A composition by Yellowknife’s Carmen Braden forms part of an album just nominated for a 2025 classical album of the year Juno.
The album Ispiciwin – “journey” in Cree – is by Luminous Voices, Calgary’s professional chamber choir. Braden and a range of other composers contributed work to the album.
Cabin Radio asked her to explain Crooked by Nature, her work that features on Ispiciwin. It’s a wild ride.
“It’s probably the most feminist piece I’ve ever written,” Braden said on Wednesday evening, a day after the Juno nomination was made public.
Braden had been commissioned to think of a concert featuring music from England’s Tudor period, which is generally considered to be the 1500s.
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Music from that time “has a real old sound to it to ears today,” said Braden, “and they wanted to have new music written about things happening at that time. So my task was women in the Tudor age. And it wasn’t the best time for ladies in the Tudor age.”
Braden studied old literature about women, including a pamphlet published hundreds of years ago in which a man described women – in Braden’s words – as “either virgins and angels or whores of hell and the demons that will tempt us, and there was no grey area for this man.”
The title Crooked by Nature came from that pamphlet.
“He says women came from Adam’s rib,” said Braden, referring to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
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“The rib is bent and not useful for anything, and consequently women are also bent and crooked by nature, in spirit.”
The plot now thickens, because Braden found a response to this man’s pamphlet from a woman, which she said was one of the first works to be published by a woman under their own name.
To create her composition, she drew from the pamphlet, the response “and a little bit of – I hate to say this out loud – Donald Trump as well.”
“There’s a little bit of a mob riot moment in the middle,” she explained.
Asked if a future Juno nomination was anywhere in her mind at the time, Braden said that was the last thing she had associated with the work.
“This was a bit of an experiment and there are some risky things in it,” she said, attributing the nomination to the Calgary choir’s “commitment to excellence” in performing both her composition and the album’s other works.
“There’s a huge amount of representation from Indigenous composers. There’s flute and guitar, and it’s a very cool album beyond just my badass feminist piece,” she said.
“Two days ago, this piece was literally just on a shelf and hasn’t had that many performances. Now it might get some more. That’s awesome.”
Other contenders for this year’s classical album Juno include the symphony orchestras of Toronto and Montreal.
Michael Bublé will host the 2025 Juno Awards at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena on Sunday, March 30.
