A lot has happened since 2018, the year I described the Happenstancers in these pages as part of the future of chamber music and song recital. A year later, two of the ensemble’s three founding musicians (mezzo-soprano Adanya Dunn and pianist Nahre Sol) departed Canada, which left Brad Cherwin in Toronto with room to invent from scratch and experiment – and experiment he did! The Happenstancers are now a large informal band of musicians with Cherwin as the artistic director, with several busy performance seasons under their belt each more ambitious than the last, an annual festival, a visiting guest conductor, a concert space in a Lutheran church out on Bloor West, a part-time production manager, a video artist, and a solid record of success with granting bodies. And most importantly, an audience which – the Holy Grail of classical music – skews under 40 years old.
Next step would be to have repeat performances and to take them outside Toronto, Cherwin tells me when we meet in a coffee shop to talk about yet another iteration of Happenstancers’ all-choral West End Micro Music Festival (WEMMF), Revelations, a contemporary music shindig pushing boundaries and rethinking the concert form, happening November 22-23 and Nov 29-30 at Redeemer Lutheran Church,1691 Bloor St. W.
“We would love to tour, but it’s hard to make the finances work,” Cherwin says. They performed one year in New York (where pianist-composer and recurring Happenstancer Nahre Sol lives) and at a festival in PEI, but the logistics around performing even in places as close as Hamilton remain daunting.
Unless there’s a co-presenter on the ground? “That’s the way to do it: you have to have a local partner. We’re open to that, absolutely. I’ve reached out to a lot of festivals, and will keep doing that.”
Is it that people find contemporary classical music a tough proposition? “We’d like to avoid those labels. We don’t stick to boundaries between musical genres or periods. But who knows, maybe marketing would be easier if we did.”
Shunning the timely: There’s another thing that the Happenstancers would rather not do, he says, even though a lot of organizations have taken that route.
“Shows that have some sort of connection to current events. Climate change. A political narrative. A dramatic through-line. All that stuff is fine, but I don’t want to attach our shows to something timely. That’s sticking us here. I’m more interested in attempting something timeless. Besides, my opinion on this or that current issue is not that interesting. It’s not about me and my opinions. It’s about finding this shared space between the performers, the composer and the audience. And letting them make up their own minds.”
The current mood in the sector is to issue political statements, I put to him. Every couple of months there’s a new cause to champion. “I salute people who make that part of their mission. But I want to present exciting music before an audience and let it pass over them. That’s all you can ever do.”
There’s also been a lot of talk lately about organizations and individuals refusing donations from corporations they consider problematic, I suggest. Would you object to corporate donations? “I’m not so lucky!” says Cherwin. “Are you going to vet a private donor? I can’t ask a private donor, who are you supporting with your money. I’m not interested in going down that path. And we’ll never have the luxury to do that, even if we wanted to.”
His priority, he says, is accessing sufficient funding so he can support the artists he is working with. Artists are top priority. “A lot of the money comes from the same places anyway, whether or not you’re acknowledging it. And I mean, how different is it to get funding from BMO than from the Canadian government? I don’t necessarily agree with all the decisions our governments make, but that’s life.”
If the choice is, use the money to make what hopefully is really good work – or not use the money – there is no dilemma, he says. “It often is that simple. We don’t have much money, we need to work. Maybe down the road when we have a five million dollar budget, I can refuse some money from someone.”
A change of topic: Who goes to the Happenstancers concerts, who are their audiences? I ask. “We’ve come a long way from ‘friends and family’ type audience,” he says. “The hardest people to get are people that I know, musicians who go to things all the time. Our audiences are people we don’t know.”
It helps a lot that Cherwin, a talented visual artist, still does the ensemble’s visual materials, branding and promotion. “I can crank out the ads for social media in no time. We are able to put our stuff out there to a young-ish audience in a very low cost way.” He will, foreseeably, remain the visual art director, and not only because of the costs: the visual and the musical interact in Happenstancers’ programming in significant ways.
“I have fun doing that. If we were to hire an artist to do it, it would be expensive. And it should be expensive. But when I do it, it’s free. One of these days, I’ll pay myself for it, but not yet,” he laughs.
His enthusiasm is contagious, nowhere more so than when he talks about working with Simon Rivard, the conductor whom he met when they both attended Barbara Hannigan’s EQ program in 2021. “I think he is the best young Canadian conductor in the world today,” says Cherwin of the Music Director of Edmonton Opera who will conduct this year’s WEMMF. As happenstance would have it (see what I did there), while in the EQ program, Cherwin was looking for a conductor for Pierrot Lunaire, and the rest is history.
Is this it, did the Happenstancers find a permanent baton? “I’d be thrilled.” Cherwin says. “I don’t schedule things that need a conductor until I know Simon is available. He’s that good.”
Happenstancers present “Revelations”, the West End Micro Music Festival 2024, November 22-23 and 29-30. Works by Cassandra Miller, Caroline Shaw, Luciano Berio, Thomas Tallis, Claude Vivier, Hildegard von Bingen, Sofia Gubaidulina, Kati Agocs. Simon Rivard conducts. Visit JUST ASK for details.
Lydia Perovic is a freelance writer in Toronto. She is a book columnist for The Hub and writes Long Play, an arts and culture newsletter on Substack.