West Vancouver musician, composer and music teacher Anne Leader has a hard time answering questions about her creative process.
“It just arises. I feel like I have very little to do with it actually. I even feel funny saying it’s my music. It’s just like I happen to hear something that was floating by. I remember Pete Townshend describing writing like that once. He would say, all these melodies, everything is swirling out there. It’s just who is receptive to what is floating by and who reaches out and grabs it. I think he was on to something when he said it like that,” she says.
With three albums released in the last two years, the 56-year-old remains firmly attuned to her surroundings and is continuing to adhere to her organic and rather spontaneous creative process.
“It’s very unscientific, it’s all experimental and I just begin to hear melodies. I even hear instruments playing them ... It’s like this trail I keep following and sometimes it goes somewhere and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says.
Leader’s recent focus on her own recording projects follows a lengthy and prolific career writing for television. Funnily enough her first credit was a 1999 co-write on an episode of Baywatch.
“It’s funny to me too,” she laughs. “Although when I get a royalty cheque it’s super cool to see – yeah it’s out there being played.”
Her career continued to evolve from there and she wrote for a variety of networks including Global, APTN, CBC, CTV, Knowledge Network and Slice.
“Writing for television is a wonderful discipline because a composer is writing what they think will really support the emotional arc of a show. If you take a horror scene and write comedic music to it, it becomes a funny scene. That’s the power of music,” says Leader.
In recent years she’s been successfully focusing on her personal recordings and has been rewarded with “a huge creative outpouring.”
Among her recent recording projects is Stillness, an album of four 16-minute tracks that’s ideal for yoga classes or healing environments like acupuncture or meditation sessions. Stillness was released under the name Jambhavan, a kirtan (a call and response pattern of chanting) group that’s a partnership between Leader (harmonium and lead chant) and Vancouver resident Fred Ghatala (mridangam).
Jambhavan is presenting an upcoming immersion retreat with local yoga practitioner Jen Owens June 11 in North Vancouver, offering participants an opportunity to experience a day of yoga and chanting, community and nature (Info: jenowens.ca).
Leader has long had an interest in the practices of yoga, meditation and chanting.
“I’ve always been very interested in what we can’t see and touch and the mystical side of life. I can remember being five years old and having a burning curiosity about all of this,” she says.
The second album Leader released in the last two years is Healing Hope, which took just over a year to make. Much of the record was written during the final days of the life of her beloved canine companion Luba, who passed away at age 12, including “Luba’s Song,” the first notes of which she played after returning to the piano upon Luba’s passing.
Leader’s most recent album, In Deep, was inspired by the sounds of humpback whales, which she incorporated into the music.
“It was really emotional because I felt like the whales were guiding me through this process and I just felt like I was under the water with them and I just felt so privileged to listen to these sounds so microscopically. It was amazing the connection I felt to them as creatures. It was very powerful.”
For her next recording project, Leader plans to release an album of solo piano work.
“I haven’t performed in a long time and I really feel that that’s what I’m supposed to do next,” she says.
Another recent focus of the artist is orchestral composition and the world premiere of her inaugural works, “Chronicles,” “Luba” and “Shoot the Puck.” The music was performed as a suite May 27 by the members of the Ambleside Orchestra at Highlands United Church. Her mother, Grace, a clarinet player, was a founding member of the ensemble and was in attendance at her daughter’s debut.
“It was really lovely, very well-attended. I was so touched by the number of people who came out,” says Leader, adding she’s grateful to the orchestra’s music director, Nicolas Krusek, for his efforts to help bring the suite to fruition.
“We would meet at Starbucks and he would bring his red pen and, ‘this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ And then I would go back home and I would make the changes. We would meet again and the corrections were less and less each time. Finally the score was good enough where he said, ‘OK, now it’s ready to be printed.’ That was just a thrilling moment,” she says.
