'When they sing, they give the song to everyone'

Tonight, the Sliammon people will sing their ancestors' song for the first time

Daphne Bramham

Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

 POWELL RIVER - It's called simply Social Song (d). There are no known words. If they existed, they are long gone. Even the melody had been forgotten by the Sliammon people.

But tonight, they will sing their first nations ancestors' song for the first time in living memory at the opening gala of the International Choral Kathaumixw festival.

They will sing for an audience of 3,000, including 1,200 choral singers who have gathered here from around the world for the week-long competition.

And they are on the bill for the premiere of Tobin Stokes's 30-minute work called The Perfect Vase that also features the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, Swedish soprano Gunnel Sjoberg, Australian mezzo soprano Sally Anne Russell, Canadian tenor Colin Balzer and Powell River-born baritone Sam Marcaccini.

When the Sliammon Nun Kum Dancers and drummer Eric Blaney take the stage, it will also be the first time Sliammon people have performed at the 20-year-old festival that bears the Coast Salish name Kathaumixw (pronounced ka-thou-mew)-- "a gathering of different people."

They will sing Social Song (d) unaccompanied before the seventh movement of The Perfect Vase. Up until a few days ago, when rehearsal began, Stokes's plan had been for the Sliammon to sing with the orchestra. But they refused. It's not the way it's done.

So, Stokes adjusted.

"You have to approach it tenderly and politely, because their music is sung differently than ours and it's treated differently," Stokes explained. "When they sing, they give the song to everyone."

Once the Sliammon have finished the song, phrases of it will then run through the movement called Re-Creation that includes a ballet component. The eighth and final movement is Stokes' arrangement of the Sliammon's Prayer Song.

Stokes's work uses the perfect vase as a metaphor to explore the emotional stages people go through when they discover that what they believed perfect is lost. Stokes says it could be your culture, your spouse or even a strongly held ideal.

But the piece ends in hope with something new being created from the shards of the past.

Like the festival itself, the commissioning of Stokes to write the piece, including the revival of Social Song (d), is the work of artistic director Don James, who is intent on using the festival to bring the Sliammon first nation and town folk closer together.

It began when James convinced the other organizers that the festival's name should include the word Kathaumixw. He carried on with the idea when he went with Stokes to meet with Sliammon elders and ask for a song that they could adapt for choirs. The elders dug out a tape of the Prayer Song, which had been given to the Sliammon by Squamish Chief Dan George. The singer on the tape was his son, Leonard George.

First nations people believe that songs belong to individuals or families and only those individuals or families can sing them. But, like other possessions, songs can be given away (along with the singing rights), or they can be used with permission by others.

The elders gave permission to Stokes -- who was raised here -- to adapt their prayer song.

But when James and Stokes went back to them recently looking for another Sliammon song to incorporate into the work Stokes was writing for the 20th anniversary of Kathaumixw, the elders said they didn't know any others.

Then someone remembered a book that included Indian songs. Someone else at Sliammon had a copy of a copy and they gave that to James and Stokes. They told the pair that they could use one of the songs if they'd teach them the others as well.

That book is Music of the Indians of British Columbia, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1943. It was written by ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore who in September 1926 went to Chilliwack, where native people from all over the province worked each fall picking hops. In the evenings after the work was done, Densmore used the Red Cross shack to record them singing their songs.

One of the people she recorded was Bob George, who sang 13 songs for her, including two social songs that Densmore describes as "very old, the singer having learned them from his father."

The two -- Social Song (c) and Social Song (d) -- were traditionally sung after a person had been given a gift. In response, the receiver "sang and 'danced' standing still and turning the body from side to side with hands upraised, palms forward on a level with the elbows."

And that is how it will be first sung tonight.

But in this twisted tale of lost and found, there is another player. His name is Steven Price, a Victoria high school teacher, who found the book in the Brooks secondary school library during the year he was teaching in Powell River. The school was being rebuilt and the book was unwanted so Price took it back with him to Victoria.

It is from that original book -- long out of print -- that more copies have been made. It's from those copies that a tape was made and it's from that tape, with a single voice singing the melody, that Social Song (d) has been returned to its people.

Having given a song away, it was preserved. And having regained it, the Sliammon will give it away again tonight. And so the centuries-old tradition continues. What is precious is saved by giving it away.

dbramham@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Page Update: October 05, 2004