Emilie Lebel Q&A
By Ado Nkemka
A photo of Emilie LeBel sitting on concrete steps (that are out of focus) outside. She’s wearing a black t-shirt, smiling while looking to the right of the photo.
New Works Marketing Coordinator, Ado Nkemka, spoke to Edmonton composer Emilie LeBel, ahead of “field studies/VINES,” a chamber music concert along with a dance performance choreographed by Melanie Kloetzel/Kloetzel & Co.
Purchase tickets here to attend this concert at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church on February 1st 2025. Read this Q&A to learn more about this unique event. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Emilie LeBel
Ado: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
Emilie: I live in Edmonton. I’ve lived here since 2018. I’m a composer. Right now I teach at MacEwan University in the jazz and contemporary popular music program. I lead an interesting life where I get to create music for others to play, and I do some electronic music that I write, and then I also teach, and most of the folks that I teach are interested in pop and jazz and writing for film, writing for video games. So I feel pretty blessed that I get to live a life in many, many different kinds, and of music.
I'm also the Composer Advisor for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. So I do mentorship there for early career composers, so that they have opportunities to work with professional musicians in an orchestral setting. Outside of all the music-y things, I spend a lot of time walking with my dog, and I like cooking and reading and plants, if you can tell from behind me laughs – gardening, planting that kind of stuff.
How did you get into composing?
I like to joke that it was an extended remix route to composition. It wasn't an obvious choice for me, at all, for a number of reasons, but the brief story: I was really involved in music when I was in high school. I went to a public school that had a really great arts program, so I was really, really fortunate to play in a jazz band and orchestra, all sorts of different things, and I was a trumpet player. I went on to study at university, thinking I would do something in music around trumpet. That didn't really pan out for me, in the end.
I had an injury, couldn't play trumpet anymore. So I went on to study audio engineering, and then worked in recording studios for a while, in my early 20s, and then always felt like I wanted to be on the other side of the glass, I wanted to be making stuff, not recording stuff. So I went back to school in my mid 20s to finish the one year of a music degree I’d started. And it was in my mid to late 20’s, that I started composing when I was back at university. I think it was because I had a few professors who were really encouraging and showed me that it was a possibility.
Before then - there simply weren't any opportunities that showed me composition was something that I could do - all the music I played in high school was predominantly, Western classical, European men. So I started composing when I went back to school in my 20s, and then just didn't really stop.
What’s something you really like about composing?
This will sound silly, but it's really hard, a lot of the time. But I like that, because it constantly challenges you and asks things of you to push yourself and grow. And I think before I started composing, I couldn't really see a vocation where there was that opportunity for continual growth. And so even on the days where it's hard or frustrating, I like that it challenges me and forces me to to think deeply and try new things and grow.
How do you go about composing? How do ideas first emerge?
I think it's a deeply personal question. Everyone creates really differently. I work with lots of people who do everything without notation, and the notation comes last or not at all, and there are people who are very notation focused, and that's their first point of entry into writing.
I'm somewhere in the middle. Most of my writing starts quite visually, if that makes sense. Most of my writing starts with a picture or a graph or a timeline. So usually, when I'm commissioned to write a piece, I have a few ideas of how long it should be and maybe what it's going to be on a concert with or on a CD with. I have some things that ground me or as a starting point. So if I know it's going to be a 10 minute piece, I'll usually start sketching out a timeline of that, and maybe some colors or textures and things. So it starts quite visually for me – even just jotting down words that might describe an emotion or an atmosphere.
I find starting quite hard so these are little baby steps into something bigger, and then I do most of my work at the piano. You can see right behind me there's a piano, and I sketch out things, usually, in pretty standard notation, so written notation, like a stave, but not that specific. It might just be a few rhythms or some chords that I like, but not all the details. And then once I sketched out a piece that way, then I take it to the computer, and I would think most composers who are dealing with the end result being notated music, at some point, take it to software, because it's just a lot faster. And then that's where I can be more specific and try things and move things around a bit.
Sometimes, if I'm working with electronics, I'll do everything orally, so I'll just work directly on DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and come up with my sounds and not use any notation at all. So it kind of depends a bit on the project and who I'm working with and what they're comfortable with. But I would say, most of the musicians I work with, want some sort of notated score. Maybe there's some improvisation within it but they want something pretty notated for them, I guess, for lack of a better way to describe it. Whereas, when I'm doing stuff for me, if it's going to be improvised and electronic, then I don't really deal so much with putting it into some sort of final written notation.
“field studies” album cover. Click to listen on Bandcamp.
You're doing some electronic stuff for field studies/VINES right?
There are two pieces on the album that have an electronic component, so those two pieces are quite notated. Because there's musicians playing, and then there's an electronics part – the electronics are kind of like descriptive cues within the musical score – usually it's me that's running them, so I just cue the things that need to happen.
What headspace were you in going into the composition of field studies?
The album features two pieces that were written, a while ago, for colleagues who are both based in Toronto. So I kind of thought about this as pieces-for-old-friends-and-new-friends, and then the other three pieces were written when I moved to Edmonton.
I moved here, in 2018, and then some of the first people I met here were two of the musicians who are in UltraViolet, the ensemble who's performing on the album and at the concert in Calgary (February 1st 2025, at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church).
I can't remember the exact timeline, but all three of the pieces were written during the pandemic. I had approached the ensemble, asking to work with them. And then the world kind of went “kaboom.” I don't think anyone was in a terribly good headspace chuckles and probably still isn't now, but it certainly did give me time – there was a lot of quiet during that time, those pieces were written with my dog and me in the studio and not much else around.
I think back to that time and I was able to go camping and do some outdoorsy stuff, but I was teaching online, I was living by myself. So I think there's a sense of patience and quiet to all three of those pieces, because my immediate surroundings were quite small and quiet. I'm not sure any of those pieces really capture the sort of general sense of anxiety that the world had at that time. I don't know why, because certainly other things I wrote during that time might have grasped onto that a bit more. But, at least to me, I don't think there's a sense of uncertainty underpinning those works, but certainly a reflection of a lot more time to go walking in the woods and sit in a studio, in quiet contemplation. So they're all quite slow in how they unfold, and quiet, and subtle, in a way.
What was or what is the intention of the album?
I think the intention shifted a bit. Initially, I wanted to do this collection of works that were old and new, that all centered around different aspects of interacting with the natural environment. So they all have a connection to nature.
But as I started writing the music and, at that time, there weren't really concerts going on, and I don't think any of us really had a sense of when a lot of that stuff would return and what that would look like – part of the intention was I just felt the need to record this so I could share the music with others.
I think the project was a bit unique, at least from my perspective. Three of these pieces weren't played live before they were recorded. And unusually, music's out on the concert stage or in the concert hall, and then it's recorded at some point. So it was a strange thing to not have all these pieces premiered and road tested in some way before they were recorded. They were recorded and put out as a way of sharing in a time where we weren't really sharing stuff in the concert hall. I think that was part of the intention from a really pragmatic point of view.
I hadn't released an album of my own work; a song or two of mine had been on a bunch of other things, but I'd never taken on the task of taking ownership of a whole collection of my music and organizing that. So that was important to me, at this point in my artistic work, to have something that I had produced the entirety of.
You’ve talked about connecting with UltraViolet – what makes you excited about the fact that they'll be performing the record at the concert?
Edmonton is a city of a million people and yet we only have one ensemble in town that plays exclusively the work of living composers, which I find interesting that we're a pretty large city at this point and yet it's still very niche. Part of my excitement was that they are the ensemble in town that wants to work, and is excited to work, with living composers. That continues to be exciting for me.
I think for a lot of composers in my discipline of concert music, or coming from the tradition of classical music, there's a lot of focus on premiere. So your piece is premiered, and that's very exciting, and then we don't tend to get a lot of repeat performances. So there's something really special about having an ongoing relationship with an ensemble who wants to play your work more than once. So that's really exciting to me. They've now played drift, one of the pieces on field studies. They've now played it twice already, so it'll be played at a third concert in Calgary.
There's something nice about the way music settles and becomes their own that is different from just having a piece played once at the premiere. I think a lot of composers would say that it's a lot of work to write a piece of music and then it just gets played once, and then you don't work with that ensemble again. I really value the longer term artistic relationships where our work gets to evolve and change and we get to do something more than just once.
The performance of field studies is taking place alongside Melanie Kloetzel’s VINES, a dance piece. How do you feel that your works complement each other?
What I've gotten to know about Melanie and her work, I'm really excited about. There's a point of synergy around pacing, and timing, in her work, and this very slow unfolding of movement, and how she thinks about space that I think aligns with what I'm trying to do sonically. That excited me – just to be able to have a conversation about what that means in terms of how she thinks about it in movement, and space, and dance, and how I think about it sonically. The initial meetings have been exciting for me to think about that.
I'm excited to see how it also impacts the audience, because so much of the music that I create and gets put out there – the concert experience is steeped in very clear protocols that have this really long history. I like that having dancers in this space, crawling and moving, will actually disrupt all of that and really change that experience for the audience and some of the conversations we've had around even questions like “Where will people sit? Will they clap?”
I got excited about how that's all going to be disrupted and change from a typical concert: sitting facing the stage, the musicians come out and people clap at the appropriate times. I think it'll be interesting to see how this distorts all that in really lovely ways for both the dance and the music.
What are some things or a thing that you're looking forward to when it comes to the February 1st concert?
I haven't had much music played in Calgary, so I'm actually really looking forward to just meeting the audience and interfacing with a different group of people from Edmonton and hearing their thoughts on how they experience the dance and the sound.
The last time I had a piece played in Calgary, it was 2015, maybe, so it's been a while. It's not a community I'm super familiar with, so that's exciting to me, to meet some new and different people and to connect with the few people that I already know there.
Canada is so big but the music community is so small, so it's always really nice to have opportunities to go to different cities. And I think there's an interesting connection, particularly between Calgary and Edmonton, because we're the two sister cities in Alberta, and there's not much else. There's a lot of space and not a lot of population in this province, so I think anytime there's opportunities for musical cultural exchange between the two cities, that's really, really exciting to me. I hope Edmonton is able to do the same thing: sometimes bring stuff North and host Calgary people here as well.
Is there anything that you'd like to share that I haven't given you the opportunity to share?
Helen Humphreys wrote this beautiful book called Field Study, and I read it when I was working on the music for this album. She’s an amazing writer and it was a real touch point of inspiration while I was working on some of this music. It's a really beautiful book and worth spending some time with.
What is it about the book that connects to your album or in what ways was it inspiring?
You could describe this as a memoir. There's moments in it that are memoir, but Helen Humphreys also talks a lot about the natural world and has all these little fact bites from different things.
The book takes place – there's this herbarium, which is basically a library of pressed plants and flowers. So it's this whole history, but also scientific information of all these different plant species. She gets to spend time there, sitting with all these plant species, learning about them. She describes all these different plant species, but then you're also taken to little moments in her life during that year, and then also little fact bites, different historical figures who have pressed and collected flowers and ferns.
I think there's a lovely, contemplative, slow nature to the way that she writes and she finds these small moments in life that I think other people might overlook or not describe and I just found, you could say, almost, solace in her words and that she created these little moments of magic out of just going for a walk with her dog or coming across this one pressed plant that she found particularly interesting, and then somehow links it back to Emily Dickinson's poetry.
There was just a really quiet, gentle pacing to the book, but also these connections to the natural world and her observations.
Sometimes you read a book; it's the right time, right moment, and it just coalesces with what you're working on. I had been thinking about the idea of the album being called field studies and then I stumbled upon this book where she's doing a study of “the field.”
Get tickets to the February 1st concert here.
Emilie LeBel Bio
Alberta-based Canadian composer Emilie Cecilia LeBel specializes in concert music composition, and the creation of mixed works that employ digital technologies. LeBel’s artistic practice has been recognized through several significant awards and appointments, including Affiliate Composer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2018–2022), Composer-in-Residence with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada (2015), SoundMakers Composer in Residence with Soundstreams Canada (2015–2016), Land’s End Ensemble Composers Competition (2016), Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2015), Canadian Music Centre Toronto Emerging Composer Award (2012), and Canadian Federation of University Women Elizabeth Massey Award (2012). LeBel’s debut album of chamber music, field studies (2023), received a JUNO Award Nomination for Classical Composition of the Year (2024), and a Western Canadian Music Award Nomination for Classical Composer of the Year (2024). LeBel holds degrees in music composition from the University of Toronto (DMA) and York University (MA, BFA Hons.), and in audio engineering and music production from the Harris Institute for the Arts (Dip. Hons). LeBel is presently Composer Advisor with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and a faculty member at MacEwan University.
