Orchestra's musical land acknowledgment to feature works from 3 Indigenous composers

Four musical pieces crafted by First Nations composers will be highlighted in a concert at the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre in Hamilton on Friday.

Dawn Avery, who is Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk), is one of the composers featured in Land Acknowledgement: a Concert, to be performed by community orchestra Sinfonia Ancaster. 

"I was going to rework a piece then I thought, no, this is about the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe people," said Avery.

"I wrote a new piece that's going to be premiered for this because it just seemed important to invoke the ancestors, the current people and all the people moving forward." 

Her composition features unique soundscapes to honour the ancestors and the land. She said the orchestra will recite the nations upon whose territory Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre now sits, creating a "vibration" through the spoken names.

Musicians will use wind instruments without playing notes to replicate natural elements like the wind and others will use their instruments as percussion, recreating the sound of "footsteps of the ancestors on the land."

Jeffrey Pollock, music director of Sinfonia Ancaster, said when the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre opened last year the building gave the musicians a "sense of legitimacy" because of how ideally suited it was for performing. He said he wanted to demonstrate his appreciation for the space by acknowledging the land upon which the building sits. 

The orchestra's first concert of this season, along with Avery's piece, includes music by Spy Dénommé-Welch, who is Anishinaabe, and Jessica McMann, who is Cree from Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Using the spirit of the Two Row Wampum as inspiration, Pollock said he wondered "who might be a compositional brother from the old world" to accompany the other pieces. That's when he thought of Beethoven.

Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is "one of the earliest examples in all of music that deliberately tries to put into music the feelings of joy [Beethoven] experienced being in nature," he said.

Each composition features instruments being used in a way musicians in an orchestra wouldn't normally, he said. 

String bows scrape against the instrument's strings without producing a pitch to evoke the sound of crunching snow below one's feet in Rouge Winter by Dénommé-Welch and his composition partner Catherine Magowan. Their composition Bottleneck will also be performed.

Avery said it felt good to be among three Indigenous composers on the program.

"I feel like that's really important and I hope people schedule more Indigenous composers because there are a lot of us out there now and it's getting bigger," she said. 

In 2007, when Avery did her doctorate on Indigenous classical music, she said there roughly 15 well-known Indigenous composers and now the community of composers has gotten larger.

She and Dénommé-Welch will be in attendance at the performance Friday and in a panel discussion preceding the concert.