Editor's Opener

When boards go overboard, and some hopefully happier tales

Speaking for myself, in a world where so much news is competing for my eyeballs and aching ears all the time, my capacity for enjoying granularity or nuance in stories is at an all time low – as I dare say it is for “all of you out there in vacuumland” as Allan McFee (remember Allan McFee?) used to call us on his show. It was called “Eclectic Circus” and ran on CBC Radio (remember radio?) for 20 years from 1965 to 1985.

I only had the pleasure of his company for ten of his 20 years. I found him on my radio dial (remember radios?) right after I arrived in town in 1975 and he became a constant companion for a good long while, I remember.

I remember my radio too. It cost me $8.88 and I bought it on my third day in Canada, at Honest Ed’s (remember Ed?). I also remember the exact price because “88 cent sale” was the Honest Ed’s bargain-hunter gimmick of the week.

Everything on sale was 88c or a variation of the theme: three UNBREAKABLE! enameled 9.5” dinner plates (white on the inside, blue underneath) for 88 cents; three mugs and glasses (not unbreakable); three knife-fork-and-spoon sets; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

At first I thought the three-thing was weird, but I very quickly came to like it because of how comfortable it made me feel – as though I had already lived here for long enough to have broken or lost one of every set of cutlery or crockery I owned.

As you know, quartets, not trios, are the most stable formation for chamber ensembles, playing bridge, water glasses etc. So if someone in your quartet moves on or dies, you immediately go out and replace them. Unless you are the Amadeus String Quartet who, when that happened with one of their founding members, disbanded instead, thereby becoming legendary.

But where was I? Honest Ed’s … radio … Allan McFee … vacuumland ... Ah yes! Short attention span. In today’s world where thousands of stories are waiting to suction our eyeballs, there is no time for nuance. A story either lands heads or tails and it’s done. We move on.

Here’s an example: 15 months ago when the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony Orchestra (KWSO) declared bankruptcy, all the headlines said the same thing, so that was the end of that. Too bad. File it under bad news and move on. Except the musicians in the orchestra refused to do that.

And now there’s a whole new set of headlines: KSWO bounces back! or KSWO returns! or KSWO returns from bankruptcy! And so we vacuumlanders file the story under good news instead, right next to Kitchener Waterloo Chamber Music Society celebrates their 50th anniversary season. Fifty years! That’s even older than my radio.

Ok, then, what should a nuanced, coin-on-edge story headline about the KSO say instead? Maybe this: Ontario Superior Court Judge Rules that KWSO bankruptcy can be annulled.

Which means what exactly?

“It’s as if the bankruptcy never happened,” explains Bill Poole, the new chair of the KWSO board. “Our incorporation documents and our charitable registration number exist, and so we’re ready to start business again as if nothing has happened. With the added benefit that we have no debt at this point.”

Let me be very clear, I am not knocking Bill Poole. He’s one of the good guys in what’s happening now, to undo last year’s debacle where the bankruptcy announcement took place only days before rehearsals were due to start, and after accepting season subscribers’ money (and fees for enrollment in the Symphony’s Youth Orchestra) past the point when the decision to declare bankruptcy must surely already have been known.

Yes, the bankruptcy annulment is very very good news; as anyone who has ever applied for charitable status can tell you, starting from scratch is tough. And it’s good news that the new board has made a start in rebuilding trust with the orchestra’s major donors and local supporters. And with the musicians of the KWSO (who are the real heroes of this past year in terms of keeping the brand alive by keeping the music going, however and wherever they could).

But organizational good news is not inevitably musical good news. Concerts between now and next summer will be sporadic (like the two announced for this fall), and are taking place in the “intimate” surrounds of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church (450 seats) not in Kitchener’s Centre in the Square (1800 seats) – the orchestra’s home for the last 44 years.

“We would all do well to remember,” one community member told me “that Centre in the Square would not likely have come into existence 44 years ago, were it not for the rock-solid existence of the KWSO and its sister organization – the then Kitchener Waterloo Philharmonic Choir [now the Grand Philharmonic]. In fact the federal grant that laid the foundation for the Centre in the Square was specifically predicated on the Centre becoming a permanent home for the KWS.”

“It is also worth pointing out that the Centre in the Square was not a major creditor under the terms of the annulment— the subscribers and the players are the two major creditors. The Centre was paid its rent right up to the collapse. But curiously there has, so far been no response, encouraging or otherwise, to the bankruptcy annulment announcement from management at the Centre, or from the politicians on Kitchener City Council (who are the Centre’s actual landlords), or from the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge Regional Council, the ultimate political bosses in the Orchestra’s (and the Centre’s) catchment area.”

Going into 2025, it will be the musicians still calling the shots as they heroically did when the organization went AWOL. And that’s good news. It has, after all, been their livelihoods that have taken, and continue to take, the greatest hit. But the new board is onside, the organization is intact, and public and largely local sponsorship support are too. All of which is good news, as far as it goes.

But for those of you out in vacuumland who still like a shot of nuance in your news, stay tuned! The coin is still balanced on its edge.

Hopefully happier?

I’m not really sure why I injected that “hopefully happier” phrase into this Opener’s title, to tell the truth. Except that New Year’s messages are supposed to be wishful, aren’t they? Especially after an “annus horribilis” as the Queen on the front of the coin once called one particularly lamentable Old Year as it slunk away. Optimism, however cautious, is every eve-of-new-year editorialist’s patriotic duty.

In the case of the KWSO the happier tale seems to be well under way to being written, fingers crossed, now that the board that went overboard is gone. So in that one instance, our wish for them is relatively easy. May the New Year bring even happier headlines, much more music, and continued strength to the musicians’ cause.

And who knows? Perhaps the emerging KWSO story can be an object lesson for others in the arts when their organizational and artistic priorities are no longer in tune. (We’ll have more to say about that in the next issue.)

Grains of hope

But I am finding it very difficult to project that one little good-news-so-far story onto any larger canvas, whether it be local, regional, national or global. Because what lies ahead looks even more foreboding than the year about to drop.

When the future of the planet feels like a coin toss it’s a scary thought that the best hope to wish for is that things stay on edge. So instead, I wish for all of us the resolve to gather grains of hope wherever we find them. And I believe that one way of doing that is to gather in the name of music.

There are thousands of reasons, all around, to lapse into helplessness or paralyzing cynicism right now. And the truly terrifying thing is that it doesn’t take a thousand reasons to trigger that withdrawal into despair. One can be enough.

So to the music makers, and all the people who support you, I wish for you the resolve to carry on doing what you do. So we can have the nourishment to continue doing what we do.

And to you, reader, think of every listing in this magazine as a potential crumb of consolation – the opportunity to congregate for any and all reasons from the sacred to the just plain silly. Find some peacehowever you can. And thanks for reading.

Carrying on is what, at our best, we all do best. Viva la musica.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

Renewals, Urban(e) and otherwise

For once I had this Opener carefully planned. It was going to be called Sankofa – at the crossroads. But, something came up just yesterday (September 25) – the announcement of profound organizational change at Toronto Consort, one of Toronto’s flagship musical presenters. So now I have something extra to talk about.

Turning Points En Route

The first turning point in The WholeNote’s 29-year-plus journey was when a column originally called Classical Heaven on $100 a month, in a scrappy neighbourhood newspaper called The Kensington Market DRUM, outgrew its host, So we took the plunge and spun it off as a separate publication in September 1995. We called it Pulse.

“We” were Allan Pulker, who had come up with the idea of the Classical column in the DRUM in the first place. I had helped start the Kensington Market DRUM eight years earlier and was its editor. Allan, a classical flute player himself, knew his way around the classical music community. I had been in the DRUM editorial trenches since it was founded, so I had a bit of an idea about mistakes to avoid.

The way “Classical Heaven” worked in the DRUM, Allan would gather together all the relevant listings he could lay hands on, for events within a “reasonable distance” of Kensington Market. (I think we defined “reasonable” as a ten-minute bike ride.) All those listings would get published and he would then make his “picks” (within the $100 budget) and write about why he had chosen them. Even within our “ten minute bike-ride” radius we were getting way too many listings for the amount of space the DRUM could afford.

We modelled Pulse physically on the first issue of the DRUM, eight years earlier – a forward-fold four-page newsprint tabloid, for the print nerds among you. We also adopted the DRUM’s distribution model – controlled circulation (i.e. free to the reader), with no more than 20 copies to any distribution point. And we agreed that we would never charge musicians and concert presenters to be in the listings because spreading the word about their work was the whole reason for the magazine to exist.

Our first print bill (4,000 copies) was $150, and we more than covered it on ad sales!

Turning point number two was the kind of sideways thing you think is a disaster, but thank your stars for later on. It was early 1997 and Pulse was sailing along quite nicely. Circulation was up to 12,000 copies and the magazine (still black and white but no longer tabloid) was up to 24 pages. Then the letter from the big law firm: Tower Records, a big US chain had just arrived in town and was flexing its muscles. “Pulse” we were informed by Big Law, was Tower Records’ trademark for their in-house music magazine. We were forthwith to cease and desist.

First instinct was to fight. Good publicity, big US bully picking on the little guy, and all that. A very wise lawyer friend explained: “if you have a trademark you have to defend it or lose it. Just tell them you need time to change the name and they will be only too happy to oblige.”

So we did, with our TMFKAP cover getting a bunch of smiles while we asked readers to help find a new name. Why “WholeNote”? Some obvious reasons, content-wise. But one reason that really helped cement the change. The name, WholeNote, is very hard to hear the first time round. “HomeNotes?” So you get to repeat it, and even spell it. And then people get it. And don’t forget it.

Next defining moment, I’d have to say, came in the summer of 2001, when we launched DISCoveries. “CD Reviews with a difference” the tagline said. Remember CDs? 11,183 reviews later, despite being told that CDs, like print, are dead, we are still receiving around 160 every print cycle, by mail no less, for consideration for review. Remember mail? And the artists reviewed don’t ask for links to online reviews, even though we are online. They want pdfs to show that the review was in print. Go figure.

More to the point, our DISCoveries section brought dozens of new writers, and dear friends, into play for us – and a tranche of readers as passionate about recorded music as our most fervent concertgoing readers are about the editorial coverage we give to the live events we list.

April 2020 needs no explanation as to why it was a turning point. Maybe just an explanation as to why we decided to keep going through those terrible two and a half years, when live listings dried up entirely, and we went through one false start after another, conjuring phantom turning points as we went. “We’re all in the same boat together” was a favourite rallying cry back then, remember? More often than not from people whose livelihoods were relatively unimpaired. “More like ‘we’re all in the same storm’” one arts worker colleague dourly said.

And so here we are at another turning point. Entering our 30th year of operations, with hopes as high as in the euphoric early years when we snipped our classical music listings out of the DRUM to set sail on their own, creating and publishing information that over the years has helped float a lot of artistic boats – craft of all sizes. And here’s the funny thing. Right now, The WholeNote is in the position the DRUM was in 29 years ago.

The world of music we need to continue to document, as a community good, is far more diverse and extensive than can be accommodated within the confines of the space The WholeNote can afford.

So, here we are, just about ready to take the plunge!

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

Listening Fresh

I have had a lot of fun going to live musical events these past four weeks – so much so that I will spare readers my periodic rant about post-pandemic supply chain woes, and the perilous state of the arts, and society in general, when workers, in the arts and otherwise, struggle to keep roofs over their heads, both for work and sleep.

What’s In a Word?

I remember a while back, during Wimbledon maybe, a well-known violinist on the local scene (concertmaster for more than one orchestra) going on a Facebook rant about tennis, specifically the scoring system. His complaint was not about the way the scoring works – first to four points wins you a game (except you have to win by two points); first to six games wins you a set (except you have to win by two games); and a match is typically “best of three sets”, except in “major” tournaments, when the men play “best-of-five-set” matches, which can consequently end up running longer than Lohengrin.