Features

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W.B Yeats

With apologies to W.B. Yeats, “slouching towards Bethlehem” is a perfect description of me as I walk the 15 minutes down Bathurst Street from home to the Toronto Island Airport. I am Newark bound, with my one overstuffed carry-on bag on my shoulder. It’s 6:30am on a Friday, and I have to be on the bus to Bethlehem at 10am. So I have not had time for shower, shave or coffee this balmy May 8 morning.

But I make my Porter flight to Newark with time to spare and find my bus; my little spring adventure is underway.

When Douglas McNabney dropped by The WholeNote office a week or two ago, it was mainly just to set up a time to sit down later in June and have a conversation – a filmed Conversation@TheWholeNote, for our YouTube series, to be exact – about his vision for this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival. However, as often happens in these kinds of situations, one thing led to another and before we were aware of it, our conversation had already begun. In this particular case, it was especially easy to get carried away – this is the tenth anniversary year of Toronto Summer Music and McNabney’s fifth year of his tenure as the festival’s artistic director. From the look of the programming in place, this festival will have a presence in Toronto’s musical landscape this summer that will be tough to ignore.

Think of what follows as a taste of a “Conversation” to come, where McNabney will be catching up with WholeNote publisher David Perlman to talk about the business of curating a city’s music, brand-new opportunities for amateurs to get involved in the festival scene, and how to cope – or even take advantage of – the coming Panamania. Until the time comes, however, here is a little of what has been on McNabney’s mind, and on ours, as festival season swings into full gear.

WN: For now, let’s get a sense of the festival, and of the shape of it.

The summer music festival can be a bit of a mystifying concept. At just the time of year when you would expect most concert performers to pack up their instrument cases and head to the cottage, there is, across the country, a sudden eruption of summer music-making branded as “festival season” – a phenomenon often put together by people who work throughout the year and around the clock to make it happen. And yet, despite all the similarities (weekend getaways, specially-themed concert series, multi-arts celebrations and educational initiatives), you’d be hard-pressed to find two festivals in any given summer that appear to be cut from the same cloth.

So what exactly is a summer music festival, and, apart from the fact that it’s in the summer, what are some of the factors that give each its unique fingerprint – keeping audiences and organizers alike coming back for more? Make no mistake – increasingly, music festivals are more than just blips on the regular musical calendar. These summer events have a particular capacity for going above and beyond the constraints of the average concert series, offering up an experience that is not only carefully curated but musically unique. And who better than some of the people who do that curating to talk about the unique characteristics of the festivals they shepherd into being?

In an article that will be featured in the forthcoming summer issue of the Canadian Music Centre’s digital magazine, Notations, composer John Beckwith writes about how, late in 2013, John French, director of the Brookside Music Association in Midland, invited him to compose a piece to be performed in July 2015, marking “the 400th anniversary of the voyage of Samuel de Champlain and a few fellow adventurers from France to the ‘Mer douce’ or ‘Fresh-water sea’—today’s Lake Huron. I said yes,” says Beckwith. The Ontario Arts Council approved the commission, and, effectively, that’s where the story of Wendake/Huronia, as the work is titled, begins.

Brookside’s John French first described the undertaking to me back in April: “The new work will be performed by a chamber choir, the Brookside Festival Chorus, comprised of members of regional choirs, a pair of First Nations drummers, Shirley Hay and Marilyn George, Laura Pudwell, alto, and Theodore Baerg, narrator, accompanied by the Toronto Consort under the direction of David Fallis. It’s a 30-minute work in six movements, reflecting on the Wendat culture from pre-European contact to the present day and ending with a prayer for reconciliation between the two cultures. It will be presented in a tour of Georgian Bay communities including Midland, Parry Sound (as part of the Festival of the Sound), Barrie and Meaford and potentially others.”

People who witness one of the three performances of Luminato’s 2015 revival of Murray Schafer’s Apocalypsis this June may read in the program book that the work was commissioned by CBC Radio in 1975. This new production of the piece may have a fresh look and presentation, but the score is the same bold Schafer composition, first produced during what John Peter Lee Roberts, then head of CBC Radio Music and the work’s commissioner, called “The Golden Age of Achievement” at CBC Radio.

The period of time Roberts refers to is 1950 to 1980, 30 years that correspond closely to the span of time that Glenn Gould had his own professional career, one that was intertwined with the development of music at CBC Radio. Glenn’s very first recital for CBC Radio was in December of 1950 and despite his enormous labours for an American record company between 1955 and 1982, the year of his death, he retained a close working relationship with those of us who produced music programs at CBC. Of course Glenn was one of thousands of Canadian artists who made programming for CBC, enabled by the Broadcasting Act, a cornerstone piece of Canadian legislation that remains in force to this day.