Marion Newman is a mezzo-soprano, a teacher, and the voice you hear on CBC's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Kwagiulth and Stó:lō, born in Bella Coola and raised in Sooke, she spent more than twenty years in Toronto before coming home to teach voice at the University of Victoria, where she once studied piano.
Recorded in her office at UVic, this conversation moves from a piano lesson in a castle tower to a rehearsal at the Orpheum, where the late Bramwell Tovey stopped to ask her how she wanted to sing his music. Marion talks about the "quiet choir" of family who made her a musician, a childhood homeschooled on Vancouver Island, why leaders need to learn how to apologize and mean it, why she no longer capitalizes the word reconciliation, and the name she carries: Nege'ga, she who is like a mountain.
Marion served as a senior advisor on Vancouver Opera's report on Indigenous mentorship in opera, co-authored by Ashley Daniel Foot and Asitha Tennekoon, out later this fall. Midway through, host Ashley Daniel Foot asks her what an institution owes people after it asks them to talk.
Chapter markers (from the recording)
00:00 — "Stop talking. Just pay us."
02:50 — Ancestors, and where the fight comes from
04:18 — Welcome
05:57 — The first music: potlatch, the kitchen radio, and a grandparents' piano
10:11 — Mary Jackson and the tower room at Craigdarroch
12:17 — From pianist to singer
14:06 — The quiet choir, and being homeschooled
17:56 — Teaching where she once studied
20:28 — Bramwell Tovey: "How would you like to do this?"
23:17 — What an institution owes the people it asks to talk
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