How Music Can Repair the Past

An Interview with Ian Cusson

Ian Cusson, Worship and Arts Director for Grace Toronto Church, is also the current Composer-in-Residence for the Canadian Opera Company. His soprano aria, “Dodo Mon Tout Petit,” recently premiered in Ottawa to enthusiastic critical praise. Jen Michel, Imprint’s Lead Editor, caught up with Ian recently to talk about his work.

I’M CURIOUS ABOUT YOUR FORMATION AS A COMPOSER. CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PROFESSIONAL JOURNEY AND WHETHER YOU CONSIDER YOUR WORK AS A COMPOSER A “CALLING”?

Since I was a child, I’ve been drawn to making things—writing stories, drawing. I suppose the pull towards composing was the ideal fit for me—a means of expressing ideas, thoughts and feelings where words or images are inadequate.

I see composing as a calling in the way I see any activity as a calling. God has put me in this moment, with these particular opportunities, and this particular set of skills. But I don’t see the work I do as a composer as a higher form of calling than any other. In different seasons of my life, God has called me to work in a range of fields, including a car-part factory, a fast food restaurant, and as a photocopy clerk. All of these are wonderful and worthy callings, and I’m thankful for each of them as examples of God’s provision and faithfulness in my life.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT “DODO MON TOUT PETIT”. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE PIECE AS WORK OF REPARATION, AS SOME HAVE CALLED IT?

The commissioning of this piece is a unique one in the art music world. I was asked to write music for a scene from the historic Canadian opera, Louis Riel. The original music for the scene was taken in part from a sacred song of the Nisga’a people, an Indigenous community on the West Coast. This music was used in the opera with neither permission nor compensation.

Canada and other nations have a well-known history of this kind of “use” of culturally important materials, but rarely is the legally and morally problematic nature of this borrowing acknowledged. There is no precedent for formally returning musical materials as in the case of this work. For these reasons, it is a significant act of reparation that I hope will become a model, helping us as a nation to question how we’ve used and taken materials from Indigenous peoples, and what kind of tangible actions can be taken to right these wrongs.

HOW DOES A PIECE LIKE “DODO MON TOUT PETIT” COME TO BE? WHAT RHYTHMS OF WORK PROVE HELPFUL FOR YOUR COMPOSING?

I am a composer who is drawn to story and text, and much of the work I create follows some kind of narrative shape, or directly sets text to music. For this piece, I spent time reading the text, thinking about it, putting it away and coming back to it, before writing any music. I thought about fragments of musical material—musical gestures—and these became the entry points into the composition.

It is very important to know how I want an audience to feel the moment a piece finishes. Establishing the emotional arrival point gave me the roadmap for the piece, and I wrote and orchestrated it fairly quickly over a couple of weeks this summer.

YOU’RE A MÉTIS COMPOSER, AND YOU’RE ALSO A CHRISTIAN. HOW DOES YOUR INDIGENOUS IDENTITY AS WELL AS YOUR RELIGIOUS FAITH INFORM WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH THROUGH YOUR MUSIC?

Being Métis—a distinct people group who live at the intersection of First Nations and settler peoples—means that most of the time I feel like I am living between two worlds. Not First Nations, not White. This has the potential of being a place of instability, a “neither/nor.” But I see this hybridity as an opportunity to move between worlds and communities.

In some ways it is an embodied expression that parallels the Christian experience. Christians live in the “now and not yet”—between the temporality of this life and the eternity of the life to come.

And just as I can’t separate my being Métis from my work, I can’t separate my being a Christian from my work. The two are in all that I do and make. In my compositions, I aim for unfiltered truth-telling, an examination of the human condition that doesn’t settle for cheap categories or reductionistic caricatures. I hope to show in and through my work the incredible beauty and dignity that all humans have by being made in the image of God; I hope to show in all of my work the incredible grace shown to us in Christ.

Text: Jen Michel