Out of the privileged bubble

Genevieve Cimon, director of "Music Education and Community Engagement", has been with the National Arts Centre for the last 15 years; she spoke to a gathering of CFUW women in Ottawa last week. Her boss Peter Herrndorf (President and CEO of the NAC and a Companion of the Order of Canada) has "put the national back into the National Arts Centre", she said. He it was who encouraged the National Arts Centre Orchestra to tour the remoter parts of Canada for the sake of educational projects such as its Music Alive Program in the prairies, Nunavut and (most recently) the Atlantic provinces.

What follows in this blogpost is a report of what Ms. Cimon told us and not necessarily an expression of my own views. I'll leave the value-judgements to you.

The touring NACO's initial mandate was to introduce children of elementary school age to classical music and modern composers, preparing teaching guides for the local teachers. This program has recently undergone some "rethinking", so as to pay more attention to the music of regional artists. Ms Cimon said that the experience for the NACO itself has been "transformative" --- a fundamental shift in the way that they see themselves. Previously, she told us, they had been living "in a privileged bubble". The role of a professional Canadian musician today, she said, is "to be an agent of change". The NACO has been working with youth at risk, which means first creating trust, recognising and showing one's own vulnerability and nurturing a common humanity. She compared it to the Sistema programs* in S. America and elsewhere.

In the past, "white composers" had been commissioned to write, for example, an "Inuit piece". Such an endeavour is no longer deemed respectful, condescending rather, and in any case, said Ms. Cimon, the northern audience's reaction to such compositions is "bad". It is traditional in such communities --- more appropriate, she implied --- to play one's own instruments and pass on traditional dances from generation to generation, some of which were taught by visiting whalers in the old days.

I felt that this rather contradicted what she was trying to say. She also mentioned the fiddlers of northern Manitoba who surely acquired their skills from Europeans, as well.

Alexander Shelley (from the UK) made a determined effort to learn about Canada when he took the post of the NACO's music director, and that includes the latest thinking about Canada's indigenous peoples: "reparation comes before reconciliation." Last year, the NACO and their associates created an experimental, collaborative, multimedia show called Life Reflected, about the life and thoughts of four Canadian women, one of whom was from the First Nations. Furthermore, through the Rita Joe Song Project, youth from the reserves and northern communities have composed their own responses to Rita Joe's poem about a Mi'kmaq girl in a residential school, "I lost my talk" ...

"We are building resilient communities by means of the arts!" exclaimed Ms. Cimon.

250 NAC events, this year (Canada's 150th) have put the spotlight on indigenous artists and often on female artists.

Not all of Ms. Cimon's talk was about outreach to Canada's rural or native communitites. She reminded us that, each summer at the NAC in Ottawa, there is an international Young Artists' program: a summer school for promising artists which, apparently, is becoming increasingly collaborative rather than competitive, the participants learning empathy and compassion. She says that this is a generation that wants to volunteer.

The new wing of the NAC is "Ottawa's new living room". More free programming is being planned, such as yoga and meditation sessions, on Mondays!


* This, I feel, is a misleading comparison, because as I understand it, El Sistema's mission is to bring classical music to the slums, a guiding principle being "the ambitious pursuit of musical excellence", rather than encouraging children to explore the familiar music of their own communities.