Two weeks ago on January 28, armed with a folder of carefully selected memorabilia of my own, I walked into the Music Gallery’s new location at 918 Bathurst  for what was referred to as a “90s Archive Jam!” Hosted by Joe Strutt and Fahmid Nibesh, the jam was basically a call for materials – a request for members of the experimental music community to gather and share their memories (and physical memorabilia) of what the Music Gallery was like in the 90s. Linked thematically to an ongoing “History Series” at the Music Gallery (focusing on the history of experimental music-making in Toronto), the jam helped shine a spotlight on an important time in Toronto’s musical past – a past in which the Music Gallery itself has played no small part.

Joe Strutt: Citizen Music Archivist

Toronto musician Joe Strutt‘s career has shifted markedly over the past few years. Making music has been mostly sidelined in favour of his work as a “citizen archivist”: running Track Could Bend, a monthly concert series of "improvised music and weird rock offshoots,” and maintaining his long-running music blog, Mechanical Forest Sound.

Over the past nine years, Strutt has methodically logged a myriad Toronto concerts by mostly local musicians. At last count he’s posted well over 4,000 concert entries, many with live audio recordings attached – a staggering number of events in anyone’s book. Consequently, his blog has grown to become a valuable archive of the local music scene.

I called Strutt last week, asking how it all began. He told me his blog “was initially a personal aid memoire and not consciously an archiving project of the creative music scene in Toronto.” It has nevertheless eventually grown into an incredible archive of local musical culture – what Strutt calls “an investigation of a wide range of artists, [and] reflections on concerts as shared experiences – as acts of citizenship.”

Strutt is also behind a series of “Toronto Experimental Music Wikipedia Jams,” the first of which was held at the Tranzac Club's Tiki Room on a balmy Saturday afternoon in November 2016.

The idea first occurred to Strutt when he went online to search for a Wikipedia entry on the CCMC, Toronto's venerable "free music orchestra" that formed in 1974 and established the Music Gallery. There wasn’t one.

To set about addressing that omission, he pitched his first Wiki Jam to redress the issue to saxophonist Glen Hall, the co-founder of the 416 Creative Improvisers Festival. “Glen was enthusiastic about it,” reported Strutt. I was among the roomful of eager participants who showed up at the Tiki Room and weighed in on the subject.

At home after that session, Strutt says that he “basically bashed out the Wiki text. Then other people improved it, adding rigour by providing links and formatting tweaks. The next time I checked, I was surprised to see my sketchy footnotes properly cited and formatted by a retired engineer from Australia!” The finished Wikipedia page CCMC (band) stands as a tangible testament to Strutt’s initiative and perseverance.

“Then in February 2017 I organised another Wiki Jam for the Wavelength concert series and festival,” says Strutt. This is what the Wavelength Music Arts Projects Wikipedia entry looks like, a year later.

“In preparation for the Music Gallery’s recent 90s Archive Jam! some of us took a field trip to York U’s archives to lay our hands on the old MG tapes,” Strutt explains. “We sat down and happily spent hours listening to recordings of live concerts.”

Why the interest in rediscovering and archiving the history of the Music Gallery now? “One of the reasons is that the Music Gallery is institutionally strong right now,” says Strutt. “It therefore has the luxury to address its past, and not just dwell in survival mode.”

Strutt summed up his view on his archive jams. “For me it’s about engaging with the community, sharing our stories. These events bring those who were first-hand participants together with younger folks who want to participate in that living community.”

Archive Jams at the Music Gallery

I asked Music Gallery artistic director David Dacks, in a phone call, about the ongoing History Series and how the 90s Archive Jam! came about. “One of the pillars of our strategic plan is to re-examine our archives and legacy,” he says. “York University’s archives contain our audio archives and images prior to 1999, but everything since has been a bit more haphazardly collected in binders, CDRs and, lately, through archived links. So I invited Joe Strutt, who serves on the MG’s Artistic Advisory Council, to host a 90s archive jam in order to generate material and conversations. In turn he invited musician Fahmid Nibesh to split the hosting duties.”

“The 90s Archive Jam! was not actually part of our History Series,” Dacks clarifies, “but a more relaxed event in which MG participants could share their stories and original documents. During the event I experienced several aha moments. For example, I was fascinated to hear Alan Davis speak of his nine years of extensive world music programing at the Music Gallery, which included the appearances of some significant artists.”

What will happen to the 90s material collected during the jam? “University of Toronto graduate student Mairead Murphy has been working diligently for months to archive concert audio recordings and pertinent paper documents on our HD,” Dacks explains. “It’s a race against time: CDRs have never been the most robust technology. She is also assisting us as we set up a presence on Bandcamp: Live at the Music Gallery. Initially we plan to upload six live concert titles from 2014 to the present and build from there.”

The History Series

The History Series itself continues with two upcoming events exploring the documentation of Toronto’s creative music. First is a discussion of Creative Music on Campus Radio on Thursday, February 15 at the Map Room, Hart House, University of Toronto, co-presented by the Music Gallery and CIUT-FM.

Dacks explains how non-mainstream music and radio art were boosted by the emergence of FM radio in the 1960s. “Combined with the advent of late night programming, radio opened up countless hours of experimental programming possibilities for stations large and small,” he says. “Campus radio was…especially important in fostering community and paying royalties to up-and-coming musicians creating jazz, new music and completely unclassifiable sounds.” The wide-ranging conversation on February 15 will be hosted by Dacks (himself a 25-year veteran of CIUT), and features panelists Ron Gaskin, Sarah Peebles, Nilan Perera, Claudia McKoy and Luca Capone, all active in campus radio.

The series continues on Friday, April 6 with a panel on Creative Music Journalism, presented by the Music Gallery and Musicworks magazine. Dacks will talk to journalists about “the challenges and joys of describing abstract music.” Panelists include Mark Miller (Globe and Mail), Carl Wilson (Slate, The Guardian, Globe and Mail), Katie Jensen (Polaris Music Prize podcast, IMPSTR), Jennie Punter (Musicworks, Toronto Star) and Jerry Pratt (Exclaim!).

“Evolving from occasional coverage of jazz and ‘new’ music in major newspapers during the 50s and 60s, experimental music found dedicated outlets in publications such as Coda and Musicworks by the 70s,” notes Dacks. During the 80s and 90s, alternative media such as NOW Magazine, Eye Weekly, The WholeNote and Exclaim! placed creative music activities in a wider cultural context. And more recently, podcasting has carved out a new space merging what print and radio used to do: incorporating both journalism and radio production to promote creative music to ever-changing audiences.

In addition to bringing people together to tell personal stories and to generate paper and audio artifacts, these archiving efforts of Joe Strutt, the Music Gallery, and others are pointing to meaningful ways our music communities articulate their collective memories – and how we do the essential work of passing on our musical legacies to future generations.

The Music Gallery’s 2018 History Series opens with “Creative Music on Campus Radio,” on February 15, followed by “Creative Music Journalism,” on April 6.

Andrew Timar is a Toronto musician and music writer. He can be contacted at worldmusic@thewholenote.com.

The TD Toronto Jazz Festival has announced the four special projects supported by its 2018 Discovery Series this spring – and with them, an indication of how the festival’s vision for jazz in Toronto is continuing to evolve.

This year’s Discovery Series features guitarist Harley Card’s new Sunset Ensemble octet, on March 1 at Lula Lounge; the Heavyweights Brass Band’s CD release for This City, March 29 at Lula Lounge; Adrean Farrugia and Joel Fram’s CD release for BLUED DHARMA, April 27 at Gallery 345; and “The Smith Sessions Presents: Bitches Brew,” an event featuring female-led groups performing original music, April 28 at the Canadian Music Centre (CMC).

Started in 2011, the series is a part of the TD Toronto Jazz Festival’s outreach to local performers creating original work, and to year-round, multi-venue jazz programming in the city. Each year, an assembled Toronto Jazz Fest jury selects four projects to receive support and funding from the festival. Over the last 8 years, the series has accumulated an alumni list that serves as a veritable who’s who of local jazz innovators – and that has helped transform the festival from an annual affair into a year-round showcase of local music-making.

The announcement of the 2018 projects was one of Josh Grossman’s first, since transitioning from part-time to full-time artistic director of Toronto Downtown Jazz last month. So far, he’s excited about the results. “We always get projects that fit nicely within the festival mandate,” he says. “It’s a nice cross section of projects each year; it never feels like a stretch to find projects that really work and make sense.”

This year in particular brings a wide range of projects to the local jazz community: two CD releases; a collaborative project focusing on women leaders in the arts; and in the case of the Sunset Ensemble, which takes Harley Card and David French’s quintet and expands it into a new octet, a new venture by an already-established local bandleader. “Harley is a great example of a musician who has established himself clearly on the local scene, but who is striking out and taking a bit of an artistic risk by writing music for an ensemble a bit outside of his comfort zone,” says Grossman. “That’s exactly the type of thing we’re hoping to support.”

Grossman notes that the other three projects similarly represent different facets of the festival’s mandate: Heavyweights, for the ensemble’s emphasis on community outreach, Farrugia and Fram for their partnership between local and international musicians, and Bitches Brew for bringing together very different artists in a meaningful way. “The Bitches Brew sessions is such a unique event; it really resonated with the panel,” he explains. “The four musicians brought together there – Aline Homzy, Anh Phung, Emma Smith and Magdelys Savigne – really do come from four very different traditions. It will be neat to see how that all comes together.”

The festival this year also seems to showcase a wide range of venues (from the CMC to Lula Lounge), as well as artists of many different ages and career paths – a move that for Grossman was purposeful.

“I think part of it is the recognition that artists at any stage of their careers are able to take on special projects,” he says. “That’s what makes the best artists the best artists: they’re always trying new things. So there’s no [age] criteria for applying, other than that we’re looking to support local musicians who are making a significant contribution to the local jazz community.”

Moving forward as full-time artistic director, Grossman already has ideas about where the Discovery Series will head, and how it will grow alongside the main festival each year.

“A couple of years ago, a panelist said, ‘wouldn’t it be great if these were projects that were not only set apart in jazz, but also [connected with] broader communities in the city,’” he says. “There’s no way to mandate something like that – what would that thing be? – but [reaching beyond jazz into other communities] is a part of the application form now, and I’m excited to see how people interpret that, moving forward.”

More actively, Grossman plans on building stronger ties between the featured projects and the festival itself.

“Right now, there’s no direct relationship between support in this series and performing at the jazz festival,” he says. “I don’t know what [that would look like], but I want to explore that a little bit more. I want to create stronger relationships.”

It’s safe to say that the series will continue to develop in the future – and that in the meantime, with these four projects lined up for the spring, it’s off to a good start.

The 2018 TD Discovery Series opens on March 1, with a presentation of Harley Card’s Sunset Ensemble at Lula Lounge, Toronto.

“Almost Unplugged,” Soundstreams’ latest Ear Candy concert on February 1 at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Cabaret, was an experience in contrasts. Two very different violinists –  Andréa Tyniec and Jesse Zubot – took the stage to present their own mini-concerts, then came together at the end in a structured improvisation.

First up was Andréa Tyniec, a passionate performer raised in Montreal and currently pursuing an international career both as a soloist and a collaborator in dance and theatre. Her set featured two works by Canadian composers – Love Song for MAD by Terri Hron and Stand Still by Michael Oesterle – and began with a 1923 composition by Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist, composer and conductor who was regarded as “the King of the Violin” in his day. Tyniec performed the Prelude of his Sonata No. 2 with agility and virtuosity, moving around the sixteenth-note passages with ease. Direct quotations from one of Bach’s partitas appeared throughout. Tyniec is one of the fortunate violinists in Canada to be loaned a violin from the Musical Instrument Bank of the Canada Council for the Arts, so we were treated to sounds played on the 1689 Baumgartner Stradivari violin.

The Ysaÿe composition ended up serving as a link to Hron’s 2013 composition, created in collaboration with Tyniec. Hron asked Tyniec to record something so she would have the violin sound in her ear as she composed, and Ysaÿe’s composition was the one chosen.  Hron states that the piece became a key element in her compositional decision-making. Love Song for MAD is part of Hron’s Sharp Splinter cycle, a project dedicated to an exploration of her family archive of letters, audio cassettes and films. These were documents made by her parents and grandparents, particularly during the time they were separated by the Iron Curtain. The four-movement composition is scored for audio playback and solo violin and features the sound of a typewriter along with excerpts of conversations between her sister Madelaine Hron and their parents. Tyniec’s solo performance ended with Oesterle’s four-movement Stand Still (2011), which was full of fast rhythmical and repetitive patterns that created intense pulsations of sound.

Jesse Zubot and his violin have an intense connection, and are like an extension of one another. Added to that mix was a series of foot pedals controlling an array of effects that Zubot danced his way around. The end result was something akin to “violin-plus-plus” – and that’s not a criticism at all. In fact, the sonic world that Zubot created was mesmerizing and fascinating – an endlessly-changing kaleidoscope of colour, with the violin sound almost fading into the background at times. Having only heard him live as a member of Tanya Tagaq’s band, this gave me a chance to listen with focused attention for each new twist and turn of his imagination as he navigated his way through one seamless improvisation that never wandered. At several points he moved his bow so rapidly across the strings that the bow became a blur, creating a fluttering sound somewhat like the movement of a hummingbird’s wings.

Zubot grew up studying classical music but has diversified over the years to explore multiple forms. He produced Tagaq’s Polaris Prize-winning Animism album and her 2016 shortlisted follow-up Retribution. Improvisation is his great love and passion, which was so evident onstage. The concert ended with a structured improvisation that Zubot created for himself and Tyniec to play, titled Collab. Just before they began, Zubot quipped that he hoped he didn’t get lost in one of the sections; however, to my ears, everything flowed with ease as they moved between scored material, at times in unison, and improvisational material. It was a most satisfying way to end the evening, with two extraordinary and distinctive violinists coming together to create a flurry of acoustic sound on two unplugged violins.

Soundstreams presented “Almost Unplugged,” featuring violinists Andréa Tyniec and Jesse Zubot, on February 1 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

On Friday, January 26, singers Chelsey Bennett and Joanna Majoko performed with their respective bands as part of Burdock’s Piano Fest, now in its third year. The premise of Piano Fest – procure a high-quality grand piano for the week, book piano-centric acts in complementary double bills – is fairly simple, but it has provided a welcome outlet for musicians during a month, following the eggnog-soaked fever dream of December, that is typically light on festival programming. It has also, judging by the packed house on the 26th, become a prime destination for live-music patrons, although the credit must, of course, be shared with Bennett and Majoko, both of whom perform regularly in Toronto and beyond.

Bennett – who is also a pianist, and played on the baby grand for the duration of her set – performed first, joined by keyboardist Darryl Joseph-Dennie, bassist Peter Eratostene and drummer Julian Clarke. Her show began with a looped, a cappella introduction to a bluesy, funky 4/4 piece, rounded out by solos from all four members of the band. The second song was “Don’t Use Your Eyes,” a minor-key, backbeat-focused original that evoked Jill Scott, both melodically and rhythmically, and was followed by “Missed Connections,” a song about the wistful aftermath of chance encounters, featuring an athletic solo from Joseph-Dennie.

Bennett is a natural, engaging storyteller, and her easy affinity with the crowd served her well in the intimate setting of Burdock’s Music Hall. This affinity was used to full effect in “My Place,” a 12/8 original dedicated to the warmth and comfort of the urban apartment, which Bennett performed alone, accompanying herself on acoustic piano. It was fitting that a song about the relationship between an individual and her environment was a solo performance – and it resulted in one of the most compelling moments of the evening, as the extra space gave Bennett the opportunity to showcase her dynamic range as both a singer and pianist. Rounding out her set was the original “No End,” a 6/8 gospel-tinged number about a shared sense of limitless possibility within a romantic relationship. The fact – which Bennett shared with the appreciative audience in another funny introduction – that the particular relationship that inspired the song ended soon after it was written, and that the song itself served as the last song of her set, only added to its charm.

Taking the stage with guitarist Andrew Marzotto, pianist Ewen Farncombe, bassist Mark Godfrey and drummer Jon Foster, Joanna Majoko began her set with an arrangement of the jazz standard “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Bennett and Majoko share some musical similarities – but where Bennett sings R&B and neo-soul, Majoko sings modern vocal jazz with R&B and neo-soul influences, with an emphasis on harmony, individual soloing, and engaging rhythmic interplay between band members. All of these elements were used to full effect on “I Hear Sounds of Africa Calling,” a 6/8 Majoko original that featured a strong piano solo from Farncombe, and “These Nights,” an original ballad, sung by Majoko with a plain, delicate vocal quality that showcased the range and accuracy of her voice.

Majoko played the caxixi – a basket shaker used widely in Brazilian music – throughout much of her set, but never quite as impressively as in her wordless arrangement of Miles Davis’ “Nardis,” in which she superimposed a consistent 3-beat figure on the 4/4 song while singing both the melody and a scat solo. Herbie Hancock’s “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” saw Farncombe taking another confident solo and Foster doing some of his strongest work of the evening, and the original “You Are Bold,” which began with a beautiful keyboard and voice introduction, gave Marzotto the space to stretch out on an excellent guitar solo.

“Where You Are,” a funky, swung-sixteenths original, served as the evening’s penultimate song, and showcased Godfrey’s electric bass skills, both as a thoughtful soloist and as a rock-solid timekeeper (he held down the low end on upright, for the majority of the evening). It should be noted that the sonic balance of Majoko’s set was really top-notch, a testament not only to the maturity of Majoko and her band, but also to Burdock and its consistently outstanding front-of-house sound. Finally, Bennett returned to the stage to join Majoko for Roy Hargrove’s “Forget Regret,” which featured both singers sharing the melody and trading scat solos over the rhythm section’s confident playing, eliciting enthusiastic applause and bringing a joyful night of music-making to a close.

Burdock presented Chelsea Bennett and Joanna Majoko in a double bill as part of its third annual Piano Fest, on Friday, January 26, 2018.

Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer, and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached through his website, on Instagram and on Twitter.

Immigration and the status of refugees continues to be a global issue. Whether through the discourse and dissent on the fate of “Dreamers” on our own continent or the mass displacement of tens of thousands due to climate change, war and societal unrest around the globe, refugee-related concerns continue to receive increasing attention from media, politicians and the public as a whole.

A fundamental element of immigration debates, particularly in North America, centres on how our individual and massed views of outliers – our understanding of the foreigner – are often based on incorrect and stereotypical perceptions of how those different than ourselves will impact the social structures around us. We hear how immigrants will “steal jobs,” infiltrate our cities, poison the minds of our youths with “radical agendas,” and pose a threat to the very fabric of a democratic society which we have treasured since the Great Philosophers.

These arguments, presented everywhere from internationally-televised political speeches to private dinnertime conversations, are not new; many of these anti-immigration rationales have been used, in some form, for centuries. Running January 18 to 23, 2018 in Toronto, Safe Haven – Tafelmusik’s latest multimedia concert and the brainchild of bassist Alison Mackay – countered these age-old prejudices, exploring the overwhelmingly positive influence of refugee populations on their adopted cultures over the past four centuries. Working with guest performers Maryem Tollar (narration/vocals), Diely Mori Tounkara (kora) and Naghmeh Farahmand (percussion) to create a unified multimedia presentation incorporating music, words and projected images, Tafelmusik revealed how several significant developments in the Baroque era were the result of immigrant-based cultural collaborations.

Beginning with religious refugees from France fleeing Louis XIV’s revoking of the Edict of Nantes, Safe Haven first focused on the influence of the Huguenots, French Calvinist Protestants, on the rest of Europe. These refugees were welcomed by many, but others were concerned about the influx of these strange people, citing their religious beliefs, strange language and unusual headdresses as reasons why the entry of Huguenots should be prevented.

Weaving a thread through the music of Vivaldi, Lully, Goudimel and Purcell, we saw the influence of the French carried to Italy and England, intellectual exchanges resulting in the dissemination of Lully’s operas and suites, and the adaptation of these dance forms by Italian composers. By highlighting the influence of the French on German musicians, particularly through the introduction of the oboe (hautbois), we learned why J.S. Bach was so enamoured with the instrument and its rich, novel sound. Bach also utilized French suite forms in his compositions, writing works of astounding complexity and inventiveness and arguably stretching the style to its limit through works such as the Six Suites for solo cello.

Another significant Huguenot emigré featured in Safe Haven was the Amsterdam-based publisher Éstienne Roger. Beginning his trade by producing grammars and dictionaries, Roger started engraving music in 1696; by 1722 Roger had published over 500 editions of works by composers like Corelli, Albinoni and Vivaldi – a musical superconnector whose craft resulted in widespread distribution of these composers’ works.

Other notable religio-political conflicts which resulted in social diasporas and subsequent musical developments include the 17th-century expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands and Poland, as well as the outlawing of Catholicism in England by Elizabeth I. Poland, with its Warsaw Federation Act guaranteeing freedom of worship to all, became a cultural melting pot, a contact hub for Jews, Catholics and Roma that influenced numerous composers – including Telemann, who transcribed a number of Roma melodies and later used them in his orchestral compositions.

From a musical perspective, the standard of Tafelmusik’s performance was particularly impressive, especially given the changing stylistic elements throughout. Placing concerti by Vivaldi and Corelli cheek-to-cheek with a Lully suite or Bach oboe obbligato cantata movement requires immediate yet subtle changes in approach, and the orchestra’s fluency and expertise in all styles was on full display. The blended use of smaller chamber works and larger concerti to highlight instruments and their combinations was very effective: Elisa Citterio’s Winter solos glittered; Charlotte Nediger’s Sweelinck was subtle and sublime; and Marco Cera’s oboe lines sung in Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata 156.

One performer that cannot go unmentioned is kora player Diely Mori Tounkara, a native of Mali and resident of Montreal. Tounkara’s virtuosity and musicality added another dimension to this performance, most notably with his first solo, mesmerizing everyone in Jeanne Lamon Hall with his total immersion in the music and his instrument. The kora, a plucked instrument that resembles an upright lute (it’s actually a hide-covered calabash with a neck and 21 strings) flourished within the Mali bardic tradition, and its inclusion in Safe Haven presented a fascinating cross-cultural collaboration that was likely a new and novel sound experience for many in the audience.

A highly effective and tightly-woven tapestry of words, music and art, Safe Haven used all three forms of media in such a way that the entirety was far greater than the sum of the individual parts. Removing one component would have caused the whole to unravel, like the pulling of a thread: without the words, the musical selections would be decontextualized, disconnected, and discombobulating; without the music, we would have a dramatic lecture; without the images, another entire layer of contextualization and visual engagement would be lost. It is new and innovative presentations such as Safe Haven that help us appreciate what a wonderful culture and community we live in – one where creative, experimental and profound concepts and ideas can be realized onstage, to the benefit of all.

Tafelmusik presented Safe Haven January 18 to 23, 2018 at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre and Toronto Centre for the Arts, Toronto.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist.

From the earliest days of Western musical civilization to the present, Notre-Dame de Paris has played a prominent and pivotal role in many of music’s finest moments and housed some of its most brilliant minds. In the 13th century, Pérotin le Grand, one of the Medieval era’s most respected and influential composers, developed the organum, the first exploration of polyphony in European church music. Through his organa, Pérotin pioneered an entirely new style of music, expanding previously monophonic chants (single lines sung in unison, such as Gregorian chant) into two-, three-, and four-part compositions, thereby paving the way for choral music as we understand it today.

In 1900, more than six centuries after Pérotin le Grand, Louis Vierne was appointed principal organist at Notre-Dame de Paris. By this time the tradition of excellence in church music at Notre-Dame was firmly established, continuously developing and thriving, despite changing social conditions and political unrest. Nearly blind from birth due to congenital cataracts, Vierne studied with César Franck and was assistant to Charles-Marie Widor before obtaining the highly-regarded and equally highly sought-after organist post at Notre-Dame. (To this day, the position of titulaires des grandes orgues is considered one of the most prestigious in France.)

Vierne maintained this high standard, playing hundreds of organ recitals and inspiring generations of future composers and organists through his concert and service playing, powerful and skillful improvisations, and extraordinarily emotive compositions. Vierne was so closely connected to Notre-Dame that he passed away during what was to be his last recital, his 1750th, suffering either a stroke or heart attack on the bench of the great Cavaillé-Coll organ in his beloved church.

Upon entering Notre-Dame de Paris and hearing the organ for the first time, the majesty and grandeur are overwhelming. The enormity of space and sound, working together in perfect synchronicity, produce an unparalleled and profound effect. On January 19 in Toronto, the Choir of St. James Cathedral, led by director of music Robert Busiakiewicz and organist David Briggs (former artist-in-residence at St. James), sought to recreate this powerful atmosphere with their concert The Splendour of Notre Dame, featuring music by composer-improvisers connected with Notre-Dame in the 20th and 21st centuries: Louis Vierne, Pierre Cochereau, Maurice Duruflé and Yves Castagnet.

The first work of the program, Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, Op. 16, is a personal favourite. Written the year before his appointment to Notre-Dame, this piece opened the concert in an extraordinarily powerful way: majestic, imposing, dissonant C-sharp minor played on full organ, answered antiphonally by the choir. Originally composed for two organs and played by two organists (the Grand-Orgue and the Orgue de Choeur), Briggs masterfully adapted the score for solo performance on St. James’s pipe organ, making the necessarily rapid adjustments seamless throughout. The Cathedral choir, although comprising only 18 voices, held their own against Vierne’s weighty writing, maintaining their presence, balance and impressive tuning, even with the Trompette en-chamade blaring from the West end of the building!

One of the finest performers on the international pipe organ scene today, David Briggs followed the Vierne Messe with his own transcription of Variations sur ‘Alouette, Gentille Alouette’ by famed organist and improviser Pierre Cochereau, organist of Notre-Dame from 1955-1984. Cochereau’s improvisations, renowned for their innovation, technical challenges and sheer complexity, are a nightmare for any transcriber – by his own estimation, Briggs spent “about six months, at an average pace of 4 hours to transcribe one minute of music” – and the Cochereau Variations were well over 10 minutes in duration! A piece of staggering complexity, the Variations were astounding in every way: the thought that Cochereau could compose, let alone improvise such a work – and that Briggs had the patience and determination to transcribe it – lent the performance an even higher degree of impressiveness.

Although never titulaire at Notre-Dame (he held an identical post at the nearby Saint-Étienne-du-Mont), Maurice Duruflé was an influential member of the Paris organ scene, an established composer, performer, and teacher whose pupils included Pierre Cocherau. A severely self-critical composer who continually edited his works (there are only 12 published with opus numbers), Duruflé’s Quatre Motets sur des thèmes grégoriens, op. 10 are miniature gems, and the St. James Cathedral Choir shone in their interpretations of these works. As with the Vierne Messe, the choir’s intonation, dynamic contrasts and phrasing were masterfully executed, and Busiakiewicz’s choices of slightly quicker tempi helped compensate for the Cathedral’s relatively dry acoustic; dry, at least, in comparison to the great churches of Paris!

The evening’s joyful exploration of Notre-Dame’s 20th-century choir and organ music came to a rousing conclusion with the performance of Yves Castagnet’s Messe Salve Regina, based on and including excerpts from the great 11th-century Gregorian chant. Castagnet is the current Organist of the Orgue de Choeur at Notre-Dame where, since his appointment in 1988, he accompanies daily masses and plays choral accompaniments; he is also a gifted composer, as his Messe demonstrated! Demanding a great variety of timbres, textures and sonorities from both organ and choir, Castagnet’s love of Notre-Dame, its instruments and its choirs shines through his music, as both organ and choir play equal roles in the declamation and interpretation of the traditional Latin Mass texts.

Clearly demanding and intricate but never superficial or indulgent, the Messe Salve Regina was a splendid way to conclude a concert that did exactly what it promised to do: bring the splendour of Notre-Dame and its inimitable traditions and musical pedigree to Toronto. For a little while, it felt as though we too could turn around and savour the stunning rose windows of that great gothic structure.

The Cathedral Church of St. James presented “The Splendour of Notre Dame” on January 19, 2018 in Toronto.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist.