The first concert in Soundstreams’ Encounters series took place at Hugh’s Room on Tuesday evening.  It was a presentation of Andrew Balfour’s L’Empire Étrange which is a sort of meditation on the idea of Louis Riel.  It begins “Comment chanter Louis Riel, Do you know me?” and that’s the only time his name appears so it’s not, in any way, a narrative of Riel’s life and it’s not hagiographic.

At intervals between the musical numbers Andrew took up the microphone and said a few words about what he was trying to do with the piece and this is important because Riel is such a polarising figure in Canada; traditionally a “traitor” to Anglophones but a “hero” to Francophones and certainly to Métis.  And, as I think we settler folk tend to lump Indigenous people together  (those “numerous other First Nations, Métis and Inuit” who get a mention in every land acknowledgement.) we tend to assume, I think, a common Indigenous view of Riel.  Andrew is Cree and he sees it a little differently!

There was tension between the Plains Cree and the Métis in the 1880s.  The Métis were farming traditional Cree hunting grounds and had played a role in the collapse of the buffalo population that had reduced the Cree to near starvation.  The Cree leader, Poundmaker, stayed out of the 1884 rebellion.  Not that that kept him out of a Canadian jail.  This is a perspective that hasn’t featured much in anything I’ve read about Riel; still less in any of the musical works based on the “Riel legend” but it’s pervasive in L’Empire Étrange.  This is not say that the work is “anti Riel”; still less an apologetic for the Canadian government..  It’s not at all but it does have a kind of indirectness except where John A. McDonald is concerned.  No mercy for him.

It’s scored for piano, percussion, violin and cello plus a lead vocalist and a chorus of twelve.  It’s episodic with each movement typically using different forces.  Structurally, it starts with questions; “Comment chanter Louis Riel” and “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land” and “visionary” Riel (“Je m’appelle David”) is sort of equated with Wesakechak; the Trickster.  A series of short, rather beautiful pieces deal with Vision, Peace and Death before John A. McDonald rudely interrupts with a slurred drunken version of The Maple Leaf Forever and an extract from one of his genocidal speeches.  Then we come to Riel’s end and there’s a reference, conscious or not, to the Cree warriors who died on the gallows too.  Not every young man followed Poundmaker’s wish to avoid the conflict.  There’s an echo of a Cree death song in “May Death find you with the creator in mind” before it finishes with a setting of Notre Père (en français).

I’m conscious that I haven’t written much about the music and that’s because I got so caught up in the text and the ideas behind it.  I would love to hear it again and give the music the attention it deserves.  I just remember it as fitting well with the words and setting the mood.  I hope there’s a recording.  It was certainly very beautifully played and sung.  I guess I got pulled into the vortex that Andrew describes thusly:

Riel pulled many people into a vortex… Empire Étrange is my musical vortex… and an abstract soundscape of conflict and war wounds.