Symphony on Native Land

Cris Derksen with the Orchestre Métropolitain

It’s no new thing for orchestral soloists to send a message through their wardrobes. Piano virtuosa Yuja Wang, with her haute club wear, builds a subtle bridge for young uninitiates to feel at home in the concert hall. Wang’s piano colleague Khatia Buniatishvili, with her busty gowns, has cemented legendary status among frustrated bachelors the world over, whose ecstatic YouTube comments praise her “lithe” and “supple” interpretations of Rachmaninov. The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who sometimes strides onstage in blue-sequined jackets and wears fussy hairdos that have led some jokesters to dub him “MFT” (Maestro Frosted Tips), makes a convincing case that even on the stodgy orchestral stage, clothing can express individual personalities.

What are we to make, then, of the wardrobe choices of electric cellist Cris Derksen, who last week walked on with the professionally concert-black-clad Orchestre Métropolitain de Montreal and (for him) discreetly black-suited Nézet-Séguin, wearing a flat-brimmed black baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Deadly Enough,” aviator-style glasses, a black t-shirt, an animal-skin vest, white pants, and no shoes?

Derksen, an Albertan self-described “indigenous cellist and composer” of Cree and Mennonite ancestry, was joining the orchestra for its American minitour of Philadelphia, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, to perform an original composition called Controlled Burn. A cinematic but musically lightweight piece, Controlled Burn celebrates the pre-colonial American practice of setting a controllable fire on a parcel of land to prevent larger destructive fires. While chock-full of video game music cliches, the piece cleverly uses extended string techniques to evoke the crackling of burning wood and the cries of seagulls. It would have seemed less slight if not programmed alongside two titanic feats of orchestral composition—Sibelius’s Second Symphony and Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto.

Before Derksen shuffled barefoot onto the stage, Nézet-Séguin mounted the podium to introduce her. Explaining the imagery in the piece, he offered the audience a moral: “In our modern world, we see fires only as forces of destruction when we could see them as a force for hope.” Admonishing contemporary Canada and the U.S. for not performing controlled burns, an obsequious Nézet-Séguin implored his audience to heed indigenous wisdom: “We must learn to respect Mother Nature and listen to our First Nations brothers and sisters.” In spite of the factual inaccuracies implied by Nézet-Séguin’s fawning preamble (controlled burns are widely employed in contemporary American forestry if not often enough in California, and were common in Europe prior to American contact), his words served perfectly to introduce the dressed-down cellist who followed him onto the stage.

Before Derksen even acknowledged the audience, her wardrobe had already spoken volumes by totally inverting the foundation of mutual respect underlying any ensemble tour. When one first goes to a friend’s house for dinner, one keeps any stipulations on the meal to be served to a minimum, brings a gift, and offers to wash the dishes. Likewise, when one goes to a foreign city to meet a new audience for the first time, one programs repertoire the audience is likely to enjoy, shows gratitude for the host city’s hospitality, and dresses elegantly and conservatively. In keeping with tradition and decency, the Orchestre Metropolitain (and even Nézet-Séguin) came onstage looking their best. Derksen came in looking like she was arriving for a bar date for which she would be paid in Miller Lite.

Derksen’s message could not have been clearer, and it was the same message that Nézet-Séguin communicated in his guilt-ridden preamble: You—our audience, the Orchestre Metropolitain, classical music in general—are invaders. No matter what I play, what I say, or what I wear, you are fortunate I’ve allowed you to listen in, fortunate that I’ve even allowed you to enter this hall. You are on native land.

This left the audience to contemplate the depth of irony that message entailed. The irony that it is the very openness and curiosity inherent in the Western artistic tradition that has made it possible for Derksen to find a voice in music—a voice she now uses to insult that tradition to its face.