Stir Q&A: New Vancouver Chamber Choir composer-in-residence Laura Hawley on choral music, community, and collaboration
The ensemble will perform Hawley’s The Arrow and the Song at its epic season-opening concert
Laura Hawley.
Vancouver Chamber Choir presents Figure humaine on September 27 at 7:30 pm at Pacific Spirit United Church
WHEN VANCOUVER CHAMBER Choir launches its 2024-25 season on September 27, it will not only execute Johannes Brahms’s masterpiece Fünf Gesänge, Op. 104 and Francis Poulenc’s epic Figure humaine, but the ensemble will also introduce audiences to its new composer-in-residence, Laura Hawley. The group will perform her The Arrow and the Song.
Hawley has a long list of professional titles. An associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, she is artistic director of Edmonton’s Da Camera Singers, conductor of Edmonton’s ChandraTala, founding conductor of the Diocese of Edmonton Children’s Choir, founding artistic director of Hypatia’s Voice Women’s Choir of Ottawa, and former collaborative pianist and singer with the Canadian Chamber Choir. She teaches piano, theory, harmony, and history out of her studio, and has a master’s degree in music theory from University of Ottawa. The WholeNote has described her music as conjuring “the forces of nature and its effect on the human spirit”.
Stir connected with the Edmonton-based Hawley in advance of VCC’s upcoming performance to learn more about her background and her plans with the choir.
Your bio mentions that you were surrounded by choral music in your childhood. Can you tell us more about how music entered your life?
I have been immersed in choral music my whole life. Music first entered my life when I was in the womb. My mother was pursuing her undergraduate degree in music education when pregnant with me and completed it with me as a baby, which blows my mind that she was able to do all of that! She is a singer, conductor, and educator, so there was never a time in my life when there was not music in the house. We spent a lot of time singing together, and eventually I and my siblings all sang in her choir.
What is it about choral music that appeals to you?
As I see it, choral art has a potency of expressive power unparalleled in the field of music. It possesses a synergistic combination of collective human intention—what the performers are expressing, coordination of physical bodies (the singers, whose heart rates and brain waves sync up, the audience members, who join in this syncing and whose ear drums and brains convert sound waves to music), [and] emphasis on blend that prioritizes the collective over the individual. And then there is the fact that the music is expressed through the most infinitely flexible of all musical instruments, the human voice—in fact, through multiple voices combined. Choral music’s resulting capacity to embody concepts of timbre and intonation that align in perfect resonance with the natural laws of physics—to say that choral singing seems to have a magical expressive capacity and fosters community only touches the surface of the art form’s power.
On a deeper level, that expressive power and sense of community arise because choral art engages a high level of human evolution in something that we have observed in the world of quantum mechanics, mindfulness practice, and prayer: human thought affects change. In our fast-paced modern world fraught with existential and ontological anxieties, where our wonderfully yet challengingly comfortable lifestyles create spaces for increasingly complex hopes and dreams informed by conflicting influences, it is more crucial than ever for people to access this kind of high-self engagement and communal exploration of our metaphysical potential. At the same time, music is and has always been a mirror of its time. Music evolves and changes because, as composers seek to express things that have not been expressed before, they need to create music that has never been created before, and thus new sonorities are born. As far as I’m concerned, there will never come a time in my life where I won’t find all of this incredibly fascinating, important, valuable for human experience/evolution, and a powerful agent of beauty, health, positivity, and change in ourselves and in the world.
What are your plans for Vancouver Chamber Choir as its composer-in-residence?
As this year’s composer-in-residence with the VCC, they will be performing a large number of my works throughout the season, and then I will write something new for them for the spring 2025 concert. This is an exciting and rich collaboration to have with a choir, to have the singers really get to know my music throughout a season and perhaps get a deeper understanding of my music. The choir has performed some of my works before, and in recent years supported the completion of a major work of mine called Tapestry, and Kari’s questions and feedback about the piece were invaluable in shaping the final version of the score. These kinds of engaged, collaborative relationships are inspiring and really help the music take its best possible shape.
It’s truly humbling to know that so many excellent artists will be dedicated to and engaged with my music, and will be sharing it with the choral connoisseurs in their audience as a focal point for the season, and I feel truly grateful to have my contribution to the art form valued and brought to life in this way. 
Related Articles
