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. 

Renewals, urban and urbane

“Urban renewal,” was a catchphrase here and elsewhere from a few years after WW2 to around 1970, with housing initiatives, public and private, as a major component. It became synonymous in the sixties with the attempted or actual erasure of whole neighbourhoods, and has now graduated to the status of subject of earnest academic debate on topics such as “Public endeavour as a means of urban improvement.” 

With this city, for the first time in decades, getting directly back into the business of building affordable housing, it’s worth taking note of those italics, especially if your own definition of “public endeavour” and “urban improvement” include funding for the arts. The current out-of-control rise in cost of housing and workspace, is the “no-one-to-blame,” velvet glove equivalent of the bulldozers of the ’50s and ’60s. 

Sankofa and the art of social renewal

Very few readers of this magazine will be unaware of recent City of Toronto efforts to rename Yonge-Dundas Square, with many opinions on the subject, and lots of people trying, or refusing, to wrap their minds and tongues around the name proposed as a replacement. Just remember that the SAN- in Sankofa is like the KAM- in Kamala, and you’ll be ok. 

Pronunciation isn’t the main problem here. Observably the loyalists doing the complaining about tampering with the Yonge-Dundas name, were also the chief complainers about how changing “all our sons” to “all of us” in the National anthem was an erasure of “our” history.

The irony is that the Ghanaian saying in which the word sankofa is embedded translates as “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten” i.e. permission for all of us to do that, before it’s too late to pass it on. It’s what you do with it when you have recovered it that counts. Make it food for thought? Or wait till it rots?

The fundamental question is how long will it be before a city like Toronto starts signalling to its people that our street and park names, overwhelmingly reflective of colonial heritage, are not sacrosanct: and that renaming them (when a beautiful and inclusive name is put forward) can be an act of reconciliation? 

Sankofa and the art of time

The upcoming performances of Sankofa: the Soldier’s Tale Retold take Stravinsky’s 1918 work, dripping with relevance in its own time, out of the realm of sacrosanct classical safety. “I believe in this project with all my heart,” says Andrew Burashko, founder of Art of Time Ensemble, “Re-envisioning Stravinsky’s work with a new narrative and staging that speaks directly to one of the most pressing social and political movements of today allows for new ownership, new authorship, and new audiences. It is an important and opportune moment for such creative and radical experimentation.”

The project also embodies Burashko’s philosophy in regard to what art councils like to call “succession planning.” Art of Time announced right from the start of their 2023/24 season that it would be their last, and that Sankofa would be the organization’s final show – not “passing the torch” but using the opportunity to fire up other people’s dreams: poet Titilope Sonuga who has interwoven a new libretto around Stravinsky’s work; director Tawiah M’Carthy; and each of the musicians from The Glenn Gould School who will now have this show in their memory banks as an example of what can happen when the classical “before” is carried into the “beyond.” 

Toronto Consort

By contrast, “passing the torch” is sometimes the right way to go, especially for an ensemble labelling itself as a consort, where the whole is always creatively more than the sum of all its parts. I never knew the ensemble in its early years in a U of T setting, but I relished its work under David Fallis after severing its academic ties. Fallis always wore his learning lightly, relishing the startlingly relevant range of music – from the sacred to the naughty – in the Medieval, Renaissance and Early Baroque music the group explored. He also delighted in collaborative curation – a delight evident in the work of the seven or eight core artistic associates of the Consort who remained after Fallis stepped away in 2017/18 and shepherded the Consort through the COVID years, and the difficult pandemic aftermath. 

Late last year, Consort suspended the latter half of its 2023/24 season to regroup. Mid-September we became aware of an unsigned open letter jointly written by seven members of that 2018-2024 group of associates, indicating that they had stepped away from the Consort and wishing the organization well in its future endeavours. Then came the September 25 announcement, by Andrew Adridge, the Consort’s Executive Director and Heather Turnbull, Board Chair, stating: that countertenor Daniel Taylor, who spearheads the U of T’s Early Music Program, has been appointed General and Artistic Director with Dame Emma Kirkby as Honorary Patron; that the Consort will re-establish close ties with the U of T; that a full 2024/25 season will take place, commencing with a Renaissance program “The Muses Garden” on October 11; and that a new roster of Consort artists and associates is now in place. None of the seven associates who co-authored the open letter is part of that new roster. 

On our cover

We at The WholeNote don’t often turn to abstract or semi-abstract images for our covers. Readers look at a cover and either recognize who’s on it, or best case scenario, are curious enough about the person looking back out at them to want to find out.

But sometimes it’s not the individual but the idea that we need to be reminded of – that the desire to make music, alone or collectively, in private or in public, endures everywhere. It’s always a force. So how do we make it a force for the good?

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

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