Features

The year was 1951, the month November and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra was about to venture beyond the borders of Canada (indeed, of Ontario) for the first time. Destination? Detroit.

Only this was the period when the junior senator from Wisconsin was looking for suspected communists beneath every bed and the orchestra happened to include players being denied entrance to “the land of the free and the home of the brave” through the pinkish hue of their political complexion.

Torontonians felt a sense of outrage. Our orchestra should go intact or not at all, some voices argued. The conductor, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Canada’s first and only musical knight, felt differently. He wanted the engagement. So he dumped the so-called Symphony Seven and the orchestra wound up making its American debut without them.

As with any business, there’s more to music making than meets the eye. In our last issue, we featured conversations with some of the local live music scene’s industry professionals – spanning the roles of acoustician, librarian, set designer and even surtitles operator – who help keep the music happening and the machine running smoothly. Also among those unspoken heroes of this city’s musical life are the concert curators – those who do all of the artistic directing and season organizing, and whose job descriptions require a very special type of behind-the-scenes musical genius.

Here follow conversations with three such directors and organizers, each facing their own particular musical milestones. Tricia Baldwin, after 14 years as managing director of Tafelmusik, has just accepted a new position as director of the new Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts at Queen’s University, where a whole new series of challenges and accomplishments are in store. Lang-Ning Liu, artistic director of the Toronto International Piano Competition, is in the midst of planning and preparations for the 2014 competition this month. Finally, bassist, producer and composer George Koller is getting the ball rolling with a brand new concert series: International Divas, three all-acoustic concerts that will feature a grand total of 18 renowned female vocalists.

As each of these three curators are carried to new places – or to the next stage of a familiar planning process – they are sure to meet with unique trials and triumphs on the road ahead. Though they won’t necessarily be performing under the spotlights themselves in the coming months, they will certainly play a big part in the process of making live local music happen – an accomplishment that concertgoers, co-workers and star performers alike are sure to appreciate.

What constitutes the musical mainstream, and what’s upstream of that? Who determines what fits into musical categories, into genre streams that guide musicians in their careers, presenters in their programming choices and listeners in their concertgoing? Which music is a legitimate representation of a lineage worth investigating, and what is a marginal, outsider expression?

The Music Gallery (I’m tagging it MG in this story) founded in 1976 by Peter Anson and Al Mattes of the free-improvising group CCMC – originally an acronym for Canadian Creative Music Collective – is a constantly morphing downtown music institution that has valiantly grappled for decades with these and other thorny questions to do with music presentation. During that time it has variously been a venue for rent, a producer and co-presenter, a cultural hub, a rehearsal space and concert home for numerous musicians and ensembles of multiple genre affiliations, an exhibition space for visual art, the home of a record label, and Musicworks magazine’s original incubator.

Had it been situated in Soho, NYC it might have been long ago widely recognized as a key downtown music institution. In Toronto, though terra incognita to most residents, it nevertheless remains a vital venue for edgy performers and adventurous music seekers alike.

Welcome to The WholeNote’s third annual guide to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) spotlighting films in which music plays an intriguing role. Selections range from music-centred documentaries and musicals to movies featuring characters involved in making music to soundtracks that are integral to the quality of the films they help drive. With 285 feature films in this year’s festival, there was some alchemy involved in choosing the 22 titles on the following list – the soundtrack category is particularly difficult to predict in advance.

You meet the most interesting people at New York City dinner parties. That’s where Ethan Hawke first met Seymour Bernstein, the 85-year-old subject of his documentary Seymour: An Introduction. Bernstein began playing the piano as a child in Newark, New Jersey and by the age of 15 was already a teacher. He had a brief concert career after studies with such giants as Alexander Brailowsky, Clifford Curzon and Nadia Boulanger before settling into his role of helping others develop.

It was Hawke’s explanation of Bernstein’s teaching mantra in response to Hubert Vigilia’s question on flixist.com two years ago (just as the film was taking shape) that piqued my curiosity and made Seymour a must-see on my TIFF to-do list: “What is harmony? What is dissonance? Why should we practice? Why should we work hard, and what difference does it make when you play the right note or don’t play the right note? He’s a very deep guy. I was touched by him, and I thought he had a lot to teach me about acting, and then I slowly realized that the way he’s talking about the piano relates to every profession.”

There is an old adage that says, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” but that is exactly what composer/lyricist Nicole Brooks did with Obeah Opera.

In 2012, the hit production earned a nomination for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Musical/Opera. Nonetheless, the Obeah Opera that will be unveiled at Nightwood Theatre’s New Groundswell Festival (September 11 to 14) is a totally new work. “I always knew it wasn’t complete,” says Brooks. “Both the story and the music had to evolve. The ancestors wouldn’t allow me to rest.”

The ancestors Brooks references are the West African female practitioners of the ancient healing art of obeah. Obeah women who were captured and enslaved brought their healing practices to the Americas where the pressure of Christianity converted the concept of obeah into an evil force. Even today, some superstitious people from the Caribbean fear the very sound of the word. When Weyni Mengesha, the director of the new version, asked each member of the cast to bring one fact about obeah to the first day of rehearsals, over half cited negative connotations. One cast member said her mother even refused to talk about it.