Features

It’s amusing to look back at the moment in 2003 when after eight years of ad-hoc existence we incorporated and decided to name the parent company of this magazine Wholenote Media Inc. Prescience or hubris? It’s hard to say. After all, back then the fax machine was at the cutting edge of communications technology, we didn’t have a website, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube didn’t exist, and Bell Canada was seriously contemplating suing for trademark violation anyone who referred to the relatively new phenomenon of the Internet as “the web.”

As wild as the ride has been since then, it’s immensely reassuring to see the re-emergence, out of the madding, digital, multimedia gadget- and platform-driven crowd, of an electronic medium which, if not as old as the hills, certainly predates most of the hyper-kinetic information-dispensing media that compete for the attention of our eyes, ears and app-posable thumbs.

I’m referring of course to the latest incarnation of what used to be good old-fashioned talk radio, where hosts and guests sit and bicker amiably over things they care about – and you and I get to overhear the conversation, while we go about our business, all senses other than our ears, and maybe our minds, undistracted from cooking, or driving or jogging, or whatever else it is that we need to continue doing.

And what, you ask, is this greatest new medium since CBC Radio? Podcasts, of course. And the main point of this story is to tell you that TheWholeNote is now on the podcasting bandwagon and we’d love to have you along for the conversational ride!

Conversations <at> TheWholeNote Podcasts:

All you have to do is find your way to the Conversations <at> TheWholeNote podcast page, where you will not only discover our most recent episodes for your listening pleasure, but will also be able to scroll through audio-only versions of almost three dozen video interviews conducted over the past four seasons.

Who’s on first? Edwin Huizinga:  

The most recent guest in our studio was violinist Edwin Huizinga, who graces the cover of this issue, and who not only brought two violins to the interview but even contrived to play one of them during a wide-ranging half-hour conversation. He spoke of his work as a period violinist with ensembles like Tafelmusik and Cleveland-based Apollo’s Fire. And about his working relationship with California-based steel guitarist William Coulter, with whom he has just recorded an album, Fire and Grace, that doesn’t so much break the boundaries of classical, folk and world music as allow the two players to wander from realm to realm. Other bases touched included Huizinga’s intimate concert series, Stereo Live, co-curated with COC violist Keith Hamm at Campbell House; his involvement with San Francisco-born “Classical Revolution” that seeks to take the music out of its traditional venues; touring Versailles with Opera Atelier; all this and more in a freewheeling chat with an individual for whom clearly “serious” is not a description of one type of music or another but rather a description of the kind of love a listener or player brings to the experience.

Here’s just a taste from the podcast itself:

WholeNote: You do a lot of period playing and a lot of other stuff. Do you have two violins for that?

Edwin Huizinga: Always. Nowadays I just always perform and tour with a double case. At the moment I’m performing about 50 percent on my modern violin and about 50 percent on my Baroque violin. That’s really exciting for me.

WN: The recent recording you did with William Coulter, guitarist – steel string guitarist, is that steel and gut [strings] or steel and… .

EH: That’s steel and steel…in that project, even though we are exploring music from around the world, Baroque music, classical, Celtic, Argentinian, Bulgarian, I’m performing that almost exclusively on my modern violin. The project was sparked in Cleveland of all places; we met because a really great friend and colleague of mine, Jeannette Sorrell, who is the artistic director of Apollo’s Fire, actually suggested that Bill work with me on a project that he was directing in Cleveland with Apollo’s Fire…eventually a YouTube video of me jamming with Mike Marshall was the ticket to Bill, who had not met me yet, understanding that I could break the boundaries of classical music and really get into fiddling and bluegrass…Then this past year we’ve basically dedicated a lot of time together to record this album of all kinds of classical and folk repertoire and it’s coming out in just a couple of weeks.

Ivars Taurins, conductor, Tafelmusik Chamber Choir: this conversation, October 11, 2016, was occasioned by the fact that the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir is celebrating its 35th anniversary, kicking things off with a concert right at the beginning of November (November 2 to 6) that draws on repertoire and composers that have made a mark on the choir over the years. The charm of this kind of chat is that it can range far and wide, as this one did. Why violists make good conductors, if indeed they do; how Taurins’ “Herr Handel,” who conducts Tafelmusik’s renowned annual sing-along Messiah at Massey Hall, came into being (thank you, Ottie Lockey!); the Choir’s and Tafelmusik’s ongoing relationship with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s Kent Nagano; pros and cons of memorization; the undervaluing of choristers (musicians who sing together), especially in a world that gears post-secondary music education towards the idea that success consists of a solo concert career.

Again, just a taste from the podcast:

WholeNote: …We’re going to need to wrap, so coming back to violists is a good way to do it since your final concert is Mozart’s C Minor Mass, which is you and the orchestra fully joined in a work by another great violist.

Ivars Taurins: Yes, exactly – and it’s such an incredible work in terms of a composer who again is looking back, inspired by Bach’s B-Minor Mass and by Handel’s oratorios and counterpoint, so it’s a fascinating work to dive into. I’ve sunk into that work a number of times and it was a great opportunity in this anniversary season to pay tribute to it.

WN: And before that in February you a have program devoted completely to Bach.

IT: Completely…and it explores the choral works, elements of the choral works, that [audiences] don’t know. Again, it’s the tip of the iceberg. We get to hear the great cantatas, we know the great choruses, but of the hundreds of cantatas he did write – well, over a hundred – and the church cycles he composed, there are so many hidden gems….

Guy Fawkes Day Elijahs, with Stephanie Martin and Noel Edison:

We previewed this interview extensively in the October 2016 issue of the print magazine, as two conductors of major choirs, both in their 20th seasons with the choirs in question, compare notes on (entirely coincidental) November 5 Toronto performances of Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Needless to say, there’s far more in the conversation than what found its way into print!

Sondra Radvanovsky: Beyond that, a stroll through the audio archive is a delightful trip down memory lane full of insights and delights (while you wait for the lasagna, or ponder whether, sitting on the 401, it is indeed worth the drive to Acton). Take this snippet from our October 2015 conversation with opera superstar Sondra Radvanovsky in her Caledon home. It was interesting enough at the time, but having heard her triumphant Norma at the COC just last week, it’s just that little bit more interesting, this time around.

WholeNote: …And then I heard you, very memorably in the lobby at Classical 96, when they launched…and what was astounding was this ability, it doesn’t seem to matter what the size of the room is, to do your pianissimo the same way in the Four Seasons as in a room like that…the power is astounding and beautiful and it’s very unusual. I have wished to be able to be in the seat I was in – for the Roberto Devereux it was right in front by the orchestra and I wished I could have, during the really quiet moments, parachuted to the very back of the fifth balcony because I had the sense it would be the same….

Sondra Radvanovsky: Spinning the pianissimi.

WN: Spinning the pianissimi, yes that’s it.

SR: There’s a real technique to singing piano. And I think I learned a lot of that from listening to the greats. Montserrat Caballé. Because you have to always keep the sound moving forward. Because you can sing piano but block off the air and it goes probably about two rows up. And the real trick is in the placement of the voice; what we say, keeping it in the mask right here. Because if you keep it spinning with air it will reach the very back of the hall but still sound just like a filament….

To listen to our podcasts, you have two options: you can listen via a website (streaming), or you can use a podcast app on your phone, tablet or computer to subscribe and have the podcasts delivered to your device as they happen. The WholeNote podcast is available to stream by visiting www.thewholenote.com/podcasts – or on all your favourite podcast services including iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, BluBrry, PocketCasts and more.

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

Let us start our story in the present day in the person of Toronto pianist Mary Kenedi. To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, as well as the 135th anniversary of the birth of Hungary’s pre-eminent 20th-century composer Béla Bartók, she has organized two November concerts titled A Bridge to the Future. The first concert on November 17 is at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, while the second is at the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec on November 29. As for the title, A Bridge to the Future, Kenedi explains that “the title symbolizes the hopefulness of immigrants from Hungary who travelled to a new continent, replacing their country of birth with a new one that offered freedom and democracy.”

She was one of them. And so was I.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution - some call it the Uprising - began on the afternoon of October 23 as a crowd of at least 20,000 demonstrators assembled in central Budapest. Starting as a peaceful demonstration it quickly turned very bloody indeed. I had just turned six in the Western Hungarian city of Szombathely.

Descriptions drawn partly from a 1957 UN General Assembly report paint a complicated picture of the compelling events which led up to and then followed it. Here’s a much-simplified snapshot.

Students and writers joined forces to voice their grievances levelled against the hardline Stalinist government of the Hungarian People’s Republic. The crowd’s initial goal was the public square adjacent to the statue of József Bem, a 19th-century military figure, a hero for both Poles and Hungarians. There, Péter Veres, the president of the Hungarian Writers’ Union, read a 16-point manifesto to the crowd, challenging the current national regime on several fronts.

By the evening of October 23 the crowds swelled by a factor of ten when the students joined other Budapesters in the large parliament-building plaza on the opposite shore of the Danube. One group of demonstrators in the city’s Hero Square toppled and broke up the imposing bronze statue of Stalin, a potent symbol of oppression and occupation. They left only its metal boots in which the Hungarian flag was planted. A larger group was fired upon at the national radio station by the State Security Police (ÁVO) resulting in numerous demonstrator deaths.

That October day’s momentous events marked the start of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As its news spread, further demonstrations and armed conflict erupted in the capital and flashed throughout the country. Within days the existing government fell and a new one was formed. Within the week Soviet troops withdrew just outside the country’s borders. For a few heady days a democratic and independent country seemed within the grasp, at least in the imagination of many hopeful Hungarians.

Beginning on November 3, however, multiple Soviet armed divisions began their return to Budapest and other major Hungarian centres with the aim of swiftly destroying the Revolution and installing a government under Moscow’s control. Armed Hungarian resistance was extirpated by November 10. Records indicate that over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed in the conflict, and 200,000 Hungarians subsequently fled the county as refugees. (Most fled through Austria, as did my family. It’s a route retraced by recent Syrian and other refugees.)

This fall marks the 60th anniversary of those difficult events. For decades public discussion about the Revolution was suppressed in Hungary. October 23, the date marking the start of the 1956 Revolution, is a national holiday today in Hungary.

Kenedi’s motivation for organizing the concerts is multi-layered, musical and social. Her overall musical aim, she says, is “to educate people about the high quality of Hungarian compositions, and to help audiences get past the knee-jerk reaction of fear on hearing the names of 20th century composers.”

But her personal background also plays strongly into things: “I also hope to inspire the descendants of the 1956 immigrants to keep in touch with their rich cultural heritage,” she says, using her own life experience to illustrate her point. “I emigrated from Hungary to Canada with my family…after the Hungarian Uprising. In Toronto I studied piano with Mona Bates and Pierre Souvairan. Then I returned to Hungary where I worked directly with students of Béla Bartók, followed by a year of studies at the Liszt Academy,” she adds. “Returning to Toronto, I received my master’s degree in music at the University of Toronto and made my New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall.”

The musical exodus: Just like everyone else, Hungarian musicians were caught up in the post-Revolution maelstrom. Like his composer friend and colleague György Ligeti, the multiple-award winning Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music György Kurtág (b. 1926) also fled his homeland after the sad outcome of the 1956 Revolution became evident.

Both in terms of general impact and Canada’s musical community the events of 1956 had immediate, as well as long-term, resonances here too. In 2010 the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of the Canadian government declared the “Historical Significance of the Refugees of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” stating that more than 37,500 Hungarians were admitted into the county during the period between late 1956 and the end of 1957, observing further that “Hungarian refugees themselves, generally young and highly qualified when they arrived, contributed significantly to Canadian society, particularly to its cultural diversity and to the national economy by contributing their skills to the country’s workforce.…This has in turn contributed significantly to the creation of an open, tolerant and culturally diverse society, which remains a source of pride to us all.”

Putting those 1950s immigration figures into the current context, the Canada 2011 Census indicates that 316,765 Canadians claim Hungarian ancestry. Internationally, Canada ranks fourth among the countries of the Hungarian diaspora.

The tsumani of immigration following on the heels of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, my own family among them, included many musicians, music teachers and university students. Settling mainly in the largest Canadian cities, in a few years they had begun to establish themselves musically in their new country.

The celebrated Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and music educator Zoltán Kodály visited Canada in 1964, and again in 1966, when he gave the MacMillan Lectures at the University of Toronto, where he was also awarded an honorary doctorate. His visits were facilitated by his former student George Zaduban (1931-2003), a music teacher, conductor, organist and composer-arranger who, in 1960 had founded a choir mainly comprised of recently arrived Hungarians in Toronto, the Kodály Chorus. A folk-dance group was added soon afterwards and thus the Kodály Ensemble was born. Periodically the group would be supplemented by an orchestra, and it mounted ambitious performances involving over a hundred performers in major Toronto venues. As a teenager in the late 1960s I sang tenor with the Chorus for a season or two, including, as I recall, singing in the Kodály Chorus on its tour to Cleveland, Ohio.

The Hungarian music educator and composer, Thomas LeGrady, also immigrated to Canada in 1956, initially settling in Montreal where he taught solfège and orchestration at Loyola College and elsewhere. Another Kodály student, the conductor, composer, pianist and teacher Tibor Polgar (1907-1993) made Toronto his home. He taught for years at the University of Toronto and at York University while scoring feature and documentary films, plus CBC radio and TV soundtracks, often employing Hungarian idioms in his compositions.

And beyond these examples of first generation 1956 Hungarian emigrants who continued their careers in Canada, the influence of the events of 1956 continues to echo among second generation Canadian musicians as well. A good example is the multi-Grammy Award-winning songwriter-singer Alanis Morissette (b. 1974). Her father is French Canadian while her mother fled Hungary with her family after the 1956 Revolution. Another is Kati Ilona Agócs (b. 1975) the successful midcareer Canadian composer of contemporary classical music and faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music. Agócs grew up in Southwestern Ontario, where her Hungarian father eventually settled after leaving Hungary in the wake of the 1956 events.

As for Mary Kenedi, her sense of mission and allegiance has broadened over the years into an avid advocacy of 20th-century Canadian composers as well as of Hungarians; in 1993 Kenedi organized and performed an 80th birthday concert for the eminent Toronto composer John Weinzweig (1913-2006). It was nationally broadcast on CBC radio and released as a Centrediscs CD.

Pursuing a career-long commitment to the music of Bartók, Kenedi notes with enthusiasm that “one of my most memorable concerts was the solo recital I gave at the Bartók Memorial House in Budapest. Last November I performed a program at the Hungarian Embassy in Ottawa to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Bartók’s death. As for albums, I’ve issued two recordings of Bartók’s music, [Zoltan] Kodály’s complete piano works, in addition to three all-Canadian CDs.”

Reflecting the contribution: I asked Kenedi about the contributions of Hungarian musicians who made Canada their home in the wake of the 1956 Revolution. She was quick with her reply. “For such a small country, Hungary has produced a multitude of talented people in all walks of life, but to be immodest, particularly in the arts. Composers, instrumental and vocal soloists, chamber musicians and orchestral players are all represented. Check members of any orchestra and Hungarian names keep popping up. The vitality and wonderful training of these artists who came to Canada made an enormous difference in our musical landscape.”

The November “Bridge to the Future” concert program is true to its name: “It will have three Kodály songs sung by wonderful mezzo-soprano and actress Krisztina Szabó. She’s a no-brainer since I really respect her talent…as well as her sense of humour! We’ll have Dohnányi’s Trio Op. 10, Kodály’s Piano Sonata Op. 4 and his very significant Cello Sonata Op. 8, a work full of references to Hungarian folk music. I am playing Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, and of course some Bartók: Three Hungarian Folksongs from the Csik District, Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, and Romanian Dance Op. 8a among several other of his works for piano solo. Operetta arias by Hungarian composers Lehár and Kálmán will provide a lighter touch to close our evening.”

Will these concerts be of interest to non-Hungarian Canadians? I ask. Kenedi responds by talking about the innate power and universality of folk music: “While it’s a broad generalization, [I feel] folk music is based on the everyday lives…of ethnic groups and thus communicates on an even more gut level than through-composed music does. It attracts the sympathy and empathy of listeners, even though they may not share those same ethnic roots.”

As for her own future plans, they speak to a balanced identity. “I’m working on arranging performances of two pieces I have commissioned, a choral fantasy by Abigail Richardson, and a concerto for piano, percussion and strings by Kevin Lau, both younger-generation Canadian composers. I do get sidetracked into works that do not fit into either Hungarian or Canadian composer categories. An example is my 2013 Naxos CD of the chamber music of Nino Rota. I enjoy performing less-known repertoire.”

Her hope is that these concerts will provide an opportunity for others to look back with similar clarity, in order to move confidently ahead.

Andrew Timar is a Toronto musician and music writer. He can be contacted at worldmusic@thewholenote.com.

It’s November at last, in a more than usually acerbic election year in the USA, in the final days of a presidential campaign revolving in large part around a slogan about making America great again. All of which causes me to recall a moment in CBC Radio history, just over 40 years ago, that not only continues to hold its significance, but takes on a new resonance.

On the eve of the US Bicentennial year in 1976, CBC Radio Music commissioned American composer John Cage (1912-1992) to create a work to serve as a part of CBC’s observance of those 200 years of American history. Richard Coulter, my colleague in the national music department of CBC Radio, had already begun looking, in 1975, for a major American composer who might accept a CBC Radio commission through which to pay a musical tribute to the upcoming event. Richard knew Aaron Copland, having worked with him in Stratford, but when asked, Copland said he was overwhelmed with work and was too busy to even consider the project. Richard turned to me “as a former Wisconsinite”  to discuss where to look next. We both concluded that Cage would be a most suitable alternative. Richard had, in previous years worked on the Music of Today series with Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers, and several of those programs had dealt with John Cage. And, as Richard recalls, Cage “had made a couple of earlier visits to Toronto including his obsessive chess game at Ryerson with Marcel Duchamp in 1968. So I was acquainted with his processes through the years.” So we both agreed on the choice of Cage and that set the wheels in motion. The result was Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, a work that would eventually be recognized as one of his strongest political statements and most significant works overall.

Richard’s mention of my Wisconsin heritage figures directly in the story: it was thanks to a broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio in the late 1950s that I first encountered Cage and his music. I was a lad in my pre-teens at the time, and the program I heard featured Cage discussing his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. The impact of this listening experience was profound and, I dare say, one that changed me forever. Suffice it to say that my curiosity about contemporary music was thus kindled. Then, in 1974, as a member of CBC Radio Music staff, I had a much closer encounter with Cage while working with Glenn Gould on our series of CBC Radio programs celebrating the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Gould, after interviewing Cage, the former Schoenberg student, via a studio link between Toronto and New York, went on to describe Cage as “Probably the only American composer who’s had any major degree of influence on the European music scene.” He felt Cage “in many ways was the Compleat American Primitive, a sort of musical Thoreau, really, and yet the people on whom his influence was felt the most profoundly were those super organized types like Karlheinz Stockhausen.”

This view, of course, was from a 1974 perspective. It was instructive to have one genius’ point of view regarding the work of another genius, and to see how completely the two contrasted with one another. And in the process, I had plenty of opportunity for hero worship!

One year later, I found myself in the aforementioned consultation with Richard Coulter, who had just been speaking with Austin Clarkson, who was the chair of the music department of York University at that time, about the possibility of CBC Radio staging some of our productions at York. “I recall Austin Clarkson phoning one day,” Coulter says, “to suggest that the CBC believed that music events ended at St. Clair Avenue! He had a point, and that was one of the reasons for mounting the Cage commission at York along with the fact that there was a large American faculty and many US students enrolled then at that institution.”

Clarkson, now professor emeritus, told me that “York staff were delighted to have CBC Radio originate the work with Cage on the York campus. When Cage came for the production the following year, he agreed to meet with York students in their electronic music studio. I came to that session, and it was a wonderful interaction with the students.” (Clarkson added that he always included Cage’s book, Silence, among the texts for his course, a General Introduction to Music.)

The score for Lecture on the Weather (published by the C.F. Peters Corp.), states that the work was “commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in observance of the Bicentennial of the United States of America.” The work is scored for narration, including a preface and 12 amplified speaking parts (preferably to be spoken by 12 US expatriates in Canada), recorded sounds of nature and projected visuals. The texts read by the 12 narrators were derived from three books by Henry David Thoreau, his Essay on Civil Disobedience, Journal and Walden, to which Cage had applied chance operations to determine the precise selections. The 12 narrators were also given moments where they could choose to improvise melodic fragments, either by singing or playing an instrument. Cage enlisted the collaboration of American media artist, Maryanne Amacher to provide the sounds of nature. These included vividly recorded sounds from Walden Pond: first, rain and birds, then wind, and finally thunder. Although it was a commission for radio, Cage nonetheless felt that the visual element was essential for the impact it would have on the live audience. He asked the Argentinian painter and sculptor, Luis Frangella to create the visuals, which consisted of slides of Thoreau’s drawings, chosen with chance operations and projected on a wall in the performance space. The Preface was for spoken delivery by Cage himself.

In that Preface, Cage lays out his thoughts about accepting a commission to observe the US Bicentennial and his reasoning as to how he would respond, given the political realities of 1976. He writes: “The first thing I thought of doing in relation to this work was to find an anthology of American aspirational thought and subject it to chance operations.” But instead, he chose the writings of Thoreau because “reading Thoreau’s Journal I discover any idea I’ve ever had worth its salt.” He speaks about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and their respect for Thoreau’s ideas. He quotes King, in particular, for having said “What we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were saying to the white community, ‘We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.’” Cage wrote that he hoped that creating this work, might “give another opportunity for us, whether of one nation or another, to examine again, as Thoreau continually did, ourselves, both as individuals and as members of society, and the world in which we live.”

Cage then turns in the Preface to his process of using chance operations to determine the details of his composition. He says, “It may seem to some that through the use of chance operations I run counter to the spirit of Thoreau (and 76, and revolution for that matter).” But rather, he says, these procedures are a way of “freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concerns for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience. We would do well to give up the notion that we alone can keep the world in line, that only we can solve its problems. More than anything else we need communion with everyone. Communion extends beyond borders: it is with one’s enemies also. Thoreau said: ‘The best communion men have is in silence.’”

And finally comes the powerful dedication: “Our political structures no longer fit the circumstances of our lives. Outside the bankrupt cities, we live in Megalopolis which has no geographical limits. I dedicate this work to the USA, that it become just another part of the world, no more, no less.”

As Cage stood and delivered his Preface for the first time, the members of the audience at York University listened, dumbfounded. The usually apolitical John Cage had taken the opportunity to call for real change in the world. And as Lecture on the Weather unfolded, that same audience came to realize that they were the first witnesses to a prescient work, one of lasting significance. Lecture on the Weather was broadcast on the series I produced, Music of Today, on July 4, 1976.

I was fortunate to enjoy many more productions with John Cage, especially after I created the long-running CBC Radio Two series, Two New Hours, in 1978. But the experience of working with him on Lecture on the Weather was perhaps the best way to get to know him, and to establish a long friendship.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

That “Music heals” – if not the body then at least the soul – is one of the most popular sayings about the power of music; its benefits oft-touted to prove the good that it can do for its listeners and practitioners.

But it doesn’t though – at least, not always. Like any physically and emotionally demanding experience, music can put an enormous strain on the bodies and minds of the people who make it. For many, a career in music can lead to serious stresses – stresses that often don’t get talked about. It’s time, for performers and listeners alike, to begin a dedicated conversation about how music can heal and help people – and on the other end, how people doing musical work can exercise the self-care necessary for keeping a life in music from becoming harmful.

Ensemble Vivant is one group that makes the connection between music and health an intimate and integral part of its work. Founded and headed by pianist Catherine Wilson, the group is a pioneer on the piano-chamber music scene, culling its repertoire from both classical and jazz worlds. It’s also the flagship ensemble for Wilson’s not-for-profit Euterpe – an organization that conducts research on the healing effects of exposure to live concert performances, and provides musical opportunities based on that research for children and communities in need.

Ensemble Vivant’s current project is “Christmas Tidings,” a month-long tour from November 27 to December 23, to ten cities across Southern Ontario. The music itself is a variety of seasonal repertoire, much of it adapted from the ensemble’s 1992 album of the same name. What makes this particular tour stand out from other holiday shows, however, is its incorporation of Euterpe initiatives. At each concert, the ensemble will be collaborating side by side with a different children’s choir, providing guidance as well as professional performance and rehearsal opportunities for local students.

Wilson is the driving force behind this initiative, and with good reason. “Playing in a community band in junior high school provided a safe haven, allowing me to escape from an extremely strife-ridden background,” she says. “The band was family for me and planted the seeds for my love of chamber music.” Wilson goes on to explain that for her, a key goal of Euterpe, and of the work that Ensemble Vivant does alongside it, is ensuring that those who otherwise wouldn’t have access to high-calibre concert experiences get the same types of music-making and concertgoing opportunities that made such a difference in her own life.

In terms of her own life in music today, Wilson recognizes the health threats of performing professionally, but maintains that seeing the healing benefits of music in action through her Euterpe research and performances provides ample motivation for seeking and finding solutions.

“There are a variety of physical stresses to being a concert pianist. Staying healthy physically, avoiding injuries and not becoming too worn down is always a challenge,” Wilson explains. “I swim regularly and see a top physiotherapist. I have endured several long-term setbacks over the years…yet it is music that has always been my main source of psychological strength. Industry stresses, physiological and psychological stresses notwithstanding, the music-making is a labour of love…and is what excites us and keeps us healthy. Giving through music is healing and enriching for our audiences, as well as for us.”

Ensemble Vivant’s tour begins in Orillia on November 27 and travels across the province, wrapping up on December 23 in Ottawa with the Cross Town Youth Chorus. For details on the tour, visit ensemblevivant.com.

Artist’s Health: I first visited the Artists’ Health Centre this summer, when a sudden change in my work schedule led to a minor injury in my wrist. Becoming aware of the services and the resources they offer for artists of all disciplines has been hugely helpful – both for managing the healing of my own injury and for navigating how musicians can become more open generally about challenges with mental and physical health.

Based out of Toronto Western Hospital and run in partnership with the Artists’ Health Alliance, the Al and Malka Green Artists’ Health Centre is a clinic offering both medical and complementary care for professional artists. Patients must self-identify as creative professionals and meet at least one of the centre’s requirements for what constitutes being a professional artist. Services include acupuncture, chiropractic medicine, craniosacral therapy, registered massage therapy, physiotherapy, psychotherapy (for individuals and in groups) and shiatsu therapy – all with a special focus on accommodating the career paths, lifestyles and income levels of professional arts workers.

Susannah McGeachy, the clinic’s nurse practitioner, is typically a musician’s first one-on-one contact with the Centre. Her job, which includes assessing the client’s needs, referring them to other centre professionals and giving them interim guidance on how to manage their condition, means that she sees a lot of different professional musicians – with a lot of different complaints.

“I deal with a wide variety [of issues], but there are certainly recurrent themes,” says McGeachy. “I would say that generally, soft tissue injuries are pretty common – things like sprains and strains that aren’t always allowed to rest and heal the way that they need to because of the demands of a musician’s professional practice. Things like chronic tendinitis – broadly, we call them overuse injuries, where you can get inflammation and damage from using a very small muscle group to do the same kind of motion again and again, many times. Another thing that comes up often is the challenges that musicians face around mental health and anxiety, sometimes associated with what I call being in ‘constant evaluative situations’ like auditions and performances, with a certain level of career unpredictability.”

With the level and volume of issues that McGeachy sees, it’s clear that our music industry needs to change – both in the way it employs musicians and in the stigmas in the performing arts around prioritizing self-care. “I know it’s a complex thing,” McGeachy says, “but I think that with performance and rehearsal scheduling, more attention and awareness needs to be paid to the physical demands on the musicians – who are often performing a lot of very different repertoire in a short period of time, and having these ‘bursts’ where there’s a lot of physical demand, both in terms of the pieces themselves and the travelling that musicians have to do. I think with orchestras, for example, and even sometimes in educational institutions, the work happens with much more regard to venues, conductor availability, and things like that – but it doesn’t always seem like there’s an eye on getting a good balance of repertoire – physically – and giving the musicians rest and recovery time.

“There’s this idea in the music industry,” McGeachy continues, “that it’s important to play as many gigs as you can, and that however those fall, the musicians are just sort of expected to rise to the challenge. And I think that systemically, that makes it very hard for individual musicians to know how to take good care of themselves.”

And as for advice to musicians, about how they can focus on self-care, and why it matters?

“Your body is your instrument as much as your instrument is your instrument,” says McGeachy. “If you think about the care and attention that a musician gives to making sure that their instrument is well-tuned and protected and not exposed to the elements...what I think musicians don’t always realize is that they are an even more intricately made instrument than the one that they’re playing. And that really to make a long-term career out of this work, it’s important to learn your body as early as possible. It’s about forming practices that will allow you to do what you love for as long as you want.

“Overall, I think the biggest message that I try to drive home with musicians is to learn to listen to their bodies,” she says. “To not play through pain. To break up practising into shorter sessions, especially if something hurts. And to warm up: I think that musicians often think of musical warm-up but not physical warm-up. Before playing, it’s important to do some physical warm-up to increase your heart rate and circulation – a brisk walk, jumping jacks, or a few flights of stairs. It sounds silly, but it’s pretty basic physiology – it decreases the risk of injury. And otherwise, musicians are people too, so doing the things that are good for everybody: regular exercise; a well-balanced diet; drinking lots of water; and doing things that you love, and promoting your own balance and mental health.”

McGeachy also mentions that her door is often open and that the Centre is always happy to see people (artistshealth.com) – so musicians, if you’re ever in need, be sure to look them up.

The potential for music-making to act as a healing experience for people – and the potential for a musical career to become mentally and physically unhealthy as well – is worth discussing. If you have your own story about music and self-care, as a musician, or as a listener, feel free to send it along, to editorial@thewholenote.com. I’m sure that there will be others who can relate.

I’ve dealt in the past with injury and anxiety, and it isn’t an easy subject to communicate about. I’ve known professional musicians who have neglected their well-being because they felt that self-care was fundamentally at odds with living in the service of their craft. I’ve known music students who have been reluctant to tell teachers about playing while hurt, because they were afraid to be seen as a liability within their studios. Unless performers and listeners keep having conversations about how music affects the minds and bodies of people, for better and for worse, it will remain difficult for people to recognize that self-care and musical commitment need not be at odds with one another. In fact, for many professionals, those two things make the most sense when they can feed off of one another.

Let’s get talking.

Sara Constant is a Toronto-based flutist and musicologist, and is digital media editor at The WholeNote. She can be reached at editorial@thewholenote.com.

Esprit Orchestra founder and music director Alex Pauk will take the podium at Koerner Hall on the evening of October 23 to lead his orchestra in a heartfelt tribute to Canadian composer and cultural icon, Murray Schafer (b. 1933). Pauk has collaborated with Schafer for over 42 years on a wide range of innovative musical projects that includes 60 performances of Schafer’s works with Esprit alone, not to mention many others that began when the two met in Vancouver in 1973. “The time is right for this tribute,” Pauk told me. “It’s right for Murray, it’s right for Esprit and it’s right for me.” He went on to say that the concert “reflects the amazing relationship between Murray, me, Esprit and the audience.”

When they first met, Pauk was engaged by the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra (VYSO) and Schafer was in his last years of teaching at Simon Fraser University (SFU). In 1974 Pauk conducted Schafer’s North/White, a work composed that year for full orchestra and snowblower, with the VYSO. At that time, Pauk was looking for academic work at SFU, and he asked Schafer if he might help or offer advice. Schafer’s reply may have turned Pauk’s fate. He said: “You’ll be better off if you stick to conducting contemporary music, and the rest of us will be better off too.”

The VSYO released Pauk from his conducting position in 1977, in what Pauk felt was a reaction to his programming of “too much contemporary repertoire.” But by then Pauk had met the Romanian/French composer/conductor Marius Constant. Constant was touring the world conducting contemporary repertoire, including his own, and he found frequent conducting opportunities in Vancouver with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. Constant provided a career archetype for Pauk, one that matched the guidance Pauk had received from Schafer. He befriended Constant, and the two discovered they shared artistic interests. For example, Constant remarked how very interesting the works of Schafer were, particularly those he had conducted with the Radio Orchestra in Vancouver.

The freshly inspired Pauk returned to Toronto in 1980 with a mission to create a contemporary music orchestra and in 1983 founded Esprit Contemporaine, soon to be renamed Esprit Orchestra. The works of Schafer figured prominently in Esprit’s programming from the very beginning. Alex told me that it was while preparing a performance of Schafer’s Dream Rainbow Dream Thunder that he was suddenly struck by the realization that Schafer’s ear and skill with the art of orchestration was extraordinary. He realized as well that “Schafer’s orchestral music is about ideas – BIG ideas!” And his sonic palette was designed to project those powerful musical aspirations.

This observation about Schafer’s extraordinary gift for writing orchestral music was not lost on me, as I began to expand my own appreciation of his music through hands-on experience. Having created Two New Hours, the network contemporary music series on CBC Radio Two (1978-2007), I began recording and broadcasting concerts with Esprit Orchestra almost from its inception. Among the many fascinating new orchestral compositions my broadcast team and I encountered, it was the works of Schafer that stood out. We were impressed with the orchestration, the breadth and power of the ideas and simply the realization that Schafer’s writing sounded brilliant in every way, especially given the exceptionally high standard of performance delivered by Esprit. These were the characteristics that would make for compelling radio, and we were inspired to do our utmost to help make these works sound as vivid and convincing on air as they were in the concert hall.

I had known Murray since first meeting him in 1971 during the Dayspring Festival at Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church. His artistic leadership was immediately apparent, as he showed no fear whatsoever for being out among the throng, constantly challenging and provoking people. He was also fearless about taking music away from its comfort zone in the concert hall. A wilderness lake was just as good a venue for music, complete with its built in audience of loons, chipmunks, frogs and, yes, even bears and wolves.

My engineers and I went with Murray and his hand-picked group of musicians to Wildcat Lake in the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve to make a radio program called Wolf Music in 1996. This was to be a radio program made of Schafer’s music, played in the wilderness, interspersed with his gently spoken reflections on the relationships between mankind and nature. The recordings we made at dawn when the wind was still, using groups of microphones positioned around the lake were eventually assembled, synced in our editor and broadcast, both on CBC’s Two New Hours and also in Germany, on Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Wolf Music received a special citation at the 1998 Prix Italia in Assisi. The recording is available on the Centrediscs label (CMCCD 8902).

This adventure proved to be a mere test for us to determine whether it might be feasible to record and broadcast the 1997 Patria Music/Theatre Projects’ production of Schafer’s environmental opera, Princess of the Stars. On the strength of Wolf Music, this subsequent challenge was agreed to, and the entire cast of singers, canoe paddlers, stagehands, puppets and the members of Esprit Orchestra, all decamped to Wildcat Lake for the duration of the production in the late summer of that year. The Two New Hours team went along too, and several performances were recorded and eventually broadcast on CBC Radio Two. In 1999 that production won a medal for excellence in broadcasting in the International Radio Festival of New York.

Nearly 20 years and hundreds of compositions later, Schafer has written music for all situations: the wilderness, the countryside and, alas, even the concert hall. I had several opportunities to commission works from Schafer for broadcast on Two New Hours, including the dramatic aria, Thunder, Perfect Mind. This work, based on an ancient Egyptian text, had its premiere in a performance by Esprit Orchestra and Pauk, with soprano Eleanor James, Schafer’s wife, at Jane Mallett Theatre in Toronto in 2004. We subsequently recorded the work in Glenn Gould Studio for release on Atma Classique. That recording, which also includes James’ performances with Esprit and Pauk of Schafer’s Letters from Mignon and an orchestration of his early work, Minnelieder, is currently available in the Atma Classique catalogue.

The Esprit concert at Koerner Hall later this month will include a rarely performed Schafer composition, Adieu Robert Schumann (1976) – a CBC commission, written for Maureen Forrester), incorporating writings from the diaries of Clara Schumann detailing her ailing husband Robert’s decline, and using as well fragments of Schumann’s own compositions. The soloist, Krisztina Szabó, speaking about her role as Clara Schumann, says she is “struck by the poignancy of Clara’s thoughts,” as she watches her husband slip away. Szabó, who grew up singing Schafer’s choral music as a member of the Toronto Children’s Chorus and who has been a soloist in other Schafer works says, “I love the evocative colours in his vocal writing … “I find that Schafer’s music calls to me.”

Two works on the concert that are more commonly associated with Esprit are the Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1985), which was, in fact, the first work of Schafer ever performed by Esprit, in 1987, and the Esprit-commissioned Scorpius (1990), a sort of orchestral scherzo. Esprit has programmed these works often and, in the case of Scorpius, has realized excellent value from one of their five Schafer commissions.

Flutist Robert Aitken, the soloist in Schafer’s flute concerto, says this will be his 18th performance of the work. He told me: “It’s the most successful flute concerto of our time. Whenever it’s played, it’s a huge success, it always steals the show.” Pauk added, “It’s simply one of the great flute concertos of all time.”

Esprit’s tribute to Schafer underscores a long and fruitful relationship between Canada’s most revered composer and the country’s only symphony orchestra exclusively devoted to the creation and performance of contemporary music. Pauk told me that “Schafer’s music embraces so many dimensions, ideas, emotions, theatricality, spirituality and even humour, all unified within a musical experience.” He says that this completeness is what makes Schafer so enduring, and this concert is perfect proof of that.

Murray Schafer and Eleanor James will attend the Esprit concert on October 23; one week later, on October 30, coincidentally also at the Royal Conservatory of Music, they will be present as harpist Judy Loman launches a 2-CD compilation of Schafer’s complete works for the harp. Loman told me: “Because it’s my 80th birthday, it has now become my birthday present to myself to include the launching of this CD.” Schafer composed seven major works for the harp, five of them for Loman and two for her students, Lori Gemmell and Heidi Krutzen. The CD, titled Ariadne’s Legacy, will be available from Centrediscs, the record label of the Canadian Music Centre.

David Jaeger is a Toronto-based composer, producer and broadcaster.