How Dean Burry Makes Opera Belong to Children
Inside the creation of "The Bremen Town Musicians" and building shows for young imaginations.
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Ashley Daniel Foot:
We’re Inside Vancouver Opera and my name is Ashley Daniel Foot. Today I’m joined by Canadian composer Dean Burry, whose operas for young audiences have been performed across Canada and beyond. His works include The Brothers Grimm, The Hobbit, and today’s focus, The Bremen Town Musicians, an immersive opera created especially for elementary students.
Dean, it’s great to have you with us.
You’ve written so much music, but a big part of your career has been about creating music for young audiences. Can you tell me what drew you specifically to writing for children and families?
Dean Burry:
A lot of composers look at writing for young people as well as almost being something lesser, in a sense. A lot of times it feels like it’s a gig or it’s something like that. And that’s something that I’ve kind of come up with quite a bit in my own career kind of thinking about that as well. I think one of the reasons is I just haven’t grown up myself. I think that’s a part of it as well. But I was always quite involved with teaching young people as well. And I realized that the kind of stories that I wanted to tell really resonated, ideally resonate with young people, and with adults as well.
I started with the Canadian Opera Company working in their box office, right after I graduated with my master’s in composition from University of Toronto in 1996. And I was working in a dive coffee shop on Yonge Street and actually got a job in the box office of the Canadian Opera Company. Whereas a lot of people, it was just a gig. For me, I spent my lunch hours up in the library or up in the practice rooms and I actually started doing some of the workshops for the school groups that were coming in.
When I finished that box office job, I got a job teaching the after-school opera program, which is something I did for them for about 17 years. So 7-12 year-olds, writing operas with kids across the city. And at one point I found myself in the elevator with Richard Bradshaw, the general director, and I said, Richard, you probably don’t know me. I work in the box office, but I’m an opera composer.
So it was a combination of him having looked at my music, me being involved with the education department, a couple of years later when they needed someone to write an opera for their school tour, which was The Brothers Grimm at that point, I was there and kind of fit right into it.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
It’s funny you mentioned The Brothers Grimm because right after that you were commissioned to write The Bremen Town Musicians. What about those Grimm fairy tales made you want to turn them into operas?
Dean Burry:
The idea of doing The Bremen Town Musicians came up a few years later. In fact, Grimm premiered in 2001 and it was 2009 when we first did Bremen Town Musicians with Opera Lyra. Again, it comes back to the Canadian Opera Company. When I was working in that box office job, they asked staff members to do presentations on the upcoming season because people who work in marketing or, you know, in the box office, for example, don’t necessarily know all the operas that are going to be coming up.
And so I was given the task of doing a presentation on Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. It’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful opera. But in working on that, I found that the story of The Brothers Grimm was even more interesting. We know the fairy tales really well. But this idea of an opera with the two heroes being essentially librarians, or scholarly philologists, word lovers, nerdy, just like me. And so the actual story of how those very famous fairy tales came into being was fascinating as an opera as well.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Writing for adults obviously is different for writing for elementary kids. When you’re considering an opera like The Bremen Town Musicians for young folks, what are the tools that you’re thinking of using as you’re composing?
Dean Burry:
Talking about how that particular fairy tale, Bremen Town Musicians because again, Brothers Grimm uses Little Red-Cap, which became Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel. So I had to kind of choose the three stories that I wanted to choose. And The Bremen Town Musicians was, which did not figure into it, but it was one of the ones I thought how musical it is, know? When you have a piece that has music built right into it, it almost kind of demands to be made into an opera, right?
The interesting thing about The Bremen Town Musicians it is very much about a group of friends working together. It’s funny, I’m watching Stranger Things right now, just the fifth season. And so it’s that classic story of a group of friends, friends who feel down on their luck and who feel isolated, coming together to find kind of a community and to find a way to work together.
Although the very interesting thing is that in The Bremen Town Musicians , the animals are all seniors. They’re all kind of animals who have, you know work animals, a donkey and a dog and a rooster, who’ve outlived their usefulness in a sense, right? And they’ve been cast out on that end. So again, like to kind of make reference to famous movies like Goonies or Stranger Things or that kind of thing. Classic. Except all the characters are senior citizens.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I want to talk a little bit more about theatricality, pacing, musical language. Are these things that you think about when you’re crafting or is there, what does your process look like when you’re building the work?
Dean Burry:
When I was in high school, the question for me was, am I going to go to theatre school and become an actor and a playwright? Or am I going to go to music school and become, what I thought was a saxophonist at that time? Because I was so very involved in both.
I started writing songs about grade six, I think. I had a piano teacher that got me into the composition side of things, really. But at the same time I was writing my own plays in grade nine, my junior high school drama club produced Good Gods, which was the first play that I had written. And in grade four, used to do puppet plays in the back of my grade four class. So it was trying to find a way to bring those two worlds together.
I did go to Mount Allison University in New Brunswick to do a music degree with saxophone, but I pretty quickly realized that there was a way for me to be in both worlds. And I thought it was going to be musical theatre, chiefly. This was the age of Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera.
So in my third year of my undergraduate, I wrote my first opera and then I fell in, as I mentioned, to the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. And so for me, obviously a lot of times as a composer… and if you think traditionally about opera, music was often the thing which was over anything as justified by some of the odd libretto choices that you find in traditional opera. But for me, it is all about the story that is equally served by the drama and the music and the design.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What do you hope a young person seeing maybe their first opera with The Bremen Town Musicians will extract from the experience? What will they take away from it all?
Dean Burry:
We know that opera still has a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of people. Twenty years ago, when I was teaching a lot for the Canadian Opera Company, there were still a lot of stereotypical things on TV and in movies. I know there’s the “fat lady” in Harry Potter. There was a gum commercial that was on television that had opera as well.
And so, but, you know, in some cases it feels like even some of those stereotypes are kind of are moving away.
I think the main thing is that, yeah, we’ve got that word opera in it, but when those kids sit down in front of it, there shouldn’t be any barrier. It hopefully is really strong storytelling with engaging characters and engaging music. That’s what you want from a children’s opera. But in reality, that’s what you want from any opera. That’s you want from an adult opera as well.
Ultimately people should be pulled into the story, and as I mentioned before, the music and the design and the theatricality and the drama should all just pull them along in that as well. And maybe they will go home and say, “Hey, mom, hey, dad, you know, I saw an opera and I really loved it today.”
Ashley Daniel Foot:
So Dean, imagine you’re talking directly to students right now. They’ve watched the opera and they’re amazed at the thought of possibly becoming composers or involved in the creative arts. What would you say to those young folks who are dreaming about composing an opera or maybe being involved in the world of the arts?
Dean Burry:
I know it’s sometimes hard to imagine yourself being a composer. When we think of the big classical composers, you think of Beethoven or Mozart, and they just seem impossible like aliens almost in a sense. And there’s no possibility of doing that. Listen, a three-year-old child can pick up a crayon and be an artist. Essentially being creative with sound is being a composer.
So it’s something that I did from a very early age. And I feel like the creative part of it… I mean, I love performing. I do love being on stage, but there’s something about being able to sit back and kind of create these worlds, you know? Like anything, it takes a long time. It takes a long time to learn how to fix a car, right? It takes a long time, but it’s not so foreign that it’s out there.
Start by writing songs. That’s something that we have around us. And again, an opera, The Bremen Town Musicians is about 45 minutes long, but some adult operas are hours long in a sense, right? And that can seem really daunting, but starting with a two or three minute song, that is essentially what an opera is. It’s storytelling using music and drama as well, you know? It’s thrilling. I did it from a very, very young age. And again, the ability to be able to make up a world like that is magical.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What do you remember about the first piece that you ever composed?
Dean Burry:
Again, I think it would have to go right back to grade four and that those puppet shows, you know, where the teacher got everyone to turn their seats around. This is grade four, I remember, Mrs. Scamel. The last Friday of every month, I would bring in my little homemade puppet theatre and the puppets that my mother had made from my sister’s old stuffed animals. I would do a show. If it was February, I would do a Valentine’s show. If it was October, I’d do a Halloween show. And there were a bunch of little sketches and songs as well. Essentially, again, an opera in grade four. And the high of it all, the excitement of being able to kind of like share that with people.
Of course there’s the fun of like being on the stage and everyone’s looking at you kind of thing. But it’s more so about the idea of being able to share something and to share stories with people. And again, I would come back even further than that. Yes, my degrees are in composition, but first and foremost, I’m a storyteller.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
I love that so much and I think that’s what we strive to do is bring the story to life through music. Dean, it’s been a real pleasure chatting about your work and your contributions to Canadian opera. Really, I can see where it started all back in grade four thanks to Mrs. Scamel.
Dean, thanks so much for sharing your time and insight and for creating work that welcomes young audiences into opera with such imagination and care. If you’d like to learn more about Dean’s music you can visit deanbury.com.
If you’d like to experience The Bremen Town Musicians in person, Vancouver Opera’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program will be presenting public performances on March 6th - 8th.
You’ll be able to find more information at vancouveropera.ca. As usual, I’d like to thank my producer, Mack McGillivray, and I’ll see you at the opera.
Dean Burry is an award-winning composer and librettist, dedicated to creating educational programs that introduce opera to children. The Brothers Grimm, Burry’s work commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company, premiered in 2001 has been seen by over 180,000 school children across Canada, the United States, Europe and South America. Other major works include The Hobbit for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company and Sarasota Opera, The Scorpions’ Sting for the Canadian Opera Company, The Vinland Traveler and Le nez de la sorcière for Memorial University of Newfoundland, Pandora’s Locker for The Glenn Gould School, The Mummers’ Masque for Toronto Masque Theatre, the CBC serial radio opera Baby Kintyre, The Bells of Baddeck and Beacon of Light for Rising Tide Theatre. Recent premieres include the Dora Award winning Shanawdithit, Sea Variations (Canadian Art Song Project), String Quartet No. 1 (New Orford String Quartet) and the opera Il Giudizio di Pigmalione with COSA Canada and Opera McGill. His chamber work The Highwayman was released in October 2023.
Ashley Daniel Foot - Host, Inside Vancouver Opera
Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.
Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera
Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.