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In the fall of 1984, the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music, one of the most important festivals of new music, took place in Canada. Composers from many countries gathered in Toronto and Montreal. Most of them had no idea that the Canadian musical scene was so diverse and accomplished. In the ensuing years, this attitude has changed greatly, and foreign composers are often visitors to our shores. However, this winter and early spring will see an unusual number of internationally famous composers coming to Toronto. In this article, I’ll mention just six of our high-profile visitors:Krzysztof Penderecki, Osvaldo Golijov, Gerald Barry, Steve Reich, Zygmunt Krauze and Jonathan Harvey.

If you have a desire to sing, you’d be hard-pressed not to find a place for your voice these days. I’ve been studying community music in Toronto, and my sneak peek at The WholeNote’s 2012 Canary Pages confirmed my own sense of the many opportunities open to singers of all ages, abilities and interests. And that’s just what’s listed in these pages. If the Canary Pages are the tip of a singing iceberg, then there are likely hundreds of places to sing in Southern Ontario. And by all accounts, Ontarians are singing.

I was in my teens, growing up in a small Wisconsin town, when I first encountered the name Pierre Boulez. The late composer was mentioned by no less a person than Igor Stravinsky in his Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, published in the late 1950s. Stravinsky felt that Boulez was a promising emerging composer, and he was particularly impressed with Boulez’s 1954 composition, Le marteau sans maître. Having read this, I immediately visited my local record shop and ordered a copy of a recording of it with Boulez conducting, a Vox Turnabout LP (TV 34081S). It’s a record I still own, although it’s considerably worn out from the thousands of times I listened. This work made a strong impression on me then (I admit I tried to mimic the approach in my own juvenile compositions), and it still does today.

My first person-to-person meeting with Boulez was in 1975, when CBC Radio Music sent me to London to attend a BBC Radio symposium on the Broadcast Presentation of Contemporary Music. It seemed as though the BBC was planning a new initiative in this area, much like CBC, even if the resulting programs were still a few years away from launching. I was, at the time, producer of the program Music of Today on what was then called the CBC FM Network. Pierre Boulez was in his final year as music director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and he was asked to give the keynote address at our symposium, which was attended by contemporary music producers from many national broadcasters around the world.

Boulez made many points about how he, having just served four years as the BBC’s chief conductor, saw the role of public broadcasters in developing contemporary music specifically, and classical music generally. But his main point was this: producers who design music broadcasts should always be didactic in making their programs. His point was simple and sensible – it boiled down to, “Know what you have to say and what point you have to prove, and then make your programs for the sake of proving that point.” He further argued that even if the focus of the broadcast were weak or ill-advised, a didactic approach would at least be more interesting and engaging than programs with no point at all.

For my own part, I was entirely in Boulez’s camp on this point. Having just completed ten programs on the life and music of Arnold Schoenberg with Glenn Gould the year before, I was already a convinced and committed didactic broadcaster. The opportunity to champion Schoenberg at the hands of Gould, perhaps his most compelling advocate, was a memorable and entirely convincing experience. Gould made no secret of his admiration of Schoenberg’s music and our ten programs on the topic were nothing if not didactic.

 Two years later we began planning CBC Radio’s signature network contemporary music program, Two New Hours, and once we launched in 1978, Boulez’s music was prominently featured among our regular broadcasts of international concerts. And we also broadcast our own productions of his work from Canadian concerts. In 1979, when New Music Concerts staged the North American premiere of Messagesquisse for solo cello and cello sextet, we were there to record and broadcast this superb new creation.

In fact, it’s likely that Robert Aitken’s New Music Concerts has been the Canadian organization most associated with Boulez’s music, having presented his work numerous times over the years. They were the ensemble of choice in 2002 when Boulez received the Glenn Gould Prize, performing a full program of his music in Glenn Gould Studio for the presentation of the award. Flutist Robert Aitken, pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico, soprano Patricia Green and  cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras were featured as soloists with the NMC ensemble, the latter gentleman having been selected by Boulez to receive the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. Boulez had initially declined the invitation to conduct the concert, but at the first rehearsal, realizing he was in the presence of such an outstanding ensemble, he spontaneously changed his mind and took the reins.

The late Larry Lake (1943–2013), host of Two New Hours from 1995 to 2007, interviewed Boulez during that Toronto visit in 2002. Boulez told Larry that while he had never met Glenn Gould, he respected him for his single-minded devotion to his own principles and for exploring new ways to apply electronic media for the dissemination of music. Boulez made the observation that Gould, like himself, “… had a point to prove.”

New Music Concerts will once again honour Pierre Boulez, February 15, in their concert at Betty Oliphant Theatre at 8pm. They will present two of his compositions with an organic connection: the solo piano work, Incises (1994/2001) and its relative, the large ensemble piece, Sur Incises (1996/2006).

With Boulez’s passing, we remember him as a brilliant yet complex artist. His talents were so numerous and so exceptional, it’s difficult to single out any one as his defining trait. Those of us who were with him for the 2002 Glenn Gould Prize presentation saw him as a gracious, warm and generous man, but there are just as many reported episodes where he was the “Pierre-of-the-sharp-tongue.” In a public interview I held for the International Music Council in Vienna with Austrian composer Kurt Schwertsik in 2006, Schwertsik recalled the early days at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in the 1950s and 1960s. He said that Boulez would, “...arrive late and leave early, leaving behind numerous cuts, bruises and other virtual injuries to the participants’ egos. It was then up to Bruno Maderna,” he continued, “to come after him and soothe and mend all that Boulez had inflicted.”

Boulez’s goal was to aim high to achieve goals of significance, and in so doing he left many behind. He was an artist who always had a point to prove, and he had no lack of confidence in his creative powers. Perhaps my most lasting memory of him is from an interview on CBC’s Arts National with the late Terry Campbell (1946–2004) in 1991, when Boulez was in Halifax for Scotia Festival. He remarked that “Once we come to recognize the brain as a muscle, the sooner we’ll realize that in its regular exercise over time, we can accomplish great things.”

Boulez was right, and he did achieve greatness, leaving us his rich legacy. 

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

Knowing how busy his schedule was going to be over the course of the spring, I booked my final interview with Peter Oundjian good and early (Thursday, March 8, to be precise). He was in town for New Creations, one of the signature series he created in the course of his 14 years as the TSO’s conductor and music director. I’d had a chance to get a sneak-peek look over the first “post-Oundjian” 2018/19 season before going in to meet him and what struck me immediately was the fact that all the Oundjian signatures are conspicuous by their absence – New Creations, the Decades Project, and most noticeably, Mozart @, which he had launched as Mozart@249 the very first year he arrived – stealing a march on the looming Mozart at 250 hullabaloo, in that endearing blend of cheeky and canny that has characterized his stay here.

(As it turned out, he had not looked at the upcoming season at all and in fact had no hand in putting it together. So rather than, as in some previous years, the spring interview being with musical director Peter Oundjian with an enthusiastic agenda of “upcomings” to promote, this was a rather more leisurely and relaxed ramble through this and that, looking back as much as forward. Enjoy.)

WN: So 14 years with the Tokyo String Quartet and then 14 years of this? What’s with that?
Peter Oundjian (laughs): Yes, well it did rather play into my decision – because I knew the time was coming when everyone would need to reinvent themselves a little bit on both sides; so then I looked at that number, 14 years, and said, well, it seems about right. But, truth be told, we were hopeful we had found a successor so I thought, “Well, this is going to be smooth, because you always want to know that your organization is going to be in good hands when you leave.” Whenever I wake up at night it’s “What do they need, what could go wrong, what do they need going forward, what do I do about this particular personnel issue, conflict, this sound issue, what about fundraising, why are we not having more success in this area?” There are just a million things to think about… More than there were with the [Tokyo] Quartet, actually. I mean with the quartet it was like going to the moon. “Here’s your schedule for the next two years… Go!” 140 cities every year. Here are the programs. Practise. Rehearse!

If this is Houston it must be Opus 131 again… that kind of thing?
Exactly. Here it’s been different every week. I mean figuring out the guest conductors. Who the orchestra really enjoys? Who challenges the orchestra the most? Who simply makes the orchestra feel good. What’s the right balance? It’s an enormous task, and really challenging because it’s so multifaceted. There’s a tremendous emotional input that goes into it – and intellectual. So when you decide the time has come to move into a different place in your own life and the life of the organization, the one thing you worry about is – and this is maybe going to sound a bit self-centred – will people realize how much attention goes into this? And… You don’t want a vacuum, put it that way. That’s what you worry about, because when I arrived there was a serious vacuum. The first few times I conducted this orchestra there had been serious leadership vacuums on both sides. I mean certainly we had not had luck with CEOs staying very long, and the right kind of vision. Jukka-Pekka [Saraste] had left several years before.

Yes, there was an uneasiness at the time. I agree. But is there going to be less of a vacuum this time round?
Oh I think so. Very much. First of all, Sir Andrew Davis is a great friend and is somebody everybody trusts implicitly, and he has a very strong relationship with the city and with the orchestra. But also I have to say we are in a less tenuous situation. The morale of the orchestra is in a very different place from where it was in the 90s, and that’s by the way not to point fingers at Jukka-Pekka in any way. He came into a very difficult economic situation, where the Canadian government was backing away not just from support of the TSO but from the arts in general – and that’s what brought about the tax structure change, by the way, more of a feeling that the private sector should enable it, if we believe in it, then let the private sector, with the help of the government via new tax structures, show their vision and prove their worth.

So in those terms, Sir Andrew is coming in as the vacuum cleaner…
Well put! (laughs) Right. I mean, if the orchestra had come to a decision regarding a conductor in the last two years since I announced my departure it would have been different, but they didn’t… it was close but it didn’t happen.  

It was close?
It was. But the person took another position.

From an audience perspective these searches are pretty boring actually – certainly not a public blood sport. I mean, nobody wants to be known as the shortlisted candidate who didn’t get the job.
Exactly. It’s the opposite of politics, and so it should be. Nobody should know who’s on the shortlist, and at this point, by the way I don’t think there’s even a shortlist. There’s a lot of discovery going on.

Listening to you talking about capital gains and tax structures and the like, is that one of the hats you’ll be hoping to wear less moving on?
It’s a good question. I mean, I have been music director of two organizations for almost seven years now – I took on the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) officially in 2012 but before that you’re [still] doing all the planning. I have been working in that kind of “administrative capacity” for two symphony orchestras for the past seven years or so. So definitely it was on my mind that now’s the time to focus more exclusively on musical discoveries, and musical adventures and musical thinking. Also I will be doing a tiny bit more work at Yale. Well, I shouldn’t say tiny, more work at Yale anyway. I have taken over the Yale Philharmonia – the Yale Music School is one of the postgraduate schools at Yale and it’s the only major research university in North America that has a dedicated performance music school and it’s tuition-free so the standard is very high. I’ve been a professor there since 1981 actually…

Tokyo String Quartet had a Yale residency, right?
Exactly. Part of my obligation as a member of the quartet was teaching chamber music at Yale.
So I have had a very close affiliation with Yale. It’s very close to my home in Connecticut and it’s meant a lot to me over the years. So I was asked if I would take over the program, which is an interesting ensemble in that they prepare in the same way as a professional orchestra – all the rehearsals are within one week – six rehearsals. So not only is it easier for me to be involved, but…

… Also a taste of the real world for the orchestra.
Exactly! And not only that, it means I can bring in international guest conductors who can give a week, but could never have given two or three weeks in the old way of preparing.

So tell me a bit more about the RSNO music directorship. I assume it has its own mix of rewards and challenges, but have there been transferable solutions from here to there?
The important thing is not to take anything for granted, because if you go with your expectations rather than with your observations you are in trouble. Similar and different problems and exciting rewards. It’s been a wonderful experience with RSNO: it’s an orchestra that plays with a great deal of expressivity. We’ve been able to tour them to China and Europe and the United States. And a lot of recordings. That’s been one of the best things with the RSNO because at the TSO, as you know, we don’t have a contract that really allows us to make recordings. The only recordings we have made here are live, with possibly a patch session. Two performances and you have to hope there isn’t a bar where things didn’t go well on both nights. But in the RSNO you actually really record. You go in and you do the thing and if something goes wrong you work it out. And that allows people to play with a lot of risk. When you are recording live you want it to be exciting but the risk element is a really tricky one. I have to say, though, the TSO has been amazing, really amazing in their live recordings. If you listen to them… I mean we did The Planets and Rite of Spring in one night! And I listen to those recordings sometimes and say “If we had done those in recording sessions, what would have been more, quote, perfect.” Some of the most exciting recordings are live; they are not the most perfect but…

But at least you can hear the hall breathe…
Right. So with the RSNO it’s a different kind of contract, where a service can mean a rehearsal or it can be a concert or a recording session. In the States and North America generally, that’s not the case. Recordings have to be in a separate contract.

Has raising kids in this city helped shape your perspective on what needed to be done at the TSO to build bridges to that next-generation audience that everyone talks about as some kind of holy grail?
I’d say first that one’s own children are not a good gauge because they’ve grown up with music around them all the time and they play instruments and so on. But for me, reaching out is not just a generational thing. I have always tried to make the concert hall a friendly place, a non-elitist place. And sometimes that’s been quite trying, because when you are about to go out and really perform… I mean, when an actor’s about to go out and be Hamlet they really don’t want to go out before and spend five minutes explaining the play. How do you gain the credibility of then being Hamlet? Obviously it’s not quite the same when I step onto the podium. I am not becoming another person, but when I start to conduct I am becoming an interpreter, and hopefully some kind of transmitter of feeling and atmosphere and everything else.

So it’s a tough transition from “mine genial host”?
Exactly. You’re in two very different modes. And certainly, there are certain pieces before which I have not spoken. Or have tried to separate the speaking from the performance in some way. But people have been generally appreciative of my welcoming them, trying to give them some sense of what they are listening to and what to listen for.

To demystify the thing…
Right. So to get to your question, if I can help people who might otherwise not come back, and who might now say “I have friends who would actually enjoy this,” and even bring someone with them the next time, then that’s gratifying. And all in all, the size of our audiences is gratifying.

I remember a performance of the Tchaikovsky Sixth where you spoke from the front of the stage. The second mezzanine was filled with first-timers. You were explaining the structure of the piece how the Third and Fourth Movements are a reversal from the norm.
In terms of character you mean?

Yes, exactly. And you said “So don’t be surprised if you want to applaud at the end of the third movement.”
Ah yes, I remember.

And then you actually went further – you said “In fact, if you feel like applauding, go right ahead because this ‘rule’ we have about not applauding between movements of a symphony actually didn’t come into effect until a decade after this symphony was written and performed.”
That’s correct. Yes.

And what was so interesting about that for me was seeing what you earned from that as conductor later on.
How so?

Well, you got to hold the silence at the end of the final movement way, way longer – maybe eight, ten seconds of…
Of meaningful atmosphere. Right.

So I’m really interested to know where you stand on the whole etiquette thing, because what that particular intervention at the beginning did was to disentitle the purists in the audience from being your glare police. And from where I sit, the rewards of that kind of recalibration of what’s okay far outweigh the disadvantages.
Right. So, I’m not convinced that the house rules, developed by Mahler and Schoenberg really, have the same relevance now as they did then. And by that I mean that people behaved pretty badly in concerts then. People talked a lot in the 19th century. It was much less formal, from the reports we hear. And in opera, too. I mean, at La Scala there was cooking and eating going on in the boxes. So they were frustrated that people were not really listening during the movements, and they wanted to take control, to say “No! You’re going to be quiet, and even between the movements you’re going to be silent and not talk because otherwise we can’t get your attention back.” I may be exaggerating slightly, but I think that it was really a reaction to failed listening. Otherwise, how did movements get encored in Beethoven’s time? Because people applauded like crazy. They thought it was so amazing. “Play it again. Play it again. We want to hear that movement again!” Obviously there was a huge reaction to each movement. 

That’s a delightful thought.
Now obviously there are certain pieces, certain movements that, when they end – first movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto for example – it’s just plain awkward when it’s silent after that, it so calls for a response. Nobody has any problem with that at the opera. People applaud after the big arias; nobody looks at them and says “What are you doing?” That hasn’t changed. I don’t think applause necessarily interrupts the flow of a symphonic performance. But it depends on the symphony and it depends on the movement. Now I happen to like applause at the end of the third movement in Tchaik Six because I then get to completely destroy their good mood, by hearing when that applause is going to die and then bringing in that devastating chord. I think it’s incredibly dramatic. Much more dramatic than bringing it in out of silence. Personally. But then I come from a family of different kinds of performers too so… I mean you know who my cousin is?

You mean Eric [Idle]?
Exactly. Of all the Monty Python guys he’s the one they all trust with putting on the shows because he understands how people react and what order to do things in. Anyway, all this to say, understanding the theatre of things is very important.
Now, do I want applause after the Adagietto? Of course not. It’s not the end of anything. The silence is very, very powerful. So I think I know when applause is okay and when it’s not, and I hope what I have developed is a kind of trust from people.
And one last thing to say: people with a real love for the symphony, when other people react and clap after a first movement, they should be saying “Wonderful – there are new people in the audience tonight!”

Going way back, the first time I interviewed you, you were standing in the hallway of your house in Connecticut waiting for the movers – Tippett Richardson I’m guessing – to arrive....
(Laughs). You’re right, it was Tippett Richardson. In fact, it was John Novak’s son Dave, who was one of the movers. John has been a fantastic supporter of the TSO.

So on the subject of houses – this is a bit roundabout, but bear with me – when people are selling a house they have lived in, realtors will advise that, yes, it needs to be furnished, but it really shouldn’t be too personal.
Staged.

Yes, exactly. And looking at the upcoming 2018/19 season, that’s what it feels like. Functionally furnished for whoever the new occupants are going to be.
Right, and that’s possibly exactly what it is. As I say I haven’t seen the brochure (not for any intentional reason, I just haven’t got round to it), but that may well be the thinking behind it, because the new person wants to come with a vision.

The Oundjian branding is gone. New Creations is gone. The Decades Project is gone. The Mozart@ series is gone.
Yes, Well the Decades Project, I never really got to complete. I actually loved that project. I have to say I wish it had intrigued people more. It intrigued the people who came, for sure, but I thought it was just so fascinating. It was a good example of the things I like to do. Bartok/Strauss is another example. You know, programming unlikely contemporaries. Or Rachmaninoff and the Impressionists. Or Stravinsky/Brahms. Stravinsky/Brahms was especially indulgent on my part, because Stravinsky was 16 when Brahms died, and I was 16 when Stravinsky died, so I thought “Wow, was Brahms to Stravinsky in his head that great contemporary, living composer?” And yes, he was! As Stravinsky was to me when I was a young man hearing Stravinsky premieres. So I was fascinated by that. It’s all about ways of framing programs. Of storytelling.

So to get back to my point, this coming season doesn’t have that curated, storytelling feel to it. I’m assuming that in a transitional year, with 20 different conductors coming in – I listed them all if you’d like to look – some of whom one might infer are under consideration for the new appointment, one way to truly evaluate the chemistry between candidates and the orchestra is to say “Let’s see what the new people do with the old stuff.”
Very much so. Part of the thinking is you need to see these conductors under the same observational umbrella. It’s sensible. And it’s exciting in a different way. Clearly a lot of the conductors on this list have never been here before. Some of course are old friends. So it’s clear what the concept is. There are some people coming simply because we like to hear them make music with the orchestra – Gunther [Herbig], Pinky [Pinchas Zuckerman], Sir Andrew of course. Others may be under the microscope in some sense. But it’s not a shortlist or anything like that.

And you are completely gone from the picture for the entire season, I see, although I gather you’ll be part of the picture for the 2019/20 again.
That’s right, yes.

So is that part of the “getting the previous occupant out of the way” blank-slate thing we were talking about?
Yes. I think a lot of conductors don’t really step aside properly, it seems to me. I mean, you can look at all kinds of examples. You know, huge farewell and then a couple of weeks later they’re back on the podium again and you’re wondering, well, what was that farewell about then? So it made sense to me to have the announcement of the new season, which I had no hand in, while I’m still in farewell mode, or whatever you want to call it; and to include me in the announcement as music director would not have seemed right. And as for the season, obviously they’re going to be looking at a lot of people over time, and also inviting back well-loved, trusted friends of the orchestra who’ve been here quite a bit and whom they really know. And the following season, all going well, I’ll be back as one of those!

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

Directories can make for dry reading. Just think about the proverbial telephone book. On the other hand, if you delve into the lives lived behind the names, things start to get a lot more interesting.

A similar example is The WholeNote’s Blue Pages, the magazine’s 13th annual directory of musical organizations throughout the GTA and beyond. Each group submits a short profile, and while certainly not dry reading, these snapshots are still very factual.

My specific assignment was to write “a personal point of view on what’s in the directory.” What follows is my journey into “the blue”— to get behind the names, as it were.

At first instance, one is lost in a sea of choirs, instrumental ensembles, opera companies, presenters, churches and service organizations — 26, small print, double sided pages, to be exact. In order to negotiate a way into this mass of material, I came up with the idea of asking questions inspired by the Blue Pages.

I received a memorable phone call early this past June – one that surprised and delighted me. It was from the Chancellery of Honours, informing me of my appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada.

The citation that came with the appointment spoke to the decades of commissioning, producing and broadcasting the work of Canada’s composers during my 40 years as a member of CBC Radio Music. Regular readers of The WholeNote will know that I have recounted various important episodes of this history in these pages over the past two years. But the honour of being formally recognized for this work now has me looking back through a slightly different lens, focusing
on the circumstances that made possible a mission as seemingly rarefied as supporting composition in Canada.

The answer? Public broadcasting.

At rock bottom, the difference between public radio and commercial radio is that commercial radio delivers audiences to advertisers, while public radio, on the contrary, enriches the audience with content of value. This basic difference remains today, even with the encroachment of the internet and social media. This difference was already clear in my mind when I arrived at the CBC Radio Music department in 1973, ready and eager to produce original musical content for the network. John Peter Lee Roberts, the man who hired me after I finished my Master of Music degree in composition and electronic music at the University of Toronto, had already laid the groundwork. He had been the head of the national radio music department of the CBC since 1965 and had built a strong music department that was content-driven, always focused on delivering an enriched, high-quality music service to Canadian listeners. He believed that commissioning original Canadian works was at the core of the CBC’s mission: in his ten years as Head of Music at CBC Radio, he commissioned about 150 works, many now recognized as Canadian classics, such as Harry Somers’ famous Gloria. Such creative leadership could only be undertaken under the mandate of public broadcasting.

1973, the year of my arrival, was also the year Roberts, together with the Canada Council, created the National Radio Competition for Young Composers – a scheme to identify emerging Canadian composers and to highlight their work in broadcasts for Canadian listeners. It was also a way of encouraging and eventually developing young composers into mature artists, whose works would form the content of future contemporary music programming. Roberts turned the administration of the competition over to me in 1975, as he was leaving the Radio Music department. The CBC/Radio-Canada National Competition for Young Composers ran every second year until 2003, and introduced some 165 winning composers to Canadian audiences.

The responsibility of organizing this national competition was the first of three opportunities in the period from 1975 to 1978 that enabled me to begin my work developing Canadian composers at CBC Radio. The second was when I was named CBC Radio’s delegate to the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in 1977. The IRC is a new music meet-up that takes place every year, organized by the International Music Council, with the participating public radio services of some 35 countries. Serving as CBC’s delegate gave me an outlet to present the works of Canadian composers we had produced at CBC, as well as providing access to new works from around the world for broadcast in Canada. And the third key opportunity was the creation of a new CBC network program that would serve as the platform for the original content we were about to begin producing in earnest. This program was Two New Hours, which launched on New Year’s Day, 1978.

January 1978 was a new beginning: for the next nearly 30 years, we had a national network program that brought Canadians a window on new music creation by Canadian and international composers. The IRC, together with another international exchange mechanism, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), gave us the means to exchange high quality productions of the most fascinating new works being created around the world, and a means of telling the rest of the world about Canadian music. And the National Radio Competition for Young Composers provided a means to invest in the development of emerging young Canadian composers, creating the newest of new music for current and future broadcasts.

The clearest example for me of how all these initiatives worked together successfully is the case of composer Chris Paul Harman. In 1990, the 19-year-old Harman became the only teenaged Grand Prize winner of the CBC/Radio-Canada young composers competition. Our recording of his winning composition, Iridescence for string orchestra, was submitted to the IRC the following year. The international delegates of the IRC voted Harman’s Iridescence the best work by a composer under the age of 30. The work was broadcast in 35 countries as a result. Iridescence was subsequently performed the following year by the CBC Radio Orchestra, the Esprit Orchestra and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and broadcast on Two New Hours as well as other CBC Radio music programs. By 1992, Harman was already an internationally recognized composer, not to mention a celebrity within the Canadian music community.

As his career grew, CBC Radio continued to follow and assist Harman’s development with commissions and broadcasts. Most of the major musical institutions in Canada have now performed his works; he has taken his place among the most respected composers in Canada. Along the way, he won the Jules Léger Prize twice: once (2001) for his work Amerika, which was also shortlisted for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize; and a second time (2007) for his work Postludio a rovescio, commissioned by the Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam. Harman is currently Associate Professor of composition at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University; more about that a little further on.)

The list of emerging Canadian composers who also benefited in a similar way from the coupling and coordination of these three initiatives is considerable: it includes Brian Current, Paul Frehner, Analia Llugdar, Kelly-Marie Murphy, Ana Sokolović, Andrew Staniland and many, many others. The opportunities provided through CBC Radio to encourage these composers over several decades helped Canadian composition to flourish; it was certainly a key factor in my recent Order of Canada citation.

That being said, my focus over 40 years at CBC Radio Music was not exclusively on the development of emerging composers. Established composers played an enormous role in the creation of original content for our broadcasts. Norma Beecroft, Brian Cherney, Murray Schafer and John Weinzweig were among the first composers commissioned for Two New Hours. And I presented Cherney and Schafer at the IRC during my earliest years as CBC’s delegate. Harry Freedman, Harry Somers and Ann Southam also figured prominently in our program mix. Some of these composers’ most well-known, perhaps even iconic works, were commissions produced for our broadcasts. These include Beecroft’s Piece for Bob, Freedman’s Borealis, Schafer’s Third String Quartet and Dance of the Blind by Marjan Mozetich. Speaking about the commission of his String Trio, Cherney says: “I knew the piece had to be damn good and interesting but it sort of developed more sophistication and complexity as it went along in the creative process. I think that one could say that the commission itself made me feel that I had to be as creative and imaginative as possible, so I tried to be just that.” He then went one step further: “I should say that all of my CBC commissions inspired me to write what I consider to be my best pieces – the String Trio, the Third String Quartet, Illuminations, La Princesse lointaine.”

Over the course of nearly 30 years of producing Two New Hours broadcasts, I commissioned about 250 new Canadian compositions. Several of these works served as vehicles for emerging young performers, like Alexina Louie’s Refuge, written for the young percussionist Beverley Johnston, or Ann Southam’s Qualities of Consonance for the emerging young piano soloist, Eve Egoyan. Mozetich’s Dance of the Blind was commissioned as a showcase for the emerging accordion virtuoso Joseph Petric. The last of these was seminal for Mozetich: with it came his decision to write in an accessible, tonal style, counter to the modernist trend at the time. This stylistic pivot made Mozetich one of the most successful of Canadian composers. Best of all, these sorts of radio commissions initiated collaborations between Canada’s best composing talent and the best performers. In the context of our nationwide network broadcasts, these collaborations helped to shape the musical community and the sound of Canada’s new music.

1991 saw the birth of another significant creative collaboration. Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra music director Bramwell Tovey, composer-in-residence Glenn Buhr and the late executive director Max Tapper contacted me to ask whether Two New Hours would broadcast music from the contemporary music festival they were planning. I saw this as an exciting opportunity and immediately promised that, not only would we broadcast as many concerts from their festival as the Two New Hours budget could afford, but would also contribute an event which we would create, produce and broadcast live, to show our support for the WSO’s innovative programming approach.

As a result, on Sunday night, January 19, 1992, Two New Hours presented a contemporary piano recital by Christina Petrowska Quilico, live on CBC Radio Two, from the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg. The recital included music by Canadians Omar Daniel, Steven Gellman, Peter Paul Koprowski, Sid Robinovitch and Ann Southam, plus acclaimed international composers Frederic Rzewski and Toru Takemitsu. The WSO’s production team, not sure how best to market a recitalist in their 2,500-seat hall, decided to put up risers on the stage, as the main seating area, in case the attendance was small. Those 700 riser seats filled quickly, and the WSO’s management team watched in amazement as another 1,000 people then took “overflow” seats in the main section of the hall. It was clear from that moment that the New Music Festival would be a great success. By the next year, the WSO’s New Music Festival could already call itself an international festival, thanks to the worldwide distribution of our CBC Radio broadcasts over the program exchange protocol managed by the European Broadcasting Union. The WSO’s New Music Festival was copied soon after by orchestras in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and other communities, many of which were also heard on Two New Hours broadcasts.

The success of these various new music festivals in turn helped to swell the audience numbers for Two New Hours. By the time the program was cancelled, in March of 2007, the show had grown to an audience share of four percent as measured by the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM), an unthinkable figure for this sort of contemporary music show. To put the number in context, in 1980, when Two New Hours reached a one percent share, network senior managers had crowed about the achievement when defending the CBC Radio broadcast licence.

The CBC/Radio-Canada National Competition for Young Composers ended in 2003, but was revived, briefly, as the Evolution Young Composers Competition in 2006. After that CBC/Radio-Canada withdrew from this sort of activity, despite its proven effectiveness to develop emerging Canadian composers.

It was not the only area in which the CBC’s public radio mandate was drastically redefined. But that was, and remains, little consolation.

Before his death in 2016, the late Graham Sommer, a distinguished Canadian radiologist and medical researcher who believed in the transformative power of music, chose to endow the Schulich School of Music at McGill University to create a national competition for young Canadian composers. I was asked to consult on the project, based on my experience with the CBC/Radio-Canada competition. The finals of the Inaugural Graham Sommer Competition for Young Composers will be held at Pollack Hall in the Schulich School of Music on Saturday, September 29, 2018. The performances of the works of five young Canadian composers will be heard in concert and webcast. The webcast will be available on the Schulich school’s YouTube page: youtube.com/user/schulichmusic.

The five young Canadian composers who have written piano quintets for the Graham Sommer competition are: Ashkan Behzadi, Taylor Brook, Christopher Goddard, Alison Yun-Fei Jiang and Thierry Tidrow. Prizes totalling $45,000 will be determined by an international jury.

Canada is as rich in composing talent, as it was in January 1978. Continuing to develop these young composers is an ongoing investment in the nation’s musical future. The question is, what exists today to fill the role CBC Radio played in supplying a context for this to happen?

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

When Douglas McNabney dropped by The WholeNote office a week or two ago, it was mainly just to set up a time to sit down later in June and have a conversation – a filmed Conversation@TheWholeNote, for our YouTube series, to be exact – about his vision for this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival. However, as often happens in these kinds of situations, one thing led to another and before we were aware of it, our conversation had already begun. In this particular case, it was especially easy to get carried away – this is the tenth anniversary year of Toronto Summer Music and McNabney’s fifth year of his tenure as the festival’s artistic director. From the look of the programming in place, this festival will have a presence in Toronto’s musical landscape this summer that will be tough to ignore.

Think of what follows as a taste of a “Conversation” to come, where McNabney will be catching up with WholeNote publisher David Perlman to talk about the business of curating a city’s music, brand-new opportunities for amateurs to get involved in the festival scene, and how to cope – or even take advantage of – the coming Panamania. Until the time comes, however, here is a little of what has been on McNabney’s mind, and on ours, as festival season swings into full gear.

WN: For now, let’s get a sense of the festival, and of the shape of it.

In these still surreal times defined by restrictions, we are all increasingly hungry for live performance. With opera and theatre still considered too dangerous or problematic to bring back quite yet,dance has begun to return, although to unusual venues. 

The Canadian Stage Company, for example, has opened their stage in the heart of High Park – which has stayed empty of its usual Shakespearean performances this summer – for three exciting weekends of dance performances. Week One: September 26 and 27, Solo in High Park featured some of the city’s top soloists in a variety of styles from tap to flamenco, house, and contemporary. Week Two: Dusk Dances,October 3 and 4, featuring the work of three Dusk Dances contemporary choreographers, and Week Three: Red Sky, October 9 to 11, showcasing the thrilling physical style of this Dora Award-winning Indigenous company.

And while the National Ballet of Canada has had to cancel their usual fall season at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts – including perennial holiday favourite The Nutcracker – they too are making more experimental appearances, at both Harbourfront Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Harbourfront’s Brigantine Room will welcome physically distanced audiences to live performances of Robert Binet’s Group of Seven-inspired, The Dreamers Ever Leave You, October 9 to 17; and at AGO Live on October 22 and 23, audiences will get to take an even closer look at the creative process as they are invited into Walker Court to observe open rehearsals of a newly commissioned work by Kevin A. Ormsby. 

For both these companies, there will doubtless be other unusual excursions to write about in the months ahead, but right now, at Harbourfront and at several venues around the city, it’s the sixth edition of FFDN. 

When I heard that Tafelmusik was opening its 2023/24 season with Beethoven symphonies conducted by Bruno Weil and in celebration of its 45th anniversary season, it sounded like a reunion that I could not miss,” writes Christina Mahler, Tafelmusik principal cellist from 1981 to 2019.

“Tafelmusik’s collaboration with Bruno Weil started in the early 1990s with an annual invitation to play at his music festival in Bavaria: Klang und Raum (Sound and Space). As the festival’s orchestra-in-residence for 19 years, we ended our summers in southern Germany with Bruno and his family. This relationship has greatly shaped our orchestra and helped extend our repertoire into the 19th century, because Bruno wanted to explore the classical and Romantic music periods with Tafelmusik on period instruments. Playing Romantic music on period instruments was a fairly new concept at the time, and we were able to learn and explore alongside each other.

“Bruno has said that he especially loves to play Beethoven with Tafelmusik, which makes a lot of sense to me. Beethoven is a composer who makes you work. His life was hard, with many dramatic challenges. He had a fiery, earthy and willful temperament, which comes through in his music. Playing his works on period instruments gives a clearer understanding and experience of what Beethoven wanted to say. Once we learn about the composer, use the instruments of the time, and learn about the specific styles of the period, the music becomes much more powerful. Winds and strings find their original balance.

“Bruno has offered us many beautiful insights. As he has said, working with Tafelmusik means exploring Beethoven as if it was newly composed music. Approaching the music as Baroque musicians, we had to expand our palette, flexing and toning our muscles to re-learn this new style. It was an exciting process for everyone including the festival’s audience. Our annual stay in Germany often ended with the making of one or more recordings. Then, returning to Toronto, we were ready for our opening concerts, sharing our repertoire discoveries with our home audience.

“It is such a thrill that Bruno is coming back to collaborate with Tafelmusik after these awful years of COVID drought. He will bring his family and some friends from our Klang & Raum years to Toronto, and it will feel like a true reunion."

“When I joined Tafelmusik in 2004, it was my incredible good fortune to be welcomed into the musical relationship between Tafelmusik and Bruno Weil, and into the middle of the Beethoven symphony recordings” says Cristina Zacharias, Tafelmusik violinist and Artistic Co-Director.

“I knew I was lucky, but I didn’t understand at that time just how rare such relationships are in the orchestral world. The atmosphere in our work together was characterized by trust, exploration and a relentless commitment to the music in front of us. The performances that resulted from this collaboration are among the most special in my career – thrilling moments in concert halls all over the world where the magic of live performance blended with a sense of discovery and a particularly unified performance energy.

“Those ground-breaking recordings of the Beethoven symphonies set an artistic standard that we continue to measure ourselves against. The mix of musical passion and dedication between Bruno and Tafelmusik, characterized especially in our Beethoven cycle, has become a benchmark for all of Tafelmusik’s artistic endeavours. Almost 20 years later, in planning for Tafelmusik’s 45th anniversary season as an Artistic Co-Director, an invitation to Bruno felt like a natural choice – the best way to remind us where Tafelmusik came from, and to propel us toward our future. None of our passion for this music has faded, and I am so eager to bring it to our home audience for this celebration.”

Dominic Teresi, Tafelmusik Principal Bassoon and Artistic Co-Director, offered this: “One of my earliest performances with Tafelmusik was Beethoven’s 5th at Klang und Raum with Bruno conducting. It was an incredibly profound and joyous experience with my new Tafelmusik family that I will never forget. Bruno brings an uncommon breadth of knowledge and emotional depth to Beethoven and I can say that performing and recording all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies with him has been one of the most formative experiences of my musical career. I am overjoyed to be opening our 45th season with Bruno and these two monumental works.”

And a postscript: “It is an honour to return to the stage with Tafelmusik almost 20 years since our first recordings of Beethoven symphonies,” says Bruno Weil. “The musicians of Tafelmusik continue to bring such intensity, honesty and absolute delight to the music. There are few joys greater than bringing the idealism and passion of Beethoven’s music to life with my dear friends.”

The details: Tafelmusik’s 45th anniversary season kicks off with an all-Beethoven blockbuster on Sept 22 at 8pm, Sept 23 at 8pm & Sept 24 at 3pm at Koerner Hall, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning.

MJ Buell is a longtime member of The WholeNote team, and an occasional writer.

It’s a frigid afternoon in Regent Park, but spring is in my step as I set foot in the Paintbox Bistro at 555 Dundas Street East, and not merely because it’s a cool space. I’m here to interview two genuinely gifted Canadian musical icons, both alike in dignity and warmth.

Jackie Richardson is on stage at the tail end of a rehearsal, infusing Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy” with her trademark combination of swing, soul and sincerity. She’s backed by pianist Stacie McGregor, bassist Artie Roth and drummer Archie Alleyne; along with trumpeter Alexander Brown, the five will be performing in celebration of Alleyne’s 80th birthday the following evening, which launches a new jazz series at the promising Paintbox.

Pianist, composer, music director, recording artist and recently appointed Member of the Order of Canada, Joe Sealy, who will play here in late April, arrives right on time. He greets the musicians warmly as they get off the bandstand, and before long Sealy, Richardon and I are seated comfortably on the colourful couches in the adjacent room. I’ve asked Sealy and Richardson here to discuss Africville Stories, a reworking of Sealy’s JUNO-winning recording Africville Suite (1996), which will be performed as part of the Jazz Performance and Education Centre (JPEC) fourth annual gala at the Toronto Centre for the Arts on the evening of Saturday, February 23.

Courage, strength and wonder: three little words that merely scratch the surface of Alex Pangman’s inspirational story. But before going into details concerning her health and heroism, here’s a prelude to her music.

Seated on her grandpa’s knee some 30 years ago, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” was the first jazz song Pangman recalls hearing. Today the five-foot four-inch turquoise-eyed singer is known as “Canada’s Sweetheart of Swing,” a title the Mississauga native has earned by remaining unflinchingly faithful to American popular music of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

The moment my new CBC Radio Two network program Two New Hours hit the airwaves in January of 1978, composers, and especially Canadian composers, suddenly had a new way to connect with audiences across Canada. The simple act of broadcasting concerts of new works from all the major production centres of Canada each week immediately allowed a growing number of people to become aware of all the diverse sorts of newly created music. And naturally, the musicians who performed in these concerts of new works quickly realized there were paying gigs for them if they were willing to learn new compositions. Musicians began networking with other musicians, often with the result that they created ensembles to play all this new repertoire.

There’s a great Alex Pauk story that filmmaker Don McKellar once told me, about the final stages in the production of  McKellar’s 1998 feature film Last Night, for which Pauk and composer Alexina Louie, partners in life and in art, composed the score. (I can’t swear to when McKellar told me the story, except that, evidently, it must have been sometime after 1998.) Whenever it was, it’s had time to ripen with age and retelling, so I will trust all parties concerned to forgive the parts I am no longer getting quite right.

The way I remember it, Pauk and Louie contacted McKellar to say that the score was complete and ready for him to hear, and that an appointment “three sharp” was set for the given date and the appointed place. “Three sharp” was however not necessarily a musical term McKellar was familiar with, back in the day, so when he strolled up, Pauk was already pacing. “You’re late!” was the greeting, in a tone more stressed than McKellar thought the situation warranted.

McKellar wandered in, expecting to find himself with headphones on, listening to a tape or piano reduction or something … “and than they open the door to the room, and there’s a whole symphony orchestra there, waiting to do their thing. It felt for a moment as if I must have died and gone to Hollywood.”

As implausible as that moment in time must have felt, on a larger scale the fact that Esprit, the orchestra in question, is still alive and ticking after 35 years, is almost as implausible; and a story worth telling in its own right.

Esprit at 35

In the middle of this significant anniversary year for Canada’s only full-sized orchestra completely devoted to performing and promoting new orchestral works, we could have chosen to approach this story in a few different ways:

There’s the way this season’s four mainstage Koerner Hall concerts (there’s still one to come, on March 24) reflect the philosophy (and formula) that has given the orchestra its remarkable consistency and astonishing staying power. “My programming is something I always take great care with and pride in,” Pauk says. “Making the programs so that they flow, so that it’s not all one thing. I mean if you did all hard-edged European music all the time, it wouldn’t go over well, so there’s an ebb and flow in a concert, variety …”

Or there was the orchestra’s decisive move from the cramped confines of the Jane Mallett Theatre (the stage used to look like an overloaded life raft for some of the larger works they performed there) to Koerner Hall (twice the capacity) in the very first year Koerner opened. “We’re both celebrating our tenth anniversaries there!” Alex Pauk says with a grin. “You could overpower the Jane Mallett fairly easily” I observe. “Your Xenakis certainly did, when was that, in 2006? I think that was actually the start of the renovations there … your knocking every bit of loose plaster off the walls with the sound.” He laughs. “We certainly did. But you know, we, the tenants had a lot of ideas for those renovations, for the hall itself. And what did we get?
A renovated lobby.”

Or there’s the whole subject of what it takes to keep implausible enterprises afloat (a topic on which we agree to indulge in no more than a few seconds of mutual commiseration and admiration, and then move on).

New Wave Reprise

Of all the possible angles to take on the story, sitting in Esprit’s modest offices on Spadina Ave, with Pauk tapping his fingers on the table for emphasis as he talks, Esprit’s April 5 “New Wave Reprise,” a one-off event at Trinity-St.Paul’s Centre, cuts right to the heart of what makes Esprit, and its founding conductor, tick, so we start right there.

The Orchestra’s own description of the event is fairly straightforward. It will start at 7pm with a keynote address by John Rea, and will feature world premieres by emerging Canadian composers (Eugene Astapov, Quinn Jacobs, Bekah Simms, Christina Volpini and Alison Yun-Fei Jiang). Eugene Astapov and Alison Yun-Fei Jiang (for one work) will also be the evening’s guest conductors.

“What’s the size of the ensemble for the event,” I ask. “It’s a much smaller group,” Pauk replies. “Smaller winds, smaller strings, two percussion, harp, piano. So it’s all the orchestral sounds. What’s interesting is that these same composers, by and large, worked with us last year, for a slightly smaller group of instruments, and will, hopefully work with us again next year, at which time an even larger instrument group will be in play. It’s not to treat them as unable to deal with the orchestra. It’s to create a progression and maintain the relationship. It’s something we have done from the beginning with all the generations of composers we have worked with.”

He pauses, rummages for and reads from a piece of paper, a mission statement of some kind. This kind of sums it up,” he says. “‘The intent, from the beginning of Esprit, has always been to identify, engage, nurture, expose, promote and sustain relationships with creative people.’ That’s been it, basically, from the start of  Esprit as a professional organization, of the orchestra, of the kind of outreach we’ve done. But, except perhaps with our musicians, nowhere more importantly than in our relationship to composers and composing. And you do that by repeatedly commissioning composers’ work, and then reprising those commissioned works over the years. I mean if you trace the record over the years – John Rea, Chris Paul Harman, José Evangelista, Denis Gougeon, so many others. You seldom see their names just once. And we reach out constantly to new voices, and then bring them along, which is what this is about.”

Astonishing as it may seem, Pauk can lay claim to five distinct generations of composers with whom Esprit has maintained this kind of relationship. “Harry Freedman and Harry Somers, along with Murray Schafer, were the senior generation. I was always influenced by those senior composers because they had strong, clear, independent and remarkable voices, and so that’s what I’ve always looked for when I’ve programmed or commissioned.

Then there is my own generation. Alexina [Louie], and John Rea are examples. And then there’s the emerging generation represented by this event. And the next generation of high schoolers that this group of emerging composers will help bring along. Each benefitting from and contributing to the others in a kind of ongoing evolution.”

“So why New Wave Reprise as a title?” I ask (and then almost wish I hadn’t, because the New Wave Festival, launched in 2002 has gone through all kinds of twists and turns over the years). Watching me start to glaze at what begat what and when, Pauk suggests instead that I reach out to Eugene Astapov, who is an alumnus of several of Esprit’s outreach programs, and features as one of the composers (and the main guest conductor) in the April 5 event.

Astapov’s own journey with Esprit started over a decade ago when he participated, as a Grade 11 student, in composition workshops the orchestra hosted at Earl Haig Secondary School (site of Claude Watson School of the Arts), and is a case study in the kind of relationship building Pauk was talking about earlier. “I was fascinated to the extent that I decided to pursue it as a career, thanks to the support of a longtime Esprit friend and collaborator Alan Torok – director of the music program at Earl Haig at the time,” Astapov says.

A year later he began studying at the Eastman School of Music, but stayed in touch with Torok who subsequently re-introduced him to Pauk. As it happened, Esprit was engaged in preparations to host their annual New Wave Festival and commissioned Astapov for it. “It turned out to be a 12-minute work for piano and orchestra, only my second orchestral commission after the Vancouver Symphony. Thinking back now, even though the piece may not have been my strongest, I now realize how it fit like a puzzle with the subsequent works I composed and how the early experience with Esprit helped my understanding of the inner workings of a symphony orchestra.”

After graduate studies at Juilliard, Astapov returned to Toronto for further studies at the doctoral level at the very point in time that Pauk and Esprit were reviving their collaboration with Earl Haig – what was eventually to become the educational outreach program known as Creative Sparks. “In 2015 I joined the community outreach team and was invited to return to Earl Haig as the composition instructor helping students compose new pieces for small orchestra, to be played by Esprit in concert at the end of the school year! As part of this project and example to the students at Earl Haig, Alex extended a commission to me to be performed at the Creative Sparks final concert.”

Once again it was a pivotal commission, due to its use of a pre-recorded element – something he had not done before. “The piece was successful and was picked up by the Vancouver Symphony who performed it the following season,” he says.

It’s a continuing relationship at this point with ongoing opportunities for experimentation: music incorporating electronics; a Creative Sparks commission to compose a work for soprano and string orchestra; the opportunity to conduct that work; conducting unleashing a new passion. “It helped me open and alter my compositional mind and ears in ways that I had never realized was possible: deeper understanding of time signatures and tempi, orchestration techniques that help performers learn music quicker … The list goes on.”

April 5 sees the latest installment in the Astapov/Esprit story. And it’s highly likely it won’t be the last. Which is something that wave after wave of other composers, senior, established, and emerging, can attest to.

John Rea, keynote speaker at the event, was the first composer Esprit ever commissioned. His working title for the address, Pauk informs me, is “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea - Composers talking to Composers.”

“In other words, making waves” says Pauk. And he should know.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

“When did you two first start talking about this project?” I ask my guests. It’s January 14, 2020 and The Indigo Project, the latest in a long series of thematically based multimedia projects from the fertile curatorial mind of Tafelmusik’s Alison Mackay, will open on February 27. We sit surrounded by samples of indigo-dyed fabric, some old, some new, some borrowed – all very definitely blue. A fat binder of images from which Raha Javanfar is designing the projections for the show, sits on the table; over the course of the next
45 minutes, Mackay dips into it from time to time.

“Around a year ago …?” Mackay says, looking inquiringly across at Suba Sankaran, her prime collaborator on this project. “These things always take about two years to incubate...maybe a bit before that…I would have to go look at email. I began to think about this as a topic when I was working on Safe Haven. I have always been very inspired by the work of Natalie Zemon Davis – she wrote the first Return of Martin Guerre and she’s in her 90s now – she’s Aaron Davis’ mother, if you know him – and she’s just won, a couple of years ago, this enormous international history prize because she’s one of these cutting- edge people, examining court documents and things like that for written records that give glimpses into the lives of people who, perhaps as the less powerful, fall through the cracks of history. And she has done a lot of work on Sephardic Jewish refugees who went to Surinam and then in turn became plantation owners, and there was one family that were indigo growers there. I asked her to read the Safe Haven script for me, and she had some suggestions; but she also gave me some material about indigo at that time and it made me think, oh this would be a compelling topic! …”

For the full interivew, listen via the play button below or right click here and "Save As":

We are approaching the half-hour point in my taped conversation with Alison Mackay, Tafelmusik’s longtime violone/contrabass player and concert curator extraordinaire, and are finally getting round to the ostensible reason for having this conversation at this time – Tafelmusik’s upcoming presentation titled “Tales of Two Cities: The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.” As always with Mackay’s projects, it’s an immensely engaging premise – taking two cities, thousands of miles and worlds apart – and viewing them through the musical lens of the same moment of historical and cultural time.

“Let me tell you a fun thing before we get into it,” I say. “On May 21st, which is the middle of your run at Koerner Hall, Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig will be featured on stage in your show, and the same evening in the Peter Hall of the Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, “Zimmerman’s Coffee House” will be the title of the last evening concert of their 109th festival. And if you trace that college back to its schoolhouse origins, it goes back to 1745, which is only 20 years after Bach arrived in Leipzig!”

“Oh that’s wonderful,” she says, delightedly. “We should get in touch with them and see what we could do together.”

It’s a typical response from Mackay, whose relish for the juxtapositions, coincidences and synchronicities that offer opportunities to see old things anew, has become her curatorial trademark.

Memory Lane: We have just finished a rambled down memory lane, starting with the first of her Tafelmusik projects I can remember, “The Four Seasons: Cycle of the Sun,” back in 2004. That project took 1725, the year Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni was published, and made that year the departure point for an investigation of other musics being made in the world in the same year – an exploration that encompassed Chinese pipa, Indian veena and Inuit throat singing.

One can see the same bird’s eye imagination at work in her  “Galileo Project.” “It was in 2009, she says, “part of the International Year of Astronomy, because 1609 was the year Galileo first turned his telescope on the night sky. There were to be international celebrations of that event and we were actually approached by the Canadian committee that was planning events surrounding the year, to curate an event that would link astronomy and art.”

“Cutting across strata of geography and time is something you are good at,” I say.

“For me the seed of these projects is always in the music,” she says. “These events and performances are always concerts and there’s always a concert’s worth of music in them. And it’s very much about celebrating having a chance to perform the very best music in our repertoire. I hate having to include anything that’s only there because it matches the subject. I love to include profound, wonderful music – the best of our repertoire but giving the chance, just once in a while, to see it in a wider historical and cultural context. It shines a new light on the music. So it’s not that I think that audiences now have shorter attention spans or anything like that, or that they need visuals or bells and whistles. I still very much believe in purely musical concerts.”

These amplified concert forms are just as much for the musicians benefit as for the audience’s, she points out, using Vivaldi as an example. “Something like The Four Seasons is something our audience likes to hear pretty regularly. It’s a pretty beloved piece. It’s become a little bit cliched, because we hear it so much in elevators and things like that, but our audience loves to hear it, we love to play it, it’s a showpiece for our violins…but it’s very wonderful to bring some new dimension to it, a new kind of excitement for us.

“To give another example, a lot of the repertoire we play contains overtures and dance suites from operas, Lully for instance. And many opera composers in the 17th and 18th centuries were inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Brief stories, a lot of them with a central moment of incredible dramatic power and transformation…when you put that same music in the context of the story that informs each of its movements (Marin Marais’ Alcione, for example) it makes it incredibly profound for the performers and the audience, so not only does it add a cultural dimension to the music but it also adds a new layer of emotional context.” It’s an emotional “informing” of the piece that remains for the musicians after that, even when the piece is performed without the story added. “Somehow I think the emotion of the way we perform with each other, especially when we are playing from memory the way we do in these projects, communicates a new excitement and emotion to the audience. Of all the things that have influenced performing life at Tafelmusik, this – the grounding and heightening and enriching of context – has meant so much.”

Perhaps her most ambitious project to date in terms of multi-disciplinary scope and scale was “House of Dreams.” It was a journey to five houses in five European cities, all of them still standing, which for one reason or another, at some time in their history housed  very important  private collections of paintings. “In London, Venice, Delft, Leipzig and Paris,” she explains. “And in the rooms where the paintings were hanging, there were known to be performances of music, often by the most important composers in those cities.”

The buildings, in their present incarnations encompass a range of uses. “Two are small museums, one is a rather down-at-heel palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, one is a pancake restaurant in Delft, on the main square which has changed very little since the 17th century.” The Delft house, she explains, was owned by a very poor bookbinder, married to a young woman who died tragically, soon after. When his death followed, a few years later, he was found to have had, “hanging in his little tiny house, 23 of the 36 known Vermeers.”

Today, she informs me, the pancake restaurant prides itself more on the fact that Bill Clinton ate there, and has a letter from him to that effect on the wall. “We had to ask to remove it from the wall when we went to do our photography session there.”

The way the project worked was that over the course of about a year Tafelmusik formed relationships with the present owners for the purpose of photographing all the walls where the paintings had been. They then acquired high resolution images of all the paintings and were able to put the paintings back on the walls, and then put the music, live, back into the rooms with the paintings on the walls. “A bit like a guest in the house experiencing  a Rembrandt on the wall and listening to Handel conduct his music at the same time.” 

“House of Dreams” was also a memorized project; “Tale of Two Cities” will be their fourth. For Mackay, the fact, and feat of incorporating memorization into these projects has radically transformed, for the better the ensemble’s musicianship. She is aware of the toll it takes, but conscious of its immense rewards, for audience and performers alike.

“It’s a huge, huge undertaking for the orchestra and I cannot tell you how incredibly grateful I am at the number of hours of unpaid work that go into that…It’s been socially transforming…The music is so complex. I think that when you memorize something it frees you up physically. You present a more complete physicality. And the more that you do these projects – I think we have done the “Galileo Project” around the world around 75 times and “House of Dreams” in nearing 40, so they continue to grow and develop musically. We had these very nervous discussions at the start, none of us knew how it was going to work. Normally you’d say ‘okay, we are all going to start at bar 76.’ That was never an issue; someone would just start playing and everyone knew where to come in. You practise in a different way. It lifts the technical and it also lifts the ensemble.”

Leipzig-Damascus: So here we are, half an hour in, finally starting to talk about the current project, “Tales of Two Cities.” We have reached the Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.

As always it’s finding the similarities in different places at the same moment in time that is her creative spark.

“It’s very interesting. They were both entrepôt cities, at the crossroads of ancient, often Roman, roads - ancient trade or caravan routes. Leipzig was a small city but it lay at the crossroads of the east-west road that went from Santiagio de Compostela right to Kiev and Moscow, and goods and ideas flowed gradually along that route. And then there was a north-south route that ran from Venice and Rome to the Baltic Sea. Those two roads crossed right in the middle of Leipzig and because of that the Holy Roman Emperors declared it a trade fair centre with tax incentives and a protected place, so it meant for centuries traders from all over Europe and as far away as London and Siberia and Constantinople converged in this little crossroad town of about 30,000 - the size of Toronto’s Annex.

“The city of Damascus was a much more ancient city - some people think it is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, and it lay at the crossroads of routes from the Mediterranean, from Tyre and Sidon through Syria to Baghdad, through Iran to the Silk Road and the Far East. And the north-south route that went from Yemen up to Mecca and Medina, Damascus, Aleppo, Anatolia and finally Istambul.”

Damascus became the place where travellers on the pilgrims’ road to the hajj provisioned for the very dangerous journey. And they would come back to Damascus with coffee which was grown in Yemen, first known place of cultivation of what we know as the arabica coffee bean.

The parallels go on and on. Both cities at the axis of a trade route and a pilgrims’ road; both cities famous centres for scholarship and learning; Leipzig hugely important for book publishing and dissemination, poetry, literature, plays, philosophy; the same true of Damascus, renowned for science, theology, law, poetry and travel writers.

From there the stories start to actually intersect in extraordinary and tangible ways – an important family library of secular and religious 18th-century works of Damascene scribes being sold to the Prussian ambassador and finding its way to the University of Leipzig; the Ottoman ambassador to Louis XV bringing 10,000 pounds of coffee to France. And the emergence in both cities of lively coffee house cultures, Zimmermann’s in Leipzig being the one most notably associated with Bach and Telemann.

In the German city of Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach directed an ensemble which gave Friday-night concerts between the hours of eight and ten at Zimmerman’s Coffee houses on the Katharinenstrasse.

In the coffee houses of Damascus, singers and performers on the oud, kanun, ney, and daf played classical Arabic taqsims and muwashshahs, and used their instruments to accompany famous storytellers reciting from the rich tradition of adventure stories and Sufi tales found in Syrian manuscript sources.

The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House of the show’s title promises to be resplendent visually, revolving around a set piece with a large imbedded projection screen which will evoke in turn two 18th-century interiors – a Damascus ajami room and a Saxon wood-panelled interior, prepared under the guidance and supervision of Dr. Anke Scharrahs, a conservator who specializes in the research and restoration of polychrome wooden surfaces and who is one of the most highly respected international experts on the conservation of Syrian-Ottoman interiors.

But true to Mackay’s credo, the music will be, as always, at the heart of things. Tafelmusik will perform, from memory, music plausibly connected with Zimmerman’s; Arabic music, appropriate to the Damascene coffee house,will be rendered by Trio Arabica, an ensemble consisting of Toronto-based, Egyptian-born, and Syrian-trained Maryem Tollar (narrator & vocalist), Naghmeh Farahmand (percussion) and Demetri Petsalakis (oud), with narration/context provided in English and in Arabic by both Tollar and by actor Alon Nashman, blending storytelling and documentary roles as required.

And naturally, at appropriate and carefully chosen moments, the work of the two ensembles will combine and intersect because such hard-earned coincidences have been in one respect or another the lifeblood of the magic she weaves for Tafelmusik. They are, in a way, the continuo of her imagination.

Mackay’s work is not overtly political, but one can detect a quiet satisfaction in her at the timing of this particular tale. In a time of geopolitical ferment when traffic on the road from Damascus to Leipzig appears to be going only in one direction, it does no harm, and may even do some good, to reflect on the extent to which, in terms of history and culture, this is is very much a two-way street.

David Perlman is the publisher of The WholeNote.

Am I just imagining it, or was musical life once much more tidily compartmentalized? There was the season (coinciding with the school year), on the one hand, and the summer on the other.  Within the summer there were festivals and concerts to go to , or summer camps and courses one could enrol in.

Nowadays along with overlap between the seasons, there is a blurring of the lines: between summer festivals and academies; between opportunities for music lovers to attend concerts in the usual way and opportunities to become involved in a hands-on way. For serious music students, if you take the summer to recharge your batteries, you have to wonder if you are losing ground between school years. For concert presenters and summer music educators, the challenge is to figure out how to bridge the gap without losing their identity.

Hamilton’s Brott Festival is an interesting example. Led by conductor Boris Brott, the festival has long boasted a busy annual summer season chock-full of orchestral classics as well as lesser-known works. This year has 11 planned performances so far between June 18 and August 14 (including Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a concert spotlighting Italian and Italian-influenced works, a performance of a Viennese gala evening with works by Strauss, Lehár and Piazzolla and collaborations with the National Ballet and Festival of the Sound). Brott and his team show no signs of letting up.

Twenty-two winters ago, Toronto-based impresarios Attila and Marion Glatz took the plunge. The previous year they had acted on a hunch and rented the George Weston Recital Hall in North York for a New Year’s Day performance of “Salute to Vienna” (the “salute” of the title being a nod to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert from the Golden Hall in Vienna’s Musikverein, these days, broadcast to over 90 countries all over the world and watched by more than 50 million viewers).

The cautionary wise had told the Glatzes they were crazy - that attempting to get Torontonians to go out to such a thing on New Year’s Day was folly. Short version, they sold out the Weston that very first year.

“Just a fluke,” the pundits continued to warn. “Take our word for it. We know the city. After the last Handelian ‘Amen’ has subsided, the musical Night falls Silent around here, except for drinking songs and increasingly raucous rounds of Auld Lang Syne followed by hungover remorse and resolution writing. Nothing happens till around the tenth of January, after which it’s serious musical business again.”

Being cautious incrementalists and prudent business people, the Glatzes listened to the advice and immediately switched the event from the 1100-seat Weston to 2,500-seat Roy Thomson Hall for the following year. They sold that one out too, as they have done pretty much ever since. Tickets for this year’s iteration are scarce as hens’ teeth, as the saying goes – it’s easier to get tickets to Hamilton (Hamilton Place in Hamilton, Ontario, that is, where the same cast will perform “Salute” a day later).

Flagship and Fleet: Now in its 23rd year, the RTH “Salute to Vienna” is arguably still their flagship event (although the on-the-ground team organizing the January 1 Lincoln Center version might argue differently). In any case, the sheer size of the fleet is now as impressive as the flagship. This year, “Salute” will be staged in 24 North American cities over the first few days of January, seven of them Canadian, and six in Florida alone, according to Andrea Warren, affable VP Marketing and Project Development for Attila Glatz Concert Productions, Inc. Around one third of the Florida attendees are Canadian Snowbirds, Warren tells me, as indeed the Glatzes themselves tend to be these days! Nor is “Salute to Vienna” the only show on the Glatz book. At RTH it has, for the past eight years, been paired with a New Year’s Eve operatic extravaganza titled “Bravissimo,” which starts at 7pm and offers the guarantee that you will be out by 10.

And the Glatz name crops up all over the calendar as presenter or co-presenter of a wide range of potential crowd-pleasing concerts and touring shows. For example, if you type the word Glatz into our “Ask Ludwig” listings search engine at thewholenote.com, for the period October 2016 to January 2017, it yields twelve results, ranging from an October 28 RTH performance titled “Magnificat” by the touring KlangVerwaltung Orchestra and Chorgemeinschaft Neubeuern Chorus, to Sony Centre film presentations with live accompaniment (“Amadeus Live” in October and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Live in Concert” in late December to the aforementioned upcoming performances of “Salute to Vienna” and “Bravissimo.”

Bravissimo! Of all these, it was “Bravissimo” that was top of Warren’s agenda when we chatted on November 24 (US Thanksgiving). Speaking by phone from the organization’s Toronto headquarters, she confided that the south-of-the-border Thanksgiving holiday was proving to be “a lovely reprieve,” from the chaos of coordination among the various casts and cities involved in this year’s round of “Salutes.”

As mentioned, “Bravissimo” is the New Year’s Eve prequel to “Salute” (albeit featuring an entirely different cast of soloists, a different conductor, and very different repertoire from “Salute’s” Viennese diet of light opera and operetta). It tends to be an operatic highlight reel – overtures, choruses, arias, duets, etc – usually featuring four soloists. They’ve played with the formula from year to year, sometimes matching rising “name” local soloists with Glatz favourites from Europe, sometimes bringing in a purely European cast of soloists. This year it’s the latter, but with, as Warren puts it, “a fun twist. We’re bringing two sets of operatic couples, on and off stage, to kick up the realism in opera’s larger-than-life emotions.” 

The “real life” couples are Donata D’Annunzio Lombardi, soprano, Diletta Rizzo Marin, mezzo soprano, Leonardo Caimi, tenor, and Lucio Gallo, baritone. Fittingly enough, it’s the tenor and the soprano (Caimi and Lombardi) who are real-life partners, as are the mezzo and the baritone (Marin and Gallo). Judging from the announced repertoire, audiences will be regaled with everything from the tender to the tortured to the titillating, ranging through arias, duets, trios, quartets, choruses, overtures and preludes, by Mozart, Puccini, Bizet, Leoncavallo, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Offenbach, Mascagni, Bellini…you get the picture. Rest assured, you won’t have to attend a pre-concert chat to figure out whether you’re enjoying yourself (although host for the evening, opera buff Rick Phillips, would be fully capable of delivering one!). Both the chorus and orchestra for the evening, although hired individually for the event (rather than as pre-existing ensembles), will be comprised of seasoned local musical specialists in the repertoire on display. 

Baritone Lucio Gallo, a returnee from last year’s event, Warren informs me, is probably the main reason for this year’s formula. “He brought the house down last year,” Warren says, “with a larger-than-life rendition of the quack doctor in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, singing “Udite, udite, o rustici,” strutting across the stage with an enormous bottle of his famous cure-all (in fact, a bottle of cheap Bordeaux), touting it to the village people as a cure for everything from asthma to wrinkles to loneliness.”

It might be a bit rash to tout “Bravissimo” as a New Year’s Eve “cure-all” since it will likely precede most of the evening’s hangovers. But very likely a good time will be had by all!

New Year’s Concert 2017

The Vienna Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel

At the top of this story I mentioned that the Glatzes’ “Salute to Vienna” paid homage to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s gala concert from the Golden Hall in Vienna’s Musikverein.

Just announced, the 2017 Vienna New Year’s Concert will be conducted by Venezuelan-born, 35-year old El Sistema-trained and Los Angeles-based Gustavo Dudamel, the youngest ever conductor to lead the event. It will be his debut at this event, but by no means his first outing with the Vienna Phil, with whom he has appeared as a regular guest conductor, starting as far back as 2007. (He is also in his 18th season as music director of the entire El Sistema project, and continues to lead the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela.)

At first glance, Dudamel and the light-opera-fuelled, Golden Hall New Year’s Day event seem an odd match. As the release about the event pointed out, Dudamel has through the years carried a social force mandate with him wherever he goes: guest-conducting youth orchestras, encouraging socially motivated music projects, or ensuring that young people from disadvantaged communities have access to his concerts. His response to recent events in Venezuela may have somewhat diminished the glow, but entering his eighth season as music director of the LA Phil (and with a contract extended to the end of 2021-22), he has nevertheless been instrumental in dramatically expanding the scope of its community outreach programs, including most notably through the creation of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), and related local educational initiatives, which bring music to children in underserved communities of Los Angeles.

With the Vienna Philharmonic regarding the New Year’s Concert as “a musical greeting to the world that is offered in a spirit of hope, of friendship and of peace at the start of the New Year,” it will be interesting to hear (and see) what happens when the spirit of Dudamel and the spirit of Vienna meet.

The live recording of the 2017 New Year’s Concert will be available (via Sony) on CD and as a download (international release on January 9), as well as on DVD and Blu-ray (January 27), on vinyl (March 3) and as a digital long-form video (February 17).

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

Will there come a time when we journalists will be able to stop making a big deal out of women conductors? We are not there yet – systemic barriers in the profession remain all too real – but the fact that we can already see such a time on the horizon is thanks to the critical cohort of women in their 30s, 40s and 50s who have more than paid their dues in the industry and are now toppling the dams everywhere, finding themselves equally at home in opera and symphonic music, and combining associate principal positions with at least one directorship. We are talking people like Susanna Mälkki, Xian Zhang, Keri-Lynn Wilson, Dalia Stasevska, Gemma New, Han-na Chang, and the conductor currently in charge of the COC’s The Barber of Seville (January 19 to February 7), Speranza Scappucci.

Piano study since the age of five; degrees from the Conservatory of Music Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Juilliard School; nine years as the rehearsal conductor with Ricardo Muti; 15 years as a répétiteur in some of the most prestigious opera houses in Europe; fluency in English, Italian, French, German – even with such a résumé and experience, the switch to full time conducting wasn’t immediate. “It helped that I have worked as a coach in so many places and that I know the opera world well already,” recalls Scappucci. “But trying to break that wall between the categories – convincing people to see that yes I was a good répétiteur and can also be a good conductor, that was a challenge sometimes. People like to put you in a box. So they’ll think, ‘Oh she’s a pianist, and pianist primarily.’”

When I wrote about Arraymusic five years ago in a WholeNote series on Toronto concert spaces, I described it as a “seminal venue”—one that maintained a strong place as both a presenting organization and as a rental space for experimental music in Toronto. Now in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, the same remains true. Despite unprecedented challenges, Arraymusic continues to search for new ways of supporting local experimental music and its affiliated performing art forms—and to find relevance in the changing musical fabric of the city.

Array’s Early Years

Years before it managed a concert venue, Arraymusic was an experimental music ensemble and presenter dedicated to commissioning and programming “full spectrum multimedia works, electronic events, group improvisations, music and dance collaborations.” The group was launched April 20, 1972 by a cohort of University of Toronto composition students. By the early 1980s, the group’s growing activities moved to a refurbished garage on a leafy upper Annex avenue.

From 1991 to 2012 Arraymusic rented a multifunctional space in an Artspace-run building. It was among a cohort of artists and organisations which reinvented Liberty Village as an epicentre of creative sector employment. I spent many happy hours rehearsing with the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan and several other groups there, as well as leading community gamelan music workshops.

For angsty teenagers (and I know this from personal experience), relatably disillusioned literary characters can provide a feeling of connection as the reader works through their own age-appropriate sense of despondent ennui. J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield was (and perhaps still is) the standard bearer in this regard. But it was, even more so, the work of Jack Kerouac (think October in the Railroad Earth, backed by pianist Steve Allen) that for many proved to be an even more intoxicating elixir, introducing readers and listeners to not only hitchhiking and counterculture, but to jazz and poetry.

I remember the first time I heard Ana Sokolović’s music: I was in Paris, participating as CBC Radio’s delegate at the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in 1996. My Radio-Canada colleague, Laurent Major, had chosen to present a work for violin duo, Ambient V, composed in 1995 by Montreal composer Sokolović (b. 1968) who had come to Canada from her native Serbia in 1992. I recall thinking that this was a distinctly fresh musical voice. There were elements of Serbian folk music, minimalism, as well as choreographed movement by the two players. It all added up to a memorable impression of music that was playful, yet highly focused and purposeful.

I certainly was not the only person to be impressed by Ambient V. Another young Montreal composer, Jean Lesage (b. 1958), heard the work and recommended it to a colleague who was designing a program for the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ). The piece was programmed on the SMCQ concert, recorded for broadcast on Radio-Canada, and subsequently chosen as the Radio-Canada submission to the IRC. Ambient V is available on a recording on the SNE label called Nouvelle Musique Montréalaise II through the Canadian Music Centre. Incidentally, Sokolović and Lesage connected romantically, and were married in 1998.

In 1999, Sokolović was named Grand Prize winner in the CBC/Radio-Canada National Competition for Young Composers, for which I served as CBC’s coordinator. The work with which she won is titled, Géométrie sentimentale. It’s a work in which the thematic material is seen from three different angles: “music through different geometries,” as her program note states. It was through her success at the competition that I first met Sokolović, and since that time we have collaborated on numerous occasions.

Géométrie sentimentale had been commissioned in 1997 by the Ensemble contemporaine de Montréal (ECM+), a large chamber ensemble created in 1988 and led by its founder and artistic director, the Montreal conductor, Véronique Lacroix. Lacroix had also been in the audience for that same SMCQ concert in 1995 and had heard Sokolović’s Ambient V. Like many others, Lacroix, too, was struck by the distinctive voice she heard in the work. Over time, and at last count, she has commissioned four works from Sokolović. The most recent of these commissions is the violin concerto, Evta.

Sokolović told me she based the concerto on ideas that surfaced in conversations with her soloist, the Montreal-born, but now Toronto-based violin virtuoso, Andréa Tyniec. Two areas of interest that Tyniec expressed were Gypsy violin music and yoga. Sokolović wrote, “Evta means ‘seven’ in the Serbian Roma language. Each of the seven movements of the concerto is inspired by the colours of the chakras and is associated with one of the notes of the scale: C/red, D/orange, E/yellow, F/green, G/blue, A/indigo and B/violet.” She further mentions, “The work is strongly influenced by Gypsy violin music played in the Balkans.” Tyniec told me: “Working with Ana on Evta after performing so many of her violin works during the past years, both solo and chamber, has been a real artistic highlight for me in my career. Playing Evta is a personal experience since some of its themes and structures are drawn from conversations Ana and I had years ago. Evta is also a wonderful challenge for any soloist, to be at once a prominent voice leading the narrative and still remaining a part of the bigger textures of the work. There is such joy in being able to both stand out, be oneself and belong.”

The concerto was premiered by Tyniec and ECM+, conducted by Lacroix at the 2017 World Music Days in Vancouver, sponsored by the International Society of Contemporary Music and Music on Main. I attended that performance. In my review of it for The WholeNote, I observed that Tyniec’s solo violin was an astounding traveller through the seven movements, flashing virtuosity in so many ways, one lost count. The thread of this fascinating composition never lost clarity as it swept through its intricate and surprising courses. It was a riveting experience to witness the unfolding of this exciting, highly original work.

Toronto audiences will at last get their chance to hear Tyniec perform Sokolović’s Evta on May 26 at 8pm when New Music Concerts (NMC) presents the work as part of their season’s final concert at Betty Oliphant Theatre. NMC artistic director Robert Aitken will conduct the NMC ensemble in a concert that also includes music by two rising young Canadian composers, Samuel Andreyev (b. 1981) and Matthias McIntire (b. 1986).

Evta is also available on a newly released CD on the ATMA label titled Sirènes (ATMA ACD2 2762.) The recording contains four major works by Sokolović, including the title track, Sirènes, a work for six female voices, written for Queen of Puddings Music Theatre (QOP) in 2000. In 2010 Sokolović wrote another, more ambitious work for six female voices for QOP, a 55-minute one-act opera in Serbian called Svadba (Wedding), arguably her greatest success to date.

In her note to the opera, Sokolović wrote: “When Queen of Puddings Music Theatre (1995–2013) approached me to write an opera for six female voices, I took the opportunity to explore the theme of a wedding, particularly the evening before the ceremony, during which the bride-to-be and her friends devote themselves to private ancient rituals. The text is based on original Serbian poetry but given a new context, adapting it to our contemporary culture, and the music is derived from traditional folklore.” Sokolović has told me that when she arrived in Canada as a student, she saw herself as a member of an international contemporary music community, and she tried to avoid any limitation to her music that might result from emphasizing her Serbian roots. However, she learned that, rather than being limiting, expressing her musical roots in a contemporary context enabled her to strengthen her voice as a composer.

Svadba has had 20 productions to date. John Hess, the co-founder (along with Dáirine Ni Mheadhra) of QOP told me, “I think it is easily the most performed Canadian opera ever. Our enchantment with Ana had a lot to do with her imaginative vocal writing and the unique exploratory quality of much of that. Her roots in Serbian traditional music and her ability to use that as a compelling ingredient of her work without becoming gratuitous or sentimental was important to us. Finally, her strong dramatic instinct left us with a body of works for the singing stage that continue to be performed.”

Sokolović’s proven success as an opera composer has led to a commission for a new mainstage opera from the Canadian Opera Company (COC). The Old Fools is an opera that Sokolović is creating with British librettist Paul Bentley. The two-act opera was inspired by a poem by English poet Philip Larkin, focusing on the fear of aging and death. In announcing the commission, COC general director Alexander Neef said: “One of the things I enjoy most about Ana’s works is that they are stories that tap into shared human experience, while simultaneously challenging our perceptions of what that is.” The Old Fools is currently in development, even as the exact production date has yet to be announced.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

Two leisurely phone calls – well an old-fashioned phone call and a zoom chat, to be precise – bracket this story. The phone call, bright and early on the morning of Saturday  Sep 19, was with violinist/composer Edwin Huizinga, calling from Owen Sound, where the 16th annual Sweetwater Festival (Huizinga’s first as artistic director) was well under way. The zoom chat, just three days later, was also bright and early – with Huizinga again, this time alongside singer Measha Brueggergosman, at a table inside Brueggergosman’s Halifax home, a kitchen behind them, and post-tropical storm Teddy, his career as hurricane having been cancelled ahead of his Maritime tour, whipping aimlessly at the trees outside. 

I’d been wanting to talk to Huizinga and Brueggergosman for a while about their current collaboration, but had been expecting to have to speak with each of them separately, so it was an unexpected bonus to find out, part way through the Saturday call with Huizinga, that he would be flying to Nova Scotia on the Monday “to finish a project with our amazing fearless Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman.” 

After eight days of pulling hair, and cursing hackers, TheWholeNote.com is BACK! And with a new template in place, the basic layout already feels cleaner and easier. We realize that some things are not exactly where they were in the previous website and that some utility has been temporarily lost, and that there will be ups and downs moving ahead. If you find any problems with the website, please do email me at systems@thewholenote.com in as much detail as you like to describe the problem.

We thank you for your patience and input during this time of difficulty. There will be bugs, we're sure, but, with your help, we’ll swat ’em as they arise.

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Webmaster of TheWholeNote.com

During a particularly compelling moment in the Art of Time Ensemble’s recent performance, Dance to the Abyss: Music From The Weimar Republic, the ensemble, now in its final season, performed Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher five times in a row. Utilizing a set of detailed instructions from a document titled Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations, the ensemble uses each rendition to iteratively strip away the lifeblood and very essence of what makes that great 1931 song so paradigmatically part of the jazz of swing-era Harlem.

"I rather suspect you are going to be running into a bit of a ‘Sir Andrew Davis, this is your life’ ambush when you hit town this time” I say into the phone. The response is an amiable guffaw. It’s 8:05am Sunday morning, Melbourne time, for him; just after 6pm Saturday night here in Toronto for me. Davis is “waking up slowly” he says, after a performance with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the third of three towering programs over a four-week period.

Davis is Chief Conductor at Melbourne, Conductor Laureate of the BBC Orchestra, and, for the past 15 years Music Director and Chief Conductor of Lyric Opera of Chicago (an appointment recently extended through the 2020/21 season).

He is, of course, also Conductor Laureate of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a position he assumed after being the TSO’s Music Director from 1975 till 1988. So, add the 27 years he’s been returning every year as Conductor Laureate to the 13 he spent as Music Director, and the stage is set for the “Forty Years on the TSO Podium” possible ambush I alluded to when he returns to town mid-May for a two-week, three-program stint commencing with the Verdi Requiem May 21, 22 and 23.

The “up here” in this month’s column is (mostly) Timmins, where Angela Garwood-Touw has a busy schedule. The New Brunswick born violinist is Concertmaster for the Timmins Symphony Orchestra, regular First Violinist for the Sudbury and North Bay Symphonies, and is an active contributor to the chamber music scene with an array of ensembles – as well as teaching students from across the region and raising a family. We talked about her musical journey north, and the joys (and challenges) of playing classical music (and beyond) in WholeNote’s “Zone 10” region.

The following story is based on a videotaped conversation at The WholeNote between Angela Hewitt and David Perlman on November 12, 2014 . Click the image below to view/hear the entire conversation.

As Pamela Margles notes in her review of of Angela Hewitt’s newly released Bach: Art of the Fugue in this issue of The WholeNote (page 77 of the print edition) “it was four years ago that Hyperion released all of Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s recordings of Bach’s solo keyboard works as a 15-disc boxed set. It was a huge project, but it didn’t include Bach’s monumental late work, The Art of the Fugue.”

“That is when everyone started writing to me of course,” says Hewitt. “You know, why haven’t you done The Art of the Fugue.” She hadn’t even performed it before then, she says, let alone contemplated recording it. “Growing up, it wasn’t even really considered a keyboard piece, or even anything you performed much. For one thing it had long been considered something of an academic work – Bach seeing what he could do with fugues, double fugues, triple fugues, mirror fugues. And there was the fact that in the first edition it was written as an open score, one voice per stave, like a string quartet.”

Ann Cooper Gay was born, raised and educated in Texas. There are two photographs that she digs out on cue to prove to disbelieving Canadians that she is truly a Texas girl. The first is a shot of her adolescent self in her backyard proudly carrying a rifle. The second confirms that she was a majorette in college, baton included. How this Texan became a prime mover and shaker in the Toronto music scene is an incredible journey.

Cooper Gay, 71, recently announced that she is stepping down as executive artistic director of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company. In her life she has been a pianist, organist, flutist, opera singer, elementary school teacher, college instructor, instrumental conductor and choir director, not to mention social activist, master of languages and a talented tennis player. No one who knows her believes that Cooper Gay will actually settle into a life of quiet retirement. Somewhere she will find a place to make music.

Ancestors on Cooper Gay’s maternal side arrived in Texas by covered wagon before it was even a state. Her paternal ancestors guarded cattle trains headed for the military, which included supplying the command of George Armstrong Custer.

Canadian composer Ann Southam’s Glass Houses, a collection of 15 pieces for solo piano, was composed for Christina Petrowska Quilico in 1981. Christina often played selected pieces from the collection in her recitals, many of which were broadcast on my CBC Radio Two series, Two New Hours. We found that the public response to these pieces on our broadcasts was always enthusiastic. Southam (1937–2010) was quick to point out the essential elements in these compositions. The first was the allusion in the title to the minimalism of Philip Glass, which had charmed her since the 1970s. But equally important was the sound of traditional East Coast Canadian fiddle music, which she had first encountered in the 1950s on the CBC Television show, Don Messer’s Jubilee. Southam found great affinities between these two disparate sources, both of which delighted her.

Barely a week before going to press, we wrote to a handful of individuals responsible for planning concert seasons in our neck of the woods. We explained that we were thinking of launching this feature, ARCS, and were hoping to get enough of a response within the next few days to get it going in this Oct/Nov print issue and then continue it online over the course of the fall.

Q1: The opening work?

The opening work of TBP’s first program of the season, Henry Purcell’s 1685 anthem, I Was Glad, is constructed as a lovely little musical triptych. It’s a vocal painting of Psalm 122 existing in three hinged panels, as it were. The first panel shimmers with trilling rhythms evocative of laughter and bright conversation as the ensemble sings of ascending the Temple Mount alongside one’s spiritual and familial relations. The middle panel drops a minor third to a new key and more solemn tone, with the injunction to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and those who live there. Then the third panel resumes the initial setting and buoyant mood in a polyphonic doxology that has great fun tangling up the words, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end” (a phrase that envisions all time and eternity as a well-composed triptych!). 

Q2: The concert as a whole?

Following the introduction provided by Purcell, the main event of our season opener is a pair of Bach’s cantatas linked by significant references to roses. One of them, BWV 72 (“Everything according to God’s will”), leaps into action with dramatic urgency from the strings and oboes at a vigorous tempo in A minor. The other, BWV 182 (“King of heaven, welcome”), begins with a sweet, stately processional duet between solo violin and baroque recorder in G Major. 

I listened to these two cantatas a lot over the summer in both possible orders, often while jogging, tracking the progression of their energy and trying to put myself in the ears of an imaginary audience who might be hearing them for the first time. Both sequences had features that recommended them. In the end BWV72 won out as first in line due to the intensity of its opening (we launch the boat of the season by crashing it directly into the waves), its shorter length and the flow from its final stalwart hymn tune into the natural instrumental interlude provided by the opening of cantata BWV182. Even more importantly, this order allows us to conclude the entire program with the blissful dance of BWV182’s final movement. Like Purcell’s anthem at the outset, it sings of delighted communal entry into a cherished home, with recorder, strings and choir trading a melody back and forth like revelers holding hands in a circle. It never hurts to leave one’s audience in a state of musical euphoria at the end of a concert, right?

TBP has also been developing a tradition over the past two seasons of wrapping things up with the functional equivalent of a benediction. After the euphoria of the concluding applause, we typically lean to a place of reflection and rest as a final send-off. In this program, we do so with Maurice Duruflé’s gentle a cappella classic, Ubi Caritas, which gives the assurance, “Where charity and love are, God is there.” 

Q3: Shaping the season?

Season planning for Trinity Bach Project has tended to look less like an executive blueprint and more like a path laid down by walking. This season is no exception, as we continue to tweak repertoire decisions, line up venues, and settle performance and rehearsal dates for programs February through May. That caveat aside, there have been a couple of implicit principles guiding construction of the season. In the recent past we’ve presented a lot of pairings of Bach with other choral composers (“Bach and Mendelssohn,” “Bach and Rheinberger,” “Bach and Tallis,” etc.). This year we’re venturing more into curation along thematic lines, as with our season opener, “Bach and Roses.” There’s a program coming up in the new year, still to be officially titled, which will be along the lines of “Bach and Life Passages,” since it includes both a wedding and a funeral cantata. We’re also planning an instrumental-only program in early January, “Bach and Epiphany,” which conceives of three concertos as the gifts of the Magi. Six or seven months from now we’ll aim to conclude the trajectory of 2024-25 with another joyful dance, in a program built around the exultant cantata BWV117, “Praise and honour to the highest good.” 

Chris Friesen is Executive Director of Trinity Bach Project. Bach and Roses will be performed Oct 3, 1pm at Trinity College Chapel; Oct 4, 8pm at Little Trinity Church, Nov 13, 8pm, at Grace Church on-the-Hill, and Nov 17, 3pm, at Metropolitan United Church.

The guitar is one of those instruments that can be hard to classify—in part, because it seems to have developed in many different directions at once. In addition to its longtime role in the classical tradition, the guitar, in its various acoustic and electric iterations, has grown to become a mainstay of rock, jazz, blues, folk and countless other musical styles. So not only can “guitar music” mean pretty much anything these days, the instrument itself has come to symbolize a huge breadth of traditions—in many cases, becoming one of the defining commonalities between otherwise disparate music scenes.

There's no better example of this spread than the concerts happening in Toronto this month. In the new music world, TO.U Collective, a new series this year at St. Andrew’s Church, features two solo guitar recitals that feature “contemporary music” in the truest sense of the word—with every work on these programs composed between 1980 and present day. On January 18 at noon, guitarist Graham Banfield presents a free concert of works by Eve Beglarian, David Lang, Matthew Shlomowitz and Fausto Romitelli. That show is followed up on Saturday, January 28 at 8pm, when TO.U presents Rob MacDonald in a ticketed program of pieces by Helmut Oehring, Simon Steen-Andersen, Philippe Leroux, and local composer Jason Doell. The composers on both programs are known for their unique experimentations with sound, with Banfield’s show in particular playing on the guitar’s multifaceted nature and borrowing heavily from rock—a link which, thanks to contemporary music groups like Bang on a Can (of which David Lang is a founder and member), is less tenuous than one might expect. Details on the series, and info on tickets for MacDonald’s show, can be found at www.toucollective.com.

The following week at the beginning of February, the RCM presents guitar(s) of a very different kind, with a February 3 show featuring Harry Manx at Koerner Hall. Billed as a musician in the tradition of “blues-meets-ragas”, Manx will perform on an Indian slide guitar, an all-metal National slide guitar, a banjo, a cigar box guitar, and harmonica, and will be accompanied by a string quartet. A difficult-to-classify but remarkable musical figure, Manx is an exciting addition to Koerner’s non-classical “Music Mix” series for 2017. More on the show at http://performance.rcmusic.ca/event/harry-manx://performance.rcmusic.ca/event/harry-manx. (Manx also appears the night before in Hamilton alongside Clayton Doley on Hammond organ, who himself wrote the string quartet charts for the Koerner performance; ticket info at http://www.ticketmaster.ca/harry-manx-hamilton-ontario-02-02-2017/event/1000517D91FD4557://www.ticketmaster.ca/harry-manx-hamilton-ontario-02-02-2017/event/1000517D91FD4557.) 

Nor is classical guitar, playing classical and folk repertoire, left behind in the bustle: on January 28, the Guitar Society of Toronto presents the Bandini-Chiacchiaretta Duo, an Italian guitar/bandoneon team who will play works by Piazzolla and Pujol, while on January 30, the University of Toronto’s vocal DMA students will sing a free show of songs with guitar accompaniment. And further afield in Hamilton, guitarist Steve Cowan presents a guitar recital at McMaster on January 24, and the Bandini-Chiacchiaretta Duo reprises their Toronto program on January 29 as guests of Guitar Hamilton.

All this to say that the long-contested identity of the guitar remains popular ground for concertizing—and that whether you’re a fan of the instrument or think you aren’t, the scene here continues to allow local audiences the opportunity for surprising, and potentially fruitful, moments of (re)discovery.

Sara Constant is a Toronto-based flutist and musicologist, and is digital media editor at The WholeNote. She can be contacted at editorial@thewholenote.com.

Q1: One particular work?

Our upcoming Amor Con Fortuna: Songs of 16th Century Spain concert on October 15th has this piece by Mateo Flecha the Elder called El Fuego. It’s this ten-plus minute song from a genre during the 16th Century called an ‘ensalada’ (salad). Essentially, they’re these epic, long disaster stories set to different little tunes that culminate with the day being saved by the appearance of the Virgin Mary or some angels, and perhaps some sort of raucous celebration afterwards. In this specific case everything is on fire (the aforementioned fuego) until it is not, and then a fellow named Joan plays the bagpipes while people sing praises to the Virgin. The music shifts here and there from these frantic rhythms to more “church-like” motet sections as the story progresses; the word painting is quite spectacular! 

Interestingly enough, since the ensalada genre is a mish–mash of smaller works of music, there’s a sort of chaotic continuity to the overall musical journey even while the textual narrative is relatively straightforward. There are no reprises of past material, and the musical styles shift depending on the text, so as a listener the whole beginning~middle~end cycle is slightly refuted by not knowing what exactly is next to come.

Q2: The concert as a whole?

This is the most exciting part about concert curation; creating something brand new from the sum of its parts. I wonder what would happen if you gave two different people the same music to program; how different would those two concerts feel depending on their order? 

Each Apocryphonia concert featuring Renaissance vocal quintet, Diapente, is programmed by a different member of the quintet; “Amor Con Fortuna” is the creation of our lutenist/tenor Jonathan Stuchbery. I know he took a particular effort in programming this concert to have both the poetic texts and the musical styles have a sort of continuity to them as the concert progresses. Specifically, he took an interest in the linguistic shift occurring in Spain at that time, so the concert reflects both a linguistic and musical evolution of thought. Beyond that, the emotional arc of the poetry was chosen in a way to keep things varied throughout the concert.

In past Apocryphonia concerts, I have played with splitting up sonatas between other works, or switching the order of the movements in order to achieve a desired effect based on the concert’s overarching musical narrative. Also this season we’re doing our second iteration of our Cabinet of Curiosities concert in June, which takes several multi-movement musical works and completely randomizes them on the night of the show. I find that especially fun because it highlights musical contrasts in a way only complete randomization could do.

Q3: Shaping the season?

The joy of vocal/chamber programmation is that unlike larger scale works like symphonies or operas you get to play with different combinations. I take multiple factors into consideration when programming a full season: time period, nationality, instrumentation, etc. The big thing is making sure the year feels varied and that no two concerts are too similar or too close to each other. I am a fan of creating narratives through programming; each concert has a story to tell, literally or conceptually. How that relates to the overall season is a bit more abstract however; my overarching aim is that if someone came to every show in the season they would feel like they saw something unique each time. 

Tenor Alexander Cappellazzo is Diapente and Apocryphonia’s founding artistic director. Amor Con Fortuna plays at the Heliconian Hall October 15 at 7:30pm.

Q1: The opening work?

Our upcoming concert, The Love Affair, illustrates how an entire program can be a carefully constructed arc, guiding the audience through different aspects of love, all tied together by the theme of dance.

We begin with Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer, which sets a light, joyful tone with its charming waltzes. This serves as the “beginning” of the concert’s emotional journey, evoking the simplicity of romantic love. Brahms’ Drei Quartette then deepens the narrative, moving into more contemplative and introspective territory, adding complexity to the emotional arc.

After the intermission, the program shifts with Aaron Manswell’s Poverty. This piece stands in stark contrast to the romanticism of Brahms, introducing a modern, socially conscious reflection on different forms of poverty—spiritual, social, mental, health, and economic. Opening with a reference to Matthew 11:28, the piece uses double entendres to explore how poverty manifests in more abstract ways, like loneliness and feelings of inadequacy. Musically, Poverty draws from Romantic Classical, Gospel and R&B influences, and its slow, unhurried tempo invites the audience to sit with its emotional and social message.

Finally, the program culminates with Martín Palmeri’s Misa a Buenos Aires (Misatango), where the sacred meets the secular in a fusion of liturgical music and tango. The use of the bandoneon in this work adds a uniquely passionate and sensuous texture, bringing the intensity of the tango to life. This final piece serves as the emotional climax of the evening, merging love, faith and dance in a powerful conclusion.

Overall, The Love Affair as a concert creates its own arc, taking the audience on a journey from light-hearted romance to deeper, more complex reflections on love, before reaching an explosive and moving finale with the tango-infused Misatango.

Q2: The concert as a whole?

For The Love Affair, several pragmatic factors influenced the programming. The first half features the TMSingers, our professional chamber choir, accompanied by piano, which allows us to focus on more intimate, lighter works like Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer and Drei Quartette. These pieces don’t require a large ensemble, making them perfect for our chamber forces and easier to rehearse efficiently.

In contrast, the second half brings in the full power of the 160 voices of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, accompanied by a chamber orchestra. This shift is both thematic and practical: it allows for the performance of Martín Palmeri’s Misatango, a larger, more demanding work that requires the depth and intensity of a full choir and instrumental ensemble. This progression from smaller forces to full choir also gives the concert a natural build in energy and impact.

Q3: Shaping the season?

Similar to the concert I just discussed, the idea of Dare to Discover permeates the entire 2024-2025 season, encouraging audiences to experience both the familiar and the new. Visionaries: Vivaldi & Da Vinci blends music and multimedia to explore genius across disciplines, while Festival of Carols offers a fresh take on holiday traditions with surprising musical selections this year. The season balances innovation with timeless works, inviting both performers and audiences to explore bold interpretations and premieres, like those by Aaron Manswell.

Each concert, much like *The Love Affair,* is a carefully curated journey, blending discovery with tradition. The season itself forms an arc, with Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at its centre. That concert is not only a tribute to the choir’s storied past but also a bold, forward-looking statement in choral artistry. Revisiting this monumental work, first performed in Canada by TMChoir nearly a century ago, honours our history while showcasing our ongoing commitment to artistic excellence and innovation. It reflects the culmination of our anniversary season and our dedication to pushing choral boundaries into the future.

Jean-Sébastien Vallée is Artistic Director of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. The Love Affair takes place at Koerner Hall, Royal Conservatory of Music at 3pm, November 3.

The sweep of this year’s X-Avant festival October 15-19, titled TeXtures, suggests a "hive mind" at work, rather than a single curator. Who else was involved and what was their role? And what was the process over time?

The majority of the festival curation was done by myself, however, like any good curation, you use the strength and expertise of your community. Programming a festival like this requires a delicate dance – creating a lineup that’s both expansive and cohesive. I put a lot of effort into representing a wide array of communities and ensuring that, alongside the expected experiences, there are moments of surprise – those unexpected additions that encourage audiences to open up to new musical styles. Small shifts in programming can have a large impact, and we’re very attentive to community input to keep evolving in a way that resonates with everyone involved.

The spark for TeXtures’ first program at Allan Gardens was Japanese-born artist, composer, and curator. Aki Onda who was born in Japan and resides in New York, and wanted to bring Phew to North America. We agreed that she would be the perfect artist for a cross-Canada tour this year, kicking off in Montreal and concluding in Vancouver, with four stops along the way, one being The Music Gallery. 

Our "Exit Points" program was brought forth by Michael Palumbo, and Tad Michalak, a member of our curatorial team,  deserves a shout-out as well for introducing me to Rafael Toral, one of our resident advisors this year, who adds another unique layer to this festival. The remaining lineup was shaped by the artists I wanted to bring to the Music Gallery this year, choosing people I wanted to prompt with this theme.

You’re going beyond your home base at 918 Bathurst this year – Allan Gardens as mentioned, and also a venue new to the WholeNote team – The Bridge (Ukai Projects) on Adelaide W. for night 4.

Well, 918 is not physically accessible, and our organization  recognizes the importance of addressing this to make our events truly inclusive. Accessibility is a crucial factor in making our spaces welcoming to all communities, especially those who require additional support. It’s something we are continuously working toward improving to ensure that our events are for everyone who wants to attend.

I also believe that effective creation extends beyond just the artist—it’s deeply connected to the setting. Some events truly come alive in smaller, more intimate venues, while others benefit from a larger space to amplify the experience. For me, the process is about making sure the space itself feels right for the concert, as it’s not simply a matter of booking an artist and placing them on a stage. Half of the impact lies in ensuring the venue complements and elevates the performance, allowing the artist and the audience to feel fully immersed in the moment.

Talk about “TeXture” as a theme: does the theme come first or last or somewhere in between for you?

I usually begin programming with a theme; it helps me think outside the box and explore how playful programming can unfold in unique or unexpected ways. For instance, “Texture” emerged from the idea of exploring how texture can be understood not only in music but as a cross-disciplinary tool. It serves as a kind of creative glue, providing cohesion while also prompting artists to consider how their work can interact with and be shaped by textural elements. 

This thematic approach offers a framework for artists to think about their art in new contexts, encouraging them to explore dimensions they might not typically consider. I think it’s a powerful tool to prompt artists and encourage them to think beyond their practice, especially for an experimental music space.

The lineup for the final concert, from Glass Orchestra to Future Proof straddles the Gallery’s history.   

I truly believe that a great community space should be multigenerational, multidisciplinary, and a place where learning, sharing, and growth happen from all sides. It’s about creating an environment where people of all ages and backgrounds can connect, exchange ideas, and learn from each other. This kind of space fosters a dynamic, inclusive community that thrives on diverse perspectives and experiences, ultimately strengthening our collective understanding and creativity. That’s why I think this [articular day is both unhinged, and also perfectly playful. We’ll see how it goes!

In what ways does this year's X Avant reflect what you've brought to the Music Gallery (and what the Music Gallery has offered you?)

When I inherited this festival, it was primarily designed to explore genre. However, I don’t typically program within strict genre streams, which to be honest, was a challenge at first. To address this framework in my own way, I started looking at how to blend communities, reimagine spaces, and explore a single theme to see how various artists might interpret it. This approach has shown me that genres aren’t as rigid as they may seem; in fact, there’s room to create new hybridizations of sound, tracing back to the origins of genres while giving them space to evolve.

Sanjeet Takhar was appointed Artistic Director of the Music Gallery in November 2020.

Q1: The opening work?

In our upcoming Mooredale Series program, pianist Benedetto Lupo will take us on a captivating journey through Nino Rota’s 15 Preludi. Each piece is imbued with its own distinct character and mood, together crafting an evolving narrative that flows through a range of tempos and emotions. We begin with the vibrant “Allegro molto,” transition through contrasting feelings – such as the introspective “Andante sostenuto ed espressivo,” and culminate in the vigorous “Allegro robusto,” creating a satisfying narrative arc.

In contrast, Aleksandr Scriabin’s 24 Preludi, Op.11 presents a fascinating departure from traditional storytelling. While showcasing a wide spectrum of emotions, many of these preludes, like Preludes No.4 and No.18, tend to feel more episodic or fragmented. Rather than adhering to a clear progression, they capture fleeting moments of expression, offering an intriguing contrast to Rota’s cohesive narrative. This approach reflects a broader understanding of musical storytelling, where the absence of a defined arc can evoke a unique emotional experience, inviting the audience to engage in a more impressionistic way

Q2: The concert as a whole? 

Starting the concert with Rota’s preludes sets a tone of accessibility and elegance, offering a light and engaging introduction. As the program shifts into Scriabin’s preludes, the atmosphere deepens, becoming more reflective, intense and emotionally rich, which heightens the listener’s involvement. This order works effectively because it creates a natural progression, both emotionally and technically, allowing the concert to gradually build toward Scriabin’s profound, almost mystical sound world.

From a practical viewpoint, this structure benefits the performer as well. Rota’s preludes, while musically expressive, are less demanding compared to Scriabin’s. This makes them an excellent way to ease into the performance before tackling Scriabin’s more challenging and emotionally charged pieces. The flow of the concert feels organic, with the music growing in complexity and emotional weight.

In essence, pairing Rota’s and Scriabin’s preludes offers a well-rounded journey that moves from neoclassical simplicity and grace to the Romantic intensity and depth of Scriabin’s music.

Q3: Shaping the season?

Looking at the season as a whole, a clear guiding principle emerges: a blend of innovation, tradition, and cross-cultural dialogue. The concert series emphasizes diversity in programming, both in terms of repertoire and instrumental combinations, creating a season that spans multiple musical worlds and styles. The overarching principle is one of balance between contrast and cohesion. Each concert creates its own emotional and stylistic narrative while contributing to a larger season-long exploration of different musical traditions and emotional arcs. Across the season, the audience is taken on a journey through different musical landscapes, from classical and neoclassical to Romantic, contemporary and Latin American influences. The programming invites listeners to experience both the familiar and the new in an engaging, progressive arc. 

Wonny Song is Mooredale Concerts’ Artistic Director. Benedetto Lupo, piano is at Walter Hall, University of Toronto, on October 20, at 3:15pm.

Let’s start by looking back — to a Toronto Symphony concert in January this year. Second half of the concert was the Mozart Requiem, with the full Mendelssohn Choir (TMChoir) doing the vocal honours. But what made the evening special was how the first half set the scene.

The Canadian, for the uninitiated, is the train that travels twice weekly from Vancouver to Toronto. While it’s largely marketed as a “cross country” experience, its route also acts as an essential inter-community link for people who live north of the Trans-Canada highway.

At the beginning of January, I received a call from a friend of mine – a drummer – who was in the process of applying to the Master of Music program in jazz at the University of Toronto. Had he been applying last year, he might have asked me to play with him for his live audition. This year – in the midst of January’s stringent lockdown protocols – he asked me to play on his audition video. This prompted a simple question: what does auditioning for a music program in the physically distanced winter of 2021 entail?

Many WholeNote readers – whether you’re a professional musician, community orchestra member, chorister, or the best damn Betty Rizzo that ever graced the stage of an Elgin County high school – will have some experience with the audition process, in a general sense. For what this usually looks like in an academic context – and how things are different this year – here is some background, drawn from my own experiences as a university music student, as well as two years spent as the admissions and student services manager at the RCM’s Glenn Gould School, from 2015 to 2017. 

Postsecondary music program auditions are generally relatively simple affairs: applicants come to a room at an appointed time, play selections from a repertoire list assembled by the school, have a brief interview with the audition panel, and leave. The composition of the audition panel is, typically, dependent on the instrument group auditioning, and usually involves both faculty representatives (e.g. piano faculty for piano auditions) and representatives from academic leadership (e.g. a program head). The panel takes notes, discusses the auditions, and makes recommendations to an admissions committee, which then embarks on a lengthy administrative process that addresses itself to merit-based financial aid, program number targets, teacher requests, offers of acceptance and waitlist, and other decisions. 

Composer Alexina Louie offers a warm greeting at the door of her home, in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood. Repeatedly, she apologizes for the not-quite-finished renovations to the house she shares with her partner, conductor Alex Pauk, and their children. The renovation has been going on for several years – and at one point even threatened her compositional activity. (More on that later.)

Soon we’re sitting around the kitchen table, looking at the score to her newest piece, Pursuit, for orchestra and string quartet. The work was composed for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Tokyo String Quartet, and will be premiered on March 7, as part of the TSO’s New Creations Festival. Such an unusual combination of instrumental forces, was, Louie admits, a challenge.

“I spent a lot of time thinking about this piece,” she observes, turning the pages of the big score, “before I started to write the notes. At the outset, I had a meeting with the Tokyo Quartet – I heard them play, and we met the next day. I said I’d like to write a piece that won’t have to be amplified. But I’m not sure, even at this point, if the quartet will need microphones. Roy Thomson is a big hall.”

When I cast my mind back to the early years of Opera Atelier, my strongest recollection is the photograph of a baseball pitcher in the programme notes. The picture depicted the moment of repose before the pitcher “winds up” to deliver the ball, which is why this anonymous sports figure ended up as a front-man for the ideal baroque aesthetic. The pitcher’s stance, with its raised hip/slouch (think Michelangelo’s David and the penny will drop) was in the perfect baroque “S” shape.

I have something of a special relationship with Opera Atelier because I was the first arts journalist to write about the company. It was 1986 and they were mounting Acts 1 and 2 of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Walker Court, in conjunction with the Vatican Splendours exhibit. It was their first professional gig – meaning that they got paid.

This year’s third annual Toronto Bach Festival, curated by Tafelmusik oboist John Abberger, includes three concerts that present not only Bach’s own music, but also works written by predecessors who influenced him. The middle concert this year is an organ recital by Rachel Mahon, assistant organist at Chester Cathedral in the UK and former organ scholar at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the first female organist in its 1,400-year history.

Born and raised in Toronto, Mahon won numerous awards and competitions in Canada and is half of the Organized Crime organ duo, founded in 2012 with fellow organist Sarah Svendsen. Although now based in the UK, she frequently returns to Canada as a recitalist; a list of her upcoming performances, including this year’s Bach Festival, can be found on her website, rachelmahon.ca.

In advance of her May 12 “Bach’s Inspiration” concert, Mahon shared her thoughts on Bach’s music, his inspiration, and what it means to return home to Toronto.

WN: Your upcoming recital at the 2018 Toronto Bach Festival shows “how Bach admired and was inspired by other composers.” What can we expect to hear? How did you put this program together?

RM: J.S. Bach’s achievements as a composer are astonishing, especially when considering he never lived or visited anywhere outside Thuringia or Saxony. This didn’t stop him from absorbing all he could at the ducal court of Weimar, where travelling musicians brought Italian and French music and where Bach was organist and Konzertmeister. We know for a fact that he copied Nicolas de Grigny’s Premier livre d’orgue and arranged Antonio Vivaldi’s music. He also took a trip to Lübeck in 1705 to learn from the great Danish organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude.

With these things in mind, I’ve included some pieces by Buxtehude which I will directly contrast with those of Bach, Bach’s arrangement for organ of an Italian concerto and a piece from Grigny’s organ book, alongside some of Bach’s great organ works. I hope that this program will give an impression of the immense impact other composers had on Bach’s writing.

As a Toronto-trained organist now working across the pond, this Toronto Bach Festival performance represents a homecoming of sorts. What does it mean to you to return to your hometown and perform? Do you approach a recital in Toronto differently
than one in the UK?

The phrase “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone” really rings true with me. It wasn’t until I left Toronto and had been gone a year that I realized just how much I love the city, so I particularly enjoy coming home, especially to play. Toronto has so much going on and this is true in the local organ scene too: there are several fine instruments in the city of all different styles.

I will be playing at Holy Family for the Bach Festival and this is particularly a homecoming for me because I was born and raised in Parkdale. When I started organ lessons at 15, the Oratorians let me practise at Holy Family twice a week and for many years I sang in the Oratory Children’s Choir (which my mother founded and directed) before I became the choir’s organist at age 18.

I would say I approach each concert I play differently, no matter where it is. Of course I take into consideration my audience and perhaps the time of year, as so much organ repertoire is based on the liturgical year, but also, and most importantly, the instrument. Organists have the unique problem of not being able to travel with their own instruments, so we must adjust to each organ and each organ is completely unique. Certain pieces just won’t work on certain organs.

I suppose there might also be an extra layer of nerves for Toronto as well. The organ world is relatively small and in Toronto I have many friends in the field. I studied with John Tuttle at the University of Toronto and wouldn’t want to horrify him with any bad habits I might’ve picked up across the pond!

Bach is one of the most-performed composers across the globe. What does Bach’s music mean to you? Do you think there’s still something new to say in the interpretation of these works?

Bach is my favourite composer of all time. I love Tallis, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Elgar and Howells, to name a few, but Bach remains the supreme composer for me. As an organist, a singer, a conductor and a listener, Bach’s music never disappoints me. I am always fulfilled by it and yet want more – I went to Tafelmusik’s St. Matthew Passion three times in one week a few years ago... There is so much to bring out in the music that no two performers’ interpretations will be the same.

I believe a performer is able to put his or her own character into a piece, to draw the ear to what he or she wants the listener to hear in the music. This is an exciting privilege and is why there can always be something new to say with these works.

Rachel Mahon’s organ recital, May 12 at 2pm at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, is the middle concert of the third annual Toronto Bach Festival, which takes place May 11 to 13.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist, and The WholeNote’s regular Early Music columnist.

According to Chaucer, April is the month that with its sweet showers “pierces March’s drought to the root,” causing all kinds of people, music lovers not excepted, to get a bit giddy and take themselves off on all manner of “sundry pilgrimages.” As a lifelong chronic agoraphobe who typically gets on airplanes only for trips revolving around grim duty of one kind or another, I was until last year, a steadfast exception to the Chaucerian rule. But 2016 was different. Not once but twice I noted my nearest exits, turned off all electronic devices and faithfully obeyed the fasten seatbelt sign as I took off into the wide blue yonder for the purpose of attending music festivals in other parts of the world.

I am, therefore, now an expert on the subject of music festivals. So pay attention.

Rule number one: Other than the ones that take place in your hometown and can therefore be ignored unless you have guests, there are only two types of festivals.

One is the kind of festival that is sufficiently compelling in its own right that it causes you to journey some place you never have thought of visiting, even if you had heard of it.

The other is a festival you never heard of but taking place somewhere so special in its own right that you feel compelled to go there at least once in your lifetime. And when you do, you discover that there’s a festival there that tickles your musical fancy, so you go to it because you are already there.

There’s one of each kind in this story: the 2016 first annual Jerusalem Summer Opera Festival falls into the second category; the 110th Annual Bethlehem Bach Festival falls into the first.

The Bethlehem Bach Festival takes place in Bethlehem, PA, nestled in the Lehigh Valley region of Southeastern Pennsylvania, this year on the weekends of May 12-13 and May 19-20. Colonized in the first half of the 18th century by Moravian settlers, Bethlehem became also, in the 1860s (across the river from the old town), the site of Lehigh University, a private school established by businessman Asa Packer. (The church that bears his name, on the Lehigh campus, remains the venue for the performance of the Bach Mass in B Minor that is the climax of each year’s festival.) And between the two halves of the town, along the riverbank is the looming rusting hulk of what was, from the 1880s till the 1990s, the steel mill from which Bethlehem Steel derived its name. Twelve years after the mill was built, in 1898, the Bethlehem Bach Choir came into being. Two years after that it gave the first ever complete North American performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. Through that whole galvanic century, the choir and the festival have endured through thick and thin, because they bring to the music not just a consistently high standard of musicianship, but a precious intangible – the fact that the music is a living expression of community.

I’ve written before about how my first awareness of the Bethlehem Bach Festival came about because of the non-stop procession of top-flight Canadian soloists to the festival, especially since Greg Funfgeld took on conductorship of the choir in 1983. Countertenor Daniel Taylor, for example, returns for the 19th consecutive year, joined again this year by soprano Agnes Zsigovics (a protégée of Taylor’s at the University of Toronto, and surely a performer to watch) and by Benjamin Butterfield, also a frequent visitor but absent last year. The three US soloists are also regulars: soprano Rosa Lamoreaux, baritone William Sharp and Dashon Burton, bass. One of Funfgeld’s gifts as a conductor is his sense of balance and blend; another is his loyalty to his performers. Talk to the soloists and they will tell you that as much as anything, the opportunity to renew beloved musical relationships in a consistent context is one of the things that keeps them coming back.

It’s been said that North America (at least from a colonial perspective) has too much geography and not enough history, while the problem in the Middle East is just the reverse. But if one thinks local rather than global, the distinction starts to blur. Walk from the Hotel Bethlehem (built in the 1920s with Bethlehem steel!) through the old Moravian Quarter, across the bridge past the hulk of the steel mill, where signs of civic landscaping and urban renewal are visibly starting to happen on the river edge, up the opposite hill to the Packer Church, and take your place in the audience. There will always be more than one generation of the same family in the choir that looks back at you. And the music, when it starts, will have a healing sound that is only possible when it is as current as it is timeless.

Jerusalem Opera Festival: Last summer’s trip to the Jerusalem Opera Festival had several memorable moments. One was sitting, late at night, on the rooftop licenced patio of the Mamilla Hotel in downtown Jerusalem, after returning from the evening’s main event, a thoroughly enjoyable outdoor performance of Rigoletto at the 6000-seat Sultan’s Pool amphitheatre, a few hundred feet down the hill. There’s something infinitely less annoying about amplification and outdoor acoustics when the surroundings are as genuinely imposing. (Although I do remember thinking, as an ambulance barrelled down the hill, klaxon blaring, alongside the amphitheatre, right on cue, that maybe this time Gilda would be saved! The second night’s performance, at the Sultan’s Pool again, titled “Opera Paradiso,” was, to my taste less successful, featuring a range of operatic moments from film, sung and performed live by singers and orchestra while the related movie excerpts flickered silently onscreen.

I found myself wondering if there was perhaps a trap for the festival in trying to attract the same 6000 people two days in a row to the one venue, rather than setting the goal of doing the same show twice in a row to grow the audience, and to lay on other things, large and small, for each audience on their “other” night. A better way to build partnerships in the community, said my small-town brain.

As it happens, this year’s Jerusalem Festival has just been announced, and someone else must have been thinking along the same lines I was. There will be two performances of Nabucco, June 21 and 22 at Sultan’s Pool. It will be very interesting to see what else, if anything, operatic or not, gets programmed head to head with those two performances.

My favourite story from the whole visit indicates the size of the challenge ahead. We were in Tel Aviv, home base of the Israeli Opera, at the end of the visit, being shown around the props and costumes room, backstage. Our guide, an opera staff member, was talking frankly about how the two cities were completely different worlds. (“It’s an hour’s drive at a speed of 30 centuries an hour,” someone said.) The NIOC staffer described how her own children, growing up backstage among the props and costumes, had never even been to Jerusalem until they were five or six years old. Holding tight to her hand as they walked through the souks with their dizzying variety of cultural and religious garb, one of the children turned to her, pointing at someone walking by in unfamiliar attire. “Mommy, what costume is that?” the child asked.

The greatest challenge for this particular festival, it seems to me, is that Jerusalem as a city is itself a living opera, on a grander, more viscerally demanding scale than anything the arts can hope to muster. It will be interesting to see how much attention this particular festival can hope to grab moving forward.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

It happened the day after I got back from Banff. My flight had arrived late the previous night, and I got back to my apartment around 11pm, after a lengthy wait in line for a taxi outside of Pearson International Airport in minus-20-degree weather, which I’d endured without the aid of toque, gloves or scarf, as I’d packed these items deep in my carry-on luggage. Imprudent though this decision might seem when viewed in retrospect, it made sense at the time: 

I hadn’t needed my woollen accessories on my last day in Banff thanks to a timely Chinook wind that raised the daytime temperature to a balmy two degrees.

After getting back to my apartment, making an abortive attempt to unpack, and falling asleep with every available blanket piled on top of my wind-bitten body, I awoke to further delights: frosted-over windows, an insufficient supply of drinkable coffee, and a refrigerator, empty but for an assortment of condiments, a few cans of beer, and a sad, desiccated apple, which in my haste to leave some four weeks earlier I’d evidently forgotten. The remedy to this dearth of comforts:
I had to go to the grocery store.

And so it was in Whole Foods – coffee in one hand, avocado in the other – that I, upon making eye contact with a nearby man who was also perusing the produce section, smiled, nodded and said a brief “Hey.” To the man’s credit, his gently startled response of “Uhh… okay” probably had less to do with any rudeness on his part than it had to do with the fact that he, unlike me, had not just spent two weeks at the Banff Centre, where it was common practice, upon encountering a new face in the close quarters of an elevator, or at a dining-hall table, to smile, nod and say a brief “Hey.” This salutation, simple though it was, constituted a layered acknowledgment of a number of implicit statements related to the unique circumstances of being at the Centre, including (but not limited to): “It’s nice to see a friendly face” and, “Isn’t it wonderful to have access to such outstanding facilities?” and “Isn’t the divide between our day-to-day lives and the pampered, unstructured, logistically streamlined lives that we’re leading in our respective residencies so great as to make you feel simultaneously lucky, grateful and slightly embarrassed?” My fellow plant-fat enthusiast couldn’t have known.

He also likely wouldn’t have known that the Banff Centre – founded in 1933, current full name Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity – hosts a number of programs throughout the year, from short-term summer workshops in disciplines such as dance, theatre, jazz and chamber music, to long-term practicums, in fields such as audio engineering, that run for the better part of a year. I was at the Centre to attend the Banff Musicians in Residence (BMiR) program, a self-directed residency that occurs annually in three separate five-week sessions throughout fall and winter. Successful residency applicants can stay for the full five weeks, although most tend to stay for three, at least in the sessions that I’ve attended. While I don’t know what internal criteria are at play in the selection process, a typical BMiR cohort will consist of approximately 25 Canadian and international musicians who specialize in a wide variety of different practices; this residency included artists such as Corey Gulkin, a singer-songwriter from Montreal, Mark Taylor, a composer from New York, and Rosa Guitar Trio, a classical ensemble from Australia.

Each week of a residency also features a guest faculty member, who hosts a master-class-style session in their studio, is available for one-on-one coachings, and who performs in the concert session that ends each residency week. These concerts tend to alternate between Rolston Recital Hall, a classical-style venue in which primarily acoustic music tends to be programmed, and The Club, the creatively named space in which jazz, pop, folk and other groove-oriented music tends to be programmed. (Blunt titular charms aside, one imagines that the Banff Centre must simply be waiting for the rightly named donor-partnership opportunity.) A BMiR session also sees the selection, through an application and interview process that takes place in advance of the residency, of an artistic associate, a resident who acts as concert curator, social convener and liaison between program participants and Banff Centre administrative staff. The artistic associate in my most recent session was Sophie Gledhill, an English cellist, who successfully wrangled our herd of a cohort with patience, humour and generosity.

At its core, a BMiR works by giving its participants the space, time and resources they need in order to do their unique artistic work, free (to a certain extent) of the stress and responsibility of their ordinary routines. Physically, the Centre resembles a small college campus, and being there mimics a kind of post-secondary experience: participants stay in one of several residence buildings, they have access to the gym, and they receive a Banff Centre ID card, which is loaded with funds on their flex-meal plan; funds they are free to spend at any of the on-campus restaurants (though not, it should be noted, on alcohol). Musicians are assigned a studio space, either in the Music and Sound building, or in one of the 28 huts located in nearby clusters. Equipment requests are processed about a month before the start of a new session. The Banff Centre has a robust inventory of gear, and will help to accommodate any unusual items needed in a given artist’s studio. As drummer Mackenzie Longpré puts it: “One of the most unique aspects of the Banff Centre is the seemingly limitless access to a large array of facilities and musical equipment. During my residency, I felt like I could request and use whatever gear I wanted, and was never made to feel like I was overstepping my bounds.”

Aside from overeating, staring at the romantic splendour of the mountains, and promising yourself that you’ll definitely, definitely go to the gym tomorrow morning, the point of attending the BMiR program is to work on a specific musical project. These projects can differ widely from participant to participant; a classical pianist might be preparing for a concerto that she’ll be performing with an orchestra in eight months’ time, while a singer-songwriter might be writing new material for an album that addresses itself to the themes of climate change and the Canadian landscape. The first BMiR session that I attended was in late 2016; I came to the Banff Centre with a band, to rehearse and develop material written in advance by the group’s leader, in order to prepare for a recording session in early 2017. I spent two weeks during that stay at the Centre, and my artistic goals were fairly straightforward: my job was to play the given material as well as I could, to experiment and develop strategies to expand upon the songs the group was working on, and to advance my own instrumental skills through individual practice. By contrast, I attended this year’s residency by myself, to compose and develop material for a forthcoming recording project. As I was preparing for my time in Banff, I imagined that it would feel more or less the same as my first time, and that my artistic trajectory would look fairly similar by the end of my stay. This assumption, as it turned out, was wrong.

Being provided with the space, time and resources to do my unique artistic work – free of the stress and responsibility of my ordinary routine – produced, in me, an unexpected feeling: an anxious dread that if I wasn’t operating at peak efficiency, I would be squandering this precious opportunity. For as idyllic as a Banff Centre residency may be, it also represents a considerable personal investment of time: time away from family, away from work, away from the real world. The idea that I was not making the absolute most of my experience became increasingly debilitating; perhaps unsurprisingly, I became a bit sick at the end of my first week, and spent a day away from my studio, recuperating in my room.

The key to overcoming this anxiety, I was to find, was not round-the-clock access to excellent facilities, or picturesque views, or all-you-can-drink cafeteria coffee: it was the mutual support and encouragement of the musicians with whom I shared my residency. It is surprisingly difficult to be open and vulnerable, particularly with people you’ve only just met, but actively connecting to the BMiR community became the key to doing better, more fulfilling work. As Gulkin wrote to me after the residency, this peer support “was one of the most important parts of the residency. While everyone was working on a different project, we all realized we were experiencing similar ups and downs,” in going through the sometimes “extreme emotional process” of creating art.

The Banff Centre is a special place, and, as I walked home from the grocery store on that frigid morning, having just warmly greeted a man I did not know, I thought about the things I hadn’t been able to take back to Toronto with me: the world-class facilities, the crisp mountain air, the clamour of Australian accents at every coffee shop and bar in town. But I was reassured that work, even in the most ideal of settings, doesn’t suddenly become easier, and that what turned out to be the most important part of the experience – participating in the cultivation of a supportive community of artistic peers – was, in fact, something that I could bring home.

Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached at www.colinstory.com, on Instagram and on Twitter.

As a first-year undergraduate at Capilano University’s Jazz Studies program in 2005, I, like the rest of my cohort, was automatically enrolled in a mandatory jazz history course. It was a survey course, designed to teach us how to listen actively, to distinguish between Armstrong and Parker and Coltrane, and to develop a sense of the historical arc of jazz in the 20th century. Our very first listening example was Livery Stable Blues, by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. 

Something of a novelty song, its name derived from the horns’ imitation of animal sounds in stop-time sections, Livery Stable Blues has the distinction of being the very first jazz recording, released by New York’s Victor record label in 1917. It also holds a more dubious distinction: all five members of the ODJB, who billed themselves as the “creators of jazz,” were white. 

To his credit, our instructor mentioned this unexpected fact, though we, as a class, did not investigate it further. There was much we could have considered: the circumstances behind the recording, the tricky concept of artistic ownership, the way in which Black American Music gets repackaged by white performers – from the ODJB to Elvis Presley to Justin Bieber – and profitably sold to white audiences. But we didn’t; instead, we moved on to the next song, and focused on learning to correctly identify excerpts for our upcoming exam. 

This experience is indicative of what is still a defining characteristic of Canadian post-secondary jazz programs: namely, that they are primarily concerned with teaching students how to be competent professional performers, and that teaching students to engage with issues of race, gender and equity within their field is outside of a program’s purview. On the surface, there’s an undeniable logic to this: students come to learn performance skills, and that’s what programs deliver. One of the unintended consequences of this outlook, however, is an erasure of the lived experiences of jazz’s canonical figures, the vast majority of whom are Black. 

IT WAS A BIT COLD, I grant you – one of those crisp January Sundays that gets called “twenty below” because it’s windy. If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought the sign saying “Isabel Bader” must be for a hockey rink, what with all the minivans rolling up, full of kids and gear. And who else in Canada but a hockey parent would sacrifice their day of rest like this, on the coldest Sunday afternoon of the winter? Who else indeed?

One of the dads of the seven musicians assembling for the hastily scheduled photo shoot comes up to me. (My standard issue cherry-red Quest Nature Tours Arctic expedition Gore-Tex windbreaker must make me look like I know what’s going on). “So whose bright idea was this one?” he asks. His shivering son or daughter is huddling with the other six young musicians, while WholeNote photographer Air’leth Aodfhin explains the shot we are looking for, and Toronto Sinfonietta music director Matthew Jaskiewicz looks on.