‘A DEEPLY SPIRITUAL’ CONNECTION
Odawa composer creates piece to honour mother-child bond for this year’s Strata Festival
The first song Barbara Croall ever heard was an old, Ojibwe lullaby. Her mom would sing it to her when she went to sleep or when she was sick. That same song, passed down from her grandfather, had comforted her mother when she was taken away from her family and sent to residential school.
“He told her that it would remind her of back home on the rez with her family,” Croall said in an email interview.
“She remembers singing it at night in her small cot in the basement of the residential school dormitory, where she slept among rows of cribs of babies who were also taken by force from their birth mothers even while being breastfed.”
Hearing her mother sing created a spark in Croall. She constantly hummed and sang to herself as a small child and was only interested in toys that made sounds.
At around four, she received a pipigwan (Anishinaabe wooden flute) and dewe’igan (drum).
She also experimented with a babysitter’s piano, quickly learning to play by ear and making her own songs. By age 10, she declared she wanted to become a composer.
“(My family) seemed to think that was a bit weird, but they never discouraged me either,” she said.
Croall never wavered from her musical path, working part-time to pay for her music lessons and eventually training at the University of Toronto, the Glenn Gould School and graduate studies at Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany.
In her work, Croall has taken the collective sounds of her life
— which also include natural sounds, powwow drums, her classical training and songs heard on a transistor radio — and created modern pieces that are both personal and sophisticated.
Croall is the guest composer for this year’s Strata Festival, an annual Saskatoon event that showcases contemporary composers. She created a new chamber work called Waasa (Far Away) for the event.
She first started getting ideas for the piece when she was playing the pipigwan and thinking about how children, including her mother and her mother’s siblings, were taken from their homes and forced into residential schools. The piece focuses on the importance of the mother-child connection.
“So many children and their birth mothers — all over the world — have suffered so much due to circumstances of warfare, environmental circumstances, various corrupt and destructive political regimes and belief systems, and so forth. That bond between the mother and child is a deeply spiritual and psychic one. Physical distances and geographical separations are often overcome through that invisible, but emotional bond,” she said.
Croall said the piece doesn’t offer a happy ending, but instead allows the listener to experience some of the visceral emotion of that journey and hopefully transfer a feeling of empathy.
Improvisation is a key component in her works, allowing musicians the breathing room to showcase their own voice.
Because so much interaction and attentiveness is required of the performers, ego never comes into play. Often this means her pieces rely on oral/aural transmission rather than written notation.
“The conductor who helps to guide timings and rhythms also gets to be more flexible, and to allow certain performers to take the lead, too,” said Croall.
Croall last performed in Saskatoon as part of North of the 49th, a show by the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. The show, which also featured throat singer Tanya Tagaq, took place the same day as the shooting in La Loche.
She spontaneously decided to open with a song of her own that she’s often sung at home in Manitoulin Island.
“It was really hard to sing with the emotions I was feeling at that time,” she said. “Somehow I was able to cope and get through the song then continue performing in my own piece by just pouring my heart out into it.”