Dr. Morna Edmundson CM co-founded the treble-voice choir Elektra in 1987 alongside the late Dr. Diane Loomer CM because, in the world of choral music, women’s ensembles were once consistently considered secondary to men’s.
“Diane and I thought, you know, that's not right,” Edmundson said. “We should form this choir and make it very brave and very forward-looking, and rally people around us that also [feel] that this is really exciting music. It's not second-rate. It doesn't need to be apologized for, and that really was our mission.”
For the following 38 years, the UBC alumna served as Elektra’s artistic director. She has commissioned — which means to request work from a composer for a specific choir to premiere, typically based on a theme — around 120 works, with a focus on highlighting composers based in Canada.
Recognized as one of the driving forces behind a choir that elevated women’s choral singing in the classical music world, it comes as no surprise that Edmundson was awarded the Order of Canada for her trailblazing contributions to choral music.
However, Edmundson was not anticipating the honour in the slightest. The nomination was put in three years prior by Sandra Phillips, a member of Edmundson’s other choir EnChor, who had rallied many other people in the choral community to support the nomination and keep the secret from Edmundson.
“You just do your work. You do it as hard as you can, and you do it because you believe in it,” said Edmundson. “The recognition is a beautiful thing on top of that, but it’s not why you do the work.”
The nomination is reflective of the support consistently offered by this community, which is Edmundson’s favourite part of being Elektra’s artistic director and what she will miss the most once she retires this June. With 50 members in the choir, ages 23 to 65, Edmundson thinks there’s beauty in choralists becoming best friends “with somebody who’s actually [in] a different generation.”
Since joining her first choir in high school and later singing with the Vancouver Chamber Choir in her 20s, Edmundson has found herself enraptured by the power of a collection of voices.
“What has always captivated me about singing in choirs, or any kind of singing together in a group, is just this beautiful teamwork that happens and [how] it engages your brain,” she said. “It’s this multi-beautiful, challenging thing that also affords us the luxury of really being in the moment because it’s a thing that is going forward in time.”
A significant highlight of Elektra’s direction under Edmundson are their concert recordings, which allow the ensemble to capture Edmundson’s unique commissions and reach and inspire other choirs worldwide.
“You might sing it for 400 people one day and never sing it again. Or you sing it for those 400 people, you record it, you put it on a CD — or now on Spotify … and it gets out there to the world,” she said. “It's this beautiful little ecosystem of audience, choir, conductor [and] composer.”
One of Edmundson’s favourite commissioned collections was inspired by The Lost Words: A Spell Book, a book written by Robert Macfarlane, which she stumbled upon at a friend’s house.
Inside the book were words that had been removed from The Oxford Junior Dictionary “about 15 years ago, because they weren’t being used in children’s literature anymore.”
Many of the words taken out of the children’s dictionary were related to nature, replaced instead with terms used when talking about technology, like ‘cut-and-paste’ or ‘voicemail,’ which had become more commonplace in children’s lives. The takeaway was that “kids weren’t playing outside enough, because if they’re not needing the word ‘dandelion’ or ‘fern’ or ‘starling’ … then those words weren’t showing up in stories and kids were losing touch with nature.”
Edmundson began the project before the pandemic, and a concert featuring The Lost Words: A Spell Book was premiered in 2022. It added 20 original compositions by 10 different Canadian composers to Edmundson’s repertoire, making it “the most significant of [her] commissions over the years,” she said.
However, she emphasized that “there are just so many beautiful moments” from her repertoire, and “getting to give birth to something new really excite[s]” her.
Edmundson will be leaving Elektra this spring after almost four decades. To capture her lasting contributions and her extraordinary career in the Canadian choral community, she will have her final concerts on May 25 and 31. These farewell performances will pay tribute to Edmundson’s favourite commissions as well as debut brand-new works by Laura Hawley, Cassie Luftspring and Tawnie Olson.
“I think it would not be misplaced to say that Elektra has been my life’s work.”
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