Gabrielle Brochu (They/Them)
Qey, nil nitlewis Sipu, nil Wolastoqewi, nil coqolsakutomuhtihtit. Nil nejeaw Odawa naka Neqotkuk.
Gabrielle is a Two-Spirit Wolastoqewi singer whose family is from Neqotkuk First Nation. They are in their second year of the MA Music and Culture program at Carleton, and hold two bachelors degrees from Mount Allison University in Classical Voice and Mathematics. Their current research centres around cultural resurgence and sonic sovereignty in their home community, specifically how music, world view and sovereignty are inherently intertwined in Wolastoqey culture. They are also interested in Indigenous opera, specifically how breaking norms and traditions in the operatic genre, coupled with good ways of knowing and Indigenous-led projects, can result in Indigenous+art music that uplifts and reinforces Indigenous sonic sovereignty.
Lucas Caryk (He/Him)
Lucas Caryk is a 2nd year MA student in the Music and Culture program. Lucas holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Brandon University with a major in Guitar Performance. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he has years of gigging experience playing in groups covering a wide variety of genres including, jazz, rock, R&B, hip-hop, and Latin musical styles. He has also performed in multiple festivals including the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival, and the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and he has many years of club work experience. He performed in the Winnipeg-based Latin rock group El León and The Strangers, who were nominated for Global Artist of the Year in the 2023 Western Canadian Music Awards. His playing can be heard on their 2023 album, Manos Rojas. His research encompasses a wide variety of topics including proselytizing through Christian heavy metal music and sound in professional golf broadcasting. He is also interested in music and conflict, performance studies, and popular musicology.
Alyssa Fluit (She/They)
Alyssa is in her second year of the MA program at Carleton having graduated with a BMus in Musical Theatre Voice from Carleton in 2023 and a Graduate Diploma in Arts Management from Queen’s University the same year. Currently, their research is focused on how queer meaning is found and renegotiated within heteronormative music and its fan bases. The case study used for their MA thesis is Taylor Swift’s work and her queer fanbase known as “Gaylors.”
They are a huge musical theatre fan and love to work backstage vocal directing or stage managing, with some stand-out favourites being Rent and Matilda. When Alyssa’s not on campus, you can find her in tap class, crocheting, or cuddling up with her cats, Bon-Bon and Marmalade.
Rowan Friesen (He/Him)
Rowan is a graduate student currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Music and Culture program at Carleton University, with a specialization in Digital Humanities. Rowan’s musical history spans nearly his entire lifetime. He began learning the guitar at the age of ten, and continued to play all the way into his undergraduate degree at Grant MacEwan, where he was awarded an honours diploma in Jazz Guitar Performance and a degree in Music minoring in Music Career Management. During his undergraduate degree he also took up playing the lute and was supervised for a specialized project digitally transcribing early handwritten lute music written in French lute tablature from facsimiles in order to restore them and make them legible and playable.
Throughout his recollectable existence, Rowan has always maintained a fascination with digital and social media and how it intersects with the experience of music and music marketing. He is currently exploring this through his master’s thesis. Here, he examines the role of TikTok in shaping the way that users of the application engage with music through short-form audiovisual bursts, and how this in turn puts pressure on musicians to change the ways they write music in order to cater to this new digitized social environment.
Ella Latta Suazo (She/Her)
Ella is a self-proclaimed jack-of-many-trades working as an arts educator, choral facilitator, voice teacher, singer songwriter/amateur producer, and crafts artist from Kitchener-Waterloo. She graduated from Wilfred Laurier University’s Community Music program (BMus) in 2022 and has come to Carleton’s Music and Culture MA program in search of deeper learning that can service her community work. Her research interests include community music, protest music, and accessibility/inclusion.