Pianist, Photographer, Author & Adventurer Extreme - Micah Pawluk is Dorion’s Renaissance Man

November 2017

It’s been an honour this year to have featured our series on local, young musicians, and I am delighted to wrap up 2017 with a story on a fascinating, adventurous and complex young pianist who insists on calling Thunder Bay home. Micah Pawluk started late for a classical musician, but his talent, active mind and inquisitive nature helped him make up for lost time.

“I started taking piano when I was 12,” says Pawluk, now 23. “I had no clue what I was getting myself into! I excelled fairly quickly and after just a few years, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.”

It was natural then that he headed to Lakehead University in Thunder Bay to study under world-class teachers Heather Morrison and Dr. Evgeny Chugunov.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor than Evgeny,” says Pawluk. “He took me further than I ever could have imagined. From New York to Italy, I went to places where a small-town boy is rarely taken seriously, where you can be dismissed simply because you’re not as technically proficient as some 6 year-old. He saw beyond all that, though. He saw the musical potential in me, and he made them see it, too.”

Pawluk’s career has taken him to Carnegie Hall in 2013 (and a first place win in the Crescendo International Music Competition) and Cremona, Italy in 2015, (where he won third place in the International Music in the Summer Festival and Competition, Senior Category). Despite the lure of the big cities, Pawluk feels a unique connection to the fabric of Northwestern Ontario and the small town of Dorion where he grew up.

“To me, there is no separation between my own journey as a person, my music, and the landscape,” says Pawluk. “They’re all the same world. My music and my personality reflect the landscape, and they are the landscape. This is home.”

Growing up the youngest in a family of eight on the shores of Lake Superior, his early life consisted of hunting, fishing and helping with his father’s trap lines. Survival was intimately tied to the land, something not usually connected with classical music.

“Our landscape is lonely to me,” he says. “Lonely and harsh, but at the same time, expressive, romantic and incredibly welcoming. You can hear the limitless woods in what I write, and you can hear little streams and birds and the contemplation that I experience when I am out on my own. Our landscape is a perfect place to explore my own inner workings, beyond where most people would feel comfortable.”

This connection to the Canadian Shield has shaped Pawluk in other ways. He is also an avid free climber and ice climber, and scaling small peaks like Mt. McKay quickly gave way to more ambitious climbs in Iceland and Scotland.

“I go on some pretty extreme adventures,” says Pawluk. “The skills that I need to climb a mountain on my own are the same skills needed to perfect a piece of music, whether compositionally or for performance. And, of course, the things that I see on my adventures fill me with inspiration, with joy, with the energy needed to do the extra work needed to really polish a musical performance. When I practice too much without climbing, I go a little crazy. And if I climb too much or hike too much without practicing, I also go a little crazy. So they balance each other out. Also, pushing my limits by adventuring shows me how much farther I can go in music. It shows my limits, and then destroys them!”
Pawluk has begun composing in ways other than musical. Not only is he a talented wildlife/landscape photographer with a thriving business in the local craft market scene, he’s recently turned his sharp, creative mind to writing, with a book of poetry and a book of prose based on his free-climb of Scotland’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis.

It started, he says, as a natural progression from classical music.

“I started reading literature because I wanted inspiration for my piano playing,” says Pawluk. “And I began writing because I loved literature and because I needed to express myself. Every facet of my artistic career is ultimately driven by the need to express myself. When I’m composing, the sounds that I explore are really attempts to express things that I cannot figure out how to put into words. Poetry is similar because, like music, it explores new, contemplative and incredibly dissonant sounds in a way that doesn’t sound dissonant. Great prose has some of the same qualities. I needed to tell my Scotland story in prose, because it was more practical. I find a greater freedom in poetry but they are, ultimately, the same. Structure and form in music, poetry and prose are (in my work) meant to be organic, simple, and beautiful.”

Accompanying Pawluk’s two written works are four musical CDs and a rather impressive photography collection, with some local images and others from his trips to Italy, Iceland and Scotland. Post cards and calendars are available at the Baggage Building Arts Centre, as are both books, which can also be purchased from Chapters, Coles and Amazon. He can frequently be found at the Farmer’s Market, and in many of the local recital halls for concerts and performances. He is also available as accompanist for weddings, dinners and other formal/informal functions.

Check out his website at www.micahpawluk.com, on FB and on Instagram.

Heather L. Dickson is a photoshop guru, zoologist and author of 6 novels.

Visit her website at www.hleightondickson.com

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