Vetta Chamber Music and Rosemary Georgeson source stories from the ocean in Land and Sea
The musical organization remounts Seasons of the Sea, which features words by Indigenous artist and storyteller Georgeson, in a mixed program
Rosemary Georgeson. Photo by David Cooper
Vetta Chamber Music presents Land and Sea on November 15 at 2 pm at West Point Grey United Church, November 16 at 7:30 pm at West Vancouver United Church, November 17 at 2 pm at Pyatt Hall, and November 18 at 2:30 pm at ArtSpring on Salt Spring Island
FOR AS LONG as she can remember, Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene artist Rosemary Georgeson has had a relationship with the ocean. Her mother lived on her dad’s fish-packing boat until she was eight months pregnant with her, when they got caught in a storm and decided to move to land.
Georgeson has lived on Galiano Island since she was a year old and grew up in the commercial fishing industry. So when Vetta Chamber Music artistic director Joan Blackman approached her to write text that would accompany composer Jeffrey Ryan’s Seasons of the Sea, a West Coast musical response to Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the words flowed naturally.
“I spent the first half of my life working on or around the water so anything to do with seasons was a huge part of defining my life,” Georgeson tells Stir. In Coast Salish traditions, the seasons have different names, she explains. Winter is “cold Earth time”; spring is “rebirth, new comes back”, summer is “Earth heating up time”, and fall is “Earth cooling down time”.
“My father, grandfather, grandmother, and all the rest of my Georgeson family are people of the water,” she says. “Being aware of all the seasons and all that they bring has always been our way of life. [When writing the text,] my thoughts went to my father and grandparents and all that they taught us growing up on the water and on the boats, to stay safe and to be able to live a good life out on the water. As Joan and Jeffrey were speaking with me I was hearing my father’s voice and how to stay safe through our seasons on the water.”
Seasons of the Sea will be remounted when Vetta Chamber Music presents its second concert of the 2024-25 season, Land and Sea. Making up the other half of the program are chamber works related to the Earth and the stories it inspires: Jean Sibelius’s Impromptu for Strings; Ernest Bloch’s Paysages, B.62 for String Quartet; and Carmen Braden’s The Raven Conspiracy.
Commissioned about eight years ago to mark Vetta’s 30th anniversary, Seasons of the Sea fuses Indigenous storytelling, strings, and ideas related to the place we call home and the factors that are jeopardizing our climate. Georgeson’s words trace forces like tidal shifts, the life cycle of fish, and the ever-changing weather at sea.
“Ever since the premiere of Seasons of the Sea on Salt Spring Island [in 2016], when elder Augie Sylvester attended with his many grandchildren and other students from Penelakut Island, we have known this was an important work that needed to be shared widely,” Blackman tells Stir. “It is not only the piece—which weaves Western contemporary music and First Nations storytelling with themes of living by the sea, climate change, and building understanding of Coast Salish cultures—it is the very process of collaborating [that is important].
“And we also hear the voices of elders who have attended and led talking circles, or given the welcome dance, how powerfully it speaks to them,” she continues. “They have said it is ‘reconciliation in action’, that they can feel the heartbeat of the sea in the music, and that it speaks to the soul. I believe the more widely we share this work and speak with each other about our experiences the closer we might come to understanding. We invite people to come with an open mind and see what happens.”
During the pandemic, Vetta received grants to make a video version of Seasons of the Sea, which was filmed at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art and featured Renae Morriseau contributing Indigenous drumming. There’s no live drumming this time out, but Vetta is hosting its all-female mentorship orchestra with four more string players than in the original.
Vetta is also inviting anyone who is Indigenous to attend the performance for free. (They just have to email info@vettamusic.com.)
Georgeson sees Seasons of the Sea as a fresh spin on Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a work that she says makes no sense to her.
“We create a shared voice from two different cultures and two very different ways of being,” Georgeson says. 
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