And sometimes a little bit of the latter helps to keep the place of the former front and centre in circumstances where society’s attention has every excuse to wander.
There’s a great little example of this noise/music mutual aid society in “Seeing Orange,” our education watch (page 57), where concerned and concerted muttering helped keep music alive in the region’s largest public school board for another year.
There’s also probably a complex variation on the theme that could be braided out, by learnedly contrasting the issue’s three strikingly different “takes” on new music: Ben Stein’s “Choral Scene”(page 26), Wendalyn Bartley’s “In With The New” (page 31) and Austin Clarkson’s reflections on the tightrope between music and noise walked by some of the past century’s seminal composers (page 12).
More straightforward, as the community we serve teeters on the edge of another new season of music making, is the simple observation that they (our region’s music presenters) are in the business of making music, and we are in the business of making a whole bunch of cheerful noise about their music, so that you, dear readers, have one fewer reason for your attentions to wander from the front-and-centre place that the conspicuous bravery of making live music warrants in a civilized society. They’ll do their bit, we’ll do ours, and you, we have no doubt, will continue to do yours.
Mind you, this isn’t the easiest month in Toronto for making noise in the arts media about anything other than film, as TIFF once more takes the town by the scruff of its cultural neck. Happily, our Paul Ennis, with one foot planted squarely in his love of film and the other in musical delight, has found a way for conflicted music lovers to rationalize an annual September movie binge (“Music Lover’s TIFF,” page 10).
So, let the woofing and tweeting begin! And we’ll see you on the other side.
—publisher@thewholenote.com
