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BROADLY SPEAKING, Western classical music has been dominated by the human voice, strings winds and keyboards. The many faces of percussion music however, so central to many other cultures, have been marginalised for most of its thousand-year history.

It was only in the 20th century that percussion instruments began to be featured as (almost) equals alongside the violin and piano. In the auteur hands of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók, Americans Henry Cowell and George Antheil, and the Franco-American Edgar Varese, both tuned and un-tuned percussion instruments began to take their place on the classical concert stage alongside more established instruments. Then in the late 1930s, west coast American composers John Cage and Lou Harrison, both students of Henry Cowell, started to write for multi- percussion ensembles.

’TIS THE SEASON, they say, to be jolly. And, as the multitude of listings in this double issue of The WholeNote collectively make apparent, there are many musical ways to be jolly in December and January.

There’s the traditional choral approach, as choirs in and around Toronto present their annual Christmas concerts. Once again, the hills will ring with the glories of Handel’s Messiah – big performances, small performances, and of course the sing-along variety. (For a list of Messiah concerts in December, see blog entry entitled “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” on our website, www.thewholenote.com.)

But Handel’s perennial favourite is just the tip of the vocal iceberg. In December’s listings you’ll find everything from period performances of masterpieces by Monteverdi, Gabrieli and Praetorius to Broadway showtunes. And at what other time of the year would you get to join in singing with tenor Richard Margison and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian? (December 18, Yorkminster Park Baptist Church.)

Some choirs are looking beyond the expected Christmas repertoire. This year, the Nathaniel Dett Chorale’s Indigo Christmas celebrates Kwanzaa on December 15; and several choirs will be singing Chanukah music.

Instrumental ensembles aren’t about to take a back seat to singers, and many orchestras have big concerts planned. Selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker – the orchestral “equivalent” of Messiah, in terms of popularity – aren’t hard to find. But there’s much more out there than dancing Sugarplum Fairies: look for a diverse array of seasonally themed concerts from just about every orchestra in Southern Ontario.

Jazz musicians also want to get in on the act, and have found ways of making the holiday season their own. Jim Galloway, one of our regular jazz writers, points to some Yuletide performances in his column.

There’s never quite been an operatic equivalent of Messiah or The Nutcracker: a work that’s so durable it can be reliably trucked out every Christmas. Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors perhaps comes closest to this mark – you can hear it on December 4 at the Church of St. Timothy. For those looking for a holiday family show, there’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the Sony Centre, from December 17 to January 2. And of course New Year’s Day has its “official” operetta: Die Fledermaus will be staged by Toronto Operetta Theatre from December 28 to January 7.

This brings us to the new year. After a brief lull, Toronto’s musical life springs back to life in January. As usual, the TSO can be relied upon to warm up the month with a series of Mozart concerts from the 19th to the 30th. And at the end of the month, the Canadian Opera Company welcomes audiences to the Four Seasons Centre with Mozart’s Magic Flute. January is also the month for the University of Toronto’s annual New Music Festival (beginning on the 23rd) – which, as our contemporary-music columnist Jason Van Eyk points out, is becoming an increasingly prominent event in the city’s musical calendar.

Just as December will ring out 2010 in fine style, January looks like the beginning of a very musical 2011.

—Colin Eatock, managing editor

“Basically how it works is that each participant records material while only partially knowing what other participants have made. The full musical piece is revealed without knowing how all the parts will intersect.” – Ben Finley

Exquisite Corpse, Wikipedia says, comes to us from the French Surrealists in the 1920s. As Surrealism founder Andre Bréton put it, “It started in fun, became playful and eventually enriching.” 

As a game or technique it is similar to the game Consequences, where players in turn write something, folding the page to hide part of what they have written before passing it on. The sometimes enriching fun comes when the whole thing is presented, with the missing parts in place. The name itself came from a sentence co-created during an early Surrealist round of the game: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine).

As a technique for collaborative creation, it continues to show up all over the arts spectrum: in the 1940s, composers John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison, composed a set of pieces this way, each writing a measure of music plus an extra note or notes, then folding it on the bar line and passing it on to the next person. (Party Pieces is what the published end result was eventually called.) From post-punk English goth rock, to comic book frame-by-frame co-creation, to music theatre, parody novels, film, tv, art and architecture.

The key to the game is that the full piece is revealed without any of the participants having had prior knowledge of how the parts would intersect.

Exquisite COVID?

Come to think of it, if one substitutes “it started as no fun at all” for Breton’s “it started in fun” life feels a whole lot like le cadavre exquis right now, including not having the foggiest idea what, or when, the “big reveal” will be. 

As Kevin King writes in “On Our Cover” (page 5), “to everyone things seem to be ‘buffering’ in one way or another now, … waiting for the next Zoom meeting or Facebook live stream to start, waiting for your favourite venue to re-open, waiting for someone to invent a face mask you can play an instrument through, waiting for the curve to flatten, or for a vaccine, or for social reform.”

And while we wait, we chip away, each of us, at coming up with strategies and approaches that work for the part of the picture that each of us has to deal with, wondering how (or even if), as Ben Finley says in the quote at the top of this piece, “all the parts will intersect” and what kind of whole they will make when they do. 

One of the contributors to our Community Voices feature in our previous issue (Tricia Baldwin from the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston) made an astute remark: that COVID-19 “has brought forward the tipping point, [and is] hastening the creation of new structures to support the creation and production of the arts in a different way.” 

It’s happening everywhere I look, although “structures” is perhaps too solid a word to describe some of the improvised storm shelters and advance bases springing up: for people wishing for a “new normal” that sounds and behaves more like the old one; and for those of us hoping that the built-in inequities of the old normal never return.

For example, I chatted briefly with Mervon Mehta, executive director, performing arts at the Royal Conservatory in late June. It was right after the RCM made the brave (or foolhardy, depending how the winds blow) announcement of a full season commencing at the beginning of October. Much of what was on his mind had to do with really nitty gritty concerns: How many can we accommodate in our three halls at one-third capacity? How do we get them in and out? Who among our visiting artists will agree to do a 70-minute performance without an intermission at 3pm and repeat it at 8, instead of the one performance they were contracted to do? Things like that. But at the same time he freely admits that the new plan, detailed as it is, may have to go right out of the window if the same dispensations being offered to places of worship, for example, are not extended to the performing arts. Or if the hoped-for stages of recovery don’t pan out and even places of worship are locked down again. 

Another example: the Show One Productions/Starvox staging of the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit now under way at the former Toronto Star building at One Yonge Street. It started first as a “drive through”, thereby capturing the attention of media that would likely not have given the exhibit a second thought. And now it enters a second stage with agreed start time walk-through admission where you must stay within a projected moving circle of space as you move through it. What parts of this, I wonder, have applicability beyond this particular exhibit? Even if only in helping control bottleneck ingress and egress at the larger venues that are Show One’s more usual stomping grounds, and which are themselves in peril if they do not solve these very problems. 

Meanwhile for smaller venues without organized “arts” credentials, like our city’s jazz clubs, it’s a different matter. In Mainly Clubs, Mostly Jazz, Colin Story interviews owner/management at three music venues (The Rex, Burdock, and The Emmet Ray), which, unlike major institutions do not have the benefit of time, major financial resources, and systemic endorsement to stay afloat. Paradoxically, in the longer haul “it is small venues, rather than large, that will have the greater capacity to provide space to diverse programming.”

Full Circle

Back to the conversation with Ben Finley that sparked this train of thought. Finley is a double bassist, improviser, composer and educator, with deep roots in Campellford’s Westben Festival, where 2020 was to be the third iteration of Westben’s Performer-Composer Residency (P-CR), with Finley at the helm. In previous years, 11 successful applicants travelled to Westben, some from far afield,
for a face-to-face residency, timed to coincide with the performance/audience/showcase opportunities afforded by the festival itself.

This year? No festival. No international travel. So, logically, one would think, no composer residency? Wrong.

Instead of whittling the applicants down to the usual dozen or so, Finley invited all 90 applicants to this year’s program to join a month-long digital residency (all of June) instead. More than 60 accepted and were assigned to 13 ensembles based on intersecting, rather than similar interests. 

“So here we are all of a sudden,” Finley says, “having to cross multi-geographical and communication borders, with groups of participants, covering seven different time zones, having to develop innovative and satisfying collaborative strategies for distanced music making.” Crucially, he says, these approaches and strategies didn’t just try to replicate the in-person musical experience but rather to dive into what web-grounded meaningful connections would look like. “It has afforded diverse intergenerational musical practitioners a place to create,” he says. “It’s as though they have been enabled instead to come up with their own temporary musical institution – an exciting new development and something that may not have been possible in person. 

This unexpected adventure comes to its close July 5 to July 11, with 13 premiere performances, in Westben’s new digital venue
(www.westben.ca), of 15-minute multimedia pieces. All the creative intersections this first Westben digital P-CR has actually provoked in participants will be on display. But that’s just one step on the way. 

“We are not in an ordinary time,” Finley says. “COVID has rippled a tremendous impact. And now that ripple is intersecting with a tide – of people coming together to imagine, organize, and participate in an anti-racist and decolonized world. And we need creative and adaptive musical institutions to do this. This global residency has been an (imperfect) experiment in that.” 

publisher@thewholenote.com

The Ludwig of the title above is not a reference to Wittgenstein or van Beethoven. (Nor is it a reference to Ludwig Van Toronto, the online blog, once called Musical Toronto, that is an indispensable and entertaining part of the fabric of media and social media support for classical music in this town.)

When our listings editor John Sharpe came over to my desk a few days ago to say LUDWIG had reached the 40,000 mark, he was referring to the fact that he had just approved for publication the 40,000th entry to be processed in the listings database, code name LUDWIG, that has been, for nine years, the engine room of one of the key services that the The WholeNote provides for the music community in these parts. That’s not to say 40,000 is some kind of magic number in terms of the total number of listings we’ve published, in print and online, in our 24 seasons of documenting live music in our town – something around double that would probably be closer to the mark. But it ain’t nothin’ neither.

The acronym, by the way, stands for “Listings Utility Database (for) WholeNote Information Gathering” and we even, for a little while ran cute ads in the magazine (featuring grumpy pictures of Beethoven, of course) informing readers that if they wanted to access music by a specific genre or geographic zone they were interested in, or by keyword for that matter, they could go online and ASK LUDWIG. You can still do those things, of course, but on the website, if that’s what you’re trying to do, it now simply says JUST ASK.

“So what is that momentous 40,000th listing for?” I hear the regular followers of this Opener both asking. Well, it just happens to be a performance at 1pm on Sunday October 6, at Mazzoleni Concert Hall in the Royal Conservatory,titled “There’s a Lady on Stage”; hosted by pianist/vocalist David Ramsden accompanying not one but three accomplished “ladies” – namely vocalists Lori Yates, Tabby Johnson and Theresa Tova, with free tickets available starting Monday September 30. (The original Quiet Please! There’s a Lady on Stage, some may remember, was a project Ramsden launched in the 80s at the Cameron House (where the title of the show definitely made sense) with some of Canada’s most talented female vocalists.)

“Why are you telling us this?” my loyal readers both ask. No good reason except that it feels good to me that this milestone listing happens to be for a grassroots, free concert, in one of our more intimate halls, reflecting a commitment on behalf of that particular presenter to program creatively, and on our part, faithfully to record what’s actually happening in a live music scene where the work of people for whom music is serious fun is a more important criterion for inclusion in what we list than the “seriousness” by whatever criteria we define it, of the music itself.

Robert Harris, in his Rearview Mirror column in this issue, on page 76, is perhaps talking about something similar when he muses, hopefully, on a world of classical music “augmented by new consciousnesses, expanded to include elements of styles that already have their audiences, thereby liberating classical music from its depleting dependence on repertoire that, every year, departs further and further from the concerns of the modern world…”

May the next 40,000 listings in this magazine continue to evolve to reflect that change!

So another season (our 25th!) is off and running, so here’s wishing us all luck, and it’s great to have you back. And speaking of running, I should mention that Brian Chang our regular choral columnist and passionate advocate for community arts is doing some running of a different kind, as a parliamentary candidate for the federal riding of Toronto Centre. (Thank you Menaka Swaminathan for stepping into the breach in his absence.)

The question of support for funding for the arts is always a topic around election time at all levels of government, but too often as a kind of siloed separate thing, with support for culture and support for community concerns running the risk of becoming polarized opposites, and candidates or party score points for their support of one by pooh-poohing concerns for the other.

More to the point this time round, in my opinion, might be to support individuals running for office who recognize that most arts workers in our society are no less marginalized than many other workers – dealing with the same issues, especially in our cities – housing insecurity; a healthcare system with too many rotten planks in areas of greatest vulnerability. (Read Lydia Perović’s “Mysterious Barricades and Systemic Barriers” on page 40 in this issue for more on this.) Many of us are becoming increasingly unable to afford to participate as consumers in the industries, cultural and otherwise, that by our labours we help to build and maintain, or to dwell within the towns and cities where we ply our trades.

Maybe this time round, we should keep score of how many times our candidates (of all political stripes) talk about “the middle class”, and take away a point every time they do, for automatically assuming that that includes you and me. In each and every riding may the best mensch win.

publisher@thewholenote.com

For the 10 or 12 remaining people on the face of the planet who haven’t yet heard the news, this past May 16 The WholeNote received the Toronto Arts Foundation biennial Roy Thomson Hall Award of Recognition for our “role in promoting current music, emerging artists, and for being vital to the entire music community.”

We were one of three finalists in our category. Musicworks magazine and Mitchell Marcus of the Musical Stage Company (formerly known as Acting Up) were the others.

Our category was one of five. The Arts for Youth Award went to RISE Edutainment – a youth-led grassroots performance arts and storytelling movement “in recognition of its role in creating a healthy and inspiring space for youth, and for challenging systemic barriers through innovative partnerships.”

The Celebration of Cultural Life Award went to Ruth Howard – founding artistic director of Jumblies Theatre “in recognition of the impact, sustainability and legacy of her community-engaged arts practice.”

The Emerging Artist Award went to Jivesh Parasram – multidisciplinary artist, researcher and facilitator “in recognition of his ability to create excellent work that is honest, diverse and collaborative.

And the Toronto Arts and Business Award was shared this year by Active Green + Ross – Complete Tire and Auto Centre “in recognition of its first-time contribution to the arts through its sponsorship of the HopeWorks Connection, covering transportation costs for performers and offering discounted and VIP services,” and to RBC “in recognition of its sustained contributions to the arts through its Emerging Artist Program, making RBC a vital contributor to the arts ecosystem.”

The awards were announced and presented at the 13th Annual Mayor’s Arts Lunch (this year held at the King Edward Hotel) and actually attended by Mayor John Tory (not something one could count on with his predecessor!), along with a broad cross section of arts and business leaders, elected politicians and a hearteningly strong representation from the arts community itself.

All finalists were instructed to prepare acceptance speeches around two minutes in length (300 words maximum), and I am pleased to say that, as befits my inky stained status in life, I complied to within a dozen words of the letter of the instruction.

I’m equally pleased to say that the majority of the other recipients blithely ignored the stated limitations, leading to some of the event’s most heartfelt, inspirational, moving, hope-filled and, yes, constructively political moments.

(I also found myself wishing I had a chance to see what the other finalists wrote down. I would wager there was no set of words among them that would have been less inspiring than the ones we heard.)

In my two minutes and 15 seconds and 314 words, this is what I said:

I want to acknowledge, by name, Allan Pulker, co-founder of The WholeNote (or Pulse as it was originally known) 23 years ago. His unshakeable belief in the richness and variety of Toronto’s grass-roots music scene is the reason The WholeNote exists. I also want to thank Sharna Searle who nominated us for this award. It took her three years to persuade us, mind you. We are more comfortable telling stories than being in them.

I can’t name everyone else – our eight-member core team; 30 to 40 writers every issue; a five-member listings team who come up with 400 to 500 live performance listings each month; the 20 to 25-person distribution team regularly carrying 30,000 free copies per issue to 800+ locations where a deeply loyal readership snatches them up.  

To the finalists and other artists in this room, flag-bearers for countless others for whom the arts are necessary to feel fully alive, thank you for being passionate contributors to all our city’s villages – street by street, block by block. Thank you for giving us something to write about. And to the Toronto Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Foundation, the knowledge that you share our belief in a grass-roots music city makes this award very special.

Make no mistake, though: the grassroots music city is at risk. Housing/land cost is displacing artists, along with the rest of the working poor, from our overheated downtown; small-scale live performance venues are disappearing one by one. Outside the downtown, the nurturing of block-by-block cultural life across our metropolis is a mighty challenge – painfully slow because it is a process of planting not paving.

It’s astonishing, thinking back, that the breakthrough technology that helped launch this magazine was … the fax machine! Now we must all adjust, almost daily, to the ongoing challenge of dizzying change with all its dangers and opportunities. What a story it promises to be.”

Two weeks on, there’s not much I would want to add to those words, except this: the bit about a “deeply loyal readership” means you. Without your use of what we harvest, there would be no point to our labours.

May your summer be filled with the music you find in these pages! And may much of it be live! We’ll see you on the other side.

publisher@thewholenote.com

When is a ploy not a ploy?

A word of reassurance or condolence, depending on your musical proclivities. Calling April “opera month”, as Chris Hoile does this month doesn’t mean every other musical genre vanishes from the scene. But it’s an interesting intellectual exercise, applying a particular thematic lens to our monthly snapshot of the musical landscape. If April were an opera festival in Southern Ontario, look at all the stuff that would qualify for the brochure!

Another example of this: I remember going to a very early meeting of an informal group that was to evolve into the Coalition of New Music Presenters of Toronto. It was around the time the TSO was abandoning its stewardship of the annual November Massey Hall New Music Festival. “Well, just take what’s going on in new music in November and call it a festival” was my cheerful suggestion (not particularly well received at the time). A marketing ploy, someone called it. Ploys can be good, if they get you seeing things afresh. So, opera month it is. WholeNote says so.

Speaking of festivals …

For once, I had this Opener figured out days in advance, thanks to a snippet of news that came my way relating to Estonian Music Week, which kicks off May 24 and will offer concerts and workshops in a bunch of different musical genres and eight different Toronto venues, from Lee’s Palace to Koerner Hall, all timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Estonia’s independence. But that’s May’s news. The detail that caught my eye right now, and much more in keeping with this month’s topic, was an initiative to the tune of around two million Canadian dollars, titled “An Instrument for Every Child,” designed to put a musical instrument in the hands of every Estonian child who wants to play one, with no limitations in terms of musical styles.

But just a couple of hours before going to press with this issue of TheWholeNote, word came through to us from the Glenn Gould Foundation, of the death of Venezuelan visionary educator, Dr. José Antonio Abreu, founder of El Sistema, a transformative program of intensive free music education and orchestral training, starting in early childhood. “Abreu was a visionary figure, who recognized the power of music to transform the lives of children suffering the ravages of poverty and the host of social ills that goes with it” reads the statement posted on the Glenn Gould Foundation website. “From that realization, and by sheer force of will, he built the movement that came to be known as El Sistema, beginning with a mere 11 young people in 1975, but ultimately [spreading] to more than 25 countries worldwide, adapting and accommodating itself to the social and economic context of each.”

I’d already been planning, cleverly, to link this new Estonian initiative to the topic of Abreu, El Sistema and the GGF because April is, as it happens, announcement time for the Glenn Gould Prize for the arts. This year’s distinguished jury is heading to town shortly (unless of course they already live here) and, on April 13 at 12:30pm in the galleria at Koerner Hall the jury will announce this year’s prize winner, following which, as surely as pigeons have wings, feathers will ruffle and/or fly in all directions. After dust and dander settle, the public, and the jury, can take in an astounding 8pm Koerner concert by a likely future winner of this and/or many other prizes, 13-year old British composer, pianist, violinist and improviser Alma Deutscher.

A bit of history: The Glenn Gould Prize started out in 1987 as a strictly musical one, awarded every three years; R. Murray Schafer was its first recipient; then Yehudi Menuhin in 1990, Oscar Peterson in 1993, and Toru Takemitsu, Yo-Yo Ma, Pierre Boulez and André Previn, in 1996, 1999, 2002 and 2005 respectively. Abreu was the 2008 honoree, followed by Leonard Cohen in 2011, Robert Lepage in 2013 and Philip Glass in 2015.

Somewhere along the way, I think either just before or just after the award to Leonard Cohen, it was announced that henceforth the prize would be known as the Glenn Gould Prize for the arts, rather than strictly for music. And around the same time as the change to “Prize for the Arts” was announced, it was also announced that the Prize would be awarded every two years instead of every three.

One more little piece of history: since 1993, the year Oscar Peterson won, there has been a second award, called the City of Toronto Protégé Prize, awarded to some person, or in one case organization, of the Laureate’s own choosing, generally announced at the prize-giving ceremony sometime during the year after the announcement of the main award. Abreu selected Gustavo Dudamel as protégé in his year. Yo-Yo Ma selected a true protégé, future fellow Silk Road Project core company member, pipa player Wu Man for his. She remains to this point the only woman among the 20 honorees to date.

Growing up: Of all the laureates so far, Abreu was for me the one that best reflected what prizes like this should really be for, and the direction that I hope this year’s jury will take in their deliberations. I understand why for the first couple of decades of its existence a prize like this is as much intent on building its own pedigree via the credentials of its chosen laureates as the other way round. The Prize had to prove its importance by choosing widely know laureates, who then, usually, return the favour by the graciousness and alacrity with which they acknowledge the importance of the award.

But how much better when the Prize is bestowed on someone of towering importance to art and life whom we don’t already know. Abreu was one such person for me; I will always be grateful that the Prize brought his life-changing work to my attention. Going further, it is highly unlikely that El Sistema would have found fertile soil in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada were it not for the prominence given the movement here in 2008.

The April 13 announcement will take the Prize to a whole new level if it brings into the limelight a person (of any gender) who stands to benefit more from having their work brought into focus by the Prize, than the Prize merely basking in the laureate’s reflected glory. Now that would truly be a feather in the Glenn Gould Foundation cap.

As for the matter of the gender of the laureates, it’s an issue that gets thornier with every passing cycle. Each time a man is chosen, the cumulative imbalance becomes more improbable. Just as problematic, though, in my view, will be the backlash as and when this changes – the huffing and puffing of small-hearted people who will immediately assume that this award, unlike the other 19, was gender-based. So, to the jury, good luck. To those who are waiting to question the jury’s integrity, look into your own hearts. To José Antonio Abreu, you will not be forgotten.

publisher@thewholenote.com

on the way from the lobby (the north lobby that is, of Roy Thomson Hall). I was on my way back from RTH to the WholeNote office here at the Centre for Social Innovation at 720 Bathurst Street, last Wednesday morning January 15 2014. I had been at the Simcoe-King punchbowl for a Toronto Symphony Orchestra 10am season launch for their 2014/15 season (more about that in a minute), and was heading back to the WholeNote office. On that particular morning it was cold enough that instead of my usual King-Streetcar-to-Bathurst/Bathurst-Streetcar to-Lennox saunter I took the coward’s way and slunk through the underground tunnels from RTH to St. Andrew and took the trains to Bathurst. And it was there that the aforementioned funny thing happened. Ah but I am going too fast. Some background is needed.

Two bits of history

First bit of history: around 10 or 12 years ago the TTC decided that loitering at Bathurst subway station was becoming a real problem. The best possible way to deal  with the perceived problem, their experts decided, was to pipe non-stop classical music into the station, reasoning that the loiterers, being of a certain ilk, would be so offended that they would vacate. 

Second bit of history: around two years ago the TTC decided that the pigeons who had moved into residence inside the Bathurst subway station were becoming a real problem (riding the escalators to the platforms, for example).  The way to deal with the problem, the experts said, was to pipe loud recordings of hawks at unpredictable intervals into the station, reasoning that any self-respecting pigeon would immediately beat a retreat no matter how cold it was outside.

Back to our story

And so it was that at around 12:30pm this past January 15 I was strolling through the mezzanine level at Bathurst subway station, my press kit from the TSO season launch in one hand and a patty from the station patty shop in the other. And right then, a funny thing happened. What happened was that the Brandenburg concerto (in A440) stopped, and simultaneously Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and a Sharp-shinned Hawk launched their respective cadences into the mezzanine.  And nary a loiterer bolted. And not one pigeon ducked for cover.

Aha, I said to myself. There is a new audience for this music we love.

And back to RTH

I love the way that season launches and press conferences have morphed over the years we’ve been doing this stuff. Ten years ago a TSO season launch would have attracted 30 TSO staffers, about the same number of  sponsors, and maybe 15 ink-stained wretches from media, mainstream and  otherwise. Someone from the TSO would have introduced some key sponsor who would have read a quick speech and then the music director would have tried to sound spontaneous as he made his way through the media package that was going to be handed out at the end of the launch anyway, so no real need to take notes or listen.

It’s sure not that way any more! For one thing, there were well over 250 people at this launch, most of them TSO subscribers, seduced by an occasion offering genuinely witty and off-the-cuff stuff from the music director, interspersed with four or five well-produced little video greetings from the coming season’s luminaries, and an opportunity right after the launch to sit in on a TSO rehearsal in the hall.  In fact there were so many people there enjoying the event that you could hardly see that the number of media types in attendance these days is far-and-away less healthy than, say, the number of pigeons on the platform at Bathurst subway station.

As for the details of the season announced last Wednesday, stay tuned over the next month or so. There’s a lovely lot to talk about, and Peter Oundjian, the TSO music director, has promised us a visit, probably at the beginning of March, during their New Creations Festival, to talk about it all. “Hard to believe it’s already ten years since he came on the scene” you hear some say.  “Hard to believe it’s only ten years” you hear from others; testament, I suppose to the fact that he wears the role with all the comfort of an old pair of slippers and all the enjoyment of a kid with a brand new toy.

And what of the endangered few?

That’s what I found myself wondering leaving RTH that particular frosty morning. And by “the few” I don’t  mean the pigeons or the loiterers, but us. The arts media. When in all the time I have been doing this, I found myself wondering, have I ever felt more mainstream leaving a TSO launch? In other words, when has the main stream of arts coverage in the city’s media been so dried up and shrunken that The WholeNote’s presence or absence at an event like this would even be noticed or commented upon?

 Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having one’s contribution to the cause noted. But it’s unnerving to realize that one is standing out in a crowd because the crowd is dwindling.

Among the biggest talking points at the TSO launch that day was that one of the city’s best and truest voices on the musical arts scene might be thinking of winding up his blog, leaving us all with a far less musical Toronto.

Nah, I say, if Grieg and the hawks can keep the pigeons and loiterers hanging around to listen at Bathurst Station, there’s hope for reinvention yet.

publisher@thewholenote.com

The other day I found myself scratching my head a bit at a press release from an organization I confess I had never heard of— the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony Orchestra — on the occasion of, drumroll please, their 18th anniversary, their “Chai” anniversary.

“A Chai anniversary has its roots in the Hebrew word for ‘life,’ which is Chai, with its Hebrew letters adding up to the number 18. For this reason, the number 18 is a spiritual number in Judaism and represents a time to reflect, remember and celebrate,”the release explained.

My legions of faithful regular readers will doubtless both remember that I do not respond enthusiastically to anniversaries that are multiples of five and ten. Seven, I have more than once proclaimed in this spot, is of far more intrinsic interest than ten. Many a publicist in town can attest to the fact that the 10th or 20th or 40th anniversary big story idea they have floated my way has found itself dashed on the rocks of editorial indifference. “Forty? Wow! That’s only two years away from 42. Now that’s a really important one!”

So imagine my delight at receiving the above-mentioned LAJSO release about their BIG 18th anniversary! It adds another arrow to my bow, another argument the next time someone comes along and says it’s time to worship at the shrine of ten!

Come to think of it, 18 is what The WholeNote will turn this year.“A time to reflect, remember and celebrate,” indeed. Thank you LAJSO!

And wait, there’s more! Since 81 is simply the mirror image of 18, it stands to reason that the organizers of all this September’s various Glenn Gould 80th anniversary celebrations should cool their jets, and wait one more year before starting the hollering and hooting. Same goes for Murray Schafer (80). Sorry Murray.

There’s a problem though, isn’t there? Even an extra year won’t be enough time to convince the public at large that it is important for their spiritual health to re-learn their nine times tables. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Multiplying by ten is as easy as one, two, three. So if you were expecting me to say “bah, humbug” yet again to the power of ten, I am sorry. I surrender. Henceforth the number ten rules: from our cover story coverage of the two-day Glenn Gould Variations summit at Convocation Hall; to Andrew Timar’s highly personal take on the 100th anniversary of the birth of another musical titan, John Cage; to David Olds’ reflections on the 25th anniversary of Naxos Canada. I mean, everyone knows 25 is a sort of ten!

And don’t expect it to stop with this issue either. As the season unfolds, expect to see us tip the hat to some particularly notable 40ths: Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams and Toronto Consort, to name but three.

It’s a slippery slope, I grant you. I can already hear the aforementioned publicists sharpening their digital pencils on behalf of clients who have reached 10 or 20, or 25, or 30 this year.

Even worse, in the distance I hear a rumble of discontent from some of the notable 40s to whose anniversaries only last year we turned a blind eye. Every flip flop has its consequences. So to them I say, cheer up! You’re only a year away from 42. As I said to Bob Aitken on page 28, now that’s a really important one!

As for The WholeNote, 18 feels like a really fine milestone to be reaching. Mind you, it will probably take us another two years to organize the party, anyway!

And in the meanwhile, l’chaim! To life. 

—David Perlman, publisher@thewholenote.com

Way back when, The WholeNote was an occasional column called “Classical Heaven on $100 a Month” in a homegrown community newspaper called the Kensington Market Drum. “Everything within a 15 minute bike ride of College and Spadina is our turf” the Drum declared, thereby, by fiat, turning everything from City Hall to Walter Hall to Dixon Hall to Barbara Hall to RTH into legitimate Kensington Market news, including all the goings on at what was then generally referred to as “The Clarke,” namely the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, just east of us on College Street.

We’re talking the late 1980s here, folks, when a facebook was what you draped strategically over your sleeping nose to keep the summer sun off, and the good doctors at the Clarke delighted as much as all the rest of us in the simple art of coming up with clever acronyms for things. I remember, at the time, receiving one punch-drunk press release from the aforementioned Clarke Institute which managed in three paragraphs to make reference in capital letters to Seasonal Affective Disorder, Mood and Affective Disorders, and Bipolar Affective Disorder, thereby proclaiming themselves in one breath to be the answer for all that ails society’s SAD, MAD and BAD.

To their credit, it didn’t take them long to realize the error of their ways; to understand that in their line of work patients, as much as doctors, can recognize an acronym when they see it. So MAD and BAD disppeared from their PR lexicon, before too much of a fuss could be made. But Seasonal Affective Disorder has shown a remarkable tenacity. A quick Google search, right now, January 28, 2013, yields no fewer than 2,900,000 results for the phrase. Not too shabby, as pre-internet coinage goes.

Part of why SAD has stuck, here in Canada at least, is because of how completely it dovetails with the February Blues, that state of mind that dogs us all as we crawl past the turn of the year towards the spring and summer light that feel right now as if they will never return.

Well, abandon despair, all ye who enter here! In these pages are all the little signs of hope, musical candles in the dark, that you need to begin your journey back to the light: from Lunar New Year, to a Valentine-themed outbreak of Chopinesque passion, to almost weekly announcements, by various presenters, of musical seasons to come, well into 2014.

And it’s no coincidence that February and March are the months when we at The WholeNote crank up our efforts to pull together as much information as we can about what the summer offers in the way of music education. See our little house ad on page 50.

This year we are going a step beyond: putting together for March not just the summer’s musical offerings, but a directory of as much as we can gather about the individual teachers and community musical schools that offer, year round, musical solace against all the manifold despairs of the dark. We’re calling it our “Orange Pages.” Partly it’s because we’ve already assigned Green, Blue and Canary to other uses. And partly because it suggests that an active musical life can be a reliable shortcut to a sunshine state of mind. 

—David Perlman, publisher@thewholenote.com

Looking over my notes, there were a lot of things I thought this last “For Openers” of 2020 was going to be about.

Last week, for example, I had what I am tempted to call my “usual” chat with a cherished reader, who calls without fail after receiving the issue, but only after having had time to read it closely enough to make specific observations (occasionally trenchant), about its contents. But also always unfailingly encouraging, as well as (time after time over the years) offering suggestions (usually in the form of questions) for stories we should consider taking on. 

This time the question was “Have you considered doing a story for readers like me (who need for various reasons to get tax receipts for our donations) who are willing and able, especially at a time like this, to support musical organizations (particularly those with a sense of social justice)? A story like that would help us figure who to give our money to.” A good idea indeed, I agreed. 

Except that afterwards, I’m sorry to say, I found the idea irking me like a scratchy tag in a new shirt. Why? Because I am less sure than ever before that being able to issue tax receipts for donations is necessarily a reliable indicator of which organizations, in the music community and beyond, are the most at risk right now, or the most deserving of support. A bit like the way, back in March and April, when it came to deciding who should be eligible for governmental pandemic support, only T4 employment earnings were initially deemed proof of “real work” – no comfort to workers in the gig economy, or small businesses, where the dreamers usually pay themselves last anyway. 

So, there’s a story there, but definitely a more nuanced one than at first glance. And yes, we’ll probably tackle it – but, um, not right now. 

A few weeks before that, according to my notes, it was the “We’re all in this together” pep talks from our social, cultural and civic leaders that were seriously irking me to the point I was vowing to thunder about them here. What’s the “this” we’re supposedly all in? Not the “same boat,” that’s for sure, I scribbled. The same storm? Yes indeed, but in a whole range of craft, not all equally seaworthy and not all equally equipped to issue life jackets (or T4s) to those on board. But that one is not so simple either. After all, how do you define “seaworthy” when what is needed for the urgent task at hand is the alacrity to change course to avoid an iceberg? 

So, yes, there’s a story there too, but definitely a more nuanced one than at first glance. So … um, not right now. 

Instead, there’s this, from all of us at The WholeNote whose lives, like most of yours, are under (re)construction without benefit of blueprint: a crazy quilt of artistic initiative and endeavour and tenacity on the cusp between what was then and who knows what next? Still all doing the things we know how to do, but in ways we never needed to know till now; still figuring out ways to keep telling the stories we are driven to tell; hanging in until we can hang out. And maybe, just maybe, getting a teensy bit better, with each other’s help, at figuring out when to say “um, not right now” to the things we long for that just bloody well have to wait.

Right now “all in good time” is not the worst thing to wish on. Enjoy the read, and we’ll see you on the other side.

publisher@thewholenote.com

My mighty mother, of whom I shall say a little more at the end of this farewell, had a story she loved to tell about how as a fledgling activist in the 1940s she proved her credentials to the assembled members of the South African Communist Party cell of which her then boyfriend was a member, by announcing her passion for the music of Shostakovich; then later, when she tired of the aforementioned boyfriend (and his politics), she greatly simplified her exit from the relationship by confiding to the scandalized cohort her abiding love for the symphonies of Tchaikovsky.

The WholeNote’s annual Blue Pages are always a nice reminder of how diverse the musical tastes of our community are and how much opportunity there is in a relatively peacable land to indulge one’s own musical tastes without having to deny anyone else theirs. It is a relief when matters of taste don’t have to be a matter of life and death. Enjoy the read, and may you find something delightfully unexpected (or unexpectedly delightful) in the course of it.

What’s in a Name? The recent opening of the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre has given a dozen other organizations the same opportunity as the Regent Park School of Music to take big steps forward. The organization Artscape, long an advocate for artists in the community, should take a bow for somehow harnessing the energies of developers and City departments to a common purpose. And beyond that, it’s no small talent to turn common purpose into a viable business plan. This is where commodities such as “naming rights” come into the picture, no less here than for the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, or the O’Keefe/Hummingbird/Sony Centre. That being said, the announcement, right as we were getting ready to go to press, that the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre was henceforth to be known as the “Daniels Spectrum” came as a bit of a jolt. It is hard to watch community history and the idea of art and culture casually obliterated like that. But even if Daniels, the major developer of the new Regent Park, had to plaster their name on this building along with all the others, why Spectrum? To any good hockey loving Torontonian “I’m off to the Spectrum” sounds like you’re going to watch a road game in Philadelphia. Even calling it the Daniels Arts and Cultural Centre would have been better, eh? “I’m off to the ACC” means something in this town.

Minor cavil aside, the building is going to be a real asset, for the performance spaces it includes and for the arts and community organizations it will house well. Thanks to the staff of Regent Park School of Music for helping us capture the story and thanks to RSM students Dillon, Megan, Ryan and William Chan; Siddartha Kundu; Boris, Sima and Yakov Tarnopolski; and Alex, Lilly and Sally Twin, for helping make the story a reality by appearing in our cover photo.

I said I would return to the subject of my mighty mother at the end of this, and here we are. Ina Perlman’s life’s work, two continents away, during the darkest days of South African apartheid, was with the hungry and the homeless and the dispossessed, first in the tens, then hundreds, then thousands and more. She’d have been furious at being mentioned publically like this. But she’d have liked the company she is keeping in this particular issue of the magazine. Because she understood the idea of small beginnings, things like The WholeNote Blue Pages, like the Regent Park School of Music.

Music cannot feed the body. But it can make a person hopeful enough to want to eat.

Saturday October 20, 2pm: Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre. Space is the Place. Community celebration of music and dance. Featuring Hymn to Universe, a dance work by B. Coleman. Sun Ra Arkestra; students from Regent Park School of Music; Bill Coleman, choreographer. 585 Dundas St. E. 416-703-5479. Free; community gathering to follow. Be there.

At the party after The WholeNote’s 20th anniversary concert at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, Friday September 25, a former Governor-General of Canada (who shall remain nameless) said to me some kind words to the effect that we were to be commended for the service we had rendered to the artistic community over the past two decades and to individuals like her who in large part get their information about what is out there musically from this publication.

My reply, if I remember correctly after two hours onstage with the inimitable Mary Lou Fallis (thank you, Mary Lou!), was that the most amazing thing is not the fact that we told the story, but the fact that the story existed to be told.

All we have done is to document one aspect of the astoundingly vibrant cultural life of the remarkable cultural fertile crescent along the Canadian shoreline of Lake Ontario. Take a quick look at the Blue Pages in the centre of this magazine and the listings in any issue of the magazine, and you will see what I mean.

Bottom line: There would be no WholeNote if there had not been an extraordinary music scene in these parts to document.

October 19: That is why we are weighing in on the topic of the federal election now under way. Because we believe the artistic life of this city and region is under threat in some very significant ways. And people who care about that should think carefully when they cast their vote.

I am not going to tell you who I think you should vote for. But I am going to tell you what I think you should vote against.

One: Vote against candidates and parties who use the word “middle class” as if they know what it means. And then go on to talk about “what middle class Canadians want” as if that were the only important thing in the election.

In a story in this issue, pianist Eve Egoyan, at some point, talks about life as “an independent artist who makes a living in bits and pieces.” Ask yourself: how many “middle class” people would describe the way they make a living in those terms? And then ask yourself how many cultural workers you know who fit that description?

Finally, ask yourself which parties’ policies are geared to the needs of the other people in our society who also “make a living in bits and pieces” but don’t have the cachet that gets artists (even starving ones) invited to dine at the tables of those who make their living in much more orderly and predictable ways.

Look to support parties with policies that support and empower the working poor, for the majority of the artists that make our society rich in ways beyond money fall into that category for a significant part of their lives, even while they bring us all joy.

Two: Vote against candidates and parties who pit cities against suburbs; and who don’t seem to understand that the only way to keep our cities truly, fully culturally alive in the ways that made this magazine possible is to enable the next generation of artists to be able to afford to live in the places where they learn and ply their trade.

Ask yourself: what will have changed irreversibly for the worse when our audiences can afford to live in a city, but the majority of the artists on its stages cannot?

Three: Vote against candidates and parties whose policies suggest they think throwing money at studying problems is actually part of the solution.

Or who base their campaigns on promises to make great new things from scratch without explaining how they will build on what is already there.

Or who say that solutions for those in the arts, whose lives are built of bits and pieces, are different than for everyone else in the same boat.

And then vote.

Twenty-year archive: Earlier in this rant I mentioned that what The WholeNote has done is to document the musical life of this thin strip of land for the past twenty years.

As part of this 20th anniversary celebration, we are pleased to announce we have digitized our first 20 years. They are available for your nostalgic pleasure at thewholenote.com/previous.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Shouldn’t it follow that a mayor making pronouncements about how some city south by southwest of here has, gasp!, “a live music guidebook and a smartphone app…and they help people find live music easily in the city,” would look around to see what we do have before throwing more top-down money to “grow our creative sector as a key to economic growth.” Nothing wrong with the sentiment, John. Just look around carefully at the bailiwick for what’s already invented and make us all part of the solution. (I’ve underlined the previous sentence in the copy of the mag I’m mailing you and put a post-it note on the page. I know (and am glad) you are busy.

“Top down” inevitably means tapped out: “grass roots,” once a beautifully apt metaphor, has long been trampled down to the point of losing its meaning. Why bother when for an executive salary of half a million or so (plus another half million or so in contracting fees) you can lower a giant Christmas tree or festival onto a city square any time you like, and have it appear to be alive for the couple of weeks that people are paying attention. After that? Let the Games begin!

I loved Nuit Blanche long before … that evening last fall, walking through the Market and up the stairs to the roof of the Kensington Parking Garage to watch the people coming from all directions, drawn by grass-roots magic, to watch that laser beam emanating from that roof top, strung like a tight-wire rainbow telegraph, high over Dundas Street,  across MY city, to the side of the CN Tower, watching it shimmer as it cut through the rain. 

Faithful followers, should make a note of the fact that this (March 19 2015) is the earliest that I have settled on a title for this Opener in the 19 years 6 months and 19 days that this publication has been in print.

And if you like the title, thank WholeNote stalwart, oboist Karen Ages, who interrupted a Perlmaniacal rant about the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Bach Festival (in which little town Bach’s music was a living part of their liturgy, decades before Mendelssohn pronounced Bach to be risen from the dead)... “Speaking of non sequiturs,” Karen said. “I’m going to get my hair cut on Monday instead, so as not to miss our Friday Directories meeting.”

Musicians with big ones, take note: the best way to protect a large instrument (in this case Ben Stein’s theorbo) while visiting The WholeNote office, is to leave it right out in the open, in the middle of the floor, so that even if the publisher doesn’t see it someone else will, just in time to stop said publisher from putting his foot into it. (The reason for Stein’s visit was to discuss an upcoming feature on A Cappella singing as a genre in the upcoming May issue.)

How Low Can You Get? Good question! Partial answers will be found at Flute Street’s “And the Giant Began to Dance” concert April 12 at Christ Church Deer Park, featuring something called a sub-contrabass flute. And at Associates of the TSO’s “Don’t Always Have Fun Without Me! The Double Bass is Here!” at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre on April 12 – the very next day. Deep. Very deep.

We called it our Canary Pages because we were advised that certain people would sue our tushies off if we called it the Choral Yellow Pages. Now as we enter the home stretch on our 13th annual Canary pages (the deadline is April 6), the official explanation is that the metaphor derives from the practice of miners using canaries to detect methane gas. No canaries singing means DANGER! CALL THE MAYOR.

publisher@thewholenote.com

My visitor to the WholeNote office, this icy April Tuesday afternoon, James Norcop, braved unseasonably slippery sidewalks and roads to get here, lured by the prospect of getting to talk about a topic dear to his heart – the upcoming Concours musical international de Montréal, which takes place this year from May 27 to June 7. This is the seventh edition of the Concours dedicated to voice, which rotates with violin and piano every three years. But it is the first, largely thanks to Norcop, that will give art song, his lifelong passion, its rightful place in the sun.

Norcop is, however, a good listener, very adept at drawing people out, so only a few minutes into our chat, the conversation has drifted away from the Concours, and instead of me asking the questions I am holding forth on the topic of the previous Friday’s Glenn Gould Prize announcement, trying to recount for him the particulars of the story that award-winning composer and chairman of the China Musicians’ Association professor Ye Xiaogang had told Friday’s noonday audience after the announcement of the winner – or 12th Laureate as the Glenn Gould Foundation terms it – of the Prize.

He was one of an accomplished panel of nine jurors who had spent the previous day narrowing a book of “more than 30 and fewer than 100 nominees” (as the chair of the jury Viggo Mortensen had described it) to just one: Jessye Norman, one of the great singers of her generation.

Each of the eight other jurors had spoken in turn after Mortensen announced the winner, I explained to Norcop, and there had been something in what each of them said that had disarmed the cynic in me, lifting the occasion beyond any previous such announcements I had attended. As one of the jurors, renowned singer Ute Lemper, put it in her comments: “It was not easy. Down to three people, I do feel that at the end we did not decide purely with the intellect, but decided with the heart and at that moment I thought this is a wonderful moment of life where you suddenly get overwhelmed with something stronger than just the intellect. With a perfect balance of heart and intellect and knowledge and spirit all having come together.”

Ye told a story about the way Gould himself had come into his artistic consciousness. It was one of those roadside stories – hearing something on the car radio already in progress, recognizing it as the Goldberg Variations but needing to pull over to the side of the road to listen right through and to discover who? “It was Gould. The 1955 Goldberg,” Ye said. “1955, I thought. The year of my birth! In that moment I said to myself I can do great things.”

A pause ... Then “Can I tell you my Glenn Gould story?” Norcop says.

“I was at music school at USC, and on staff was a great figure, a lady by the name of Alice Ehlers. She was a refugee of course, came from Germany – she had played harpsichord for Furtwängler, in Passions, and so on, so she had credentials. ‘Madame Ehlers’ … she was extraordinary. She gave this Baroque interpretation class we all attended. And she was never late. This one day we were all there. Two pm came. Then 2:05, 2:10 and no Madame Ehlers; 2:15 and we were all getting ready to leave and there she was. Walking on air. ‘Ach, I have heard a miracle. There is a Canadian, his name is Glenn Gould. He plays the Goldberg Variations. I don’t agree with everything but he is magnificent!’ Glenn Gould’s Goldberg – the only thing that ever made Madame Ehlers late for class. And this was in 1955, right in the moment after the record’s release.”

As for the first time Norcop remembers hearing Jessye Norman sing, the memory of that moment is also vivid, even though the date and place are not. “Was it 15 years ago? 20? 25? Hers has been an extraordinary career. It was also one of those car radio stories. You know, when you turn on the radio in the middle of something playing, so instead of being pre-warned, you have to make up your own mind about what you are hearing. And for me it was simply ‘My God!’ She was in the middle of Wagner’s Wesedonck Lieder. She sounded like a young Kirsten Flagstad back then.”

Heading North

Within ten years of that memorable day in Madame Ehlers’ Baroque interpretation class at USC, baritone Norcop’s career was about to take an 18-year “temporary back seat” to that of Norcop the arts administrator – a career that would take him from manager of the Vancouver Opera to the Ontario Arts Council, where he met Charlotte Holmes, his future wife. In more than a decade and a half at the OAC he served, among other positions, as music officer and eventually as head of the touring program for all the arts.

Through it all, vocal music, and in particular art song, remained (and remains) a throughline and consuming passion. The Jim and Charlotte Norcop Prize in Song and Gwendolyn Williams Koldofsky Prize in Accompanying, at the U of T Faculty of Music, are testament to that. So too has been Norcop’s role, from the first year of Douglas McNabney’s tenure as artistic director of Toronto Summer Music, eight years ago, in enabling the TSM art song academy to rise from the ashes of TSM’s short-lived opera program. The hard rocks of financial unsustainability were the primary reason for the opera program’s meteoric rise and fall. “Besides which,” Norcop says, “there are other places in the world to go for opera studies in the summer.”

But for art song, not so much, although for Norcop as a genre it is at the pinnacle of the classical vocal arts, albeit widely viewed these days as a poor relation of its “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” aria-driven operatic counterpart. “It requires all the powers of passion, interpretation and artistry that opera does, distilled into intense moments. And all without benefit of script.”

For years he hoped and tried to establish, with collaborative pianist Liz Upchurch, a vocal arts competition in Toronto; she wanted to dedicate it to her mentor, repetiteur and vocal coach extraordinaire Martin Isepp. But “Toronto is a very tough place to fundraise for musical causes,” he says, wryly.

Which brings us, finally, to the main reason for his braving the ice to be here: the Concours in Montreal.

Aria vs. Song

“Canada only has four musical competitions of international stature,” Norcop says. “There’s Banff for string quartets, Honens for piano, Montreal for organ, and then there’s this, the Concours.”

And even the Concours, with its triennial emphasis on voice, was missing the mark, as Norcop saw it, based on his first visit there, for the 2015 vocal round. “The category was just voice, with everything lumped in, so naturally opera ruled the day, with maybe a little bit of oratorio thrown in.”

To cut what should be a longer story short, he leapt in, making the case to Concours executive and artistic director Christiane LeBlanc that it should be feasible to create parallel streams within the triennial vocal round, so that in the vocal year there would be a competition for aria and one for song, running parallel.

“She got it right away,” Norcop says (with perhaps no implied criticism of years of futile trying to do the same thing in Ontario).

The speed with which it has all come together (three years is nothing in administrative time) is remarkable, reflective of the alactrity and passion with which Norcop threw himself into the task of raising the roughly $250,000 needed to get the initiative off the ground, and to put into place a prize structure matching dollar for dollar the $130,000 offered overall in the aria category (which has a 16-year head start on its upstart twin).

And Norcop is putting his own money where his mouth is, in the category that best reflects a lifetime of insight into the realities of pursuing an artistic life in art song. It’s the James Norcop Career Development Award, a no-strings-attached $50,000 to the winner.

“The song business is not like the opera side,” he says. “It’s a life of one-night stands, or putting yourself out there. The publisher of the Montreal Star gave Maureen Forrester an award that was the equivalent of that much when she was setting out, and she used it to go to Europe. She never looked back and she never forgot.”

True to his principled understanding of the nature of the art of song, he takes great satisfaction from the fact that the collaborative pianists accompanying the singers will, if under 35 years of age, be automatically entered into a parallel competition, for the John Newmark Best Collaborative Pianist Award. “We need to name our awards for our great artists,” he says. “Competitors are coming from around the world. It’s a chance to tell them the story of who our great ones were.”

And a way to support the ones to come.

“You can follow the whole thing via live-streaming,” he says. “It’s a great audience to be part of. They are faithful, following it all the way. But nothing beats being there. Oh, what fun it’s going to be.”

publisher@thewholenote.com

Back in 1999, the feeling of collective millennial fervour and/or impending doom, as the thousand-year clock ticked toward midnight, is something that any of our readers old enough to remember Y2K will be able to relate to. And literature and everyday discourse are rife with examples of phrases like “100th birthday” and “turn of the century” being used in ways which take for granted that the reader or listener will understand, without any need for any further explanation, why the odometer clicking from 99 to 100 always has special significance.

I am, however, starting to think that any time the calendar threatens to click over from nine to ten, people are suddenly galvanized into getting something important done “before it’s too late.” How else do we explain the rash of earth-shakingly important events in years, like this one, when the moving finger of fate is pointing to a nine? And this in turn leads to subsequent rashes of anniversary celebrations, every ten years after that. Like this year’s 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969; or the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; or … drum roll please! ... the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the WholeNote Blue Pages directory!

That last example is of course entirely flippant; the other two are not, although I must confess that while I listened in 1969, with half the world, over a crackling transistor radio, to Neil Armstrong flub his big line, and forgave him, I couldn’t care less at this point what Buzz Aldrin thinks about Armstrong, 50 years later. More than anything else I find it depressing that, 50 years later, the same old loony theories about the moon landing being a hoax still refuse to go away.

As for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, I still think that one is worth celebrating (as, I notice, Orchestra Toronto will do in their upcoming October 27 concert).

There’s another 30th anniversary concert in our listings this month also worth celebrating, and since it hasn’t been picked up by any of our writers, I am going to do a shout-out for it here, for three reasons.

Titled “Freedom Reborn,” it takes place at 5pm on Sunday, October 27 at St. Andrew’s Church at King and Simcoe, across the road from Roy Thomson Hall. As the organizers explain, the freedom it celebrates is “the 30th anniversary of the return of democracy and freedom to Central Europe” – namely the rollback of Soviet political domination, throughout 1989, in Hungary, Poland, and what was then Czechoslovakia. I won’t pretend to have either a deep historical

understanding of the ebb and flow of that year, or the visceral memory of what it meant for citizens of the countries in question, many of whom experienced it from places like Canada where they had taken refuge, or sought firm ground on which to take a stand.

I do remember, though, the phrase “The Velvet Revolution” to describe the astonishing, largely nonviolent series of events in Czechoslovakia between the middle of November and the last days of December 1989, culminating in the swearing in of Vaclav Havel – an artist for crying out loud! – as president on December 29, just before the clock ticked over. I also understand a little bit better now than I did then, the extent to which, in the absence of the momentum building through all the other Warsaw Pact countries over the course of that year, that astonishing outcome would have been entirely impossible.

One of the things I like most about this particular concert is that it is a joint venture among the Consulates General of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in Toronto along with the Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Canada – the four member nations in the so-named Visegrad Group of Central European countries. Cooperation to make happy noise is almost invariably a good thing.

The second thing I like about it is that the artists involved reflect all the countries concerned: Alicja Wysocka, soprano; John Holland, baritone; Jan Vaculik, baritone; Sophia Szokolay, violin; Daniel Wnukowski, piano; Imre Olah, organ; Novi Singers Toronto; the St. Elizabeth of Hungary Scola Cantorum; the Dvořák Piano Quartet; and Toronto Sinfonietta, under Matthew Jaskiewicz, music director.

And the third thing I like is that the repertoire chosen (again representative of the four countries involved) is for the most part beautiful – joyful and familiar, stirring and celebratory, so that the people attending (and it’s free, so expect a crowd!) have a good chance of coming away without the kind of ambivalence that dogs us all every day, in the fishbowl of awareness of the negative consequences of our own actions and inactions, intended or not.

Moments of hard-won escapism. Maybe that’s the message. Let’s hope the organizers don’t feel like they have to wait another ten years to wade in our town’s musical waters. Our Blue Pages directory is full of examples of people working collectively on an ongoing basis for art’s sake. In the mean times we live in, beauty needs all the help it can get.

publisher@thewholenote.com

October 13 I felt like I knew a whole lot more about my fellow-Ontarians’ attitudes to the arts than I did the previous day. I knew, for example, that:

• 83% of Ontarians listen to music on a local radio station at least once a week

• 45% listen to music through a website or other streaming radio

• 79% of Ontarians read articles in newspapers or magazine at least once a week

• 60% attend professional music concerts “at any frequency,”  another 55% attend professional stage plays or musicals and 51% visit art museums or art galleries

• Of the 43% of Ontarians who dance socially, 61% said it is “very important” to them

• 80% of respondents who visit art museums and galleries also reported it is “very important” to them. The home is the predominant setting for engaging in music (89%), dance (51%) and visual arts (71%) activities

• 45% and 48% of respondents do music and dance activities in restaurants, bars or night clubs, respectively

• Ontarians who engage in participatory music activities attend concerts by professional musicians at a rate that is two to three times higher than those who do not

• 95% of Ontarians said they would like to be doing more arts activities than they are doing now.

The thing that happened overnight between October 12 and October 13 to make me so much better informed was that the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) released the findings of a major commissioned report, the Ontario Arts Engagement Study, that looked at “the full spectrum of arts activities from traditional audience-based activities (such as attending performing arts events or visiting an art gallery) to personal practice activities (such as playing a musical instrument, painting, or taking dance lessons), including arts participation via electronic, print and digital media (such as radio, television or the Internet).” And it explored “the importance of these arts activities to Ontarians, the settings in which arts activities take place, the relationships between personal arts practice and attendance, and the patterns of engagement across regions and demographic groups such as age and gender.”

So as I said, October 13 found me better informed than I had been the day before, but not necessarily a whole lot wiser.

Thankfully along with the report there was a “List of Things To Think About” (for people like me, I guess, who find information a obstacle to thought).

“The report raises questions and implications for arts organizations seeking to enhance their relationships with audiences” it said, and went on with its questions. There were eight. So far I’ve got as far as three:

Given the pivotal role of electronic, print and digital media in the landscape of arts engagement, how might arts organizations reach more deeply into the population through these media?

How will online activities, such as downloading music, change the way we deliver our artistic product?

How can arts organizations move forward and meet audiences, especially the younger ones, where they are and where they want to be?

Aha. Now there’s a plan …

Back in our naïve youth as a magazine we used to handcuff ourselves by proclaiming one or another month of the year as [some particular genre] month. As in “April is Opera Month”; or “March is New Music Month.”

One problem was, of course, that we failed to inform the hundreds of presenters putting on concerts every month far enough in advance so that they could change their plans to fit with our executive orders.

Another was that, with every passing year, our tidy little rolodex of genres has eroded as rapidly as the memories of those among us who still know what a rolodex is.

But of all the “this month is” edicts and proclamations, the one that still feels intuitively right to me is the next one coming up after this one: thanks to the presence in our upcoming May edition of our 15th annual Choral Canary Pages, there is still an argument to be made for saying that “May is Choral Month” in The WholeNote.

It’s not because all our stories in the May issue will have choral themes. It’s because our Canary Pages are not primarily designed to give audiences information about what choral performances are coming up, but to give you and me as much information as possible about what choirs are out there to join, so that we can give ourselves an opportunity to breathe in loud and joyful unison, voicing common hopes and feelings with other people on a regular basis. In a world that conspires in every imaginable way to have us twittering away in querulous, frightened or acrimonious solitude, more than ever, making music together affirms our common humanity.

More than a decade ago I explained in this very spot that the reason we had called it the Canary Pages was drawn from the dark days of coal mining, where caged canaries were strategically deployed in the tunnels to alert miners to the presence of poisonous gases. “As long as the canary is singing, you’re O.K.,” the theory went. “But if the canary croaks, metaphorically anyway, hold your breath and run.”

Aside from some surly Hamiltonian (since moved to Sarnia, I believe) who blasted us for holding up cruelty to animals as something laudable, it’s an image that stands up rather well I think. We can, to a significant extent, gauge the extent to which our arts environment is becoming toxic by whether community-based, collective music-making remain stable because those participating in them are able to remain within those communities.

The erosion from the urban landscape of local venues to listen to live music is getting some attention these days, which is good. But the displacement of the people who work in those spaces, musicians and non-musicians alike, because they can no longer afford to live in the communities they work in, tells us even more about the fragile musical health of our cities.

 publisher@thewholenote.com

I checked The Wholenote’s snail-mail really late tonight — deep in the throes of putting the November issue to bed, and have to walk down four flights of stairs to get it. But I needed a break before diving into what has become a serious love/hate ritual for me over the nearly two decades of doing this: namely the task of closing the issue by writing this Opener.

There were a few cheques in the mail, a “thank-you” card from a printer rep I can’t remember talking to on the phone and — here’s the point — yet another reader survey, clipped from the September magazine, completed by hand, stamped and placed in a hand-addressed envelope and put into the mail. The flood of survey responses has dried to a trickle at this point, so as I opened it I found myself thinking “What if this were the last one? If so, what would the ‘last word’ from our readers be?”

“Thank you for printing WholeNote” she wrote. “It has introduced me to so many venues in Toronto. Toronto is such a vibrant musical city but I did not know it until I found your magazine about 7 years ago and I lived in Toronto most of my life. Please continue this magazine, I get it every month. It would be such a loss to me if I didn’t get it.”

Aside from the fact that it’s always nice to brag, the profound point I get from this lovely affirmation is that we had nothing to do with creating the vibrancy — it’s the city that has that. All we did was open someone’s ears to the pulse of what is already going on.

Stretching the point still further, it seems to me that what The WholeNote has done for that individual’s sense of the vibrancy of our city’s musical life, so music itself does to tune us, individually and collectively, to the inextinguishable roaring vibrancy of life.

Increasingly, looking around, people have taken music and commoditized it, made it entirely personal — shoving little earbuds in their ears, bopping to their own individualized rhythms in a helter of other people, all slightly out of sync in their aloneness.

I happen to think the tide is turning, though. Precisely because the digitized world gives us the capacity to be completely alone, the messy meat monkey that is the human self gets hungry to escape a world that is suddenly, alarmingly, back to front. And seeks out a world of community, of congregation. It may not be to concert halls as we know them, but it will be rooms full of people engaged in listening to the same live roaring hum of music in the ears.

“Teach me to listen, teach me to sing, teach me to play, teach me how to learn” comes the gathering cry. And music says: “I can do that.”

Here are some interesting snippets of all this from the writings you will find in this issue:

Hans de Groot in Art of Song: “Last summer my daughter Saskia turned twelve [and] chose ... to move to the Downtown Vocal Music Academy on Denison Avenue, ... the brainchild of Mark Bell, a man known in musical circles for his leadership of Canada Sings, a community Sing-along that meets every second Tuesday of the month somewhere in East Toronto.”

Jack MacQuarrie, our Bandstand columnist, digging into studies supporting the benefits of music and quoting the lead scientist on one such study: “Everyone can benefit from music training. A wealth of empirical, neuroscientific evidence supports the positive influence of music training on numerous non-musical brain functions, such as language, reading and attention ... across the lifespan into older adulthood.”

Richard Herriott, interviewed by Rebecca Chua, talking movingly about the music series he and Winona Zelenka will launch at St Stephen in-the-Fields Anglican Church this month, not only to raise awareness of and funds for autism spectrum research, but just as importantly to create a context for people with autism spectrum disorders to attend live music and have the particularities of their individualism embraced as part of the concert experience.

Ben Stein, in Choral Scene, describing a concert by the Orpheus Choir of Toronto which will feature Benjamin Britten’s 1938 cantata World of the Spirit: “Britten was a life-long pacifist who lived briefly in America during the beginning of WWII, in part because his pacifist leanings were not well received in pre-war Britain.” A concert like this requires more than passive spectatorship — it combines “choral music and visual imagery, in the kind of multimedia presentation that has become an Orpheus Choir specialty.” and demands engagement of head and heart.

And here’s Allan Pulker in Seeing Orange our ongoing commitment to the cause of music education, usually nestled deep in the magazine but brought by occasions such as this from the back to the front.“In March this year we published our first Orange Pages directory” he writes, “a collection of profiles written by private music teachers, community music schools and summer music programs of various kinds. Their goals and ours were, and remain the same — to put music teachers with something to offer in touch with prospective students wanting to learn.” Namely with you, “the reader who is looking for opportunities to deepen the place of music in your life or the life of someone close to you.”

As the nights lengthen may the gathering dark find you, vibrantly, among the friends you find through music. That’s what we’re here for. 

—publisher@thewholenote.com

Sometimes the way I can tell that things are going well around here is by noticing how small, in the overall scheme of things, the things I am fretting about actually are. Like two days ago when I found myself agonizing about whether it would be more accurate, on the cover, to describe this two-month issue as “combined” or “double.” “Double,” I told myself, is how I think we have usually done it. But with the concert scene being significantly put on hold in the latter part of December, for Festivus or whatever you choose to call it, and the first couple of weeks of January significantly dedicated to recovery, there isn’t double the amount of activity. “Combined” would be more accurate. I went searching for answers in our “rear view mirror” – the complete 23-year flip-through archive of this publication on our website – to see what we’ve done in the past, all the way back to Vol 1 No 4 in December 1995. (Click on Previous Issues under the “About” tab.)

The results: “double” takes the prize by a long way, with “nothing in particular” a respectable second (as in the cover of Vol 1 No 4 illustrated here). “Combined” is almost nowhere to be found, except this time last year. (Things must have been going well for even longer than I thought!)

There were three other things that I particularly noticed, as I flipped my way through the archive.

First was how often the subjects of the covers of past Dec/Jan issues, especially the early ones, still crop up in our current coverage: Tafelmusik’s Ivars Taurins in his “Herr Handel” Massey Hall “Sing-Along Messiah” outfit (Vol 2); Val Kuinka, who will be stage-directing Highlands Opera Studio’s production of Andrew Balfour’s new opera Mishaabooz’s Realm this December (Vol 3); the Toronto Children’s Chorus (Vol 5) and mezzo Krisztina Szabó (Vol 7) who will appear together in the TCC’s concert “The Fire Within” December 16 at Roy Thomson Hall; Barbara Hannigan (Vol 6), just here in November for a Koerner art song recital, who dropped into her hometown in December 1999, fresh off her Lincoln Center debut, to see in Y2K as the Merry Widow for Toronto Operetta Theatre, whose New Year’s Day-straddling productions of light opera and operettas are a time-honoured fixture of the holiday season … The list goes on. 

Second, amusingly, was noticing the different ways the cover copy on these various issues riffs on the contrast, performance-wise, between December and January: “The Holiday Season and Its (Not-So) Flip Side”; “December Glitter, January Gold”; “To the Holidays and Beyond!”; and (my favourite), “Mid-Season Blip.”

Third, and this is for you, whomever you may be: in analyzing the pattern of when we did and didn’t make an effort on the cover to call attention to the fact that it was a double issue, it seems that the years we made an extra effort (like the words DOUBLE ISSUE in 30-point type around a medallion of two-headed Janus) were right after years when we had made no effort at all. And that is because those were the years when you phoned me up to complain that it was already January 8 and your January WholeNote had still not arrived.

It won’t this year either!

The Rear View Mirror: The context for the headline on Vol 1 No 4, pictured here (still one of my favourites), is that it coincided with a time when funders of the arts (in particular the Ontario Arts Council) were reeling under the impact of the politics of the time. The “Common Sense Revolution” it was called. This year, for the first time in many years, we are seeing significant increases in funding to the OAC (increases that are being passed along). If it’s a sign that the value of the contribution that artists make to the wellbeing of Ontario, economically and in every other way, has been recognized, it’s a welcome sign indeed.

publisher@thewholenote.com

At some times of the year (and in some years more than others) I find myself thinking about my dear former neighbour, Ida Carnevali, founder of the Kensington Carnival Arts Society (KCAS).

As I wrote in this spot, back in May 2006, the various projects of KCAS over the decades were “a living example in the art of throwing some transforming activity into the path of the ordinary, nowhere more dramatically and effectively than in the annual Kensington Festival of Lights which to this day takes the form, at sunset every winter solstice, of a hand-made lantern-lit Market-wide march, from scenario to scenario, re-enacting all the world’s yearning for light.”

“Scenario ambulante,” she called it, organizing various scenes to be performed along the route of the march, enlisting everyone she could round up to participate and then leading the audience on a journey to discovery the story.

As I wrote back then, “It is that potential for accidental discovery that I yearn for in the urban context. Urban art, it seems to me, should be judged by the extent to which it can be ‘come across’ by people engaged in the ordinary. And even more so by the extent to which the artists themselves are willing to go  beyond ‘business as usual’ by availing themselves of the opportunities for chance encounters and spontaneous collaboration.”

In the KCAS Festival of Lights solstice drama, during the Ida years, there were great battles in the streets between giant puppets representing forces of darkness and light, sometimes Hannukah scenes, always on a Market rooftop a Nativity (which annoyed the hell out of the solstice purists). Always there were real people, bystanders, simply going about the ordinary, stumbling across the ordinary, being amazed, and by their amazed presence becoming, in turn, part of the spectacle.  

Most especially, always at the end, and usually in some empty wading pool in one or another local park, surrounded by hundreds and sometimes thousands of young and old, there was a giant fire sculpture representing the old year, which after a period of frantic drumming and dancing was set ablaze, sending the sparks flying upward.

(I remember one year, sometime before global warming, we made snowballs, shivering round the wading pool as the sculpture burned, and on impulse threw them into the fire. “Why are you doing that?” someone asked. “It’s making a wish for the new year,” we answered. “It’s for luck.” So the person who had asked the question made a snowball and threw it into the fire. And someone asked them “Why are you doing that?” and they answered “It’s making a wish for the new year. It’s for luck.”)

And after that it snowballed effortlessly into a tradition which rekindles without discussion every time there is snow at the solstice. 

It’s interesting to read what I wrote ten years ago about urban art and the need for accidental discovery, and about artists being willing to go beyond the ordinary. Much more than I felt back then, it seems as though these are things that willy-nilly are under way, and somehow they make more easily described sense this time round. Take the World View column in this issue (page 24), as an example, with its description of secret concerts, and how they have the potential to breathe life into ordinary space. “Ida knew that,” I say.

But I have to confess that what got me thinking about Ida on this particular day was a gloomier thought – that sometimes a year deserves to go out without any fanfare, especially a year as loud and globally destabilizing and politically topsy-turvy as 2016 has been. Maybe instead it should be sent slinking into the night with neither a wish nor a prayer, nor even a snowball hurled after it.

“Not with a bang but a whimper,” as T.S. Eliot said?

Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not. If I look around this room, change goes on here at The WholeNote, in lots of quietly methodical and interesting ways.

One example: last month you could have accessed a flip-through edition of this print magazine three days before the print edition hit the street, and within a couple of days of the print magazine hitting the street you could have gone to the online listings on our website and used the Ask Ludwig search engine there for listings in any genre, geographic zone and date range we cover.

(Ten years ago, by contrast, if you wanted to look at our live concert listings you would have waited for a copy of the magazine to arrive at one of the hundreds of places to which it was distributed in the thousands, by a dedicated crew of drivers and hoppers, most of them music lovers themselves. Just for you, dear reader, to pick up, free of charge.)

 We still do that, so you still can. (And a quiet thank you to all the drivers and hoppers who make that fact possible, month in and month out.)

But this month if you’d known about it, you could have accessed the searchable online listings for December/January a full week before we went to press. And, all going as planned, if you go back to the website to Ask Ludwig for help at the beginning of January, you will find hundreds of listings already on line, clear through to the end of the season. More than ever, when the world feels dauntingly big, everything that adds to the potential for accidental discovery of art and music on a human scale is a victory of sorts.

Throw a snowball in a fire and make a wish.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Fall can be either a rough time or a good one to start feeling hopeful, depending on your point of view. Just like “back to school” means a lot of different things, depending where you are coming from and who is taking you there. 

This year in particular, the season of first cold nights and falling leaves brings very mixed feelings. Alongside “fourth wave”pandemic dread that nothing will ever be “normal” again, is a glimmering hope that, yes indeed, there is a chance that some aspects of what we called normal are gone for good, because just like “back to school” what’s called normal depends on where you stand in relation to it.

Blue Pages

Normally, for more than 25 years in fact, the fall issue of The WholeNote has been “Blue Pages” time – a special supplement containing dozens of short profiles by music makers and presenters in our community, telling readers about themselves and their plans and hopes for the season underway. Individual profiles could be interesting or not to a reader, depending on your personal musical likes, but collectively they were always more than the sum of their parts, because they gave a comforting sense of who “we” were as a music community, chock-a-block with the familiar, but always offering up something new for the adventurous to explore.

The WholeNote doesn’t publish a “Manitoba Edition” – but if we did, it might well feature the two artists interviewed in this issue. Violinist James Ehnes hails from  Brandon, Manitoba, and has gone on to international fame and fortune. Vocal coach and conductor Miah Im, who currently teaches at the University of Toronto, was born in Winnipeg.

And something else connects Im and Ehnes, at least on this occasion. They’re both performing in halls on Philosopher’s Walk – the brick lane that’s a direct path between the Royal Conservatory of Music and U of T’s Edward Johnson Building. With the opening of Koerner Hall, the Bloor-Avenue Road area has become an intensely musical place. And while the RCM and the Faculty of Music tend to maintain their solitudes, their approximity seems to be a good thing from a concert-goer’s standpoint.

The WholeNote has never published a “Vocal Edition,” either – although the current issue comes pretty close. In addition to our usual columns on the operatic and choral scenes (contributed by Christopher Hoile and Benjamin Stein, respectively), several other columns draw attention to the variety of vocal music in our community.

Allan Pulker focuses on several singers who are busy this month: sopranos Shannon Mercer and Carla Huhtanen will both be performing in Queen of Puddings’ presentation of Puksånger-Lockrop (by the contemporary Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist) – which, judging by descriptions, should be a wild and earthy piece of folk-inspired music. Later in the month, Huhtanen will be joined by mezzo Krisztina Szabó and baritone Jesse Clark for a (presumably) more civilized Schubertiad, under the auspices of Off Centre Music.

As well, Pulker mentions a remarkable recital at the U of T this month: soprano Lorna MacDonald, and mezzo Kimberly Barber will recreate a 1973 joint performance of Lois Marshall and Maureen Forrester. Also at the U of T, the Aldeburgh Connection will stage a programme of two English composers: Britten and Purcell.

Our early music columnist, Simone Desilets, points out that Tafelmusik will also present vocal music by Purcell in November: soprano Suzie Leblanc, tenor Charles Daniels and baritone Nathaniel Watson will sing in Purcell’s King Arthur.

And our correspondent Terry Robbins returns to The WholeNote this month, with much news about the community musical theatre scene. A new company, “Steppin’Out Theatrical Productions,” which will perform at the new Richmond Hill Theatre, is the creation of 16-year old Brian Lee. Steppin’Out’s season opens in November with The Pajama Game. Robbins also talks about November shows by Clarkson Music Theatre (Thoroughly Modern Millie), Brampton Music Theatre (Footloose – The Musical), Scarborough Music Theatre (Nine), and Curtain Call Players (A Chorus Line).

Several performers from the instrumental side of the street are also featured. Pamela Margles, talks to James Ehnes about his nascent career as a pianist, among other things. Jason van Eyk, our new-music correspondent, focuses on the St. Lawrence Quartet’s ambitious commissioning project, which has led to the creation of five new works for the ensemble by Canadian composers. And mJ buell’s contribution to the issue is an interview with clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas.

Finally, Jack MacQuarrie, who writes our band column, reports on a tragedy. Fred Mills, who played trumpet in the Canadian Brass for nearly a quarter of a century, was killed in a car accident near his home in Augusta, Georgia. MacQuarrie talks with Charles Daellenbach and Raymond Tizzard about the late trumpeter’s distinguished career. Mills’ passing is a loss to the musical world.

Colin Eatock, managing editor

Everything I know, for better and for worse,  about making a magazine comes from watching my father pack the trunk (“the boot” we called it) of whatever second-hand family second car we were entrusting our lives to on that particular vacation (“holiday” we’d have called it).

“This time we are leaving crack of dawn” dad would say. So there I was, standing shivering in the dawn’s early light, marvelling at dad’s packing prowess – as wave after wave of impossibly large quantities of stuff kept arriving beside the car, somehow finding their way into every nook and cranny of the trunk. 

Only an hour later than planned, victory! Dad slams the boot lid down. Well, nothing so satisfying as a slam, actually. More like a muffled “humph” as he stands on tiptoe and bears down till the latch clicks. And turns in triumph, only to see my mother coming out of the front door, dwarfed by the largest suitcase yet. 

It’s called explosive silence. With a little staring contest thrown in. “Well you didn’t think I was going to leave my own suitcase behind, did you?” I can still hear Mom say, witheringly quiet, across the many years. I don’t remember what ended up having to be cut to make room. Not any of us four children or the two dogs. So maybe nothing at all.

Just like making a magazine.

Packing to come to Canada in 1975, some 18 years later, was a different story. “Just me and a backpack and a two month bus pass,” is how I used to boast about it to my own children, until they started rolling their eyes. A very full backpack it was, I should add: shoes for every occasion, passport with student visa, complete works of William Shakespeare … three favourite ties. Even a toothbrush. A masterfully stuffed backpack, every nook and cranny of it.

So as this first full post-pandemic season, fuelled by gallons of hope and a dash of denial, roars back to life, and you browse your way through this overstuffed first issue of our 28th season, spare a thought for all the packing and repacking that went into accommodating that last big story that got wheeled out to be added after we thought we were done. (I won’t tell you which one it was.)

Saying I came to Canada with only a backpack is not strictly true, though. I walked into the U. of T. International Student Centre (on St. George St.), some afternoon in late August 1975, dragging my backpack with the broken strap behind me. “Hello, name please?” asked the friendly person at the desk. “Perlman” I said, and started to spell it “P-E-”, but before I even got to R she turned around and shouted to whomever was on the other side of the partition behind the welcome desk, “PERLMAN’S HERE.” And a loud chorus of “woo-hoohs” came back in response. And all of a sudden I remembered the 30 to 40 manilla-wrapped parcels, each with six or seven precious books, that I had mailed to myself care of the ISC in the two months before I left for this new life. 

The books we cannot bear to part with reveal us! Even now, 48 years later, if I spot one of them  among the many hundreds more on my shelves, and touch it, take it down, turn to a page at random, it is like opening a time capsule. 

I dip into the 27-year archive of The WholeNote in a similar way. (All our issues are available on line at kiosk.thewholenote.com.) I skim for the stories I am afraid of forgetting,  then find myself lingering in the listings, marvelling: for the legendary artists I  have been privileged to hear; for the ones I heard before they became legends; for the music I already liked, for music I never knew I would come to like; concerts I went to for some exalted piece of music I craved like comfort food, and instead came away gobsmacked by the joy of encountering something rich and strange that I would never have found on my own.

May the joy continue.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Every year, swallows return to San Juan de Capistrano. The event, which occurs punctually on March 19, is cause for local celebration, and has made the California town famous throughout the world.

Similarly, we in Southern Ontario have cause to celebrate the annual return of a special flock. For eight years, The WholeNote’s “canaries” – the choirs that populate our Canary Pages – have made an appearance in our May issue. But unlike Capistrano’s swallows, which depart every year on October 23, we’re pleased to say that most of our canaries make Toronto and environs their home year round, contributing to the musical life of our communities.

This year our Canary Pages contain more than 130 choirs. We’ve redesigned the layout, and we like the new look. In the directory, you’ll find a wealth of information about choirs of every description.

It’s fitting, we think, that we’ve chosen the month of May to publish our Canary Pages, as it’s an especially busy time for choirs. After honing their skills and polishing their repertoire during the dark days of winter, spring is the time of year when choirs are at their musical peak. Large and small, professional and amateur, you’ll find choirs, choruses, and vocal ensembles of every description in our listings. A quick tally reveals nearly 100 choral events happening this month.

With the Canary Pages as your guide, it’s easy to learn more about a choir you might be interested in joining – and with so many choral concerts happening this month, you’ll probably be able to hear that choir in concert some time in the next 30 days.

While there’s much to celebrate on the choral scene this month, we also have cause to mourn. Our Choral Scene columnist, Benjamin Stein, pays tribute to the late Deral Johnson, for two decades the driving force behind choral music at the University of Western Ontario, in London. Stein points out that Johnson educated several generations of singers and conductors, including some of the most active professionals in the province. (I too sang under “DJ” at Western – and I can personally attest to the fact that no student, however modestly endowed with talent, was beneath his concern or beyond his ability to instruct.)

Also on the subject of vocal music, Christopher Hoile, who writes our On Opera column, points out that there’s been a curious shift in the operatic calendar. While April has traditionally been the biggest month for opera in Toronto, May now wears the crown, with no less than ten staged and semi-staged operas on the boards this month.

What else does May have to offer? As you’ll have no doubt noticed, both early music and world music are represented in our cover story. David Perlman’s interview with Terry McKenna (lute), Bassam Bishara (oud) and Wen Zhao (pipa), sheds light on these related instruments, and the musicians who play them.

Last but not least, tucked away in Allan Pulker’s Classical & Beyond column is something that shouldn’t pass without comment: a free mini-concert at the Royal Conservatory on May 6, to which all WholeNote readers have been specially invited. We hope that many of our chamber-music enthusiasts take advantage of this opportunity to hear the Conservatory’s ARC Ensemble.

Colin Eatock, Managing Editor

With summer chilling down, and with the Toronto International Film Festival safely caged in its Lightbox again, we hardcore live-music lovers can get down to the serious, year-round business of enjoying ourselves!

Well, almost. For myself, I’ll only be able to start doing that once this October issue is safely to bed. Which means I have to get this last little bit of writing done as usefully as possible in the next two hours. So that I can decide which of the Blue Jays/Yankees game or the first of the U.S. presidential debates to watch, and which to record. (It’s not a question of which will be more enjoyable live. It’s a matter of which will be unendurable without the ability to fast-forward.)

To be quite honest, I’d likely have finished this yesterday (Sunday), if I hadn’t decided to play hooky from the office in the afternoon in order to slip downstairs for a couple of hours to listen to a highly entertaining concert (if concert’s the right word) in “The Garage.”

The Garage, as my legions of faithful readers both know, is the back end of the endlessly malleable ground-floor amenity space in the Centre for Social Innovation, here at 720 Bathurst St. (The WholeNote offices are on the fifth floor.)

Yesterday afternoon’s little concert was by an as-yet lesser known Baroque ensemble in town called Rezonance. (If the name rings a bell, it’s likely because our early music columnist regularly notes his affiliation to the group, as their harpsichordist, at the end of his column.

I’m very glad I went. First half consisted of the Bach Coffee Cantata, second half, a Brandenburg. Both were played to an audience of what looked like well over a hundred people, most of whom looked as though they were there because they were already familiar with the group, and found their way, via the ensemble’s instructions, to an unfamiliar (and somewhat unorthodox) venue.

But there were others there, I am sure: people who work in the building and heard something musical but unfamiliar drifting up the freight elevator shaft. And some who just happened to be on the street, passing by, and felt entitled to come in.

It was a comfortable setting to just walk into. Straight back chairs were arranged higgledy piggledy in rough concert hall formation about halfway down the room. Most were occupied. Other people stood, or lounged elsewhere in the large room, as close to or far removed from the music as they chose to be. Footsteps could be heard creaking on the second floor above. Sporadically, the city sang like a siren choir outside, as emergency vehicles passed on Bathurst St. Every so often a streetcar driver, who cared a bit more than some others do, blared an indignant horn at a motorist failing to stop behind the rear doors for passengers alighting from the northbound car at the Leonard St. stop just north of the building.

People at the far edges of the room talked quietly but comfortably (no hissy stage whispers!). Conversely, the closer one moved toward the music, the more one became aware of a certain something in the air. I am not sure I have the words for it, but at some level it represents the best hope for live music of the kinds I care most about, so I’ll give it a try.

As best as I can describe it, it was like moving, layer by layer, into a consensual circle of active listening – a bubble within which, by some unspoken agreement, everyone there was simply attending on the music being offered. No-one shushing or tutting anyone else. Active listening rather than demanded or orchestrated silence; something biostatic (like a good old-fashioned wooden cutting board, rather than antiseptic steeling quiet, where the slightest sound infects the whole room.

The point? Simply this. We tend to think of the word “concert,” in musical terms, as the thing itself - an event that music makers or presenters arrange for audiences that dutifully arrive at the appointed time, occupy some designated spot for the appointed duration, and respond in ways time-honoured, or prescribed, or enforced with a glare or a sidelong glance.

But what if “in concert” routinely meant something more like the thing I’ve been describing for the past eight or nine paragraphs? Not so much the name of an event, but rather more a description of how people are, together, when they actively choose to listen to what they came there to hear?

Blue Pages: I’d be remiss not to do a shout-out here for the 17th Annual WholeNote Blue Pages, tidily tucked inside this issue of the printed magazine (and maintained online, year-round). In an odd way, the 155 presenter and venue profiles in this annual directory amount to something a bit like the “In Concert” moment I’ve just finished describing.

For one thing, they’re certainly not “everyone in the room” when it comes to the ever-changing map of presenters and venues in our catchment area. Every year brings new presenters to the scene, with dreams, plans, new energy, new ideas how best to get the word out as to what they do.

But these 155, whose profiles you can read, do represent a kind of heightened engagement with what we do. They tend to get us their free listings more systematically, to buy advertising when they can, to keep us in the loop about what they are doing.

They are certainly not the only music makers we write about! But they are proof that there is a living musical community out there, worthy of our, and your attention.

As always, in its scope and variety, it’s a compendium well worth dipping into. May it lead you into a season of concerted listening, some of it entirely unexpected!

publisher@thewholenote.com

I always have a funny moment  of pleasure when one of our columnists finds himself or herself having to preface a reference to a particular upcoming event with a disclaimer – calling readers’ attention to the fact that the columnist in question is actually performing in the event they’re about to tell you about. (See the final paragraphs of Ben Stein’s and Ori Dagan’s columns in this issue for examples of what I am talking about.)

It doesn’t happen often, but often enough. And the pleasure that I get from it, every time,  is the little reminder that so many of our writers are, in fact, active participants in the musical “Beats” they write about, rather than detached observers. 

I also get some satisfaction, in those situations, from the fact that we still make the effort to point these little conflicts of interest out to our readers when they happen. It gets harder and harder when all the protocols they teach in publishing courses about keeping  one’s editorial  operations as pure as the driven snow are being blown away by the winds of digital change. It’s especially hard for the little guys like us to stick to protocols for keeping editorial and advertising separate at a time when even the big guys who passed exams in the rules are floundering for consistency.

So what am I driving at? Well, just this: this is one of those times when I am busting to use this supposedly sacred bit of editorial real estate to tell you about a whole bunch of things I would not even know about if I were wearing only my editorial hat instead of the two or three that every member of this tiny organization must juggle just to keep this little publication going.

So, damn the torpedoes!  Here I go! (I can always go back to being an editorial virgin in the morning, can’t I?)

One: Azrieli

Were you in too much of a hurry to come visit me here to notice the advertisement from the Azrieli Foundation on page 4, announcing the Azrieli Music Project ? The competition announced in the ad should make the composers among you sit up and take notice, at any rate. It offers a  $50,000 prize for a 15 to 25 minute newly composed work of “orchestral Jewish music,” by a Canadian resident; to be performed in a gala concert by Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

The question that jumped up at me immediately was “So, what constitutes ‘Jewish music,’ in these times?”  To their credit, the AMP doesn’t duck the question. “The question What is Jewish Music? is at the heart of a constantly evolving cultural dialogue,” they say. “Taking into account the rich and diverse history of Jewish musical traditions, the AMP defines ‘Jewish Music’ as music that incorporates a Jewish thematic or Jewish musical influence. …  Defining Jewish music as both deeply rooted in history and tradition and forward-moving and dynamic, the AMP … challenges orchestral composers of all faiths, backgrounds and affiliations to engage creatively and critically with this question in submitting their work.”

Consider the following: in this month’s WholeNote listings there is a concert on March 12, jointly presented by the Ashkenaz Foundation and the Aga Khan Museum, titled “Spotlight on Israeli Culture” and featuring the Diwan Saz Interfaith Ensemble – a multicultural ensemble of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Bedouin musicians performing “ancient music from Central Asia, Turkey, Persia and the Holy Land.” And two days later, on March 14, the Music Gallery, Ashkenaz Foundation and Koffler Centre for the Arts combine to present a work called The Lanka Suite by Tova Kardonne which, according to columnist Andrew Timar, “goes back to the Klezmer bands Kardonne played in, starting in her teens, as well as to her grandparents’ Eastern European Jewish roots” and goes on from there to engage with the social realities of post-civil war Sri Lanka, taking in, along the way, Kardonne’s   “studies of Cuban santería batá drumming, North and South Indian drumming patterns, and her participation in the Brazilian Samba Elégua group.”

With these kinds of dialogue under way in our town, it will be fascinating to see who rises to the AMP challenge. We will follow the story as it develops.

Two: IRCPA
Still on the subject of ads in the issue, please take a look at the one on page 28 for IRCPA (International Resource Centre for Performing Artists) for their series of workshops, March 27 to 29 and then April 10 to 12. Ann Summers Dossena, driving force behind IRCPA, has been preaching in the arts wilderness for as long as I can remember about the unmet needs of artists on the edge of performing careers who have nowhere to turn for support, resources and expertise when they are in the process of making the transition from a sheltered academic environment to the realities of life as  working musicians. Now finally, it seems people who should have been listening long ago are starting to listen.

I’m proud to say The WholeNote is sponsoring the third of the March sessions (Sunday March 29) right here at the Centre for Social Innovation, 720 Bathurst Street. The first five of you who respond to publisher@thewholenote.com saying you read this can be my guests at the Sunday session!

Three: March for Music Therapy; MusiCounts
And still on the subject of ads, I have two more you should go and look at. First go check out the March for Music Therapy ad on page 77. It’s another example of how music can send out tendrils of re-engagement with community life and living.

And while you’re splashing around the back of the magazine, pop over to page 56 where you’ll find under “Opportunities” in our splendid revamped Classified advertising section the following all-too-easy-to miss announcement about the MusiCounts TD Community program - one of the most unequivocally useful bits of corporate sponsorship I can think of. “SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW BEING ACCEPTED” it says “for the 2015 MusiCounts TD Community Music Program, which provides access to musical instruments and equipment to thousands of children in under-served Canadian communities. The grants will be distributed in allotments of up to $25,000 totalling $220,000. Grant applications are now being accepted at www.musicounts.ca, with a submission deadline of Friday, May 8, 2015.”
And finally:
This issue heralds the beginning, in terms of coverage, of our long slow walz towards the summer, in the form of Part One of our coverage of Summer Music Education.  In Sara Constant’s story “All Roads Lead to Summmer” that introduces the directory (page 12) there is the comment that those seeking summer music education, no matter how different, are all looking for “options that  foster the ... spirit of learning and community.” 

Amen to that. All year round.

publisher@thewholenote.com

It’s hard to believe that April Fool’s Day was less than a month ago. This is after, all a month during which not only do we at The WholeNote have to do our usual aggregating of the live local concert scene and commenting on it, but we also have to pull together our annual Choral Canary Pages — an astonishing  (to me, anyway) snapshot of the range and diversity of our readership’s involvement in playing the world’s oldest, most basic and most sophisticated instrument — the human voice. So right now April 1 feels as though it is many hours more than a simple month’s worth of work in the past.

As I am sure it must feel for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Some of you may remember that Michael Vincent of Musical Toronto — the blog that, far more adequately than any of the city’s daily media, reports on the daily passage of the musical events we chronicle monthly here — got April Fool’s Day off to a flying start with the announcement that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra had acquired major new sponsorship and was, accordingly, being renamed The President’s Choice Symphony Orchestra.

Given the role that naming rights play in corporate sponsorship of Culture and MUSH (museums, universities, schools and hospitals)  the announcement was just credible enough for the joke to have real traction on April 1, only to turn really sour a week later when the actual TSO president’s choices put him front and centre in the harsh glare of public scrutiny over the TSO’s decision to “uninvite” pianist Valentina Lisitsa, scheduled to appear with the TSO that week to perform the Rachmaninov second piano concerto.

True to our calling as makers of lists here at The WholeNote, we dutifully documented, in the April 14 issue of HalfTones, our regular midmonth e-letter, the range of public reaction to the Lisitsa affair. And we also threw in an opinion of our own, which (for the benefit of those of you who don’t yet read HalfTones regularly) was this:
when the leader of an organization makes a difficult decision, as in this case the TSO’s president did, the reasons stated for that decision become part of that leader’s legacy, even more than the decision itself. Some agreed with his decision; some did not. But explaining that Lisitsa had been uninvited because her widely tweeted political opinions “might be deeply offensive to some” has put the TSO (which though private bears our city’s proud name) on a very slippery ethical slope.

(On the other hand, for those of you rubbing your hands at the possibilities the precedent sets, I invite you to sign the online petition calling for the works of all composers of the Second Viennese School to be permanently uninvited from TSO programming, because atonalism is clearly deeply offensive to some.)

Silver lining: the uninviting of Valentina Lisitsa had a profoundly moving corollary, in that a scaled-down version of the concert in question went ahead, without a soloist, without an intermission, and with only one work on the program — Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, under the baton of a former TSO music director, Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

As a piece of programming to suit the occasion, the Mahler  could not have been better chosen. The orchestra was clearly burning to DO THEIR REAL WORK, the audience was ready to listen,  and Saraste, conducting without a score, gave us all the opportunity, for 70 minutes, to traverse the entire emotional landscape of the turbulent week. Mahler Five starts bleak as can be and ends determined to be happy. Granted, cheerfulness in a major key is seldom as convincing as emotional storm and stress in a minor mode. But as the work came to a close there was consensus in the house, from players and audience alike — dammit after a week like this we have EARNED our D Major!

If only for a moment, the music itself was the only story, front and centre, which is as it should be. “THIS is what it’s really about” I heard someone say as we all stood to applaud (and I don’t think it was me talking to myself).

Koerner by name: The 21C Festival (now in its second year at the Royal Conservatory) is to a large extent the brainchild of the same individual who sponsored the performance hall that is the jewel in the crown of the RCM. This little  festival is a building project every bit as complex and important as the building it sits in and will take as much time and attention to bring to fruition. Wende Bartley’s In With The New on page 14 suggests that so far things are on the right track.

The world’s oldest instrument II: If like me you have always thought of barbershop singing or a cappella in general, as somehow inferior to “real” choral singing, then do yourself a favour and read the first half of Ben Stein’s column (page 22). And then carry on and read the rest of it! Soccer, by virtue of its lack of dependency on pads and gear and other equipment, has earned the title “the beautiful game.” Perhaps unaccompanied singing stands poised to do the same.

 We Are All Music’s Children: Somewhere along the line, in the next couple of issues (if it hasn’t happened already) the number of people interviewed  for MJ Buell’s column/contest in this magazine will pass the 100 mark; each of them has answered the same simple set of questions. No two sets of answers have been the same.  And the reservoir of people to interview will never run dry as long as music lives. Regular readers of the column, stay tuned! Come September 25 Music’s Children will be helping us celebrate The WholeNote’s 20th anniversary, and you could be at the front of the line to join the celebration.

Listen Up! If you are not in the habit of reading the record reviews at the back of the magazine (because what’s the point of reading words about music when you can’t hear the music the words are about), then you won’t have seen the bright yellow arrow sign below. Just saying!

publisher@thewholenote.com

If, as you read this opening sentence, you find your eyes gradually widening in alarm at the thought that this magazine has at its helm someone as prone to whimsical digression as this, you may derive some comfort, first, from the fact that my return to the WholeNote editorial foyer is temporary, and, second, from the fact that even such alarming roller-coaster syntactical rides as this sentence must eventually lose momentum and come to a stop, in order for me to turn my attention to the other four things I want to say as this sixteenth February of The WholeNote’s existence dawns, sullen in circumstance but radiant with hope.

First, for those who think talk is cheap, let me point out that the previous sentence, if purchased as a WholeNote classified ad, would have set me back $134.40 + $17.47 HST – a total of $151.87. That’s $24 for the basic ad (up to 20 words), and then $1.20 per word for the remaining 92. (Needless to say it would have been an appalling waste of money, especially since, unlike the always interesting actual classifieds on page 53, the paragraph contains no contact information, and neither asks nor offers anything.)

to attempt to distill the essence of this Opener’s crazy opening ramble into a succinct classified ad, it would definitely be in the HELP WANTED section and might read something like the following: INDEPENDENT music magazine desperately needing to be less ad hoc seeks managing editor for meaningful relationship. Job description and/or expressions of interest, publisher@thewholenote.com.

Now that’s more like it, wouldn’t you say? $24 for the first 20 words; plus $3.60 for the next three plus tax: If it works, it’ll be the best $31.19 we ever spent.

Third, for anyone seriously interested in inquiring about the job, responsibility for getting me to keep my cotton-pickin’ hands off this page is part of the job description, but it’s probably not as important as the ability to keep your head while all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Or as important as having boatloads of curiosity about how print, web, and the new social media can be made to mesh in the little niche we occupy. “Clicks and mortar” you might call it, in the service of live local music.

Fourth, it would be remiss of me not to explain that the reason we are commencing the search for a managing editor at this particular time is because Colin Eatock, whose face and thoughts you might have been expecting to see here, has had an attack of common sense and extricated himself from the craziness of holding down both the managing editor’s and listings coordinator’s posts here at The WholeNote for nigh on two years. It is you, dear whole-hearted die-hards, who more than anyone else will be aware of the many ways in which we emerge from Colin’s two years of service-beyond-the-call-of-duty, in tidier shape, and better corporate health, than before. We are grateful and wish him well in restoring some balance to his multifaceted musical life.

—David Perlman, publisher@thewholenote.com

(For my more usual ranty style, I’m afraid you’ll have to turn all the way to “Dis-Concerting Stuff” on page 60, where I offer up some suggestions for them as thinks they have a monopoly on what constitutes “proper behaviour” in others at a concert, while remaining sand-blind to their own shortcomings.)

I can’t remember any issue (in the 19 years, two months, 14 days and 23 hours we’ve been doing this) that better reflects the variety and richness of musical life in this neck of the woods. From film to new opera to world music, live and recorded, to insights into what has to happen behind the musical scenes to make it all tick, this issue’s features are an extraordinary testament to the variety and resiliency of art in general and live music in particular, in a town and region that have their ups and downs in terms of wider political support for and understanding of the role that art and culture play in the health of individuals and the communities they inhabit.

(That being said, I made a little promise to myself not to get caught up in the cut and thrust of our fall municipal elections until after Labour Day, so you’ll have to wait until the next issue for any more about that here. Not that there isn’t a fair bit to say, but, as I mentioned, there’s company in town.)

Switching gears again, it’s our regular columnists as much as our feature writers who make the magazine the fine read it’s come to be over time. So hats off, ladies and gents, for hauling in your fishing tackle and hightailing it back to town. A special nod (by way of a placeholder) to horn player and Jazz Notes columnist of long standing, Jim Galloway, whose regular column is conspicuous by its absence this month as Jim battles a bit of a health setback. To say Jim’s missing a column is unusual is an understatement. This is, after all, the man who filed 2,400 typewritten words of an interview with Oscar Peterson by fax machine (miracle of modern technology at the time) from the purser’s office of a cruise ship, rather than miss a deadline. Good news is I can truthfully tell you he’s “on assignment” writing about the musical implications of an impending anniversary five times longer, and with much grimmer resonances, than our own. 

As our Mr. Galloway’s customary signoff in his column would put it: have a good month, and make at least some of your music listening live!  

—publisher@thewholenote.com

Just about everyone I know has, somewhere tucked away inside their brain, some version of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. You know the one: the grasshopper spends the warm months singing away, while the ants (and even sometimes the uncles) work like the dickens, planting, reaping, harvesting. Come the winter the shivering grasshopper, dying of hunger, asks for food and instead gets the moral of the story rammed down its throat.

Growing up, I had a talent for standing stories on their head, like the one in the bible about the bratty kid with the slingshot picking on the big lumpy guy with the thyroid problem. But I don’t think it ever occurred to me to question that the angels were on the side of the ants, and the grasshopper got what he (or more often she, especially in the paintings) deserved.

So, it’s a fable that’s always been particularly tough on me, especially at this time of year. Here at The WholeNote, you see, we’ve just put out a combined July/August issue instead of the habitual one a month. We took a whole two weeks off — a veritable binge of idleness … tainted almost from day one with the certainty that, as for the grasshopper, there would be a deadly reckoning somewhere up ahead.

It’s always tough to enjoy the gentle slipping of summer into fall when one has a chronic case of G.A.S. (grasshopper apprehension syndrome). But it’s ten times worse at a historic moment like this when, as happens from time to time, it’s the ants that are in government at almost every political level. There they go in their ugly black limo carapaces, quivering in anticipation at the thought of all the tongue lashings they will get to deliver once the legislature or house or hall reconvenes in the fall; looking forward to taking down a peg or two the indigent and the artists — all those who don’t know what “real” work is.

It’s time I think to stand this story on its head too. In my new ending the ant waggles its antennae at the grasshopper and makes its speech about “Idleness bringing want,” and how “To work today is to eat tomorrow.” And the grasshopper says to the ant, in the vernacular, “F**k off and die, dude. Here I spend the whole goddamn summer playing my mandola so you have music to work to, and now you tell me to go get a job!?”

So all hail the pickers and players and singers, slip-sliding your way from summer to fall, rejuiced and rejuvenated and ready to roll! Rest assured, there’s an extra seat at the just society’s table for anyone who can sing for their supper as sweetly as you-all do. And may all your seats be full of bums.

There was once upon a time a creek so dark and murky that it took its name from the colour of its waters.

One particular summer, it rained so much that the creek became a roaring river too wide to leap or swing across; and in its temporarily swollen waters, Crocodile took up residence, lurking opportunistically, with only eyes and nostrils showing.

All up and down the creek’s one bank Monkey foraged tree to tree till almost all the fruit on that side was gone. Finally, there was only one granadilla, somewhat wrinkled, still up for grabs. Monkey eyed it dubiously, then hungrily gazed at the fruit-laden trees on the far bank, then apprehensively down at the dark water.

“Hey Monkey, I can carry you safely to the other side on my back” said the almost invisible owner of a very impressive voice. “You won’t even get your feet wet. I promise.”

“Oh great!” said Monkey, and hopped on.

But once too far from shore for Monkey to hop off, Crocodile said “Monkey I am hungry. Prepare to die.” “But how can that be?” said Monkey, puzzled. “I mean, you promised.”

“I don’t have to keep promises,” said Crocodile. “After all, I am a crocodile.”

“Well how was I to know you were a crocodile,” said Monkey. “You see, I left my brain — the tastiest part of me, by the way — hanging from that tree back there. I am reconciled to my fate. But I beg you, carry me back to get my brain, first. That way you get the tastiest bit, and my spirit can depart my body in peace instead of wailing forever through these woodlands in search of my lost mind. I beg you, just let me put my brain back in my head, and I promise I will hop back on and you can have your way with me.”

Safely back in the tree, Monkey plucked her brain from the tree where it was dangling, and put it back into her head through her mouth, careful not to spill even the tiniest drop.

“Hey Monkey, what about your promise?” asked Crocodile after a while. “Oh, that” said Monkey. “What kind of idiot do you think I am? Anyone with even half a brain can see that you are a crocodile.”

Blue Pages

Swing merrily through the branches of this year’s 2011/12 Blue Pages, dear reader, and the fruits of your labour will be that you come away with a much richer sense of the variety and curatorial creativity that continue to make the Southern Ontario music scene one of the most vigorous and diverse anywhere. These 164 profiles, written by the presenters themselves, are not of the largest, or smallest, or tamest or wildest of the musical presenters out there, but rather, some of each. Our dedicated team at The WholeNote has been rounding up these profiles since mid-summer but, our best efforts notwithstanding, there are always, by deadline, potential Blue Pages members that this year remained uncorralled. So check back online regularly and watch the forest grow!

Hats off, finally, to you, the true blue audience for live music in our neck of the woods, day in and day out. After all, without you, what would be the point?

—David Perlman, publisher@thewholenote.com

A couple of issues back (Vol 26, No 1) in this slot, I drew readers’ attention to the cheeky tagline “Priceless” on the top right hand corner of our front cover (where one would usually expect to find a newsstand price, or, failing that, the word “Free”). “But for how long? And what comes next?” was the question I asked. For what it’s worth, if you’ll be sad to see the Priceless tagline go, turn back to the cover and bid it a fond farewell. 

What will replace it? Perhaps nothing, immediately. The title of this Opener is maybe a good candidate. It captures the essence of what will need to change in our relationships with all the different constituencies within the music community who benefit in one way or another from the fact that we are around – in other words, you, our readership. We know how much you like us. But “what are we worth to you?” is a different question to grapple with – now that most of us, having slammed into an economic and social brick wall, find ourselves having to re-examine the fundamentals of how we used to ply our various trades. 

“You Can’t Fake the Classifieds”

Reading Jenny Parr’s interview with Musical Stage Company’s Mitchell Marcus in this issue – especially the bit about Porchside Songs – brought to mind what I wrote here last month, after her recent death in Italy, about Kensington Market arts pioneer Ida Carnevali and her visceral understanding of how art is rooted in community. Which in turn got me thinking about another Kensington character from those days (thankfully still alive if not geographically among us), Buzz Burza. 

Buzz, as we all called him, had the same neighbourhood-rooted understanding of community publishing as Ida did of community theatre, finding his way into our lives in the 1980s (by way of such landmark controlled-circulation publications as the Toronto Clarion, The Skills Exchange, and Now magazine) when we were in the early stages of founding the Kensington Market Drum. While Perlman was ranting about how the Market needed our own voice to withstand the tides of cynical change, and the onslaughts of city hall, Burza was quietly signing up dozens of businesses or agencies in and around the Market who would agree to carry the newspaper if we ever got it off the ground. “You can fake-build everything else in a community newspaper but you can’t fake the classifieds” was a favourite bon mot of his, and we took it to heart – the DRUM’s classified (DRUM HUM community ads, we called them, took the form of a brick wall across the bottom of as many pages as required, with “DRUM Bricks, only $10 a throw” as our rallying cry.

Brick by Brick

It was the same brick-by-brick approach to controlled circulation and community listings with which we built The WholeNote, from modest beginnings as a column in the Kensington Market Drum into what it was as recently as half a year ago. And, in principle, it’s the same approach – one brick at a time – that will see us (and I suspect many of you) through this next while. But we will only be as real as you help us be. 

There are four brick walls (five if you count the one on this page) in this issue, each representing an aspect of what we do that can’t be faked. Check them out. They are as fundamental to what makes The WholeNote hum as unfakeable classifieds were to the Kensington Market Drum. “I’ll buy that!” is the response we’d love to hear. And they are not all monetary asks either. But they are all crucial as we rebuild our usefulness (see page 2). 

Mind you, come to think of it, if you have thought about taking a subscription, for yourself or someone else, this might just be the time to consider doing so! And if you have immediate paid work to offer for musicians and other arts workers, see page 28. Till February those “bricks” are free!

publisher@thewholenote.com

Above all else, a disclaimer: The WholeNote attests and affirms that no real clarinet choirs were harmed in the making of the licorice stick joke (page 36, col 1, para 5) in Jim Galloway’s Jazz Notes column this issue. Welcome back, Jim! 

Youthanized: It’s amazing how the keepers of various public arts and cultural purses (arts and cultural councils and funds) have the power to send the spirits of their clients and would-be clients soaring to the heights or plunging to the depths. We only qualify for one or two of these, a situation not likely to change unless “survival arts” becomes a discipline like “visual arts” for example. And at the best of times, such as right now, the money that we receive from these sources never exceeds more than five or six percent of what it takes to keep this enterprise swimming doggedly towards the economic safety of some distant (and perhaps imaginary) shore.

Starting with soaring, we are chuffed beyond measure to announce that the Ontario Media Development Corporation has agreed to support our proposal to develop an online “Listening Room” as an adjunct to our DISCoveries CD/Record Review Section.  We’ll be tweaking and testing starting this coming month, with a full scale launch in the spring. Stay tuned, And welcome aboard, Thom McKercher, who will be piloting this initiative.

The “sinking feeling” side of things is a little harder to nail down, because it’s not specific to us but rather something that the whole musical milieu we serve is going through to some extent. It is the result of the fact that, despite the emergence of new creative organizations all the time, the governments that supply the aforesaid arts councils and funds with cash are hugely resistant to increasing the amount of money available. The Ontario Arts Council, for one, has had its budgets flatlined for years. So the money available must be shared among more recipients. Older organizations find themselves threatened with “youthanizing” - letters announcing little cuts here and there, and threatening larger cuts unless the organizations in question address themselves to newer or younger or more diverse audiences. Would it not be better to have the resources to fund directly the arts and culture arising organically from these new constituencies as they emerge?

It’s not the fault of the councils and funds. It’s the chronic lack of respect that arts work gets from dumb politicians at every level. 

Election reflections, Ontario October 27 2014: Speaking of dumb politicians,make no mistake, there’s no worse feeling after an election than to have voted fearfully (“strategically” it’s sometimes called) for the lesser of two evils. And it’s especially sour when the stratagem fails. That’s what happened in my small town the last time round. The bigger bully got elected anyway, and I had the taste of it in my mouth for a long time.

So this time round I said “strategy be damned” and voted with a hopeful heart. (So how did that work out for you, Dave?)

Well, definitely no sour taste so far; and a bit less fear in the air, because it appears the strategic voters carried the day, even without my help, which is a bit of a blow to the ol’ ego.

Mine is just a small town, mind you, but I suspect that even in what are colloquially referred to as “world class cities” the same dynamic applies: you vote, then wait, en masse, to see who the real beneficiaries of the power you have awarded will be.

Best chat I had along the way during this election campaign, by far,  was not with a candidate but with a super-fine young vocalist who showed up at a fundraiser/party for a particularly hopeful mayoralty candidate in the old home town. We chatted away, while an evening’s worth of fine musicians added their musical hearts and skills to the evening’s hopeful hullabaloo.

As is so often the case, the fundraiser fell further and further behind schedule the longer it went, and our conversation had time to wander over the whole range of galas, fundraisers, benefits  and the like – events that as you know run the gamut  from “pay what you can” to hundreds of dollars a plate; and from spontaneous uprisings, organized at lightning speed in response to calamity, to events planned months in advance with military precision all the way though to huge events.

Where music and musicians fit into such events is as varied as the range and scale of the events. “Sometimes, as in a case like this” my musical companion said, “I am doing it because I would give this candidate money myself if I had money to give. And it’s funny ... I am happier sitting around here waiting my turn even if we are an hour and a half behind, than I would be if the same thing was happening at an event for which I was being paid scale or more and was just part of the decor, arriving and departing through the kitchen door like the rest of the hired help.”

“And somewhere in between,” she said, “there are the events where you know that a lot of the people involved are being paid a standard wage or fee, for the flowers, or the catering, or the invitations, but  somehow, as a musician, I’m expected to do my work for free because as an artist I should understand that it’s for a good cause. Or even more grating, that I should be grateful because I am being given the opportunity to perform for a ‘real’ audience.”

It wasn’t an embittered rant; just a bit of gentle back and forth on how it takes all kinds to make a world. And to make the world better.  

When my musical companion did finally get up to add her voice to the mix, that election fundraising night at Hugh’s Room, it was as always with all her heart and all her might; all in all the music that night made the club feel like it had rafters, ringing with hope and with laughter.
The point is that when hope needs harvesting, music is often just what is needed to gas the engine and to bring muscle to the mix. In cases like that, who benefits? Everyone.

This issue’s Galas and Fundraisers listings are chock-a-block with events at every scale of ambition and complexity from the simplest to the grandest. But the concert listings too are replete with the same impulse. Scan the concert listings for any week, and see how often a worthwhile cause is named as the beneficiary of a given event, even if it is only to enable the venue to keep the roof over the rafters the music rings round in.

Tributes Abound: Close cousin to the benefit concert, but with a differently generous impulse at its heart is the tribute concert. There are two I want to mention briefly here. One is a Counterpoint Orchestra event in memory of a longtime member, Paul Willis. You can find it November 8 at 7pm in the GTA listings and read a short “remembering” article about him in the previous issue of The WholeNote. The second is a concert in memory of organist Massimo Nosetti, November 12 at 7.30 at St. Paul’s Anglican Church on Bloor Street East (also to be found in the GTA listings). I remember an organ concert Nosetti gave there in 2012, with a 30-piece orchestra.

For me, this is the moment I never tire of in this process: sitting with the issue almost complete, gobsmacked as always by the sheer diversity of musical life teeming under the lens of the month’s microscope.

September’s writers often spend a fair bit of time looking back at the summer past, as much as looking ahead at the month to come. In part, as I have noted in other Septembers, this is because the Toronto International Film Festival strides like a colossus across the middle of the month, so there are fewer live concerts in September than any other in the year. No major musical presenter in town hoping for undivided media attention goes head to head with TIFF. (For devotees of this magazine hungering for their customary musical fix, all is not lost, though. Once again managing editor Paul Ennis, in TIFF Tips, has seized the opportunity to combine his twin passions for film and music and has combed the TIFF catalogue for films with one or another musical slant. As always it’s a rich and eclectic mix and worth a look.

There are those rare and serendipitous coincidences (too neat to be planned) where a film of significance comes to TIFF right at the same time as a concert by the subject of the film in question. It sort of happened three Septembers ago when the Brentano String Quartet came to town, for a concert at Music Toronto, at the same time as the film A Late Quartet for which they had done the actual  playing. This year’s example is way more interesting - the Silk Road Ensemble is coming to Massey Hall two days after the world premiere of The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at TIFF. If the movie delves into the social aspects of the Silkroad Project touched on in Andrew Timar’s cover story, taking in both events will be a real treat for lovers of music and film alike.

That being said, the propensity of our September writers to look back at the summer because of slim concert pickings is even more pronounced than usual this year because it has been, to say the least, an unusual summer. “The Summer to End All Summers” we called it on our June cover – a bit too apocalyptic, it should be said, for more than one reader. “Let’s hope not!” one WholeNoter muttered, darkly. (The reference – a bit too oblique in retrospect – was to the eagerly anticipated Luminato mounting of R. Murray Schafer’s magnum opus, Apocalypsis, at the Sony Centre.)

Readers will notice that Apocalypsis features in the  summer musings of more than one WholeNote writer; In with the New columnist, Wende Bartley, joined up with the Element Choir to experience the event from the inside out; Brian Chang, who steps into Ben Stein’s choral shoes this issue, was in the balcony with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in which he sings (tenor, I suspect from his first column!); and David Jaeger refers to the work’s genesis in his musings on the golden years of CBC Radio (The Future of Canadian Music, Back Then, page 57), this time on the topic of commissioning. 

Speaking of Jaeger’s piece I got a bit of a chuckle (that’s 20th century talk for LOL) in his description of another commission mentioned in the piece – a song cycle titled Private Collection by John Weinzweig. “[It was] written for the young, emerging soprano, Mary Lou Fallis. I remember John telling me, that she was ‘pretty hot stuff’ as a performer, besides being an excellent singer.”

As for Mary Lou Fallis, she is a welcome guest in this issue, writing in Just the Spot (page 54) about her long association with Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, where she, along with yours truly, will, on September 25, host what promises to be a splendid concert/celebration of this magazine’s 20 years of existence. For details (and to arrange your free ticket to the event) see the magazine’s back cover!

But back to the topic of Luminato and Apocalypsis, one last time. Beyond the writers already mentioned in this opener, I counted at least ten other WholeNote staff and contributors, myself included, who went to see and hear Apocalypsis. And for every two who saw it, there were at least three different opinions as to its artistic merit and significance: it was an overblown insult to the perfection of Schafer’s vision; it was a tribute to director Lemi Ponifasio’s genius that he could massage Schafer’s bombast into something genuinely theatrical; it was an artistic triumph; it was an artistic failure; it was more than the sum of its parts; it never really came together….

As for me, to borrow a phrase from Bob Ben’s column Mainly Clubs, Mostly Jazz, page 45, “when petty concerns of quality and integrity eclipse art’s purpose (whatever it is), that, to me, is tragic.” Granted, Bob is talking about jazz jams, but there’s an idea worth delving into here. Apocalypsis for me had a purpose that was as much social as artistic. It brought together, under one tent, a thousand performers and twice as many witnesses, to experience something that as a totality existed only in the moment of enactment. Each of the performers, musicians, singers and soloists alike played their part. None had a chance to see  the whole picture, only to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Whoever is charged with taking Luminato into the future should reflect on this: as a festival, as a fixture, its future depends on being more like this one show – a giant tent under which our city’s artists are invited to play. Bringing in the headliners, the stadium shows, the big names is part of that mix, for sure. But the real spectacle is the musical and artistic city we already are and can continue to be if top-down “bring in experts to fix it” cultural policies are set aside in favour of humane social policies that enable our artists, along with the other working poor, to afford to live and play here.

We’ll be watching, and keeping score.

publisher@thewholenote.com 

From where I sat, in row D of the first balcony at Koerner Hall, this past April 10, 2019, jazz definitely lives.

Just like the program in my hand said it did. “Jazz Lives 2019: a Tribute to Jazz.FM91 past, present and future” was the event’s full title. It was the 15th such consecutive event giving faithful followers of the listener-supported radio station a chance to show that indeed they still do support it, in spite of recent upheavals as painful as any in the station’s storied history since its birth as CJRT-FM at the Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Ryerson University) in 1949 (that’s 70 years ago, people!). How long ago was that? Well, the JRT in CJRT’s call sign stood for Journalism, Radio, and Technology, which were three of Ryerson’s cutting edge educational mandates.

By all accounts it’s been a rough spell, and most of the people in the audience had a pretty good idea of what’s been going on. With a new board of directors in place, and a boatload of station personalities bouncing on and off the stage (some of them after being notably absent during the past half year) what was particularly encouraging was a classy absence of gloating – a sense of quiet determination to get on with things. And a really strange sense of intimacy between the audience in the hall and the people on stage – strange, that is, until one realizes that radio is still probably the most intimate of media. For all I know the guy next to me shouting “we love you Brad” to the host of “Afternoon Drive with Brad Barker” was listening to Barker with his shirt on for the very first time.

That’s because radio doesn’t require you to put on a face to meet it, and it meets you, exactly halfway no matter where you are.

A fine time was had by all, not least because the musicians who came to the party treated us to two very swinging sets. Come to think of it, from the youngest members of the JazzFM91 youth band who kicked things off to the oldest of the household names on stage, we were probably looking at an age range pretty damn close to the entire duration of the station’s storied history.

May the beat go on.

Where I sat, in row D of the first balcony at Koerner Hall, this past April 10, 2019, I was definitely a supported listener.

At some moment during the proceedings I looked down at the little silver-coloured plaque on the arm of my seat. It informed me that my particular bum-in-seat was being supported in thanks to a donation in honour of “George Ullmann, music lover and music entrepreneur, on his 80th birthday.”

Once back home, I googled the aforementioned Mr. Ullmann and found that, after graduating with a B.MUS (Toronto) in 1967 and an MA (Toronto) two years later, he had gone on to head up Boosey & Hawkes’ Canadian operations from the late 1970s till they closed their operations at the end of 1994 (with scores by such notable composers as Talivaldis Kenins, Violet Archer, John Weinzweig, Healey Willan and many others among their holdings). At which point the entrepreneurial Mr. Ullmann established Counterpoint Musical Service, which helped bridge the gap left by Boosey & Hawkes’ exit, and who went on to serve on the boards of various music industry and service organizations, SOCAN among them.

One could do worse than to have “music lover and musical entrepreneur” as an epitaph.

From where I sit right now, thumbing through the page proofs of this issue, finally ready to go to press, the music lovers around me give reason for hope:

–the hundreds in our cover photograph joining Choir!Choir!Choir! to sing Here Comes the Sun into the drizzle and mist (see On Our Cover, page 5);

–the more-than-hundred choirs taking the time to announce their presence to prospective choristers in this year’s 17th Annual Canary Pages Choral Directory, inside this issue;

–the writers of the astonishing range of stories in the issue, all so different and yet all reflective, one way or another, of how much music matters;

–the astonishing people we are lucky enough to get to write about, to whom music matters as much as it does to us;

–and, of course, you.

We are lucky.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Wouldn’t it be nice if in the coming year…the phrase “making Toronto into a real music city” disappeared once and for all from the rhetorical toolkit of certain elected officials who, in the interests of not embarrassing any particular mayor, shall remain nameless?

Why? Because it is worse than meaningless drivel; it is actually poisonous. It sounds like a noble mission, well worth studying (top-down, of course). But it does way more harm than good. You see, in order to accept the premise that Toronto needs to be “made into a real music city,” one has to buy into the prior proposition that, right now, “a real music city” is something that Toronto is not. A position with which I very respectfully beg to differ.

Differing, of course, is not difficult to do, but is not in and of itself helpful unless one proposes a useful alternative to the counterproductive bafflegab to which one is objecting.

The challenge we are facing, Mr. Mayor, is not that of “making Toronto into a real music city.” Rather it’s the challenge of figuring out how to keep real the astonishing music city that we already are.

Problem is, to start doing that, you’d have to actually believe it.

So take a look at the level of musical activity represented daily, weekly, monthly in this one small publication alone, Mr. Mayor. And realize that we serve and reflect only one relatively small part of the overall music-making spectrum. Then ask yourself what the things are that keep this astonishing musical ecosystem alive. And once you’ve come closer to understanding that, ask yourself what the things are that are happening under your watch that pose the greatest threat to this ecosystem’s existence.

Starting with an out-of-the-box comparison might be useful, so here’s one: a city cannot really hope to be a safe city for all its citizens, when the majority of its police officers have, for more than the past two decades, decided they can no longer afford to live here and have moved themselves and their families outside our city’s borders.

Similarly, we are rapidly becoming a city where the working poor (and most musicians fall into that category) are daily confronted with policies and economic realities that force displacement from our downtown of renters, of our young people, of artists, idealists, dreamers…

The urban corners and cracks and crevices where these dreamers learn to ply their trades, fixing up their surroundings as they go, are disappearing, threatened by lack of affordable accommodation. High-rise development wherever two or three properties can be assembled; commercial tax policies that penalize rebuilding small, even when the same uses are proposed for the new spaces; commercial bank financing that penalizes developers who try to factor independent business into mortgage financing; tired rows of the same old franchises on the ground floors of every new development making a mockery of the planning department’s commitment to vibrant mixed-use main street development… There are dozens and dozens of examples like these which could be found and remedied, if they were understood as problematic.

What I am trying to say is that far more than any of these individual factors, the vibrant, street-level cultural fabric of our urban life is threatened when our highest officials dismiss it as “not “real” and decide to take a top-down social engineering approach to solving a problem you exacerbate by the way you define it. So no more “making it real,” please, Mr. Mayor. Try “Our Music City: Keeping It Real,” instead, with pride in your voice for good measure.

Go plant a tomato: Jim Galloway, longtime artistic director of the Toronto Downtown Jazz Festival, and for 16 years the jazz columnist of The WholeNote, was as proud of being a Torontonian as he was of never losing his Scottish accent.

In the spring following his death on December 30, 2014, there was a gathering in his honour at Whistler’s Grille (Broadview and Mortimer), upstairs in the 4,000 sq ft McNeil Room. The place was packed. And as we were leaving, each of us was handed (Jim’s wish) a little box containing a tomato plant seedling to plant the same spring. How like him. Not “mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow” but a sense of cultural legacy as an aggregation of hundreds of small, nourishing, affectionate sustainably urban gestures.

Standing at the bus stop after, a few of us mused on how, poignant as the moment was, we’d likely miss him more with the passing of time. Wouldn’t it be grand, we said, if the Jim Galloway Wee Big Band could reconstitute itself, seasonally, from time to time to celebrate his memory through the music he loved to play.

Some things do come to pass: February 16 The WholeNote and The Ken Page Memorial Trust will host a third reunion of the Jim Galloway Wee Big Band under the direction of Martin Loomer, right here in the ground floor “Garage” performance space at 720 Bathurst. (There’s an ad with all the details on page 59.)

Jim loved the ground floor space here with its wooden beams and pillars, high ceilings and exposed brick. In the year or so before the Centre for Social Innovation bought the building, while it was mostly locked and empty, teetering between possibly being sold for condo redevelopment or else being turned into high-end offices, we’d ride the freight elevator down from the fifth floor WholeNote office and turn the lights on and talk about how it was opportunities like these, taken or missed, that would over time define the future of our music city. Little sustaining cultural acts, seeding hope, one tomato plant at a time.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Somewhere out there, in Hogtown, there’s a developer shitting bricks. 

Our lead story by Brian Chang about the Dominion Foundries at 153 Eastern Avenue goes into the details of the community response to our provincial government’s end run around the city’s usual planning procedures, so I won’t go into detail here. And I have no idea who the particular developer is who did this deal with the Ontario party in power. But I have a sneaking suspicion that by the time you read this, their names will be known and the aforementioned bricks will hit the fan.  

Even if I did know, mind you, I probably wouldn’t say, because here at The WholeNote we are not well equipped for the fast-moving “big scoop” newshound business. As I mentioned, with my other hat on, on page 2, these days we can’t even keep up, in print anyway, with the dizzying pace at which our formerly reliable monthly concert calendar, the backbone of what we have always existed to do, goes out of date before we’ve even hit the street. 

But for now let’s stick with the growing stink around the Dominion Foundries site.

The developers could turn out to be party-in-power cronies, about to benefit from a sleazy provincial end-run under cover of of COVID darkness.

Or at the other end of the spectrum they could be one of a rarer species: developers who understand that when they participate in building functional communities it costs more at first but makes what they build, in the longer term, a more valued place to be.

Or they could be somewhere in between – not particularly interested in the longer term because why should they care about the longer term when there’s always new ground to hog? 

I’m no Wiarton Willie or Punxsutawney Phil when it comes to prognostications, but if I have to guess, I am leaning more towards crony than community builder. I’d love to be wrong. 

Let’s just say, for sake of argument, that the community alliance (arts groups, existing residential associations and business districts, housing advocates) that has  temporarily prevented demolition of the heritage structures on the site wins a much bigger victory, and manages to persuade, compel or publicly shame the province and whomever they’re in cahoots with here into some form of meaningful negotiations, however long it takes to get there. 

That’s when things will get really interesting. Because one of the things that will immediately be put to the test will be the word community itself. And that will mean having to be specific about  what “the community” does want, rather than just agree on what it doesn’t. At which point things either cohere into something splendidly more than the sum of its parts, or disintegrate into clusters of competing visions, with epithets like “elitist” starting to fly. 

Let’s hope it’s the former, and we end up with something worth putting on the map. 

So what’s with all these groundhogs?

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day a jaded Pittsburgh weatherman reluctantly makes his way into the western Pennsylvania hinterland for the station’s obligatory coverage of the annual Groundhog Day hoopla as Punxsutawney Phil, for the 135th consecutive time, is prodded out of hibernation into the early morning cold, and either sees his shadow or doesn’t. If he does – sorry folks, six more weeks of winter, as decreed by Phil or Willie or Sam, for Punxsutawney; or, due north, for  Wiarton; or down east for Shubenacadie. 

In the film, our human weather forecaster (also called Phil), finds himself trapped in time, waking to the same song on the radio, going through the same day over and over again each time with variations, but with each episode ending and restarting the same way – trapped in the same day, with the same song on the radio, without hope of redemption, until ….

So here’s the really terrifying thought du jour: what would happen if each time Willie or Sam or Phil heads out of hibernation they have forgotten the previous excursus, and thinks it’s still February 2? Does that mean we get six weeks piled on another six weeks, and another... Just think what that would be like. 

At some point the whole Groundhog Day routine, designed as a fun and fine way of putting a small town on the map, would turn into a predictable moment of dread  –  a bit like the regular province-by-province COVID briefings, either announcing that because it’s gloomy out there things are about to get bright; or that, precisely because we have started behaving as though things are looking brighter, there’s now an even longer shadow of doubt as to when, or even whether,  they will. 

They will. And in the meanwhile, here are some stories to read.

publisher@thewholenote.com

March 4, 2022: I woke this morning, brutally at a loss for words of my own. Instead, these: Simon Wynberg’s, from Back in Focus, the final section of this issue, echoing in my head.

“Hard to watch and impossible to ignore.” So I reached automatically for the remote, channeling to the BBC, where I go as an admittedly weak antidote to CBC and CNN –  the closest thing I can find to a triangulated viewpoint on world news within a closed and often self-congratulatory loop where refugees in adjacent seats on the same bus, fleeing the same war, can expect to be treated differently at the border to freedom, based on the colour of their skin.

Uncannily, this is what flashed immediately onto my screen.

BBC: The acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, has been sacked by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra for refusing publicly to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The mayor of Munich said Mr. Gergiev could no longer remain in his position because of his support of President Putin. Well, Semyon Bychkov joins me now. He is the chief conductor and music director of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and he is Russian. 

Semyon Bychkov, let me ask you, first of all, unlike some other very prominent culture and art figures from Russia living in the west, are you prepared to condemn what you see happening in Ukraine? 

SB: Since day one when this war has begun, since the invasion happened, myself as well as the office of the Czech Philharmonic immediately issued statements to that effect and I have gone further in the following days. You know, there is time in life when one feels one must take a position on something that is so existentially important as this particular subject today. Everyone is free to make up their mind what they want to do if anything. In my particular case I’m free to take the position that I take, which is fiercely opposed to this genocide, this act of aggression.

BBC: Well you couldn’t be clearer Mr. Bychkov, but when you say you’re free is that because you have made a decision to cut your ties with your homeland completely? 

SB: I have emigrated in 1975 at the age of 22. And at that time, people have asked me but why have you left your country, and I said because I had to be free. And the question sometimes comes up today, and the answer has never changed. And I am actually fortunate to be free – not to have any debt to any state or company. The only debt I have in life (which will be for the rest of my life) is to my family, to my friends, to my teachers, to those colleagues, those orchestra musicians, all of the musicians with whom I make music, all those who helped me be better than I otherwise could have been. And that debt is something that I am very happy to pay.

Therefore I am absolutely free to express my opinions on the matter when it is called for, and I feel that, now, silence is not the right thing, because basically it means acquiescence to this, ah, power of evil if you will, and that is what we are faced with.

BBC: Mr. Bychkov thank you very much for speaking to us. 

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

Living composers quite often get invited, singly or in clusters, to the front of a concert hall to talk about a piece of music they have composed that is on the program of the concert in question. More often than not, this “pre-concert chat” or “illuminating introduction,” or whatever it is called, takes place 45 minutes to an hour before the performance itself and is supposed to end ten or 15 minutes before the concert starts in order to give audience members who showed up early to be enlightened time to dash out for a quick something or other.

Whether or not, on balance, I end up enjoying these pre-concert chats depends on three or four things.

On the negative side of the ledger, the thing I like least is when the interviewer/host “by way of introduction” starts out by parroting word for word from the concert program the stuff I already took the time to read (while the houselights were still bright enough to read by). Almost as bad is when the host avoids that trap and asks an interesting question, and the composer responds, word for word with what they wrote for the concert program. I say “almost as bad” because, if you think about it, being asked to talk about music you probably wrote because there were no words for the thing you wanted to express is not an enviable task.

On the positive side of the ledger, when the dialogue works out, when there’s a genuine rapport between host and guest, the reward for coming 45 minutes early is getting to eavesdrop on what sounds like a spontaneous conversation between two people who care deeply (and know more than I do) about something I am genuinely interested in.

I say “sounds like” a spontaneous conversation because I know a little bit about how much preparation it takes on the part of the host/interviewer to have a chance of achieving that kind of flow, especially when your guest composer, as often as not, equates sitting on a chair looking into bright lights with being at the dentist.

I particularly enjoy the pre-concert chats that Alexina Louie has hosted over the years for Esprit Orchestra. A composer herself, Louie more often than not manages to put her guest or guests at ease and to actually listen to what they say and respond to it, rather than spending the time while the guest’s gums flap checking the question she asked off her list and asterisking the next one.

This past Wednesday, for example, I played hooky from WholeNote production to make it to Koerner Hall in time for the pre-concert chat ahead of the opening concert of Esprit’s 36th season, only to discover that none of the composers programmed were in attendance. Two of them, Charles Ives and Tristan Keuris, being dead, had a good excuse; the third, Unsuk Chin, South Korean-born and Berlin-based, was likely otherwise engaged, having just been awarded the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, a $200,000 commission. And (proof that lightning does strike twice) the fourth, US composer Missy Mazzoli, was also likely busy, having just been commissioned to write a full-length opera by the Met, based on George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

What could, therefore, have turned into the kind of 35-minute recitation from the concert program notes that is the pre-concert format I dread most, turned instead into a delightful variation on the usual theme, with Esprit concertmaster Steven Sitarski, violin in hand, stepping in for a conversation (with his violin doing much of the talking), about the nuances and challenges, piece by piece, of the music we were about to hear.

It was eye- and ear-opening. And from it, entirely by chance, I came by the title for this month’s opener.

A warning: those of you expecting this editorial to turn erudite will be disappointed. I am no more equipped to use music to describe my word-driven brain than your typical composer is to use words to talk about their music. What the discussion of harmonics in that pre-concert chat gave me is a way to describe my greatest pleasure as editor of this magazine: reading through all the various bits and pieces it contains, most of them written, without knowledge on the part of the writers, of what else was being written for the issue, I find myself delighting in the way, over and over again, one thing happens to chime with another.

What to make, for example, of the fact that in two unrelated stories in the issue (I won’t tell you which two) a composer is asked how they compose? Mahler answers the question with a question: “How do you make a trumpet? Hammer brass around a hole.” And American world-music pioneer Adam Rudolph is quoted as saying “Shoot the arrow and then paint a bullseye around it.” I will dine out on those two for years!

Or what to make of the fact that, having scurried out to the Esprit concert this past Wednesday having just sent this month’s cover to the printer, I should discover (from the program I could still read because the houselights were up), that Kris Maddigan, subject of this month’s cover story, was toiling (almost invisibly) as third percussionist in the orchestra for the concert. Such is the life of the working musician.

The great joy of a magazine like this, anchored as it is in the life of a functioning musical community, is that you can paint bullseyes around almost any topic of your choosing and find resonances. Four different stories about the role of music in community-building and the ways in which community, once built enables music and art to morph and change. Stories about reaching audiences – “60 million streams” or “thousands of gamers” – and bringing those audiences to music they might otherwise not have found. Stories about artists in different disciplines reaching out and finding each other and making living works of art that alone they could not have.

Best of all, these are just the words about the music. This is just the pre-concert chat, and it’s over in time for you to dash out for a quick something or other. Let the music begin!

publisher@thewholenote.com

Playoff basketball and baseball back in town: The chance just to be unabashed fans of the game, bleacher creatures cheering whenever we goddamn well feel like it – leaving the game exhilarated enough, win or lose, to grab a couple of gloves and toss a ball around, or shoot some hoops ourselves, dreaming “nothing but net” as the ball, oh so close!, clunks off the rim.

Bringing some of the same engagement and freedom of expression back to the concert hall: maybe even a distinction, like the one emerging between full capacity concerts for the damn-the-torpedoes” maskless and the “is it safe to come out?” masked – between “You should know that if you clap after the third movement of Tchaik 6 the program says I am allowed to kill you” versus the “whoohoo!” outbursts of some baseball-loving jazz fan. 

And in either case, leaving the hall exhilarated enough to open the piano lid or dusty instrument case as we plunk or pick or blow away.

Clarity: it’s not altogether clear to me what our provincial government’s medical talking heads mean these days when they say they are “still following the science”: now that my beloved flip phone has bitten the digital dust, I can smartly inform you that a google search for “science of elections” (in quotes) yields 344,000 results in .64 seconds.

Music on street corners and the resumption of “Cafe TO” (street-encroachment for patios from spring to fall): not just as a pandemic-related exception to the rule but (our older and wiser sister-city Montreal has known this for decades) as part of how northern cities need to breathe in and out depending on the weather. 

Not throwing the virtual baby out with the pandemic bathwater: yes, embracing the return of live musical encounters, planned and spontaneous, indoor and outdoor, intimate and spectacular, on porches and street corners and grassy banks, in backyards and parks and festivals. Using all the virtual skills we’ve acquired over the past couple of years, but not just to reach the temporarily locked-down audiences who already knew us. Instead, once music makers are throwing sounds through real air to live audiences (no matter how large or small), to simultaneously make it possible for audiences we don’t yet know (shut in, far away, unaware, without the wherewithal) to see the backs of our heads as we listen. And to feel right there. 

Trust me on this: I would sacrifice a dozen fancy cross-fades, even audio quality, for the pleasure of seeing the back of a head in the frame, even the shiny back of the head of an oldie like me  – just for the pleasure of proof that what I am watching is live.

Exception to the rule (still on the topic of shiny backs of heads): Unless of course I recognized it as the back of the head of the gent in front of me who, at a big event the other night, stiffened so visibly I heard his spine crack when the person asked to “do the land acknowledgment” (I could already see his eyes rolling, right through the back of his head) uttered the words “stolen land.” Funny how we recognize it when it’s happening in the present, right before our eyes but far away. Yet we won’t look back in time that way, especially if it’s home truth. 

I am looking forward to the day when we embrace the act of acknowledging the land as effortlessly as we accept giving thanks for food around a table.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Two pm this past February 8 was a Saturday afternoon, and my concert companion and I had barely had time to settle into our Roy Thomson Hall balcony seats with our beer and popcorn before the lights, already dim, dipped even more, and a fractional moment of quiet rippled across the cheerful din of the place, the way a passing cloud wiping the face of the sun high above a summer lake evokes a moment’s hush.

(You can always tell it’s February in Toronto when people like me distract themselves from a task at hand by starting to talk, out of nowhere, about the summer.)

Where was I? Ah yes. February 8, about four minutes past 2pm, in the balcony level of Toronto’s most imposing cultural hall of mirrors. The momentary hush that descended on the room when the lights flickered is turning into a ripple of applause as our conductor for the day, Jack Everly, strides briskly onto the stage.

If it’s less of a ripple of applause than one might reliably expect at that moment in the concert ritual, it’s certainly not because the crowd is smaller than usual – the place is, as far as I can tell from where I am sitting, pretty much its usual respectably crowded self. And it’s not because the audience is already settling morosely into an appropriate frame of mind for something portentous – there’s a palpable buzz and hum in the air. Mostly it’s less of a ripple than one might have expected, because the logistics of applause are complicated with a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other.

Toronto Symphony Orchestra members already seated on stage do their usual decorous bit to salute the maestro as he enters – they tap their bows carefully on their instruments; stamp their feet in a refined (and of course rhythmic) way; there are smiles all round.

Everly strides to the front of the stage, all affable business, picks up a microphone that just happens to be there, and invites us all to have a good time, cheer for our heroes if we feel like it, laugh or cry if we want to, and applaud or not as the mood strikes. And then, all business, he turns to the orchestra, all attention. The lights take a deeper dive, a deeper hush descends. He raises his baton … and the movie begins.

Calling it a “movie” in these splendid surrounds is, I readily concede, not the most formal way of addressing it. Film With Orchestra is how it’s titled on the cover of the TSO program book I picked up on my way out of the hall (I had a hand free by then).

Mind you, that’s not what it’s called inside the program. On subsequent closer inspection, on the page with the official production credits for the highly successful road show, it is styled A Symphonic Night at the Movies which neatly captures the middle-brow appeal of the thing: neither film as art nor “a flick at the bioscope,” as I would have called it as a nine-year-old child in 1962 (in another country) ten years after this particular movie was made.

Whatever one calls it, film with orchestra has become, for a whole bunch of reasons, a hybrid genre that is much in vogue. The TSO, for example, does four of them a year in its own season. Three of them, this season (two Star Wars movies and Home Alone, which has become a perennial Christmas holiday offering), are branded showcases for the astonishing film score output of composer John Williams. The fourth generally digs into film classics: last year it was, if I remember, Casablanca. Today it is 1952’s Singin’ In the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds.

I understand the appeal. For movie fans it’s a chance to get under the hood of an aspect of movie-making normally hidden from view. For millions of people, for whom orchestral scores, consciously or unconsciously, are intrinsic to the way we are programmed daily as to what to feel and think, it’s a revelation to see how the all-too-familiar sounds are made: a bit like actually seeing milk come from a cow rather than from a carton on a shelf. I like to think there are favourable statistics out there concerning how many people who came primarily for the novelty value of seeing a favourite film in a new context discover the orchestra as something worth revisiting in its own right.

As for die-hard fans of the orchestra, it’s a chance to spend time in the hall, indulging a passion, without any of the usual self-appointed distractions of having to instruct less couth patrons in the etiquette of cultural palaces – a chance to let our hair down, so to speak.

So I was expecting to have fun, and would have, even without the popcorn and beer. What I wasn’t expecting was the way this particular film in this context has stayed with me for the past few weeks, taking on an aesthetic shape and colour: posing questions
(and suggesting answers) about the relationships we cannot afford to take for granted in regard to the continually evolving relationship between artists and audiences.

Part of the reason it was so interesting is the pivotal moment in the history of film that is at one and the same time the reason for the film’s existence and it’s own major storyline – the advent of the talking picture. Stars of the silent screen died off, metaphorically, in droves; new stars were born; actors who could actually act, singers who could actually sing, and dancers who could actually dance were suddenly able to bring prodigious live performance skills to a mass audience. Studios acquired orchestras where previously movie houses had theatre organs or player pianos. Sound stages on an immense scale came into existence.

Memorably, February 8 in the RTH balcony, I found the inner story of the film being played out all over again, in a crazed, Escher-like version of itself: as though the fun-house mirrored twists and turns of Roy Thomson Hall’s intentionally disorienting lobbies and levels had been transported into the auditorium itself.

There was one moment, for example, where I found myself watching the TSO live on the RTH stage (with a pull-down movie screen most of them could not see above their heads), making beautifully synchronized music for an orchestra on the screen, reduced once again to silent-movie puppetry by technology’s latest twist and turn; while, to top it all off, on that screen an auditorium of people sat watching their orchestra accompanying the same stars that our orchestra was. Layers within layers.

There was a more fundamental moment for me, though, well into the movie’s second half. (Yes, there was an intermission to top up on popcorn and beer.)

It came during one of the film’s memorable songs – not one of the obvious ones, like the title song, that had dozens of audience members happily singing along, but “Would You” a lovely gentle waltz, masterfully positioned at the film’s moment of denouement, ricochetting from bathos to pathos, in a lovely arc:

He holds her in his arms,
would you, would you?
He tells her of her charms,
would you, would you?

I suddenly became aware that the person seated next to me was singing, completely comfortably and absorbed entirely in the moment. Not “singing along,” just singing. Not an audience member “joining in.” Nor aware, even for an instant, that she herself had an audience. Just feeling permitted.

And here’s the point: she would not have had that permission either in a movie theatre or in a concert hall. It was a gifted moment, arising from a uniquely oddball set of circumstances: the live audience watching the live orchestra brought the people on the silver screen to life in a way that film alone cannot. The privacy of the typical film-watching experience kept other audience members at bay, in a way that the typical concert environment does not.

It’s an alchemy we all, artists and presenters alike, need to seek.

After all, if, as the bard says, “all the world’s a stage,” then what’s an audience?

Three days later: Tuesday February 11, at the COC

“Oh, it’s a starry night!” my opera companion, delighted, turns to me and says, very quietly, as the Hansel and Gretel overture starts and the mysterious-looking panelled stage curtain we have been eyeing for the past ten minutes or so, speculating as to how its panels will part and divide, reveals what is behind it. Like lightning the person in the row right in front of us spins around. Her “SSSSHHHHH!!!” can be heard at least 15 rows back. Our slightly sheepish discomfort lasts all of the three minutes it takes for the same individual to take things to the next level by whacking the elbow of the person next to them with a rolled up program, for encroaching over the midline of the seat arm.

Thirteen years ago, approximately

In the selfsame balcony at Roy Thomson Hall. It is a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion. One of it’s great chorales “O grosse Lieb” has just commenced and someone, I would guess in his 80s, deep in the moment and alone with the music starts, quietly, to do what Bach instructs – to sing along. Someone turns to chastise ...

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

If this were a concert then, right now,  I would be the gent who walks out onto the stage just when you think the show is about to start, to a smattering of applause from those of you who thought I might be the artistic director, until you realized my suit was too expensive for that.

I would have a creased, handwritten piece of paper in one hand and would sidle over to the lectern downstage right; I would tap the microphone until someone came and turned it on for me; I would introduce myself as [INSERT NAME OF IMPORTANT NONPERFORMER] in the organization; I would say say that before I can get to the prepared remarks carefully folded in the pocket of my suit jacket, there are three items of housekeeping to take care of.

One, to remind everyone that this is our COMBINED ISSUE, covering December AND January so do NOT call the office on January 2 except to leave a message after the tone wishing us a Happy New Year.

Two, to point out the revised structure AND ORDER of our listing sections as explained right here on this page (to your left);

Three, to thank the readers whose suggestions have helped us take this step forward in making the new Section C: Music Theatre listings a permanent feature of our coverage, and we welcome further input moving ahead.

If this were a concert I would then crumple up the aforementioned handwritten housekeeping notes and put them in my suit pants pocket; I would take out the carefully prepared, neatly folded, printed notes from my suit jacket pocket; I would put my glasses on, introduce myself again from my printed notes; and I would say that it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this 20th annual COMBINED DECEMBER/JANUARY issue of The WholeNote.

“Before going any further,” I would say,  “I wish to thank all those who have not only made this issue possible but have in fact enabled us to reach this memorable 20th December. But that rather than delaying the proceedings any further  I simply direct your attention to the staffers, contributors and funders in the masthead at the foot of this page, and to all the advertisers in the index of advertisers adjacent to it. Without their help, their loyalty and their love, none of this would be possible.”

I would then remember to take the microphone with me and would leave the stage to the performers, and you, dear readers, to your pleasure, after reminding you to turn off all pagers, cellphones and electronic devices.

Since  it is not a concert, however I urge you all to turn ON your cellphones, etcetera, and tweet to the world that the Dec/Jan issue is out.

If this were your concert,  on the other hand,  I would be in the audience hoping that among your resolutions for the New Year would be a couple of things relating to how you address us, the audience from the stage.

Think about this: we all have the goal of attracting new audiences, or to put it another way, audiences to whom what we do is new.  If they were guests in our house we would take it as a given that the first thing we could do to set them at ease would be to acquaint them with the rules of the house, by which I mean all the ways we do things that are particular to us rather than generally known.

If applause for example is a natural spontaneous human reflex at witnessing something spectacularly well done, or deep emotion revealed, it makes only slightly more sense to ask people to hold their applause than it does to ask them to hold back their tears. 

So if our house rule is that in fact such withholding is required, it is more and more incumbent on us to make that fact known to audiences who are new to our house.

It doesn’t cut it, in my book, to put little asterisks in a program next to sections where one wishes the audience to withhold applause and think that by so doing the job has been done, unless someone, [INSERT NAME OF IMPORTANT PERFORMER], has also called the audience’s attention, from somewhere in the vicinity of the lectern, stage right, to what the artists on stage are hoping the houserules will be. 

If I were now to practise what I have just preached, this is what I would say to you, if you were a new reader of this magazine:

 I’d say welcome, and thanks for giving us a try; I’d say if you want to get an idea of what makes us tick, flip quickly through the five listings sections of the magazine – from page 36 to page 68. Everything else around those 33 pages (over 800 individual live events) is  also in some way about those 33 pages. We exist to support the work of the people whose serious love of live music is there for you to see and hear on these days and dates.

If you are reading this in print, you should know that we do 30,000 of these, nine times a year, of which all but a couple of hundred are distributed free of charge at around 800 distribution points in Southern and Southwestern Ontario. And there is a  handy map on our website (under the “About Us” tab) which will show you where you can find us.

You should also know that the listings you have just flipped through are also free of charge, so if you feel as though the music you make belongs here, all you have to do to get the dialogue under way is to contact listings@thewholenote.com.

To all of you, regular readers and new our best wishes for a happy, hearty and hopeful year end and thank you for your kind attention! You won’t see us in print again until the end of January, so if you haven’t already, sign up for our between-issue e-letter HalfTones. (For details, see the house ad on page 18.)

publisher@thewholenote.com

If this was the preamble to a “For Openers” podcast (now there’s an idea!), instead of just words on a page, I’d start each episode with 15 to 20 attention-grabbing seconds of arrestingly musical noise. Then, once I had your attention, I’d lure you further in with a few carefully scripted off-the-cuff remarks, like these, as to why that particular soundbite was the perfect lead-in to this particular episode. 

Next, I’d drop in a choice quote about the snippet we’d just heard (“It’s a sort of bizzaro polka with some incredible combinations of sounds and, as you can see from the smiles of the musicians’ faces, a treat to perform.”) After that, we’d listen to the whole piece (about five minutes). And after that, the big reveal – “my guest this episode is …” And away we’d go. No more script, and only a few holds barred. 

If this were a podcast, by now I’d have told you that today’s opening soundbite (and the choice quote) come courtesy of percussionist Ryan Scott, director of Continuum Contemporary Music, one of several presenters around (a topic for another time) who have really latched onto the e-letter, with its capacity for embedding music, as fundamental to maintaining contact with their audiences. 

The pandemic-inspired Continuum newsletter I found this piece of music in is called “Throwback Thursday”. It features performance videos from back in the day when videos like this were the icing on the cake, not the cake itself – more like souvenirs, for those who were there or wish they had been; moments in real musical time, with live audiences attending on sounds flung live into the air, unfiltered, and the players in turn feeding off the energy of that attentiveness. 

This particular “Throwback Thursday” segment revolves around a Continuum concert from almost a decade ago (February 12 2012) titled ORGANized. It took place at the Music Gallery, back in the Music Gallery’s St. George-the-Martyr days. The clip, I’d have explained by now, is the premiere performance of a commissioned work titled Remix for Henk, which opened the concert. And I’d have mentioned that not only did the piece set the tone for the evening, but the whole evening would likely not have happened had the composer of the piece not introduced Scott and his co-director Jennifer Waring to Henk de Graauw in his shed in Bramalea … . (But that’s their story, not mine.) And then, if this were a podcast, we’d listen to the whole piece, right through (five minutes). 

After that – the moment you’d have been waiting for – I’d introduce my guest: Richard Marsella, composer of Remix for Henk, executive director of Regent Park Community Music School, the eponymous “Friendly Rich” of the band Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People (you can look them up). And, drumroll please, the writer of a community arts story in the current issue of The WholeNote, on the post-pandemic community-building potential of musical playgrounds. 

I’d probably start by asking my guest to connect the dots: from the music he composed for Continuum almost a decade ago, inspired by Henk de Grauuw’s musical workshed, to the piece he just wrote for us, inspired by post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans. After that? We’d gallop off in all directions. If it worked, you’d be left with some things to think about in terms of the nature of community arts, as well as suggestions for other samples of arrestingly musical noise to go look for.

If this were a full-fledged launch party for the current issue, to take the podcast idea one step further, there would be way more planning involved, and a compelling argument for inviting supporters of our magazine, like you, to join the audience (live and/or virtual, as permitted) at some appointed moment in real time, for the event. There would also for sure need to be more than one guest, given the range of content the issue covers. 

In any issue of the magazine, like the one you have just started reading, figuring out a running order that connects the dots is always a challenge – figuring out how to paint a larger picture, without compromising the integrity of each separate piece. A bit the way good concerts do. But a launch party like this would be a whole other challenge, and one that, come to think of it, I’d probably be lousy at, given the kind of choreography required for the kind of occasion it would need to be in order not to crash and burn. I get too easily distracted by delightful coincidences. 

In this case, for example, I’d be obstinately insisting to my co-curators that the next guest after Marsella has to be Max Christie and his story about Ottawa’s SHHH!! chamber duo, which digs into why the things that make small indie ensembles most vulnerable right now will very likely be the things that will help them bounce back faster. 

Why? Obviously because, as it happens, clarinetist Christie shows up as a member of the Continuum ensemble in Remix for Henk! It’s the kind of segue I find as irresistible as the Sunday New York Times crossword. “You can’t plan coincidences like that one,” I’d be arguing. “Yeah, but so what?” someone would need to be brave enough to say to me. 

I am not for one moment suggesting, by the way, that eight or nine WholeNote launch parties a year is on the agenda. But it sure sounds like a good idea for the launch of Volume 27 in the fall. 

So let’s pretend for a moment: that these next couple of hundred words are the final paragraphs of my opening remarks at an upcoming Volume 27 season launch party (date to be confirmed): “An Evening with the WholeNote” (virtual and real). 

We’ve bumped elbows with some of you, live at the door, on the way in, and informed you that there’s an $8.00 cover charge for the event. You’ve happily paid, and some of you have even said keep the change, it’s a good cause. And we’ve said thank you. 

Others of you, dozens of dozens, have arrived at the venue through some virtual portal and paid your $8.00 cover charge* some other way (a three-issue subscription is $24, for example). Whichever way you bought in for your $8.00, you did. So thank you for that.

The important thing is you are here, in spirit, sharing a musical moment in common time, witnessing the attentiveness of a live audience responding to music carried through live, virus-load-reduced, shared air. 

And then I’d wrap up my remarks by saying “a warm welcome, dear friends, to Volume 27 no 1. Who the hell would have dared hope, a year ago today that we’d make it this far.” 

“Because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Gathered here today we are a microcosm of the “cultural ecology” without which the titans of our so-called “cultural industries” would have no source of sustenance.” 

It’s a picture we try to paint every issue, including this one.

publisher@thewholenote.com

*As for the $8.00 cover charge, if you already think it’s a good idea, you don’t have to wait till September. Contact our circulation department and jump in right away, with a three-issue subscription (as some of you already have done, so thank you for that.) Your $24 will take you all the way to September 14, 2021, Volume 27 no 1. And you will have helped us get there. 

publisher@thewholenote.com