Editor's Opener

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.

By the Dawn's Early Light

Everything I know, for better and for worse, about making a magazine comes from watching my father pack the trunk (“the boot” we called it) of whatever second-hand family second car we were entrusting our lives to on that particular vacation (“holiday” we’d have called it).

“This time we are leaving crack of dawn” dad would say. So there I was, standing shivering in the dawn’s early light, marvelling at dad’s packing prowess – as wave after wave of impossibly large quantities of stuff kept arriving beside the car, somehow finding their way into every nook and cranny of the trunk.

Only an hour later than planned, victory! Dad slams the boot lid down. Well, nothing so satisfying as a slam, actually. More like a muffled “humph” as he stands on tiptoe and bears down till the latch clicks. And turns in triumph, only to see my mother coming out of the front door, dwarfed by the largest suitcase yet.

It’s called explosive silence. With a little staring contest thrown in. “Well you didn’t think I was going to leave my own suitcase behind, did you?” I can still hear Mom say, witheringly quiet, across the many years. I don’t remember what ended up having to be cut to make room. Not any of us four children or the two dogs. So maybe nothing at all.

Just like making a magazine.

Packing to come to Canada in 1975, some 18 years later, was a different story. “Just me and a backpack and a two month bus pass,” is how I used to boast about it to my own children, until they started rolling their eyes. A very full backpack it was, I should add: shoes for every occasion, passport with student visa, complete works of William Shakespeare … three favourite ties. Even a toothbrush. A masterfully stuffed backpack, every nook and cranny of it.

So as this first full post-pandemic season, fuelled by gallons of hope and a dash of denial, roars back to life, and you browse your way through this overstuffed first issue of our 28th season, spare a thought for all the packing and repacking that went into accommodating that last big story that got wheeled out to be added after we thought we were done. (I won’t tell you which one it was.)

Saying I came to Canada with only a backpack is not strictly true, though. I walked into the U. of T. International Student Centre (on St. George St.), some afternoon in late August 1975, dragging my backpack with the broken strap behind me. “Hello, name please?” asked the friendly person at the desk. “Perlman” I said, and started to spell it “P-E-”, but before I even got to R she turned around and shouted to whomever was on the other side of the partition behind the welcome desk, “PERLMAN’S HERE.” And a loud chorus of “woo-hoohs” came back in response. And all of a sudden I remembered the 30 to 40 manilla-wrapped parcels, each with six or seven precious books, that I had mailed to myself care of the ISC in the two months before I left for this new life.

The books we cannot bear to part with reveal us! Even now, 48 years later, if I spot one of them among the many hundreds more on my shelves, and touch it, take it down, turn to a page at random, it is like opening a time capsule.

I dip into the 27-year archive of The WholeNote in a similar way. (All our issues are available on line at kiosk.thewholenote.com.) I skim for the stories I am afraid of forgetting, then find myself lingering in the listings, marvelling: for the legendary artists I have been privileged to hear; for the ones I heard before they became legends; for the music I already liked, for music I never knew I would come to like; concerts I went to for some exalted piece of music I craved like comfort food, and instead came away gobsmacked by the joy of encountering something rich and strange that I would never have found on my own.

May the joy continue.

publisher@thewholenote.com

In the old normal ...

In the old normal, for us as magazine publishers, it used to cost around $1 to print and distribute one copy of an issue this size. In 2022’s post-pandemic pre-dawn, when it’s still too early to see whether the sky is really blue, the cost of printing alone is double that amount. Grim insider joke: if you want to know what the unit cost for printing the next issue of The WholeNote will be, it’ll be posted right above the pumps at your local gas station.

So whereas, in the old normal, faced with a story lineup like the one we had for this issue, we’d have said “damn the torpedoes” and added pages, instead we had to give more than usually careful thought as to which of those stories have the shortest and longest expiry dates, in terms of topicality. And we had to set aside the ones that will be just as fresh a month from now.

Like Karen-Anne Kastner’s coverage of an unusual recent concert, for an invited audience of private music teachers, in a filled-to-capacity Koerner Hall, heralding the release of the long awaited 6th edition of the Royal Conservatory’s Celebration Series. This is a significant ancillary resource for piano repertoire, used for decades by tens of thousands of private music teachers across North America. Yes, there were speeches as well.

And like Gloria Blizzard’s searching write-up of this year’s Toronto Arts Foundation’s Awards, (back live again in its normal venue, the Arcadian Court at Queen and Bay), musing on what the phrase “a seat at the table” means in a context like that.

Both stories are on their way.

In the old normal, appearing first in print was what happened with most WholeNote stories, followed by a leisurely stroll onto the website. Increasingly the reverse is the case, with many stories being served better by appearing digitally first, especially when they incorporate elements that print cannot: video and/or audio links; extended photo galleries and the like. So if you haven’t already done so, consider signing up for our e-letter, HalfTones. You’ll be alerted, and linked to, online stories as they are posted. Signup is bottom right on our homepage at thewholenote.com.

And while you are there, make sure to also check the box to receive our weekly listings update. In the old normal we tied our publication dates predictably to the beginning of calendar months, with a couple of double issues thrown in. For the past two years, with event scheduling increasingly opportunistic or hard to predict, we’ve survived, in part, by reducing our publishing frequency to eight issues a year, with each issue covering roughly six weeks.

Weekly listings updates enable us, and you, to keep up with the volatility of the new normal, with the last minute announcements, date changes, postponements and cancellations. And, by the way, “Weekly listings update” doesn’t mean just events for the coming week. Each update offers an overview of the following six to seven weeks. The print listings in this issue of the magazine are, in fact, a snapshot of last week’s digital listings update; and they will already be out of date by next week! It’s a prime example of a situation where the old normal worked less well, for us and you, than what we’re embarked on now. So check the box. Please.

And finally, in the old normal - for the past 20 years, in fact - The WholeNote happily occupied what now seems like acres of space at 720 Bathurst Street. But with occupancy costs on the same upward trajectory as unit costs and gas prices, that too is about to change. We are already in the process of downsizing incrementally and by the late summer or early fall will hope to be cosily ensconced in more modest quarters, a mere stone’s throw from where, as a column in the Kensington Market DRUM, this magazine came into being 27 years ago.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com