Sounds of the city

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This article was published 16/11/2024 (319 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If Winnipeg had to sing a song to mark 150 years since it officially became a city, what would it sound like?

Would there be a chorus? Would there even be words? Would it be a brand-new tune, a familiar one or a reimagined version of a melody we hum to keep ourselves warm while waiting at the bus stop?

These were among the questions local concert pianist Lisa Rumpel contemplated last year after the Winnipeg Arts Council began to hint at this year’s civic sesquicentennial marketing campaign, City of Song.

The answer Rumpel arrived at is an art-song event called Sing me a song you’ve (never) heard before, an evening program of local poetry by wordsmiths John Samson Fellows, Dennis Cooley, Lorri Neilsen Glenn and Heather Jean Jordan set to original compositions by Chester Duncan, Michael Matthews, Tawnie Olson, Chris Byman and Karen Sunabacka.

A one-night-only concert presented by the Winnipeg Arts Council and 101.5 UMFM, the evening will also feature collaborative performances from singer-songwriter Theresa Thor (Foxwell, Bicycle Face), soprano Dawn Bruch-Wiens and newly minted Governor General’s Award-winning poet Chimwemwe Undi, who will perform a reading accompanied by cellist Nathan Krahn.

Sunabacka, an associate professor of music at the University of Waterloo, has taken existing lyrics and text written by Weakerthans frontman Samson Fellows — Highway 1 West, Reconstruction Site, Elegy for Elisabet and Lord’s Prayer from Unit 6 — and reset them to original orchestrations for a song cycle called Too Far to Walk, which will be performed on piano by Rumpel and sung by tenor Aaron Hutton.

“What’s special about (art song) is the intimate relationship between piano and voice — how through the words and music together, they tell the story and the piano almost becomes a character itself,” Rumpel says, adding that hearing different iterations of the same poem through the lens of different composers adds depth of meaning to the original composition.

Rumpel, who was raised in Regina Beach, Sask., says she’s wanted to give those lyrics the art-song treatment with particular verve since listening to them in the freezing cold near Abinojii Mikanah.

“It needed to be a classical song. I needed to be able to play these words because it felt so real to me and so immediate that I wanted people wherever, not only from here, to be able to connect with these words in another way,” Rumpel says.

“So I approached John and he was really excited about it. He was saying that he sees the poem as its own entity outside of being a song. That’s kind of the principle for art-song as well, so when he said that, I was like, well, this is perfect.”

Samson Fellows suggested Rumpel reach out to Sunabacka, a Winnipeg-raised musician he’s known since the early 1980s when they both belonged to the Winnipeg Mennonite Children’s Choir and performed in musicals together.

“In Scrooge, John was Tiny Tim and I was his sister nearest in age, I can’t remember her name — I think it was Kathy?” says Sunabacka with a laugh.

Sunabacka approached the lyrics with an open mind, listening to the original compositions while “watching the words” to appreciate Samson Fellows’ poetic emphasis.

While jotting down her own musical sketches, she stopped listening to the original compositions, allowing fresh interpretations to develop.

Unencumbered by expectation, Sunabacka thought of her ideas of Winnipeg — swirling winds, open air, a frayed rope tying down a leaky boat to the roof of a car on a dark road, and it’s snowing.

“A lot of my work is based in the Prairies around Winnipeg and in the cold winters. I think that people just see flatness and not beauty, but I see so much beauty,” says Sunabacka, who usually collaborates with her mother as lyricist.

The musician, who lives in Kitchener-Waterloo but maintains her 204 area code, says it’s difficult to have that experience on the tree-lined roads of northern Ontario.

“I feel quite claustrophobic often. And as beautiful as the Rocky Mountains are, I always still feel like you miss the beauty of the sky because you can’t see the full horizon all the way around. So I think what’s depicted more than anything else is the space of the Prairies, the crispness of the snow. When it’s 30 below, there’s a sound that comes with it,” she says.

“I once played my music in Texas at a university and there was a Manitoban in the class, and when he listened, he said, ‘I can hear the Prairies in your music. So that made me think, ‘OK, good. Other people can hear it too.’”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com