Changing of the guard at Echo: I have been back and forth by e-mail over the course of April, with Alan Gasser, who has been part of Toronto’s choral scene for as long as The WholeNote has been around. In fact, back in our very first season, when we were still called Pulse and not afraid of being tongue-in-cheeky, he shows up in an April 1996 cover story by “Viola Jones” toasting the birth of TaxiCabaret, a seven-member cab service which will “combine singing ability with skill at piloting a taxi around town, serenading their customers on the fly.”
“Everyone knows these are tough times,” says Gasser, the group’s spokesperson: “We figured if we took government’s advice and got real jobs, there’d be that much more to go around for artists with less portable gifts. I mean, you can’t play a viola while you are driving – at least not very well.”
Fast forward three decades, and, real job or not, Gasser is at a turning point in what has been a sustaining passion.
“I’m in a very peculiar place, and a time of life,” he writes. This week I’ve travelled from my Toronto home to Boston (Salem) to bid farewell to my college choir director, John M Russell, who conducted us in the excellent Wooster Chorus, from 1977-81. That Big Goodbye rhymes somewhat with my own retirement this coming May from the Echo Choir, which I’ve led for 33 years … It’s time for someone else to shoulder that responsibility. I don’t know the right way to send the Echo community a Big Bon Voyage, but I do feel the rightness of doing so.”
He goes on from there to talk about “a weird synchronicity” just when he needed inspiration. “A prophetic voice coming from an audiobook on my phone” is how he describes it – U.S. activist and writer Rebecca Solnit reading from her book of essays, Recollections of My Nonexistence.
The most harrowing essay, Gasser says, has to be ‘Life During Wartime’ which introduces the idea that her young adult life, as a runaway independent of parents, was not just a succession of personal dangers, but “a social system of war upon women, and specifically against her bodily survival as a young woman who prized her own journey, especially walking in the city where she lived, to wherever she wanted to go.”
“That’s my hope for Echo, and for other daughters and sisters …I always hoped to be part of the solution, rather than adding to the epidemic of silencing all around us. I wanted to hear the voices of women singers, and use whatever means necessary to assist Echo and its community in being heard, and for our expressions to be vigorous and brave, audible, excellent and clear. I know for sure that real women in our real world can be expressive in all those ways, and I long for Echo’s success, as well as for all the mothers, daughters and sisters nearest-by to me. There IS space for singing, and for ringing out in harmony. Long may it remain open and welcoming.”
Echo’s Spring Concert, The Heart of Love, celebrating their 35th Anniversary, takes place at 3pm, May 10, at Church of the Holy Trinity, 10 Trinity Square. Allan Gasser and assistant conductor Katie White will share the conducting honours.
Finding common ground: “Finding common ground where music and love meet” is the title of a May 8 concert by the combined forces of Upper Canada Choristers and Cantemos, led by conductor and composer Laurie Evan Fraser, whose six-movement new work, Common Ground, anchors the program. The work was inspired by and is dedicated to U.S. historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, Fraser says, “who advocates for art as joyful resistance, and is … helping to keep us sane and hopeful in trying times.”
The movements feature poetry in English by Jacqui Atkin, who, with Laurie Evan Fraser, co-founded the choir in 1994, and in Spanish by the Choristers’ Venezuelan-Canadian producer Jacinto Salcedo. “Survival at its essence is meeting the basics to ensure life,” Evan Fraser comments in the introduction to the opening song of the collection, Seeking Empathy. “ Sometimes that is all we can manage, but if we can, we help those we love and those our loved ones love. The care ripples out. Then we don’t just survive, we thrive.”
Finding Common Ground takes place Friday, May 8, at 7:30pm at Grace Church on-the-Hill, 300 Lonsdale Road, Toronto.
Visit our Choral Canary pages, starting on page 38 in this issue, for profiles of 41 choirs active in our community, including Echo Choir.
And to search our concert listings for May/June live and livestreamed choral activity, please visit Just Ask under the listings tab on our website. From there, you can just type in “choirs” in the “options” field. Or for a more refined search, go to “advanced options” and under genre select “choral”.
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.
