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We are approaching the half-hour point in my taped conversation with Alison Mackay, Tafelmusik’s longtime violone/contrabass player and concert curator extraordinaire, and are finally getting round to the ostensible reason for having this conversation at this time – Tafelmusik’s upcoming presentation titled “Tales of Two Cities: The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.” As always with Mackay’s projects, it’s an immensely engaging premise – taking two cities, thousands of miles and worlds apart – and viewing them through the musical lens of the same moment of historical and cultural time.

“Let me tell you a fun thing before we get into it,” I say. “On May 21st, which is the middle of your run at Koerner Hall, Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig will be featured on stage in your show, and the same evening in the Peter Hall of the Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, “Zimmerman’s Coffee House” will be the title of the last evening concert of their 109th festival. And if you trace that college back to its schoolhouse origins, it goes back to 1745, which is only 20 years after Bach arrived in Leipzig!”

“Oh that’s wonderful,” she says, delightedly. “We should get in touch with them and see what we could do together.”

It’s a typical response from Mackay, whose relish for the juxtapositions, coincidences and synchronicities that offer opportunities to see old things anew, has become her curatorial trademark.

Memory Lane: We have just finished a rambled down memory lane, starting with the first of her Tafelmusik projects I can remember, “The Four Seasons: Cycle of the Sun,” back in 2004. That project took 1725, the year Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni was published, and made that year the departure point for an investigation of other musics being made in the world in the same year – an exploration that encompassed Chinese pipa, Indian veena and Inuit throat singing.

One can see the same bird’s eye imagination at work in her  “Galileo Project.” “It was in 2009, she says, “part of the International Year of Astronomy, because 1609 was the year Galileo first turned his telescope on the night sky. There were to be international celebrations of that event and we were actually approached by the Canadian committee that was planning events surrounding the year, to curate an event that would link astronomy and art.”

“Cutting across strata of geography and time is something you are good at,” I say.

“For me the seed of these projects is always in the music,” she says. “These events and performances are always concerts and there’s always a concert’s worth of music in them. And it’s very much about celebrating having a chance to perform the very best music in our repertoire. I hate having to include anything that’s only there because it matches the subject. I love to include profound, wonderful music – the best of our repertoire but giving the chance, just once in a while, to see it in a wider historical and cultural context. It shines a new light on the music. So it’s not that I think that audiences now have shorter attention spans or anything like that, or that they need visuals or bells and whistles. I still very much believe in purely musical concerts.”

These amplified concert forms are just as much for the musicians benefit as for the audience’s, she points out, using Vivaldi as an example. “Something like The Four Seasons is something our audience likes to hear pretty regularly. It’s a pretty beloved piece. It’s become a little bit cliched, because we hear it so much in elevators and things like that, but our audience loves to hear it, we love to play it, it’s a showpiece for our violins…but it’s very wonderful to bring some new dimension to it, a new kind of excitement for us.

“To give another example, a lot of the repertoire we play contains overtures and dance suites from operas, Lully for instance. And many opera composers in the 17th and 18th centuries were inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Brief stories, a lot of them with a central moment of incredible dramatic power and transformation…when you put that same music in the context of the story that informs each of its movements (Marin Marais’ Alcione, for example) it makes it incredibly profound for the performers and the audience, so not only does it add a cultural dimension to the music but it also adds a new layer of emotional context.” It’s an emotional “informing” of the piece that remains for the musicians after that, even when the piece is performed without the story added. “Somehow I think the emotion of the way we perform with each other, especially when we are playing from memory the way we do in these projects, communicates a new excitement and emotion to the audience. Of all the things that have influenced performing life at Tafelmusik, this – the grounding and heightening and enriching of context – has meant so much.”

Perhaps her most ambitious project to date in terms of multi-disciplinary scope and scale was “House of Dreams.” It was a journey to five houses in five European cities, all of them still standing, which for one reason or another, at some time in their history housed  very important  private collections of paintings. “In London, Venice, Delft, Leipzig and Paris,” she explains. “And in the rooms where the paintings were hanging, there were known to be performances of music, often by the most important composers in those cities.”

The buildings, in their present incarnations encompass a range of uses. “Two are small museums, one is a rather down-at-heel palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, one is a pancake restaurant in Delft, on the main square which has changed very little since the 17th century.” The Delft house, she explains, was owned by a very poor bookbinder, married to a young woman who died tragically, soon after. When his death followed, a few years later, he was found to have had, “hanging in his little tiny house, 23 of the 36 known Vermeers.”

Today, she informs me, the pancake restaurant prides itself more on the fact that Bill Clinton ate there, and has a letter from him to that effect on the wall. “We had to ask to remove it from the wall when we went to do our photography session there.”

The way the project worked was that over the course of about a year Tafelmusik formed relationships with the present owners for the purpose of photographing all the walls where the paintings had been. They then acquired high resolution images of all the paintings and were able to put the paintings back on the walls, and then put the music, live, back into the rooms with the paintings on the walls. “A bit like a guest in the house experiencing  a Rembrandt on the wall and listening to Handel conduct his music at the same time.” 

“House of Dreams” was also a memorized project; “Tale of Two Cities” will be their fourth. For Mackay, the fact, and feat of incorporating memorization into these projects has radically transformed, for the better the ensemble’s musicianship. She is aware of the toll it takes, but conscious of its immense rewards, for audience and performers alike.

“It’s a huge, huge undertaking for the orchestra and I cannot tell you how incredibly grateful I am at the number of hours of unpaid work that go into that…It’s been socially transforming…The music is so complex. I think that when you memorize something it frees you up physically. You present a more complete physicality. And the more that you do these projects – I think we have done the “Galileo Project” around the world around 75 times and “House of Dreams” in nearing 40, so they continue to grow and develop musically. We had these very nervous discussions at the start, none of us knew how it was going to work. Normally you’d say ‘okay, we are all going to start at bar 76.’ That was never an issue; someone would just start playing and everyone knew where to come in. You practise in a different way. It lifts the technical and it also lifts the ensemble.”

Leipzig-Damascus: So here we are, half an hour in, finally starting to talk about the current project, “Tales of Two Cities.” We have reached the Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House.

As always it’s finding the similarities in different places at the same moment in time that is her creative spark.

“It’s very interesting. They were both entrepôt cities, at the crossroads of ancient, often Roman, roads - ancient trade or caravan routes. Leipzig was a small city but it lay at the crossroads of the east-west road that went from Santiagio de Compostela right to Kiev and Moscow, and goods and ideas flowed gradually along that route. And then there was a north-south route that ran from Venice and Rome to the Baltic Sea. Those two roads crossed right in the middle of Leipzig and because of that the Holy Roman Emperors declared it a trade fair centre with tax incentives and a protected place, so it meant for centuries traders from all over Europe and as far away as London and Siberia and Constantinople converged in this little crossroad town of about 30,000 - the size of Toronto’s Annex.

“The city of Damascus was a much more ancient city - some people think it is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, and it lay at the crossroads of routes from the Mediterranean, from Tyre and Sidon through Syria to Baghdad, through Iran to the Silk Road and the Far East. And the north-south route that went from Yemen up to Mecca and Medina, Damascus, Aleppo, Anatolia and finally Istambul.”

Damascus became the place where travellers on the pilgrims’ road to the hajj provisioned for the very dangerous journey. And they would come back to Damascus with coffee which was grown in Yemen, first known place of cultivation of what we know as the arabica coffee bean.

The parallels go on and on. Both cities at the axis of a trade route and a pilgrims’ road; both cities famous centres for scholarship and learning; Leipzig hugely important for book publishing and dissemination, poetry, literature, plays, philosophy; the same true of Damascus, renowned for science, theology, law, poetry and travel writers.

From there the stories start to actually intersect in extraordinary and tangible ways – an important family library of secular and religious 18th-century works of Damascene scribes being sold to the Prussian ambassador and finding its way to the University of Leipzig; the Ottoman ambassador to Louis XV bringing 10,000 pounds of coffee to France. And the emergence in both cities of lively coffee house cultures, Zimmermann’s in Leipzig being the one most notably associated with Bach and Telemann.

In the German city of Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach directed an ensemble which gave Friday-night concerts between the hours of eight and ten at Zimmerman’s Coffee houses on the Katharinenstrasse.

In the coffee houses of Damascus, singers and performers on the oud, kanun, ney, and daf played classical Arabic taqsims and muwashshahs, and used their instruments to accompany famous storytellers reciting from the rich tradition of adventure stories and Sufi tales found in Syrian manuscript sources.

The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House of the show’s title promises to be resplendent visually, revolving around a set piece with a large imbedded projection screen which will evoke in turn two 18th-century interiors – a Damascus ajami room and a Saxon wood-panelled interior, prepared under the guidance and supervision of Dr. Anke Scharrahs, a conservator who specializes in the research and restoration of polychrome wooden surfaces and who is one of the most highly respected international experts on the conservation of Syrian-Ottoman interiors.

But true to Mackay’s credo, the music will be, as always, at the heart of things. Tafelmusik will perform, from memory, music plausibly connected with Zimmerman’s; Arabic music, appropriate to the Damascene coffee house,will be rendered by Trio Arabica, an ensemble consisting of Toronto-based, Egyptian-born, and Syrian-trained Maryem Tollar (narrator & vocalist), Naghmeh Farahmand (percussion) and Demetri Petsalakis (oud), with narration/context provided in English and in Arabic by both Tollar and by actor Alon Nashman, blending storytelling and documentary roles as required.

And naturally, at appropriate and carefully chosen moments, the work of the two ensembles will combine and intersect because such hard-earned coincidences have been in one respect or another the lifeblood of the magic she weaves for Tafelmusik. They are, in a way, the continuo of her imagination.

Mackay’s work is not overtly political, but one can detect a quiet satisfaction in her at the timing of this particular tale. In a time of geopolitical ferment when traffic on the road from Damascus to Leipzig appears to be going only in one direction, it does no harm, and may even do some good, to reflect on the extent to which, in terms of history and culture, this is is very much a two-way street.

David Perlman is the publisher of The WholeNote.

Jeunesses Musicales Ontario (JMO) and the National Youth Orchestra (NYO) Canada have orchestrated Raise the Bar, a fundraiser on June 8, as part of their continued support of the next generation of professional classical musicians. Tom Allen will be hosting the intimate evening of music, cocktails and hors d’œuvres, and he’ll be joined by fellow alumni James Ehnes, Russell Braun and other award-winners in performance in the elegant Great Hall of U of T’s Hart House.

Since 1979, Jeunesses Musicales Ontario has provided emerging Canadian artists with concert tours as well as educational concerts for young audiences. Since 1960, NYO Canada has held an iconic reputation as Canada’s pre-eminent orchestral and chamber music training institute, providing the most comprehensive and in-depth training program available to our best young classical musicians.

We asked Tom Allen to comment on the organizations’ shared values, both as an observer and as the recipient of many advantages as a result of his involvement with them as a youth.

He noted that “…the work being done by Jeunesses Musicales and the NYO Canada doesn’t only nurture musical talent - it nurtures a benevolent and caring and enlightened society.”

His own experiences included the honour of being bass trombonist in the NYO in 1982 and 1985, and part of a resident brass quintet in 1984. That quintet went on to a professional career as the Great Lakes Brass, which he toured with from 1984 to 1990. He notes that “during those years we were helped considerably by JMC, who sent us on a couple of tours and helped us find rehearsal space in Toronto, as well” and that there were other benefits to him as a young musician: there was generosity in support and career guidance, as well as lessons not only in artistry and musicianship but also the universal and transferable life skills needed by emerging professionals.

He is still grateful for the connections and experiences he gleaned. Despite a climate of arts-funding restraint, he didn’t miss out on invaluable recording and performance opportunities. JMO and NYOC still nurture high-level playing and professional development. The NYO offers that experience and, likewise, “…because of those same economic forces, classical musicians in Canada (and everywhere else) must be more adaptable, more flexible, more inventive and quick-on-their-feet than ever before, and JMC supports and nurtures that approach. The two are both sides of a (more and more hard-to-come-by) coin.”

For more information visit raise-the-bar.ticketleap.com/gala

It was 3:40 in the morning. The forest was in absolute stillness, the canoe slipping into the water, barely making a sound. It was a cool September morning on Wildcat Lake in the Haliburton Forest in 1997. My cargo – two condenser microphones and a portable digital recorder – and I were heading out to a floating platform on the far side of the lake, where I would, in the pitch black night, attach the gear to a pre-positioned mic stand bolted to the float, start the recorder, head to the nearest shore, hide with my canoe behind a boulder and await the start of Murray Schafer’s opera, Princess of the Stars. At the same time, my two colleagues, recording engineers David (Stretch) Quinney and Steve Sweeney paddled to two more locations and engaged two more recording positions. We were about a kilometre apart from one another, and we would record several performances of Schafer’s “environmental opera” over the course of a week, to be mixed and assembled for broadcast on our contemporary music show, Two New Hours on CBC Radio Two. That broadcast would eventually, in 1999, win a medal for excellence in performing arts broadcasting at the International Radio Festival of New York.

1997 had been a remarkable year for the Two New Hours team. In June of that year we recorded and broadcast a concert from the Barbara Frum Atrium in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, a surround-sound event that featured not only the first authentically staged performance of Harry Somers’ (1925–1999) spatially animated Stereophony, but also the world premiere of Borealis, a work we commissioned especially for the occasion by Toronto composer Harry Freedman (1922–2005). This event was produced in collaboration with Soundstreams’ Northern Encounters Festival, described as, “a circumpolar festival of the arts.” Borealis combined the forces of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Danish National Radio Choir, the Swedish Radio Choir, the Elmer Iseler Singers and the Toronto Childrens’ Chorus, all under the direction of conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste. These combined forces surrounded the audience from the ground floor, up into the various levels of balconies ringing the ten-story atrium. The effect of the music was stunning. Harry Freedman himself considered it one of his finest achievements in writing for large-scale musical forces.

We subsequently presented Freedman’s Borealis to the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in Paris in 1998, where it was voted fourth overall among the submissions by the delegates from public radio services in 30 countries around the world, leading to broadcasts in those countries. Harry was very pleased with this accomplishment, comparing it to the experience of “being shortlisted for the Booker Prize.” Naturally, he was also pleased to receive the royalties from those many broadcasts.

Earlier in 1997, another of our CBC commissions, Wonder, a work for soprano, orchestra and electronic sounds by Canadian composer Paul Steenhuisen, had even greater success at the IRC. Wonder had been commissioned in 1995 for the CBC Radio Orchestra in Vancouver. The premiere took place in June of 1996 at the Vancouver International New Music Festival, presented by Vancouver New Music. We presented our production of the work at the IRC in 1997, and not only was Steenhuisen’s composition voted third overall, and broadcast on the participating countries’ public radio programs, but the delegate from Austrian Radio was so impressed by the work that he organized an Austrian performance at the Musikprotokoll Festival in Graz. But it didn’t stop there. Christian Scheib, the same Austrian delegate who had been so impressed by Steenhuisen’s Wonder at the IRC, also commissioned a new work by him, for the esteemed Viennese ensemble, Klangforum Wien. Austrian Radio produced the premiere of the new work, Bread, at the Musikprotokoll Festival, conducted an extensive interview with Paul Steenhuisen, and broadcast the premiere of Bread, along with several more of Steenhuisen’s compositions. Writing to me about our original commission of his work, Wonder, Paul said, “Reflecting on it, the piece has had a nice life for itself. So many good things came from its presence at the IRC, so thanks again for taking it there.”

A few years before that, our production of Chris Paul Harman’s Oboe Concerto, was voted second in the Young Composers category of the IRC. This was in 1994, when first place went to the emerging English composer, Thomas Adès for his famous composition, Living Toys, the work that more or less signalled to the world of contemporary music that a new genius had appeared. Harman, in his typically humble manner, told me that “in retrospect, Living Toys should have been ahead by many, many, many more votes – I consider it to be one of Adès’ best works, among a selection of very good works.”

These examples were typical of what we did throughout the 1990s. We found ways to work in larger-scale, and we dared to encourage Canadian composers to develop and excel, and to feed their creative imaginations with the ambition to create works of significance. And when we submitted these larger works in international forums, such as the IRC or the International Radio Festival of New York, our successes were a clear message that our composers, with the help of CBC Radio Music, were seen to be advancing the art form. Our work developing Canada’s composers was beginning to give them international recognition. Interestingly, all of this development came during a climate of cuts to the CBC’s budget. Harold Redekopp, who was head of CBC Radio Music in the mid 1980s, and then vice-president of CBC English Radio from 1992 to 1998, remarked that, for the relatively modest budget allocated to Two New Hours, we created an enormous amount of good will in the musical community.

One of our principal methods of increasing the impact of our limited budget was through creative partnerships with medium- to large-scale organizations. Once our major orchestras began creating new music festivals, first in Winnipeg in 1992, but soon after in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor, we suddenly had the means to create programming that included many more Canadian orchestral and larger-scale compositions. We found that offering to commission ambitious new works by Canadian composers often provided the key to innovative programming, works such as Chan Ka Nin’s Iron Road, Marjan Mozetich’s Affairs of the Heart, Ann Southam’s Webster’s Spin and Murray Schafer’s Thunder: Perfect Mind, all of which, curiously enough, are now accessible on YouTube. Such initiatives often unlocked resources that had been previously uncommitted by potential partners. The programs we were then able to offer our listeners gave them a ringside seat as the music of the future was created.

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

Then: My first experience of meeting the renowned American composer Steve Reich was in a master class he gave for composition students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. It was early in 1976 and he was in town as the guest of New Music Concerts who presented performances of his music during both an afternoon and evening concert. In the master class, I remember sitting spellbound as I listened to him speak about his musical ideas that challenged all I was being taught in school.

This was at a time when the serialist aesthetic dominated the new music world. Hearing about this radical new approach was a breath of badly needed fresh air. He spoke about the importance of being able to hear and perceive the shifts and changes as they occurred in the music, and about how, for this to work, the process needed to be gradual – a musical process that resembled setting a swing in motion and watching it come to rest. It made complete sense to me.

To back up his words, he asked if anyone in the room would be up for joining him in playing his piece Piano Phase to demonstrate his phasing technique, the process he had developed to create this slowly evolving musical structure. Composer and pianist Henry Kucharzyk, at the time a student at the faculty, immediately volunteered. I remember Reich’s surprise that anyone even knew the piece and his being completely astonished at Kucharzyk’s skill in playing a work that requires intense focus to perform the shifting rhythmic patterns.

 A few days later at the NMC afternoon concert, Piano Phase was performed again on marimbas by Russell Hartenberger and Bob Becker, longtime members of the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble. The afternoon program also included Clapping Music, Music for Pieces of Wood and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, and the evening concert culminated with one of Reich’s favourite pieces, the hour-long Drumming. I remember too the instantaneous and roaring standing ovation this piece received, a rare occurrence at a new music concert.

When I recently contacted New Music Concerts to access the programs from those concerts, I was told that they had marked the first time Reich’s music had been performed by anyone other than members of his own ensemble. This was only possible because of the presence of Hartenberger and Becker.  Both at the time were teaching percussion at U of T and York, and were members of the Toronto-based Nexus percussion ensemble. In a recent phone conversation, Hartenberger told me that to make the concert happen, he gathered together musicians from other members of Nexus, some of his students, and other Toronto-based musicians he knew. Just how significant a moment in time was this concert? “Steve was wary of other people playing his music,” Hartenberger said. “But he knew that Bob and I knew the music and were able to coach, so there was some trust there that it would be the way it was supposed to be. He allowed us to do it, but it was quite a while before anyone outside the group played those pieces.”

Hartenberger first met Reich in 1971 when he was a graduate student at Wesleyan University and was invited to join the Drumming rehearsals; Reich needed percussionists to help him develop the ideas for this work. The rehearsal and composition process were interwoven and it took weekly rehearsals over the course of several months before the piece was finished. “Steve would demonstrate the new parts each week, we would play and learn that part, and then tag it onto what we had learned the week before.” At the time there wasn’t a really clear score, so in order to perform the piece it was necessary to learn from someone who had already played it and could coach performers on what was supposed to happen. Thus the difficulty in anyone outside of the members of Reich’s ensemble being able to perform not only Drumming, but most of his music written up to that point, particularly the pieces with multiple performers.

As I dug further into the story of Reich’s music in Toronto, the impact of the 1976 concerts became even more evident. At least two of Hartenberger’s percussion students who performed there went on to become members of the Arraymusic Ensemble, which Kucharzyk himself joined in 1976 as pianist, later becoming artistic director from 1982-88. It was under Kucharzyk’s tenure that Array began performing some of Reich’s music, including the larger pieces Sextet and Six Pianos. In 1988, Arraymusic’s clarinetist Robert W. Stevenson performed New York Counterpoint, one of Reich’s pieces in which a solo performer plays against multiple recordings of the same instrument. Rather than using the prepared tape available from Boosey & Hawkes, Stevenson recorded his own tracks and his performance of the piece became part of Array’s touring repertoire throughout Canada and Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1991, it was released on Arraymusic’s CD, Chroma.

Now it is 2016, 40 years later, and Reich is returning to Toronto amidst a plethora of events that Soundstreams has organized to celebrate his 80th birthday. The momentous visit will culminate in a concert at Massey Hall on April 14. Coincidentally, the concert will open with a performance of Clapping Music, the same piece that began the 1976 afternoon concert, and performed by the same two musicians – Reich and Hartenberger. Armed with all these stories of the impression Reich’s 1976 visit  in Toronto had made on me and on others, I was mildly surprised and a bit disconcerted, when I spoke to him recently on the phone, to realize that he had only the vaguest memories of that particular trip (which of course makes sense given the number of times he has toured around the world).

Once we got past my expectation that he would be able to provide his own memories of that 1976 concert, to counterpoint my own, we launched into a conversation about the two main pieces that will be performed on April 14 – Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim, which to his knowledge have not been performed on the same program before. I was sure I had heard Music for 18 Musicians before somewhere in Toronto, I told him, although neither of these works appeared on any of the concert programs for New Music concerts, Arraymusic or Soundstreams (which has presented two previous concerts of his music). Later I asked Hartenberger about this, and he confirmed that “about 10 to 15 years ago,” he performed the work at the MacMillan Theatre with a group of U of T students who worked for an entire semester to learn the piece. (The actual date, it turns out, was January 21, 2005.)

Rather than digging up anecdotes from memory’s scrapbook, the conversation Reich and I embarked upon focused on the steps his compositional ideas and discoveries have taken over time and how the explorations of one piece or series of works led quite organically to the next phase. In order to illustrate how the composing of Music for 18 Musicians in 1976 marked a turning point in his compositional approach, he backtracked even further, explaining talk about how all the music that had preceded it was based around a basic rhythm or melodic pattern. He illustrated this by tapping out the rhythmic basis of Drumming saying: “That’s Drumming, and everything else is elaboration – pitch, timbre, and canonic placement. The entire hour of music comes from that tiny little module.” The shift that happened in the composing of Music for 18 Musicians came when he sat down at the piano and made up a series of harmonies, “admittedly something composers have been doing for thousands of years, but I hadn’t been.”

His goal up to that point, he said, had been to keep the harmony and timbre the same, and have rhythm be what moved the music forward. He stressed that what made these earlier pieces work with their interlocking patterns and resultant complex counterpoint was “to have identical instruments playing against each other. That’s an acoustic necessity.” In the four sections that make up Drumming, the first three parts are for multiples of the same instrument (8 bongos, then 3 marimbas, then 3 glockenspiels), but in the last part all the instruments are mixed together. This was for him the big breakthrough that led directly into Music for 18 Musicians and the use of a mixed instrumental ensemble. He admits that although this was a step forward for him and at the time resulted in a very new piece, it was also simultaneously one step back into traditional western ways of making music.

The work is scored for a large ensemble made up of a combination of clarinets, violin, cello, marimbas, xylophones, vibraphone, four pianos and four women’s voices. Harmonically, it is based on a series of 11 chords that unfold over an hour with the cues of when to move forward to the next section coming from the vibraphone player. “The excitement for me” Reich said “was in using mixed orchestration for the first time, because I’ve been doing it ever since. The tension of going from one way of writing to another way is embodied in that piece. That makes it very unique.”

The other work on the April 14 program is Tehillim, composed in 1981. This work marks another break from what Reich had been doing up to this point, both rhythmically and in his treatment of the voice. Previously, his rhythmic patterns were created by dividing up triple metres in various ways, and vocally he had relied on using vocalise – syllables or vocal sounds rather than text. “For the first time since I was a student, I decided I was going to set words, like the normal use of the human voice.” While working, he began chanting the original Hebrew words of Psalm 19 over and over until “suddenly a melody popped into my head, while at the same time this rhythm popped into my head – one, two; one, two, three; one, two; one, two, three.” Wondering what was happening, “I suddenly realized it was the unconscious dredging up of my previous knowledge from years ago of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Bartok’s Bulgarian rhythms, which was basically the use of fast changing metres. And somehow, and who knows how, the Hebrew text attached itself to those rhythms.”

As he continued to work on the piece, with each of the remaining three movements built upon the texts of different psalms, he realized that this process wasn’t going away. Rather it ended up staying not only for the entire piece but became the basis for The Desert Music (composed in 1983) and continues to appear in many other instrumental works to this day. “It became a spontaneous discovery of another musical language through the setting of the Hebrew text.”

This story of progressive and transformative discovery has been the hallmark of Reich’s compositional career, going back to his initial explorations, in the mid-1960s, of what would happen sonically when playing back a series of tape loops with the same recorded fragment and listening as they gradually moved out of sync or phase with each other. The ensuing musical structure manifests itself inhis pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, and forms the foundation of how his musical aesthetic itself has slowly morphed and changed throughout the years. It’s as if his own musical ideas and discoveries were having and continue to have a conversation amongst themselves, as became evident when we talked about his recent compositions.

In 2013, for example, he wrote Quartet for the Colin Currie Group, a UK virtuosic percussion ensemble devoted to playing Reich’s music. By deciding to score the piece for two vibraphones and two pianos, he was using the same core instrumentation that has been the foundation for many of his previous pieces. What’s distinctive about Quartet, though, is that it changes key more frequently than in any other piece. “Harmonically, it’s all over the map, just the opposite of what you’d associate with me, especially in the early pieces. When I first finished it, I thought it was a mess, but when I heard it, I found it interesting and the performers loved it.” Two years later, in 2015, Reich composed Pulse, scored for a small group of strings and winds, piano and electric bass. “The pulse is constant, creating a very hypnotic work with static harmonic changes and just the kind of thing you’d think I would have written 20 to 30 years ago. Maybe I wrote it in reaction to the previous piece (Quartet). Sometimes that happens.”

Currently, he is working on a co-commission from The Royal Ballet in London and Ensemble Signal, based in New York. Titled Runner, the piece will be premiered on November 10 at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden with choreography by Wayne McGregor. What distinguishes this piece is the incremental changes in rhythmic values, despite the fact that the tempo doesn’t change. This musical progression of different note durations reflects the idea that runners have to pace themselves.

What intrigued me in listening to Reich speak about his music some 40 years later was how, even though in the early days his music offered a radically different approach to music making, he remains, now as he was then, almost bemused by how the evolutionary process of his musical explorations continually brings him back to the pillars of western musical tradition and more normal ways of composing.

And as we, the audiences of Toronto, gear up for his April visit, we can look forward, now as we did then, to the way the magnetic pulse of the sound weaves its own magic within our ears, as once again we engage, step by step, with the timeless music of Steve Reich.

The WholeNote’s regular new music columnist, Wendalyn Bartley, is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist.

It’s Tuesday evening and Vesnivka is rehearsing for an upcoming concert – perhaps the most important in the Toronto choir’s history.

It’s been 50 years since conductor and artistic director Halyna Kvitka Kondracki founded Vesnivka and the Ukrainian women’s choir is preparing for its golden anniversary performance. This month’s concert at Glenn Gould Studio April 17 features the works of contemporary composers commissioned by Vesnivka over the past five decades.

I’m excited to sit in on a rehearsal and race across Trinity Bellwoods Park before making my way down the stairs into the basement of St. Nicholas Ukrainian School where Vesnivka has practised since day one. As I enter the hall, the memories begin flooding in.

I was one of the young girls who attended Saturday school at St. Nick’s where Kondracki established Vesnivka in 1965. From humble beginnings as an after-school music program to an internationally acclaimed choir renowned for musical excellence, Vesnivka has become a leading voice of Ukrainian choral music worldwide, transcending language barriers and entertaining diverse audiences at home and abroad.

I was 13 when I joined Vesnivka; I sang in the alto section for more than 30 years. During that time, the choir performed across Canada, the eastern United States, South America, Europe and Great Britain on some of the most prestigious concert stages in the world. Singing at Carnegie Hall in New York City, the Royal Albert Hall in London and at a Papal mass next to the magnificent Renaissance altar at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome were unforgettable experiences that came with bragging rights.

A whirlwind seven-city tour of Ukraine in 1991 was life-changing. From as far back as I remember, my parents had talked about their beloved homeland and I soaked up its history and culture vicariously. Stepping onto Ukrainian soil for the first time and walking in the footsteps of my ancestors was almost surreal. I discovered where I’d come from and who I was.

The experience was unmatched and I was thrilled to share it with my choir sisters. We embraced our heritage and the people who opened their hearts to us. At times we were so moved by their generosity of spirit, we cried on stage.

There were also tears of joy. Travelling across that vast country on a bus with 50 of my best friends was so much fun. We’d spontaneously break out in song or laugh our heads off after someone grabbed the microphone to tell jokes over the public address system, all the while sharing goodies like cake, home-baked bread and roast chicken that had been passed on by relatives after a concert. As the miles rolled on, we’d chat and get to know one another better. Each tour – across Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Holland, Poland and so many others – made our musical family stronger.

For Myroslava Diakun, Vesnivka nourished her passion for singing. “I grew up in a family that loved music and special occasions at our house always included singing, usually in three-part harmony,” she tells me. “Fast forward 50 years and I’m still singing in Vesnivka with lifelong friends that I met in the choir who have become my extended family.”

And the songs that brought us together in our youth keep us connected in adulthood. When “the girls” get together for birthdays, weddings of our children, christenings and even celebrations of lives lived, we sing. I join in from the pews when Vesnivka sings the liturgy at St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church on Queen St. West.

When I’m feeling nostalgic, I pull out my collection of Vesnivka’s recordings. This latest release, 50 Seasons of Song, is a compilation of the “best recordings” of Vesnivka in celebration of the 50th anniversary. The songs from the early years feature a pure and clean sound with orchestral arrangements by Canadian composer and two-time Gemini Award-winner Eric Robertson. There are songs that celebrate the strength and spirit of Ukrainian women as well as compositions by I.B. Vesolowskyj, featuring his popular dance songs of the 40s and 50s with Vesnivka accompanied by Toronto’s Burya Band.

 Fittingly in this anniversary year, last month, Vesnivka launched the first phase of its e-Library of Ukrainian Choral Music. The project represents a significant milestone for Vesnivka in its mandate of promoting Ukrainian choral music, says e-Library manager and longtime Vesnivka member Lesia Komorowsky. “Vesnivka has an impressive repertoire of Ukrainian classical, folk, contemporary and sacred music in its archives which it wants to share with singers around the world – thus leaving a musical legacy for generations to come.”

The e-Library gives users access to this music online, the ability to download the sheet music in either the original Ukrainian or transliterated form for performance. Music lovers can explore it at vesnivka.com and clicking on the e-Library link.

While I haven’t been in the choir for many years, it feels as if I’ve never left as I walk into the room where old friends welcome me. “Does this mean you’re coming back to the choir?” they ask before I take a seat in the back row and wait for the rehearsal to begin.

Aside from the padded chairs and music stands, little has changed in the hall. It’s still buzzing with energy as it always did before a concert.

While there are many new faces, there are also familiar ones. Olenka Wasley, the longest-standing member of the choir, joined in 1965 and hasn’t missed a season yet. “Quite often commitments such as school, work, family responsibilities or health matters have affected the membership of many, but I pride myself on being able to manage all of these and still be an active member,” she says.

Wasley recalls being impressed by Kondracki’s enthusiasm, creativity and dedication. That hasn’t changed either.

“We all marvelled at her talents,” Wasley tells me, adding that Vesnivka has been a big part of her life and that of her family which has supported her every step of the way, knowing how much she loves singing in the choir. “I would encourage young women to come out and join Vesnivka and celebrate music through song,” she says.

I’m hoping The Nightingale, (arrangement by Borys Lystopad based on a traditional Ukrainian folk song), will be part of the evening’s practice. Its haunting melody, sung a cappella, transports me to Llangollen, Wales and the 1993 International Eisteddfodd as the judges announce that Vesnivka’s performance of The Nightingale placed first in the folk category at the prestigious choral competition. I remember leaping out of my seat and jumping for joy. It’s how athletes must feel winning Olympic gold.

While I loved the concerts, participation in music festivals and competitions opened up the world of international choral music and opportunities to meet people who love to sing as much as I do.

It was also amazing to bring home the awards – whether it was from a CBC Choral Competition or the Choral Olympics in Linz, Austria. Not bad for amateurs.

As the choir warms up, I slip into the adjoining  music room where the walls are covered with photographs, concert posters, certificates, awards and mementos. They tell the story of Vesnivka’s history beginning with Kondracki who was studying at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music when she established Vesnivka to share her rich musical heritage. It wasn’t easy and some said a youth choir wouldn’t last. Tenacious and determined, Kondracki would prove them wrong.

Encouraged by her father Bohdan Zorych, who had conducted his own choir in Ukraine, Kondracki was inspired by the beautiful music she sang growing up.

“There is nothing to compare to the pure joy of singing – of using that fabulous instrument within us to express our passion for life and love of our Ukrainian culture,” she says. “This gift is a treasure that gains greater value when shared with others.”

Back in the 60s, few had heard of Ukraine or knew that Mykola Leontovych, who composed the internationally renowned Carol of the Bells, was Ukrainian. Over the years, Vesnivka has helped put Ukrainian choral music on the map attracting culturally diverse audiences.

Even a lack of Ukrainian music for girls’ voices didn’t keep her from her métier. When she couldn’t find suitable music, Kondracki rewrote arrangements from male choir TB scores to SSA. In 1968, she commissioned Ukrainian composer Andrij Hnatyshyn, living in Austria, to write an Eastern Rite Byzantine mass for Vesnivka in three- and four-part harmony which is the foundation of the choir’s sacred repertoire. Some sections are still part of the liturgy the choir sings at St. Nicholas. Kondracki also searched archives in Ukraine for original folk songs and classical music expanding Vesnivka’s repertoire. She made connections with contemporary composers there and at home and continues to commission new works to broaden Vesnivka’s musical horizons bringing new music to audiences and showcasing talented composers.

“Vesnivka owes a great deal of its success to the incredible talent and creativity of composers who have given us such wonderful works to perform over the years,” says Kondracki.

Ukrainian-Canadian composers such as Roman Hurko, whose Liturgy No.4 (Vesnivka) launched the choir’s anniversary season last fall, as well as Zenia Kushpeta, Larysa Kuzmenko and Zenoby Lawryshyn will be featured at this month’s concert.

Kondracki continues to blaze new trails for Vesnivka by collaborating with ensembles such as the Elmer Iseler Singers, conducted by Lydia Adams, the Toronto Ukrainian Male Chamber Choir, Roman Borys, cellist with the Gryphon Trio, and violinist Halyna Dziuryn – guest artists at the gala concert.

Looking ahead, Vesnivka has been invited to the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival this summer. Next year, Vesnivka will be on stage at Koerner Hall with Orpheus Choir of Toronto as well as other artists and musicians for a marquee concert celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday and the 125th anniversary of Ukrainian settlement in Canada. It will showcase the works of Canadian composers John Estacio (The Houses Stand Not Far Apart) and Larysa Kuzmenko (The Golden Harvest).

When Robert Cooper, artistic director of Chorus Niagara and Orpheus Choir of Toronto, took on the project, Kondracki was the first person he called. They were introduced back in the 80s while Cooper was a producer of choral music at the CBC Radio and headed up the national choral competitions. “Vesnivka always won,” (in the multicultural category) says Cooper who is also artistic director of Opera in Concert Chorus and Ontario Male Chorus. Cooper worked with Kondracki in 2006 when Vesnivka joined more than 250 Canadian singers and musicians onstage at Roy Thomson Hall for “Chernobyl 20,” commemorating the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Ukraine.

“I’m very aware of Kvitka’s good work,” Cooper continues noting under Kondracki’s leadership that Vesnivka has maintained “a very high order of choral sophistication…I enjoy working with Kvitka who is very authentic, very serious about her music, is an expert when it comes to Ukrainian choral music and makes things happen.”

While the future is exciting, the focus this evening is on the 50th anniversary program. I settle into my seat as Kondracki raises her arms and Vesnivka begins to rehearse. The room fills with the glorious sound of music. I close my eyes and let my spirit soar.

Leslie Ferenc is a member of the Vesnivka 50th anniversary committee.