One of the oddities of 17 years of seeing The WholeNote safely to bed is a chronic state of never knowing quite what month it is. This may seem odd to the reader, given that the backbone of what we do month in and month out is to break the world of music down into its constituent daily instances. If anyone should know what day it is, you’d think it would be someone who spends half their working life compiling calendars of events.
But therein lies the problem: on June 20, for example, the focus of my work was sifting through concert listings covering the period July 1 to September 7, not just in our usual “GTA” and “Beyond GTA” contexts but over the whole vast canvas of Ontario and beyond, following the music as it runs with the summer sun into every imaginable corner of the region, indoor and out, urban and rural. And every so often I would find myself so taken with the idea of some concert in, say, Stratford in mid-August that I would in my mind’s eye be a month or so further into the future than I am.
No time of the year is this time warp more disconcerting than in the preparation of this summer double issue. Imagine the slight chill, dear reader, on finding myself reading on June 20, the longest day of the year, the very last listing in our GTA section, for a concert in the Summer Music in the Garden series at the foot of Spadina Avenue, stating that the concert will be shorter than normal “due to the early sunset.”
Discombobulating as all this is, I can tell you that its obverse is far worse — namely the number of times in a typical year that I find myself realizing that I have only just missed some great concert, the night before, because I thought it was long gone, having encountered it first a whole month previously, sifting through the listings, waiting to put The WholeNote to bed. “Should have read the blasted magazine,” I grumble to myself, but often I don’t because the one I am “reading” is the one that you, dear reader, will read not this time round but the next.
As I write this, my excuse for July’s concerts vanishing without a trace from my personal concert going calendar is somewhat different. It is June 26 as I write, somewhere high over the Atlantic, about to arc south of Lisbon and then Algiers, to the horn of Africa, and then on again, on one of those “maybe too late” journeys that each of us takes once or twice in a lifetime.
And so it is that instead of saying at this point, as I usually would, that I hope we cross paths during this summer, I say, instead, I hope to see you sometime on its other side, a season of earlier sunsets than this one promises to be.
And a nod to The WholeNote team for getting this magazine safely to bed in my absence, as your reading this proves they have done.
—David Perlman, publisher@thewholenote.com
