During my third, or maybe fourth, phone call to his home in Hamilton, as I was piecing this story together, Larry Paikin said he was starting to get a bit worried that he’s going to be the subject of the story. I promised him that wasn’t the case, but, hey, every story has to start somewhere, and the easiest place to start this one seems to be shortly after Larry, starting third year at Western, spotted the “Freshette Beanie” atop the head of a “tall Jewish girl” named Marina Sibulash.
Granted, it wasn’t pure happenstance; he had been alerted to the impending arrival of the incoming Marnie by a fraternity brother who had grown up across the street from her in Toronto. But in any case, he says, they were dating by the end of the first week of class – a fine example of the “if you see what you want, go for it. If you don’t see what you want, ask for it!” that pervades this story.
Says Larry: “When Marnie and I moved to Hamilton from London, ON (UWO), the Hamilton Y had an adult education program at night, so we just asked if they could add a music appreciation course to their adult ed series, and the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra provided Victor DiBello. His classes were so interesting – the insider’s view of the works he covered as well as an overview of how the HPO operated – that we both subsequently volunteered with the orchestra.”
“Volunteered” is a bit of an understatement. Larry joined the board in his early 20s; Marnie joined the Women’s Committee, and wrote the newsletter The Philarmonotes. Later, both would serve as President of the Board of directors - Larry from 1963 to 1965, and Marnie from 1969 to 1971. It was then that they developed a close working relationship with the HPO’s first executive director, Betty Webster. And it was during that period of time that “The Hamilton Plan,” the focus of this story, was hatched.
Before I let Larry off the hook for (most of) the rest of this story, one thing he said really stuck with me, when I asked if there was something in particular that the HPO had done that made them get involved beyond that first class at the Y. His reply: “They were excellent at communicating what they needed!”
What they needed
The HPO needed to change in response to changes in Hamilton’s cultural landscape. The HPO had recently transitioned from what one musician described as “the world’s finest community orchestra” to a professional orchestra needing a) to find a permanent home; b) to find a way to attract high calibre, professional musicians willing to come to Hamilton, even though the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and a very lucrative commercial music scene were just down the highway; and
c) to continue to attract younger people to get involved with orchestral and classical music.
Megan Norse, current strategic marketing initiatives manager at the HPO, points out that prior to the opening of Hamilton Place (now FirstOntario Concert Hall), in 1973 the HPO had been presenting its season in various local theatres and auditoriums – a powerful tool in making the case for the permanent home that the orchestra needed. And with Betty Webster as Executive Director and Marnie Paikin as the “tactician” on the board, the other two problems were tackled via a model where, as Norse describes it, musicians would be engaged on a “33/33/33” basis: a third of their time as sitting symphony musicians, a third of their time at McMaster University, and the other third in partnership with school boards.
And so “The Plan” was born: small ensembles from each section of the HPO would present concerts throughout the season at schools within a 60-mile radius of Hamilton (Toronto excepted); and then students at all the schools visited this way, would be brought together for a culminating concert with the whole HPO at the end of the year.
“The road to Carnegie Hall… paved with children’s shows!”
The school concerts, the Hamilton Plan brains trust realized, would be easier to implement if there were pre-existing small ensembles (string, brass, woodwind and percussion) already embedded in the orchestra. One of the first of these was the fledgling Canadian Brass, wooed to Hamilton during Marnie Paikin’s tenure as board chair, with the full support of the then head of the Ontario Arts Council Louis Applebaum. Tuba player Chuck Daellenbach, the sole remaining original member of the Canadian Brass reflected on the serendipity of the match.
“What made Hamilton special,” he observed, “was its ability to augment its small core of fulltime musicians, around 20, into a full symphony orchestra of 100 players. Not all of the “sitting orchestra professionals” were as enthusiastic about the school outreach performances, he concedes, but the Canadian Brass saw the opportunity as a gift from the get go. “Hamilton gave us, and would have given others if they had cared to open their eyes, a chance to work together as a group seven days a week,” he says. “For us, we felt a one-hour children’s concert could be treated as a musical laboratory for music choice and, as important, presentation.” Plus, he notes, children are notoriously honest in their feedback; after some concerts, there was a collective sense in the ensemble that after that kind of feedback “Carnegie Hall would be a breeze.”
Their move to taller audiences and bigger halls (Carnegie included), is now history, but “to this day Canadian Brass has people approach them with ‘I saw you at my school in …’ usually in the very early 70s. Marnie and Betty were totally focused on getting instrumentalists into the schools, and for us libraries as well, and even lunchtime restaurants for business people…”
The Hamilton Plan had achieved a 30-mile radius – half its original ambitious goal – by the end of the 80s, before being wound down in the early 90s. Some of the people I spoke to mentioned shifting funding priorities at school boards as a significant factor in the program’s demise. (As a student in the Ontario public school system at that time, I can testify to that.)
But Megan Norse points out that the HPO’s own needs had also changed. Their own professional transition had been successfully made, and the wider social and economic landscape was shifting too. What had made the Hamilton Plan work in the first place was that it had been a clearly communicated ask, in response to a specific social, economic and creative moment. And that moment had passed.
Norse doesn’t see “the Plan” as repeatable for the HPO today, but definitely believes there is value in the core idea for organizations in communities readying themselves now for what Hamilton was ready for then. But not without local knowledge fuelling adjustments. Where I live in Northern Ontario, for example, 60 miles (96 km) doesn’t even get me to the nearest community by road in any direction. And what else, I wonder, would it take, for the Plan to fly again up here?
An Instrument for Every Child.
Meanwhile, 2025 marks 15 years for another remarkable Steeltown initiative whose time had come: the Hamilton Music Collective’s “An Instrument For Every Child.” In 2022, CEO and founder Astrid Hepner gave a talk looking back at that time, as part of the Hamilton Third Wave Learning lecture series and available on AIFEC’s YouTube page. For anyone inspired by this story, it’s my recommendation for “summer listening” – a wonderfully candid perspective on the time, and the collective will, that it took to create and implement the initiative.
In the talk, Astrid remembers: “When you arrive in a new town and you don’t know anyone – as was the case for me when we moved to Hamilton – you try to find ways to connect with your new community and our new home. And for me that connector was music, as it always has been throughout my life.” Enter the Paikins again. At the time of the Hepners’ arrival in Hamilton Larry Paikin was on a committee of music lovers called the Steeltown Friends of Mohawk Music — dedicated to raising funds for the Mohawk College Music Program. “They invited us to their home just after we arrived in Hamilton,” Astrid says, “where we were introduced to Bob Miller, a former Steel executive and chair of this committee who was also a passionate jazz lover….. I knew we were in good company.”
(I can vouch for that. From my own time in Hamilton, I remember Bob Miller right around the time he had agreed to sit as the Hamilton Music Collective’s board chair. I also remember it being just as likely to find him putting out chairs for an audience, or finding water for a musician, or selling tickets at the door.)
HMC didn’t set out to run an educational program – they were actively presenting music and related arts programming, building education into outreach. But as we know from the Hamilton Plan, one thing leads to another when the time is right and you know what to ask for. A pilot at a single school in the so-called “cultural desert” of Hamilton’s North End now has embedded music into the school day of over 9,000 children across the city, along with the low-cost music programming and concerts they started out to do.
The finest of Hamilton traditions.
We lost both Bob Miller and Marnie Paikin in 2023. Having left Hamilton a bit before that, it’s harder for me to imagine the fabric of the music community without them. At some point I asked Larry about a 2024 press release announcing the “Marnie and Larry Paikin Music Initiative.” He explained that her obituary, like Miller’s, had requested donations to AIFEC, leaving it entirely up to HMC and AIFEC to decide how to use the money donated in her name ($45,000 as it turned out.) Coming full circle, HMC and AIFEC chose to collaborate with the HPO, so children learning music through AIFEC could attend HPO concerts and engage with the orchestra’s musicians. Whether these children become musicians themselves or “failed clarinetists” as Larry Paikin jokingly refers to himself, doesn’t matter. All of them are what the arts world needs.
Ultimately, this story is about times when people come together to converse based on a common purpose instead of a common skill set, because it is out of such conversations, in due course, that great plans arise. May your summers be full of conversations like that.
Sophia Perlman grew up bouncing around the jazz, opera, theatre and community arts scene in Toronto. She joined the creative exodus to Hamilton in 2014, and now eagerly awaits the arrival of her WholeNote to Hornepayne, Ontario, where she uses it to armchair-travel, make connections, and inform her Internet video consumption.
