Cree composer Andrew Balfour, seen at the Forks in Winnipeg, is the founder and artistic director of the Winnipeg based 14-member vocal group Camerata Nova.There are things you expect to hear from a classical-music composer like Andrew Balfour: that he grew up singing in a church choir. That he began playing an instrument at an early age – in his case, trumpet. That while other kids were grinding out guitar licks, miming Bruce Springsteen or David Bowie , Balfour was air-conducting Beethoven.
It’s a far cry from Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus and the rest of the Western canon that dominates choral programming in North America. And for Canadian choir directors, that may be what’s most exciting about Balfour’s work. He’s drawing on his First Nations identity to nudge the Canadian classical-music scene out of its stodgy Eurocentric traditions.
But as Balfour grew older, he’d struggled, and become conflicted and confused about his identity. Attention-deficit disorder made focusing on schoolwork difficult. He dropped out of Brandon University after a year, plagued by growing pangs of isolation. His parents had relocated to British Columbia, and the move intensified feelings of abandonment that gnawed at him when he thought about his Cree background and his separation from his birth mother.
The answer didn’t come that night, but he recalls a profound sense of feeling protected, as if something was watching over him and the other men attending the lodge. A message of sorts arrived about a week later, when he had what he describes as a vision: It felt like a near-death experience, he says, in which he was visited by people he’d known throughout his life, who spoke to him.
David Fallis, interim director of the Mendelssohn Choir, says he became interested in him after hearing Toronto’s Trinity St.-Paul’s United Church choir perform. When he began researching the composer’s work, he marvelled at Balfour’s range: “He has an Indigenous perspective on many things, but he is so knowledgeable about many styles of choral music. He might use Cree text in one piece, but then another piece that I was drawn to was written in Scots Gaelic.
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