’s how I felt. And I knew that I wanted to pursue my identity through music.”

The article recounts the kind of compositions and performances that were a result of this pursuit. Occasionally we read pro forma digs at classical music and its sinning, racist past:

Balfour’s versatility has made it easier for him to breach the staunchly white bastions of the classical-music scene, which has been slower to embrace Indigenous artists than literature, film and even pop music have. 

For now, at least, there’s no getting around the fact that when Balfour writes a choral work, the sea of faces that ultimately performs it will likely be white. And so, too, will the audience that listens to it.

Well, yes, Canada does still have an inconveniently large number of white people. But doesn't anyone notice how astonishingly racist comments like these are?

The issues surrounding identity bring with them consequences regarding agency:

Arts organizations that want to perform music with Indigenous themes and content need to be true collaborators, Balfour says. “They need to reach out, talk to elders, do a lot of listening; not just take a work and perform it however they want to.”

This makes the claim that if you write music that stems from your identity as an indigenous person, this gives you all the agency. The institutions and performers who realize the work have to follow your requirements. What makes me uneasy about this is that it implies a lot more than just singing the right notes with the right phrasing. Somehow the performance has to carry with it the ideology of identity.

At a recent gathering in Banff, Alta., of the tiny community of classically trained Indigenous musicians in Canada, Balfour and nine other artists signed a manifesto in support of “musical sovereignty” that called for arts organizations to involve Indigenous artists in every step of the creative process.

Musical sovereignty is an interesting concept, not least because it has more political and ideological aspects than merely aesthetic ones.

I think what we see here are a number of conflicting currents. One of them is simply the excellence of a musical talent able to realize his gifts and have them recognized by the Canadian arts community. Another is the relating of his work to his rediscovered indigenous identity. Still another is the musical context of Canada at large, which has its roots in European music. We see all these currents in his piece Qaumaniq for choir, cello, percussion, narrator and vocal soloists.

There are elements derived from traditional indigenous music, from European tonal traditions and from the contemporary avant garde. The effect is sometimes uncomfortably diverse.

One can see the appeal of this kind of journey for an artist like Andrew Balfour for whom it offers a kind of ready-made authenticity. But it is a bit disconcerting to realize that, for that sea of white faces that the Canadian performing and listening community consists in, the focus on and validation of his identity implies a deprecation of their identity. True, there is a certain moral satisfaction coming from displaying one's appreciation of Indigenous art, but the price is a tendency to reduce one's own authentic identity. The embedding of identity within aesthetics has a number of unfortunate consequences, not the least of which is that it tends to divide a society into identity groups in conflict with one another.