Photo credit: Hannah Eden
Janna Sailor, CMC Prairie Region Director and host of the Musing podcast, sat down with composer and performer Carmen Braden to discuss composing, creative evolution, parenting, and life in the far north!
Janna: How do you describe yourself and your creative output?
Carmen: I generally just call myself a musician. and it’s really these streams of writing, collaboration, and work that gets in front of people’s bodies on the stage, or in their ears through recordings. And then, compositions in the line of contemporary-classical, or just the classical tradition where it’s works that are written down on a piece of paper, and then I can give them to somebody else and exist without me there. I suppose I should figure out a good way to describe it where it’s like work that doesn’t need me there.
Janna: That’s a really interesting way to describe it. I’ve never heard a composer say that it can exist without me being there.
Carmen: My songs can as well. But those ones are also more in the tradition of singer-songwriter works, where either I perform them or they’re in a recording-captured medium, with bands, synthesizers, and drums. Sometimes those two areas blur in some of my work, but other times they’re firmly entrenched in one or the other. At the same time, I would love it if somebody started to cover my singer-songwriter songs, but that definitely doesn’t happen as often as, say, a string quartet playing my works without me there, because I don’t play strings.
Insights as a Singer-Songwriter
Janna: Diving into your singer-songwriter career a bit more, what was the process with your latest album?
Carmen: So this one is a studio album. I think nine songs on it from myself and my producer/collaborator, Mark Adam, who’s been with me through so much of my output over the last 10 to 15 years. We did this together and it is probably my strongest output of this kind of singer-songwriter work. The songs themselves, they’ve been crafted and inspired over different lengths of time. Some of them are very new, and others are older. Some of them could have grown out of my previous album called Seed Songs, and so some of them are arrangements or adaptations of older songs. It was years of work put into this one; over many geographies with different players adding to it. And for me, it is the deepest and strongest of my singer songwriter output. But I will also say, like most of my other work in this vein, it is not extremely unified, as in, it doesn’t all sound like one genre. For example, it’s not just a country album, folk roots album or a jazz-inspired album…So while fun in the creation and the listening, I think sometimes it difficult in terms of describing it or advertising it in an industry “nuts and bolts” type of approach.
Janna: We do like categories don’t we?
Carmen: We do! Once in a while the categories are great, and in this case, it’s own genre that you might attribute it to. When you’re in the studio, it’s quite exhilarating and there’s very little boundaries. We’ve worked to tie these all together into a cohesive album, and I think we’ve done a really great job. I’m also excited to try something in the future, where I have the exact same instrumentation for every song, or I’m going in with a genre, essentially a history of music I’m drawing on and digging in for each song.
If I’m doing another album of this style, where it’s a more traditional album of 8-12 tunes in this kind of singer-songwriter, pop-music length approach. This is what I’d do next.
Janna: You have mentioned that this was your strongest album. How do you gauge your strengths, and that this was a higher standard for yourself than your others?
Carmen: It’s a great question, and not to knock any of my previous work, but maybe it has to do with this honeymoon phase, where you’re in love with it for a while. until you do something new. If I look back at my first album I released in 2017, I was a very different person then, and so was my writing, which is not the same way it is now. It’s like looking back at an old photo from 10-15 years ago, and seeing that haircut you would never wear now. Those kinds of reflections probably have an impact on it.
I can also feel the kind of patience that went into this, going over things, editing it and making it as strong as we could, and not just accepting it because of a deadline. Giving it that space to really grow. Its bark and its trees, and its leaves, and being strong in all those parts. I’ll also accredit that to the things I’ve learned over the years of bringing people into the projects, who are better than me at different things, and telling me when it’s not strong. Going back to my producer Mark, who’s also a drummer, and has produced multiple albums, and worked with many different people in classical, jazz, pop, and rock genres. Being able to lean on his wisdom, after building the rapport we’ve had for so long.
I think what also changed in this one was both allowing collaborations and creativity that didn’t come from me to be a part of the song. That happened more in this one than any other album where Mark’s own creative work in terms of the arrangements, the harmonies, the melodies, we were working, and going back and forth more on this one than any other one. He’s actually got an original track on the album of his own that we both sing on, so that kind of maturity of people in the room, that trust, for me feels the strongest out of any of the other works and other albums that I’ve done. Interestingly, this is a singer-songwriter album.
I also have an album which is almost exclusively instrumental chamber music works. That was an interesting one because some of that music was really new, and not stage tested, or hadn’t been edited past a premier, for example. Others were years and years old and it had multiple performances, so the players on that did a deadly job. But as a composer sitting in the room, being able to either want to change things that I maybe wouldn’t have done when I wrote that piece, or make compositional changes to things because of an uncertainty of something in that moment. Those kinds of hesitations and decision making processes of recording that album, became a very different kind of stress, I say stress in a good way, a different challenge. but also I could always feel that devil on the shoulder, in the room of self-doubt as a composer who’s always looking back at old works and thinking, what could I do differently now to make it better and should I? Or is it just a stamp in time and I just leave it alone? The existential composer question.
Artistic Evolution
Janna: Tell me about your more traditional compositional world that you also inhabit, and how do these aspects of your creative output complement one another? When looking from the outside in, singer-songwriter and contemporary classical composer are two very different things.
Carmen: Yeah, there they are, and it’s taken me quite a while to just reconcile the fact that I’m never gonna give up either of these. I feel pretty strongly that it’s not a weakness of my process. It’s a bit of a complication to be sure, but both sides of these have proven that I can succeed in and find work in. I still love doing both approaches, but I did make a pretty deliberate choice to go deep and hard on establishing myself as a composer, studying, seeking out teachers, looking for collaborators, for a good chunk of what I would consider my career now. And it’s been at the forefront of what fills my days, what fills my bank accounts. I would say I’m more well-known in different parts of the Canadian music world.
In terms of my compositional journey, if I back up to the earliest part of when I was creating music, it was in my teens that I was writing songs. I definitely wasn’t composing sonatas at age 14, I was writing like teenage hormone songs about heartbreaks or crushes. I didn’t have heartbreaks because I didn’t date anyone for a long time, since I was super shy and introverted as a kid. I like crushes and the whole concept of “Oh, I’m young. Where do I belong? I hate my hometown. I love my hometown. I’m so frustrated with life and I want peace in the world.” All those things that teenagers write about, I wrote songs like that. One of them ended up on Ravens, 15 years later.
Janna: I love it!
Carmen: I decided to go on to different kinds of schooling where I learned about jazz. I met people from many different countries and was learning about music from different cultures. And I was also exposed to deeper compositional ideas or analysis or composers from the canon in my later teens. This was not something that was a really a strong part of my life, other than I took piano lessons for a long time. I knew moderate–level piano repertoire, and I sang in choirs in high school and things like that. Claude Debussy was my gateway composer. I was learning about him while I was learning about jazz piano and jazz harmony. They’re both flipsides of the same harmonic coin, and I thought it was the coolest thing. Debussy was also so influenced by nature and the environment in his writing, which also spoke to a deep part of me.
If I fast-forward over taking some time off, but then deciding to go back to school for composition, and learning through that at Acadia about the intersection of music, the environment and technology, I found this first peak when I went back to pursue a master’s after more time off, where I was combining soundworlds, environment and stage music. I was writing about these sounds and concepts in music: ice, ravens, bedrock, fire and forest fire. It was very much connected to my sub-Arctic life, and through that first part of my career, I used what was around me in my environment, in the sub-Arctic, in Yellowknife, to source the inspirations for that first core part of my output. And it’s interesting looking back on it, how I really deliberately avoided the human in that. And I think I know why right now, but ask me in 10 years and I’ll probably have changed my mind.
I remember learning about different music that people had written about Northern themes, and being not surprised or a little confused. I would often feel slighted in a way that there was these kinds of overarching tropes or stereotypes of “North-ness” that were put on people’s experiences from their own perspectives on concepts and ideas about the North, or an experience they had as a visitor. There’s just not a lot of people from extreme northern parts of the world who have traditionally done concert works. I didn’t have a lot of role models here, so what I did was quite a deliberate pushback to that, and the specificity that I chose my topics or the way I dove into these things, was at sometimes the cellular level of what happens in the sub-Arctic environment, or from a deeper lived perspective, or something over the whole season, as opposed to, say the “Lake Ice Symphony”. I wanted to drill deeper and explore all of the different parts of this really rich and subtle part of the world that is full of life and not barren. It is vast, but it also has so much richness to it that I think I wanted to be in homage to and honouring it too. But again, there was no human involved for the longest time. Even when I was recording sounds, I would bring a little field recorder with me everywhere. I had a hydrophone, which is like an underwater microphone, and I would listen to different things that way. Anytime there were human sounds, such as a boat motor, or a person walking, I’d need to wait. I was quite exclusive in that the human was not in my work, and I wanted to kinda make that spotlight shine. I think I was also probably a little afraid of engaging with humans because humans are complicated, messy and emotional, so I just avoided that for different reasons.
Now it’s different and it’s more the human in everything. I could definitely point to moving through my thirties and into my 40th year on the planet now. Now that I have kids and a long-term relationship, that side of my life is now what I see every day, up close and personal and literally inside my body. That has now changed my daily life and focus. It’s also influenced the work that I do now, involving these ideas of play, repetition. or the female body; those have been more of a focus. Interestingly, if I think about the stuff that I drew on, like the ideas of improvisation, variation or repetition of what I was looking at in natural things versus human or childlike things. There’s so much overlap, like something as simple as waves on a shore. It’s repetitive, but you can’t really tap your foot on it. There’s this kind of natural rhythm of things that I would see in the world and try to recreate in a musical way, whether it was through aleatoric toric ideas like chance ideas, rhythmic variation of feathered beams, lack of barlines or stems, or elements left up to the performer to choose. So I would have to give up some level of control or expectation.
I think about when kids learn things, they’re endlessly repeating them, but it’s never the same as they try different little things. Right now I’ve been listening to so much Taylor Swift lately, and they want to listen to it over and over again, but if I hear them singing it, they’re never singing it the same way twice. That idea of trying things each time differently is definitely carried through in my writing. You can literally see it on the page and in how I’ve approached the topics of childhood and the environment, for example.
Janna: That’s a beautiful evolution. The way the North is so intrinsically linked with your output, your sound and your inspiration, I think that’ll always be embedded in your work as an outsider listening in, and it comes through so clearly and so beautifully.
Living and Creating in the North
Janna: What are some of the gifts and challenges with creating in such a remote and possibly isolated region? You’ve made this your life’s work and you’re evidently thriving in it!
Carmen: It’s definitely a mixed blessing. There’s things about it that I love and wouldn’t give up, and to put those front and center, it would be that the community that is here. This would be a similar situation in many places that would call themselves remote or rural. It’s very a knit town in that people are ready to support each other at the drop of a hat. I know these places exist in bigger cities, and that’s just more neighborhood-centric or culturally diaspora centric, but my hometown of Yellowknife has been very open to new people coming here with new ideas, and just being excited about things that are happening and being ready for it. The fact that there isn’t a population of 3-4 million here to either compete with or try to find your way into these existing networks.
I had the blessing and the curse of not having many role models in my work here. Not that many other organizations are doing work like this, or even more permanent ensembles, and so it allows a kind of freedom to decide what you want to do, and the community will rise with you and support you. This has been my experience, and I know I’m not alone in that. There’s this beautiful sense of possibility, but on the other hand it can be a little lonely because you don’t have that many colleagues, or role models that follow you from the next generation. There’s also a hardness to the work, not in terms of brutalness, but just it’s harder work because sometimes you’re breaking ground, and breaking ground is hard work. Those two things exist when things are not as rooted or have as much of a history as southern Canada. This context of classical music is within this European tradition, which has several hundred years of history to draw on or several strong decades of work. If you think about how the Canadian shift of promoting Canadian content started in the 1950s, that didn’t exist here until say the last 20 years.
There’s so many incredible music-makers from here from so many backgrounds, I’d point listeners who were interested in this to a project called “Musicians of the Midnight Sun”. My dear uncle Pat Braden, who’s been a long time musician here and a big inspiration for me, has built this archive of musicians from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Many of them were Indigenous people, who were making music up here. They were playing in bands, writing original music, covers of Elvis Presley, country music, rock music, blues, fiddle, original music, and music in Indigenous languages. That has existed here in the kind of contemporary, commercialized, or urban way for decades but in terms of other classical output, we haven’t had that many years of it
Janna: A relatively new art form or approach to art.
Carmen: I’m excited to see where this goes, now that different technologies exist for people to be writing these kinds of music that touches on it. There’s this very contemporary field, but there’s also this real willingness to respect these traditions, these languages and these ideas. Ensembles like PIQSIQ, which is a throat singing duo originally from Yellowknife, takes this very deep-rooted cultural practice in a very 21st century way that is surprising every time they do something. To have people like that as my colleagues and creators, I find really exciting
Janna: Absolutely, and you’re creating those new pathways for those that follow, and that’s never an easy role but such a vital one
Carmen: There’s people that I’ve looked to who have been my trailblazers, and people who I’m probably working with right now who are doing the same, and I don’t even know it. It would be one of the biggest honours of my life if I can get to the stage of my career where I can look back, and see how I’ve been a part of the community here that’s widened the circle, so that more people are making the music they want and getting it heard.
The Art of Theatrical Collaboration
Janna: Now that you’ve just finished a tour, what’s next for you creatively?
Carmen: I have a couple of commissions I have to get done, and there has been challenges for me in different ways. I’ve been doing a lot of work for theatre lately, which has been very satisfying. This is music for theatre, either in a sound design capacity, like the sounds that are played through speakers in a play, whether it’s like an ambience or a specific sound cue.
Janna: Bringing the action to life!
Carmen: It helps create these worlds and tell stories. So much of what I’ve done has been sourced in words and text, especially lyrics for me. It’s been really cool to see these beautiful theatrical works, some of which are very intense in their themes, and play a part in bringing those to life. It’s very humbling, because in staged mediums, whether it’s a work for choir, solo violin, or chamber orchestra, the music is front and centre, whereas in theatre, or even film, your music is one of many parts, and you have to find where you fit in. And sometimes, I’ll create cool sounds, and the director will say no, and you have to let it go.
It’s been very educational for me too, as I have to have more patience and see how my music is going to serve the project’s artistic vision, instead of having blinders onto the other things, except the music. When it does work, it’s literal magic. When something in theatre works perfectly, it really does transport you to a different place for that moment.
Janna: It engages all the senses in so many ways.
Carmen: You’re always live in the room too, with these humans and their words literally shaking the air to your ears, and you see their bodies move and picture yourself in their space, because you are in their space, just hovering on the edge. That has an excitement that I think you don’t even find in music.
It’s a cool thing, like when you’re at a concert. You might know what’s going on. You might know the tune, whether it’s a classical tune or a song from a songwriter. It likely has something you can tap your foot to, or feel where it’s going. There are musicians on stage making sound, and you can look at them as they are doing different things. You can watch them move their instruments, and their music comes alive in your brain and in your ears.
But when you’re watching theatre, you’re in their space so heavily, and there’s so many things going on to guide you through it, whether it’s the lighting, the set or the blocking. Something as simple as their movement on stage, and how does that give power to a scene, or draw you draw your attention and have a literal physical impact on you? Does it draw you in and bring you to the front of your seat, or do you move back, because something’s just been so big that you have to give space? It’s this interactive thing that makes theatre happen.
What I’ve learned from music is that it’s not just bringing the atmosphere to life, but has a huge feature in storytelling. I’ve been grateful for the directors that I’ve worked with. Reneltta Arluk and Akpik Theatre in particular have given music a real role.
Janna: Something that always takes my breath away every time I experience it either as an audience member or as a performer is when the audience is just collectively completely silent, taking what they just experienced visually, aurally, and emotionally. That’s one of the best things in life as a performer, and the power that art has.
Audience Takeaways
Janna: So when folks listen to you and interact with your music, whether that be in a live performance, or at home in the intimacy of their space, what do you hope that they hear and take away from it?
Carmen: With both my newest album A Hard Light, and my music overall, I hope they’re hearing a curiosity and a confidence now, but also a real embrace of both the joy of all the beautiful things in life, and an embrace of the hardness, the sorrow, or the awkwardness of the life that sometimes happens in the same moment. I hope that realness, that connection to the every day is what they hear
Janna: That sounds like beautiful vulnerability and authenticity to me.
Carmen: I wouldn’t argue with that at all, but I would also couch it in the fact that we’ve put these feelings in real bangers, groovy tunes and sounds that are from old synthesizers or a big harmony moment. I’m also not a professionally-trained singer, although I’ve done a lot of choral singing. So I have this weird, kind of neutral sounding voice, that I would consider most of the time. And it’s taken me a long time to stop trying when I sing, and just let it be there. If people are hearing this voice on the album, that is one of the main through sounds of it, this kind of thread that goes through it – both my voice and Mark’s voice. Those have an authenticity for me, that I’ve worked hard to stop working so hard at getting. Get that moment of realness, being there, and being as clear as I can. That’s what we were aiming for, in the midst of all this beauty, sound, grit, groove and sometimes unexpectedness.
Check out the full conversation on Musing HERE
To learn more about Carmen and her work, check out the links below: