Noteworthy

Music is one of those special gifts in life that can cross cultures and be a conduit for connection and understanding. It isn’t uncommon to speak of music as something that can break down barriers, serve as a universal language, or heal. By bringing together TSO musicians and members of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) community, the TSO and CAMH asked what these clichés might mean practically to people in a small group setting. 

As The Art of Healing prepares for the next generation, the program has concluded its time with Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and its Shkaabe Makwa clinical services. The program combined mental health and new music creation each year by partnering a different FNMI composer with a small group of interested FNMI clients, and TSO members, blending traditional Indigenous knowledge, healing practices, and new music creation. 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent hours researching the program and speaking with the composer Ian Cusson (Métis), flutist and piccoloist Camille Watts, violinist Amanda Goodburn, and bassoonist Samuel Banks. The FNMI participants were not interviewed to protect their privacy, as they were clients of Shkaabe Makwa; their absence is an act of care rather than an oversight. Their contributions and commitment were integral to the success over the years.  

From the beginning, the program was a provocation. It dared the composers and artists to work in ways that might not be familiar, and asked the Indigenous clients to keep their hearts open in working to co-create new music. It required a shared vulnerability from each of the participants and willingness to learn together. 

“My first thought, when I was approached, was: this sounds scary,” Cusson laughed at his initial response in 2022 when he was invited to participate. “I’m a composer, not a facilitator,” he continued, describing his writing style as solitary rather than a group effort. Despite the initial uncertainty, he said “yes” with enthusiasm. 

He described his fondness for those weekly Monday meetings where they’d share music they were listening to, talk about where they were, what they hoped to communicate. His mother was a psychiatric nurse, and his sister is a social worker. According to Cusson, he is the only immediate family member not directly involved with healthcare, so in connecting to this project and community, it deepened his connection to his family.

Unlike Cusson, Watts had previous experience combining healthcare and music; she had been a massage therapist and was active in the building of the now Al & Malka Green Artists’ Health Centre. Saying “yes” didn’t challenge Watts to try something new, but she said for her, getting outside her bubble and engaging in “non-hierarchical” time was important. “Hours in the practice room and in rehearsal, surrounded by other professional musicians” was typical of Watts’ life at that time. 

“For strangers to sit in a room together and share whatever was on their mind … talking about how music had helped them, had healed them, or that they simply loved [it] was just a beautiful experience,” Watts said warmly. That time sharing affirmed her belief in the power of music to heal and connect people who might not otherwise encounter one another.

By the end of that first year, outside their usual approaches to music, Watts felt more “deeply connected to a greater humanity,” so much so that she participated in the following year. Cusson, with the guidance of the participants and their time in the circle, wrote Ikiru (or To Live); he dared to create “the most joy-filled piece” he’d ever written without becoming “saccharine.” Cusson stayed on as program advisor for composers Andrew Balfour (Cree) and Cris Derksen (Cree) over the following two years. 

Goodburn and Banks joined the program for its final year, with Derksen in charge of facilitating and integrating the weeks of conversations into a final work. Like the previous years, Derksen provided a safe and supportive environment for participants to meet and invited them to try something new or different. 

“I think that being seen by other people, being accepted, and being able to tell your story…” For Goodburn, that’s where healing begins. The program pushed her to examine her relationship to music. From a "middle-class upbringing" in South Africa, where serious study of violin was possible, her instrument and perfectionism had grown to define her identity. “I have been making this transition from that relationship to one which is a lot more humane, much more connected to people.” 

Goodburn shared an anecdote about being given a solo that broke entirely with the hierarchy of the orchestra. Solos typically go to the concert master, and she laughed about the uncertainty and initial discomfort of being asked to break rank. It was fine in the end, but she experienced a surprising level of largely self-imposed pressure.

Banks went into the programming with few expectations and “first day of school jitters,” but by the end was confronted with the grief of losing a dear friend when Derksen’s life was taken suddenly in a car accident not long after the première of STILL HERE. 

“We really started as strangers, and we ended up as friends.” Banks said, drawing on that friendship, “Cris got to work and created a really vibrant composition that is a really wonderful document of the time that we spent together and the stories that some of us told.”

Every story told shared threads of stepping outside of convention, choosing to be vulnerable with people who were strangers, and finding joy in shared humanity and love of music.

After the first performance in the CAMH auditorium, one of the FNMI participants was asked about what Still Here meant to him; his succinct response resonated with each conversation over the past few weeks:  

“It means I'm still here even though I battled demons every day.”

Robyn Grant Moran (Métis): is a Toronto-based theatre writer; she has been published in the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, and is the theatre critic at The Grind Magazine. Presently, Robyn is finishing her master's degree in Musicology at York University, where she focuses on Indigenous identity in opera.