For Cris Derksen, music is a conversation – a tool that brings attention to issues of the present and reaches back to the past. Whether it’s an Indigenous drum circle or Mozart, performances are an opportunity to comment and transform, to show that music should not be ossified, regardless of tradition or location.
A composer-performer of Cree and Mennonite descent, Derksen cut her teeth on tour with Tanya Tagaq in 2006, crafting a style that foregrounds Indigenous practices of accountability, continuity, community, and innovation through drum circles, melodic beats, and Western instruments. Since then, she has carved a career that’s garnered a Juno nomination and commissions from numerous Canadian orchestras, including the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain, and the Toronto Symphony. As founder of Indigenous Classical Gathering at the Banff Centre for the Arts, work as chairwoman of the Equity Committee for Orchestras Canada, and Calgary Phil’s Artistic Advisor, her work speaks to her dedication to showcasing how diverse Canada’s classical music scene truly is and can be.
Derksen is currently Composer-in-Residence at the 2025 Newport Classical Music Festival, where the Galvin Cello Quartet will premiere her latest commission, First Light, on July 13. The work is inspired by the Mashpee Wampanoag – who have lived across Massachusetts and Rhode Island for more than 15,000 years – and a runaway ad for a young boy named John Anthony. In the lead up to opening night, we sat down with Derksen to learn more about her practice and the sources of inspiration behind the work.
Your first instrument was piano before shifting to cello. What inspired the change, and why do you think the cello has been so effective in communicating your artistic ideas?
When I was three I told my mom I wanted to play the flute, and my mom was like – how does she even know what a flute is? She did some research and found out piano is a great beginner instrument for reading sheet music. She gave up her car fund and got me a beautiful upright piano when I was five. The cello was more of an addition. When I was ten in Edmonton, Alberta, a prairie city, there was an accessible and affordable string program in the public schools. I came home with a piece of paper saying, “does your son or daughter want to play violin, viola, cello or bass…”
I wanted to play the bass but by this time my mom had gotten a car that was too small for a double bass. She said to take the next biggest thing, which led me to the cello. It was such a beautiful happenstance as it led my life in this direction. The cello is so relatable; it’s in the same range as the human voice and has a wide range – we can do five octaves and it has such a warm and emotive tone. In my solo work, I use electronics on my instrument to further the palette of the instrument. When I set out, I wanted to make the cello and the music I made relatable. I wanted to take the cello out of the concert hall to the street level. Now I bring the street level to the concert hall and hopefully even the field.
Many of your compositions have descriptive titles, ranging from emotions to actions to people. How does this help enact your vision of how music can and should express multiple aspects of our lives?
The concept of the piece is really where I start: I need to know the journey I want to take. I think of composing as sonic storytelling. Being a composer is so interesting because I get to shed a light on whatever I think we as humans need to look at or think about. As an Indigenous composer I always come to my work with my Indigenous lens, my perspective. The last symphonic piece I wrote is called Controlled Burn, about the wildfires. There was a pre-colonial practice Indigenous folks did that involved the use of fires in so many ways, and in the springtime, they would have controlled burns in areas of the forest that needed the dry underbrush removed. This practice was banned in Canada seven years after “Canada” was made “Canada” because settlers did not understand how we kept the land healthy. They saw the fires as threatening the trees, and to them trees are money – our land and our resources are money.
With First Light there were so many things I could grab onto. When researching I found the Wampanoag are a Native American people known as the “People of the First Light” who have lived in Rhode Island for thousands of years. What a beautiful concept: the people of the first light. Also, the directive of this piece was it had to be about Rhode Island. Learning about Rhode Island was quite a trip – so many harsh realities of colonization, war over land, and racism. What really shone through was how racism takes control over how humans treat other humans. The idea that one race of humans can own another race of humans because they deem themselves “better than” is frankly appalling, and also hard to watch when I am looking at the United States in 2025.
Rhode Island’s history is so entangled with slavery of both Africans and Native Americans. Rhode Island founder Roger Williams wrote to his friend about captured Pequot people: “another miserable drove of Adam’s degenerate seed, and our brethren by nature.” This idea that a human is a “degenerate seed” is so outrageous. But it also makes me think of the beautiful quote by Dinos Christianopoulos: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
I was also thinking about who is up at the first light. It’s the farmers, the workers, and back then, the slaves. I find the light at dawn so peaceful, but I also am not forced to be awake. So when thinking about all of these things, I found a very small ad in a 1771 paper about a runaway slave boy named John Anthony, and it offered a $3.00 reward for anyone who sees the “indented [sic] Indian Boy, pretty light colour’d.” It got me to this place of: what if this piece was a reimagining of history where John Anthony managed to escape his life as a slave and create his own life reclaiming his own light?
How did you weave together the stories of John Anthony and the Mashpee Wampanoag in First Light?
Ya, for this piece, I really only found that one ad on John Anthony that got my brain thinking. This is a historical fiction piece about hope in adversity. Hope in difficult times. The US is certainly going through difficult times at the moment. Race is again playing a huge part of who gets to lead a free life. Mashpee Wampanoag are the people of the first light. Let’s reclaim John Anthony’s light.
First Light is a work for four cellos. What was it like to write for this instrumentation versus a “traditional” quartet, and do we need more cello quartets??
As a cellist I was thrilled. In my solo work, I loop so I get many cellos at once. I mean, for sure there are limitations, but as I mentioned earlier, cellos have a five octave range so, I’m definitely using all five octaves. The Galvin Quartet are so virtuosic! So that was also fun writing things above my own capability as a professional cellist. I was a bit harsh and worked in keys I usually don’t work in – it just means more shifting for the players, but I have full confidence they can pull this off. For sure, more cello quartets!
For Indigenous composers and composers of color in classical music spaces, there can be an expectation of representing the whole community. Do you feel that pressure/responsibility and how does it inform your practice, if at all?
I don’t feel like I am representing all Indigenous classical composers, I feel like I am representing myself as an Indigenous artist. We are all so different. What I do is opening doors for more Indigenous classical musicians. I run a program at the Banff Center for the Arts called the Indigenous Classical Music Residency. I started it in 2019, and there have been four iterations of it. It’s morphed a bit, and it is now a three week professional development program for Indigenous classical musicians who are university students through to professionals. I realized I knew so many Indigenous musicians across Turtle Island in the pop/country/folk genre, but I didn’t really know a lot of classical musicians, yet I would hear about them. So at first, it really was a relationship building network. It can be very lonely as an “other” in classical music, and I wanted to build a network where we could lean on each other. And it’s turned into a really beautiful network of sharing and support.
It also really opened the eyes of the classical music world in Canada. Showing that there are professional Indigenous classical musicians and if you would like to tell an Indigenous story, we are here to help you tell it. Nothing about us without us. I also work a lot within the symphony world, from the Artistic Advisor for the Calgary Symphony to the work I do as a composer across the land, and as a soloist in symphonies. I keep on saying “How do we make classical music look and sound more like Canada?” Same can be said in the States….”How do we make classical music look and sound more like the United States?”
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org.