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During a particularly compelling moment in the Art of Time Ensemble’s recent performance, Dance to the Abyss: Music From The Weimar Republic, the ensemble, now in its final season, performed Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher five times in a row. Utilizing a set of detailed instructions from a document titled Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations, the ensemble uses each rendition to iteratively strip away the lifeblood and very essence of what makes that great 1931 song so paradigmatically part of the jazz of swing-era Harlem.

When I was a child in pre-amalgamation Toronto, any trip past Bloor Street on the Yonge line was “north” to me, with the magic moment being when the subway emerged from the tunnel and went above ground; for a magic moment you could pretend you were on a different kind of train bound for who knows where.

“It’s one show stopper after another, isn’t it? There’s not a bad number in it,” is what conductor Jane Glover, DBE, says when I ask how she explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah. We met and talked in December in the lobby of her hotel in downtown Toronto, one day after she’d conducted the first of five Messiah concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in a near-full Roy Thomson Hall. Her new book, Mozart in Italy, had come out earlier in 2023, and Toronto was a cap on a busy, Atlantic crisscrossing year.

Life the way most working musicians across the spectrum knew it came to a standstill in March 2020. For Leah Roseman, a violinist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) since 1997, the effect was immediate, manifesting itself from day one as “a need to engage with people and help.” Finding herself teaching online for the first time, she began recording videos of herself playing etudes, scales, orchestral excerpts, and offering tips about learning violin for her students. “I was just going to put them in some Dropbox file, but I thought ‘Well, I could just put them on a [private] YouTube channel.’ And then I thought if I made it public maybe people would stumble upon it.” And stumble upon it they did. Ultimately, Roseman created over 1,000 videos on her YouTube channel, attracting over 400,000 views, and laying the groundwork for her path to what I call “other-level pivoting.”

Whether they are physical or metaphorical, staircases take us from one place to another through a liminal space. But far from being “non-places”’ that we should take for granted, stairways are also entities unto themselves: they can effect a change in place or fortune, and themselves stand as symbols of class or power. In Staircases, her new production for Tafelmusik, Alison Mackay explores music with direct or inferred links to staircases and, as she puts it herself, builds a case about complex connections between the arts and economic issues.