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"So you’re sweet sixteen?” I say to my guest. We’re sitting in The WholeNote office, mid-May – one of those “just-happened-to-be-in-town,” semi-spontaneous conversations that goes better for not having over-planned it.  He chuckles. “I hadn’t quite thought of it that way” he says. “I’ve just been telling people we are in our teens. But if someone wants to come along and kiss us with a big fat donation, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Anyone particular in mind?” I ask. He fires right back. “If there was, I wouldn’t tell you!”

My guest this day is John Miller, artistic producer from the outset,  16 years ago, of Stratford Summer Music (SSM), that, for six weeks of the summer anyway, grabs a share of the spotlight from the Stratford Festival, the April-to-November theatrical juggernaut that has, over the course of its 60-year existence, completely reshaped the history of one small Ontario town.

“Is the elephant co-operative these days?” I tease. “Or are you guys two solitudes?”

Perhaps it’s the presence of the tape recorder, but he pauses for longer than usual, given his normal free-flowing conversational style. And then: “...I’m only choosing my words carefully” he says “because I don’t want any wrong impression to come out. By saying that we’re in our own spheres it doesn’t mean there aren’t occasions when we cross, or cooperate. But what we realize is they are a $60 million dollar big business,  and we’re a $1 million small business, and it’s so easy to get crushed, or overwhelmed. So we tend to want to keep our own separate tracks, so that we can keep our own identity. Because I think it will always be the case that if you say ‘Stratford’ and ‘Festival’ in one breath, people think theatre. Because we started more than four decades behind them, that’s the thing. I often dream of what music would be like if the original concept of music at the Stratford Festival had been allowed to grow instead of being cut off as it was.”

“You mean the days of Louis Applebaum?” I ask. (Applebaum, the Stratford Festival’s resident composer for 43 years, had begun a separate Stratford Music Festival in 1955, two years after the establishment of the Theatre Festival.) Miller lights up. “Absolutely! When Glenn Gould was in charge of the music programming, Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten used to come. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf used to come. Duke Ellington would come. Those were great days.”

Part of the problem, he explains, is that music was deemed by the festival board to be too expensive, and so was cut out. “It is expensive,” he continues. “And it’s a psychological thing. You mount a (theatrical) production. It costs a lot, but it can run for six months. We don’t do that in music. You bring in a great orchestra or singer or somebody and it costs a lot of money, and what do they do? One concert, or maybe two if you’re lucky, and then away they go...But it’s not a case of ‘Oh we’re trying to bring music back.’ We’re not trying any more. We have succeeded in bringing music back, with its head held high.”

 “If I’d had to guess, before looking at your website, I’d have thought you’d be making a  meal of the ‘Shakespeare at 400’ thing this year,” I say, “But it looks like you’re being quite laid back about it, not whacking it over the head – you have a very diverse program.”

“Well, we’re probably doing the biggest thing in the city in regard to it,” he responds, “because we are bringing the choir from Shakespeare’s own church, the Holy Trinity Church, as the core of our choral programming this year, and they are bringing two programs of music they’ve been building up and singing to people visiting the church in their community. Their vicar is coming, and we’re going to team up with the local Anglican church here, plant trees in both churchyards...and on our lecture series music critic Robert Harris is doing a presentation on Shakespeare and music...and that’s a lot more than the Theatre is doing. So we are in fact carrying the ball on the salute to the 400th anniversary. Mind you, I could have done a whole festival based on that.”

 “You could have,” I agree. “And it’s fantastic that you haven’t.”

One distinctive feature of Miller’s abilities as a curator is how deftly he spins multiple themes that weave through the course of a Stratford Summer Music season. For example, the choral strand this year, will also feature Daniel Taylor’s Theatre of Early Music (in a program of great anthems by Handel and Bach titled ‘Let The People Hear’), The Canadian Spotlight (a chorus of professional and semi-professional singers put together for SSM by conductor Mark Vuorinen) which does a full program of Canadian choral works, and the Harlem Gospel Choir, with, as Miller reveals, a significant guest.

“What you probably don’t know yet is that Measha [Brueggergosman] will come and sing with them. Last year we had The Blind Boys of Alabama – a huge success, hundreds of people, we were turning people away – and Ben [Heppner] came and sang with them, and I thought wouldn’t it be fun to carry that sort of spirit on. But who could sing with the Harlem choir? Measha was the natural and she agreed to come.”

"Tell about the other strands this year," I ask, and he obliges with gusto: there’s the always stellar piano series (“I’m really proud of the piano series. I just love piano. That’s part of it”; there’s 7am music on the banks of the Avon; a cabaret series ranging from "Trish O'Callaghan covering Cohen to Alex Samaras doing Sondheim, to Michael Occhipinti and friends doing John Lennon.” There will also be 30 hours of barge music in a wide range of genres; three “Bach walks” in “The Grove” with music supplied by the Charm of Finches flute ensemble and commentary by the local society of field naturalists society “on the double-breasted whatevers and the purple trillium”; Whiskey Jack (who backed up Stompin’ Tom for decades) will play at the local Legion “because I thought, well, where would Stompin’ Tom have played”; one of their trademark restaurant concert series will  feature the world of harp music “from classical to celtic to baroque to Paraguyan to Senegalese to contemporary”; …the list, and his delight at all of it, seem boundless.

One element of Miller’s ability to bring about programming coups, like Heppner singing with The Blind Boys of Alabama last year or this year's Brueggergosman/Harlem Gospel Choir collaboration, relates to the formidable and diverse rolodex of musical contacts and musical acquaintanceships he has built up over a decade and a half here at Stratford Summer Music. (“The one part of my job I don’t like,” he says, “is how often I have to say no to people, now.”) Part of it doubtless also stems from previous sojourns with the Glenn Gould Foundation and before that the Canadian Music Centre.

But part of it also stems from a very savvy sense of what one might call the art of the necessary. Which arises from an acutely realistic understanding of the context in which he and SSM must operate. If he does his job right, around 65,000 people every season, who make it to Stratford for something else, will “happen across” SSM, and remember the fact that they did. 

“How do you plan for people to stumble across you and how do you ensure that, no matter how long they stick around for, they go away appreciating the scope of the whole thing and the deftness of the weave?” I ask.

“It’s very interesting,” he says. “I am always running into people who say ‘I didn’t know there was a music festival here’ and then I’ll say ‘Well, did you hear the Andrew Collins Trio; did you hear the bluegrass?’ and they’ll say ‘Oh yeah I heard the bluegrass music down on that wonderful floating stage, downtown,’ but they just sort of thought it happened somehow.”

“But that’s the big challenge, isn’t it?” I ask. “Because your passers through, your Stratford Festival attendees, even your SSM regulars, are only going to get a tiny taste of it all, unless they are coming back every weekend or staying the week, which I would think isn’t easy to do given how busy the town is in theatre high-season.” 

 He pushes back a bit at that: “Well I suppose. But if you went to the Edinburgh Festival, or Ravinia, or any of these places, even if you come for the Stratford Theatre, you know, you don’t get it all at one time. You have to come back, or you take your chance on what has been programmed by some artistic director for the dates when you’re going to be there. That’s the way it is, and as the artistic director you have to understand that. My responsibility is to present you with a  cultural smorgasbord at any given moment, so that you can pick and choose from it.”

The trick, he says, is to make sure that there is always a representative mix of ingredients so you come away with a sense of the whole.

Beyond Concertizing: Stratford Summer Music is also becoming an increasingly interesting educational destination, for public and students alike, most notably its TorQ Percussion Quartet residency, now in its fifth year, and a robust Vocal Academy which offers a jaw-droppingly fine ten-day residency to career-edge artists.

“The Vocal Academy is expanded this year,” Miller says, “with new faculty – Krisztina Szabó, Nathalie Poulin and Alison Pybus.” Pybus, he says, is a particularly significant addition. “We felt it was important that these edge-of-career singers have guidance in areas additional to voice. And management is something they need to understand and have insight into. Alison Pybus used to be the director of the vocal division at IMG. So she’s at the top of her field and will join [Michael] Schade and Phillip Addis and Emily Hamper, and Howard Dyck who lectures on oratorio, and Geraint Wynn-Davies who speaks to them about acting.”

Getting in is via a rigorous application process involving submission of recordings and CVs so they can be shipped to Schade, Hamper and Addis wherever they may be; at this point applicants come in from all over Canada, and elsewhere – “The furthest this year was New Zealand” he says. “And we sent posters to every music faculty in the country back in January.” It’s not a full scholarship opportunity but the ten days end up costing around $500, with billeting opportunities and/or housing in the nurses’ residence in town as options. “And of course while they are with us they get tickets to the theatre and everything else that’s going on in the Stratford environment.” The great thing, he adds, is that most of those vocal master classes are open to the public – “Alison Pybus will, for example conduct mock auditions, and then spend private time afterwards, giving feedback and going over each student’s promotional materials.”

Tellingly, the subsidizing of student participation in the Vocal Academy comes from the community itself – a grass roots initiative.

“What is extraordinary to me,” Miller says, “is how the community buys in. After all this time, living in Stratford, you understand how important the arts are, not just for the pocket book but for your own soul. Artists love to come here - 35,000 population, extraordinary restaurants and neighbours. I’m having fun. One heck of a good place, it really is. I am just happy to be lucky enough to do what I do.”

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

A peculiar thing happens each year around mid-May in the largest, busiest city of Canada, the fifth largest North American city: mainstream Toronto opera life all but shuts down, give or take an intrepid indie daring a short early June run. And the season stays shut until the latter half of September. This year there’s an exception, a chamber opera at the Winter Garden in July thanks to the Toronto Summer Music Festival, but it’s likelier to be a one-off than a harbinger. Classical music lovers are somewhat luckier, with the TSO working full steam until the end of June, though it too starts the season late in September. Berlin, on the other hand, goes to the opera until early August and happily returns to it first week of September. Opera in Paris runs parallel with ballet until mid-July. London goes strong until mid-July and effectively has no respite with the Proms taking over from then on till mid-September.

Even regional European houses in small cities beat us in quantity and length. The opera house in Liège (population 200,000) has an eight-production season that runs until the end of June. Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (population 780,000) starts its 12-production season early September and dovetails with Holland Festival on the other end to finish in early July.

What do the artists who make opera do in those four months that Toronto doesn’t do opera? And how do they explain our long break?

Soprano Ambur Braid recently returned home to Toronto after a Magic Flute run at the English National Opera in London, where she sang a wheelchair-bound Queen of the Night, and subsequently a very different, glammed-up Maleficent-like version of the same role at the Calgary Opera. “Evil royalty,” as she puts it, dramatic coloratura roles are becoming her calling card and one of her great historical research interests: those who attended the Canadian Art Song Project recital “The Living Spectacle” last winter were treated to a stand-up quality introduction to the wives of Henry VIII before her exceptional rendering of Try Me, Good King by Libby Larsen. She could not confirm or deny if she will return to the ENO in the near future, but I would bet on Yes, and on Verdi, the composer she’s starting to sing more, including the recital with Toronto Concert Orchestra at Casa Loma this May.

The voracious intellect whose interests range from Anne Boleyn to painter Stephen Appleby-Barr to Wes Anderson to caftans (if anybody will make them glamourous, it’ll be this statuesque soprano), Braid will combine work, study and travel this summer. “I’ll be singing the bitchy maid Dalinda in Richard Jones’ new Ariodante at the COC in September, so my June will be all Ariodante prep, all the time,” she says. She’ll also travel to Puglia to brush up her Italian, and try out agriturismo (“And eat and gain my preparatory weight,” she adds). “On August 6 I’m singing a recital of Rachmaninoff and Sibelius in Niagara-on-the-Lake, two new singing languages for me, and will be coaching all of that in July.” The COC rehearsals start on September 9.

We mull over possible reasons for the shortness of Toronto opera season, and wonder if it’s still presumed that since a lot of people of a certain class are out of town every weekend from May long weekend until Labour Day that everybody else is—or that they’re the only ones going to the opera. Opera tickets as a luxury item, opera audiences upper middle class? Sad state of affairs, if true, we agree. “Even in real estate,” she muses, “and in sales of clothes and jewellery, not a lot of people with buying power are in town in the summer, so that activity slows down.” The massive influx of tourists helps refill the audiences of London, Paris and Berlin during summer, she says after I bring up the European seasons. Is it about our habits, do we only do culture October to May? “It could be because we’re so young. Unlike Europeans, we are not brought up with it…And here, because it’s less subsidized and more expensive to go to the opera, you don’t go as often – it’s a special occasion thing. We say it shouldn’t be, but it is. And the relative rarity of performances also makes going to the opera a special event. You cannot show up at the opera house any day of the week and see something.” But she’s optimistic we’ll get there. “Hopefully we’ll get to the next step. Things are happening, it’s an exciting time to be in Canada.”

Christopher Mokrzewski has a similar take. “I get the feeling that Toronto is still a bit old-fashioned in that so much of the population takes significant time off in the summer. People are always travelling, are out of town, attending weddings and going to cottages, which makes it a little more difficult to maintain an active performance schedule with a diminished audience base,” writes the resident conductor at the Calgary Opera and music director of Against the Grain Theatre in an email. So musicians adapt and leave the city to work at festivals or train, like he’s about to do after wrapping up A Little Too Cozy, the AtG adaptation of Mozart/Da Ponte’s Così fan tutte. He’s taking a few days off in Toronto – “I’m desperate to get to a Jays game and see more concerts!” – before heading to St. Louis for a week on a professional development stipend from Calgary Opera. He’ll be working on bel canto repertoire with conductor Stephen Lord. The brilliant young musician is best known for the mashup of Schubert and Messiaen played with great conviction and drama in AtG’s “Death and Desire” last year, but his conducting interests are growing and it’s bel canto’s turn now.

He’s then off to Banff for six weeks, where he is music director for the Open Space Opera young artist program to conduct his first The Rape of Lucretia: his second one is the TSMF semi-staged performance at Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto’s one mainstream operatic exception of the summer. “I just love Banff to death. And I cannot wait for the real highlight of the summer, the Banff Centre Theatre Arts staff softball game. Big league!” Late July the AtG will perform at the Ottawa Chamber Fest, after which Mokrzewski returns to Calgary for a week of rehearsals and two weeks of performances at the Calgary Opera summer festival. “In late August and September I’ll likely be in Toronto and NYC for some professional development opportunities that are currently still in the works. Maybe I’ll take a few days off, if the mood strikes, and go on a road trip.”

Not a lot of leisure in Amanda Smith’s summer either. The emerging stage director and founding artistic director of FAWN Chamber Creative is already leaving her mark as one of the few movers within the Toronto Indie Opera network who embrace electronic music as essential for operatic creation and dance as essential to its performance. This approach was very much in evidence in Synaesthesia, FAWN’s recent six-composer workshop performance in the post-industrial area around Sterling Avenue that featured a dancer in pieces that alternate acoustic and electronic, live and tape. “I grew up listening to metal and noise music, it’s a big part of my life,” she says. The audience at Synaesthesia that night was mostly twentysomethings, and this was in part due to this bridging between the electronic music audience and the performing arts audience that those pieces proposed. “I also don’t want to charge people more than $20 per show. People are less willing to go to something unfamiliar if the tickets are more expensive. And us millennials are probably the most underemployed generation in a long while, with little disposable income.” One of the three audience-chosen pieces from the show will be commissioned into an opera. “We’re hoping to create a ballet lyrique and I want it to be sort of like devised theatre – only, devised opera. We have a workshop period, we’ll have a story, but the music will get devised.”

Smith’s degrees from Laurier and UofT are in voice and opera, but by the third year she knew she wanted to direct rather than sing. She’s since assisted a number of directors, including Michael Cavanagh for the world premiere of the now much-travelled Svadba by Ana Sokolović and Tim Albery for the landmark Grimes on the Beach at Aldeburgh Music Festival. Her summers so far have been about development. Last year she spent it in Quebec City observing the rehearsals for the new Robert Lepage production of L’Amour de loin and talking with the director (her theatre role model) about structuring rehearsals and getting the most out of people. This June she is travelling to Chicago to attend the Chicago Summer Opera program for two months. “I’ll be working with the director George Cederquist there. He does some exciting work, I’m really looking forward. I’m going to be mentored by him and have one-on-one seminars.” The two will work on Britten’s Albert Herring.

For the director Ashlie Corcoran there will be no summer vacation this year: the season at Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque where she is artistic director actually runs May to October, and her recently completed run of the play Das Ding at Canadian Stage was her 12th production in as many months. Three of the ten productions at the Playhouse she’ll direct herself: Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Coward’s Blythe Spirit and Das Ding by Philipp Löhle, a German play about globalization that she enthusiastically describes as “wild.” She’ll also be preparing for the pieces she’s directing in the fall, Blythe Spirit in Kamloops, the school tour at the COC and in December, Soundstreams’ Electric Messiah. Then off to direct the revival of The Magic Flute at the COC, the show she already assisted under the direction of Diane Paulus, and directed herself for the Ensemble Studio performance, and later revived at Opera Philadephia.

What guides her programming at the Playhouse? “It’s a year-long occupation, I’m always reading plays, seeing musicals, thinking about it constantly, and any time I see something that I’m interested in, I put it on a list or add it to the pile. And once I start programming, I see how all the pieces would fit together. It all needs to be high quality, intelligent, entertaining work, but I’m also looking for work that’s different and that sort of bounces up against each other, rubs against each other in interesting ways.” The audience is more of a regional theatre audience than summer audience, very diverse with very diverse expectations, and Corcoran aims to meet those but also to propose new and unexpected experiences. She says she can certainly imagine doing a chamber opera in the smaller Fire Hall in the future. “Last year we did an operetta, The Pirates of Penzance. I adapted it with Andrew Kushnir and we set it in 1927 in the prohibition times in the Thousand Islands. We re-wrote the libretto—Gilbert & Sullivan are in the public domain - so the pirates were rum runners, the police were the American coast guard, the sisters were a federation of teetotallers. We kept a lot of the original music, but we also included some other music from the 1920s. It was successful and great fun, and I hope to do it again in the future.”

Over at the COC, the costume department staff are already working on the two September productions. Sandra Corazza, COC’s costume supervisor tells me how her summer will unfold while giving me a tour of the third floor workrooms and storage spaces. The costumes for Ariodante and Norma are already there, shipped from their most recent dwelling places, the opera houses of Amsterdam and Barcelona respectively. The Handel was designed by Ultz with a mid-20th century Scottish village aesthetic, and there are a lot of old coats, wool sweaters and plain dresses on the rows of hangers before us. Corazza already saw the production in Amsterdam. “It’s good to be able to go backstage and ask the makers – dressers, makeup artists – what problems they had. Some of that stuff can’t be written precisely enough, even though we get the bible.” (The thick binder containing all the fabric samples, purchase information, sketches and photos is known as “the bible” among costume professionals.)

The forthcoming COC run will have an entirely new set of principals, some of whom are as physically different from their peers cast in the same roles in Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam as imaginable. The petite green ensemble now on a mannequin will have to be adjusted for the taller Ginevra by Jane Archibald. Dalinda too – the “bitchy maid” to be revived by Ambur Braid – will probably have her clothes resized. “This wedding dress,” Sandra pulls out a long sturdy white gown with modest ornaments. “It never gets worn properly, she sort of slaps it on over her slip, then sees the puppet show and takes it off, and Dalinda puts it on at one point…It’s handled more than actually worn.” The trouser role baddie will be sung by Verduhi Abrahamyan, a mezzo taller than Sonia Prina, whose name is still attached to her biker style costumes. Alice Coote’s Ariodante will be the same height as his love interest, and it remains to be decided whether she’ll be slightly raised with the right pair of shoes. For costume resizing, the seam allowance and long hem come to the rescue.

Ultz is expected to arrive in Toronto by the end of June, but meanwhile the fittings for the smaller roles are already starting. “We still don’t have the casting of the chorus, six male and six female, and 24 and 24 in Norma. Once we know that, we will know now many costumes we have to build. In Aix and Amsterdam, they had these sweaters custom knit. If these are too small, we may have to find a knitter to knit us a sweater, or go with a different costume. If Ultz decides to redesign the chorus and the extras, we’ll have to make these costumes happen.”

The gold sequin-encrusted dress by the costume designer Jessica Jahn is already fitted and waiting for Sondra Radvanovsky’s Norma. “When we get the Barcelona bible, we can find out where all these fabrics came from and start contacting these companies. We may add more red to Russell Thomas’s costume. Details often get changed when productions move from stage to stage.” The fitting of the principals and chorus starts in earnest on the third week of August. There are also the understudies to clothe, and in Norma, the children. Corazza will take a vacation too, but July is the only possibility. The 2016/17 season is already underway on the third floor of the COC’s Front Street East building.

Lydia Perovic’s novella All That Sang is out now wherever you buy books. As for her June, she’s off to Amsterdam for some Herheim-directed opera, Jacobs-conducted Haydn and Joël Pommerat’s theatrical take on the French Revolution. After a few additional days in Antwerp and Brussels, she’s back in Toronto for the summer.

In early April I happened to attend a concert by two distinguished Canadian musicians, pianist, William Aide and flutist, Robert Aitken. Friends since their student days in the late 1950s at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, where they used to play together frequently, each has had his own individual, successful career. But they had not played together since those distant days until getting together to prepare for this concert, a benefit to help pay off Church of the Holy Trinity’s new piano, showcased in this concert.

Arising from this experience, in May I sat down with Ian Grundy, artistic director of the May-to-September Music Mondays noon-hour concert series, as well as music director at Holy Trinity, to talk about the piano, Music Mondays and his new role as its artistic director in this, its 25th season.

Knowing of the fabulous reputation of Bechstein pianos, I asked why Holy Trinity had decided to seek out a new instrument rather than rebuild their old Bechstein. The trouble with rebuilding, he told me, is that you really do not know how the rebuilt piano is going to sound; there are no guarantees. With a new piano, on the other hand, you can hear it before you buy it.

On behalf of the church, Aide evaluated dozens of pianos. When he tried a seven-foot Steinway, to which Alex Thomson, the general manager of Steinway Piano Gallery had directed them, he knew at once that he had found their instrument. Only 12 years old and little played, its action was good enough to play a double glissando; its tone, strong but not overpowering. “It’s the perfect instrument for chamber music,” Ian told me. Its sound is big enough to fill Holy Trinity’s live acoustic environment but controllable enough to balance other instruments, even with the lid on full stick. An added benefit is that the case is made of Indian rosewood, which makes it extremely beautiful. Piano technician, Leela Khurana, one of only two Steinway-trained technicians in Toronto, who tuned the instrument for this concert, described it to me as “fabulous...young, flexible, resilient and powerful.”

The acquisition of the Steinway is a major step towards the realization of Grundy’s vision for Music Mondays as a first-class venue with first class instruments. One is the Steinway, of course; the other, the Casavant tracker organ acquired seven years ago from Deer Park United Church. A guiding principle for upcoming seasons, he says, is for the series to be a worthy platform for emerging young artists and to continue to feature a variety of musical genres.

“First-class publicity” is another part of the picture - to attract a more diverse audience and build audience size. He is interested in “taking music out of its compartment and reaching out to the community.” To this end he has joined the Yonge-Dundas B.I.A., a partnership which, he told me, is proving as welcome to the B.I.A. as it is to Holy Trinity.

With this kind of dynamic leadership, we can expect Music Mondays to grow into an even stronger cultural force than it already is and a major contributor to live music in the city in the summer. Stay tuned!

(And meanwhile enjoy the rest of this summer's series. Deails are in our GTA and festival listings.)

Flutist Allan Pulker is chairman of the board of The WholeNote.

People sitting in Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall on February 1, 2002, for the opening concert of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s 11th New Music Festival, as well as those listening to Two New Hours, the contemporary music series I created on CBC Radio Two, got a real jolt of high energy as the concert opened with the performance of Brian Current’s orchestral work, This Isn’t Silence. It truly was not anything resembling silence, but rather a work that quickly reached its maximum intensity and then sustained that level forcefully throughout its nearly 12-minute duration. “The notion of cranking it up and just letting it rip was borrowed from electronic music,” Current confided. In this he was also echoing the late Frank Zappa (1940–1993) who, in a 1987 interview on Two New Hours, compared writing for orchestra to creating rock music, pointing out that, “When you write fff in either case, you expect to hear some real F’s coming out.” Brian Current also admits to referencing Murray Schafer at a certain point in his composition when he requires the trombonists in the orchestra to “Howl like wolves through their trombones.”

Current had originally drafted This Isn’t Silence in 1998 while serving as composer-in-residence for the University of California Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. But he revised the work for the Winnipeg orchestra and their, by then, internationally famous New Music Festival, and this performance in Winnipeg was the premiere of that revised version. But in the meantime, Brian was also writing other orchestral music, including his superb composition, For The Time Being, the work that won him the Grand Prize in the CBC/Radio-Canada National Radio Competition for Young Composers, in its 2001 edition in Vancouver. It seemed the logical choice for me, as CBC’s delegate to the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in Paris, to bring Brian’s winning piece, and that prize-winning performance by the CBC Radio Orchestra and conductor Bramwell Tovey as one of CBC’s submissions to the 2001 Rostrum. It was the right decision, as Brian’s composition was selected by the IRC delegates that year as the outstanding work by a composer under the age of 30. His work would eventually be broadcast on the public radio services in all the 33 participating countries. It was also given a fresh live production by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Warsaw.

Current’s success at the IRC began a string of positive results in the international arena for the Two New Hours team’s productions of Canadian works. At the 2002 IRC, Lacrimosa, by the young Vancouver-based composer Jocelyn Morlock, was voted to the top ten list of works presented, and in 2003 it was Brandon, Manitoba-composer Patrick Carrabré, whose Inuit Games was also voted to the top list. In 2004, Dissolve, by young Toronto composer Abigail Richardson-Schulte, not only shared the award for the best work by a young composer, she was also offered a commission by Radio France for a new string quartet to be produced in Paris. Incidentally, 2002 was also the year that our production of Christos Hatzis’ Constantinople (with the Gryphon Trio plus guest vocalists Trish O’Callaghan and Maryam Toller) was awarded a medal at the International Radio Festival of New York. And there were more honours yet to come.

There was another notable development at the conclusion of that 2002 session of the IRC in Paris. After having served as CBC’s IRC delegate for 25 years, I suddenly found myself first nominated and then, elected IRC president. This was a remarkable turn of events in several respects. First of all, it was the only time in the 63-year history of the IRC that a non-European was elected its president. Secondly, aside from any personal assets I was perceived to be bringing to the leadership of the project, it signalled that Canadian music, and of course CBC Radio as its producer, was garnering an increasing amount of respect from the international delegation participating in the IRC. The investment that we at CBC Radio Music had made in Canadian music was recognized by our sister public broadcasters around the world, who showed an intense curiosity about new Canadian repertoire. And the series of Canadian composers who had been selected and recommended by this international delegation over the years, from Murray Schafer to Brian Cherney, to Chris Paul Harman, to Paul Steenhuisen, to Jocelyn Morlock, to Brian Current and others, represented an endorsement by a highly influential group of producers. This broad international recognition also began to bear another surprising result: the commissioning and production of contemporary Canadian works by foreign broadcasters. Whether it was Harman and Schafer being produced by NHK in Japan, Steenhuisen by ORF in Austria, Current by PRT in Poland, Richardson-Schulte by Radio France or Marjan Mozetich by Slovenian Radio, our steadfast development of Canadian composers had demonstrably positive and concrete results. We were, for example, able to reap the benefits of offshore productions by obtaining the rights to these performances through the system of international program exchange. Clearly, in the eyes of the world, new Canadian music, just like Current’s composition, “wasn’t silence!”

Our Two New Hours recordings of Current’s This Isn’t Silence, For the Time Being, and three more of his orchestral works were leased from CBC Radio archives by the Canadian Music Centre for their Centrediscs label and released on a CD in 2007. The title of that CD, as might have been expected, is This Isn’t Silence, and it’s still available as Centrediscs CMCCD 12607. And just as Current’s This Isn’t Silence was used to kick off the 2002 New Music Festival in Winnipeg, the very same programming idea was repeated in 2012 by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra when guest curator Peter Eötvös chose the work to open the TSO’s New Creations Festival that year.

A final footnote to this very creative and productive period of CBC Radio and Canadian musical history is that in 1998, the year Brian Current composed his energetic This Isn’t Silence, the late and highly esteemed Russian/Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf (1947–2001) completed a CBC Radio commission, The Smile of Maud Lewis. Composed for the now defunct CBC Radio Orchestra, this work stands as one of the gentlest, most sublime works ever commissioned by CBC Radio. Nikolai Korndorf died, unexpectedly, while playing soccer with his son, 15 years ago this month. And that was a thundering silence.

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

The 21C Music Festival, now in the third edition of its guaranteed five-year run, was originally conceived as an opportunity to celebrate creativity, collaboration and commissioning, all critical elements in  the coinage of new music in the 21st century. This year’s edition of the festival will do just that. Over five days and seven concerts featuring 28+ premieres, its audiences’ ears will be abuzz with sounds that capture fresh creative ideas and directions. Among the seven, three projects stood out in particular for me, all of them offering world premieres and, viewed together, revealing the overall scope and intent of the festival – almost as though they were a single 3-part invention titled Throat Singing – Darkness – Koto & Sho.

THROAT SINGING: Imagine having the capacity to sound like a string quartet, all through using your throat and voice. That’s exactly how David Harrington, Kronos Quartet’s first violinist, described the exhilarating and ferocious throat singing of Tanya Tagaq. Although Tagaq was raised on the lands of the Inuit people in the Arctic village of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, the traditional sounds of throat singing were unknown to her while growing up. In fact the first time she heard it was while studying at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, on tapes sent to her by her mother. Fascinated by the sound, she taught herself the technique by singing in the shower.

It was another recording (a January/February 2003 fRoots Magazine compilation CD) that led to a meeting between Tagaq and the legendary Kronos Quartet. While travelling home on a plane some 13 years ago, Harrington was listening to that CD. Track 1 was Youssou N’Dour. Track 18 of 18 was something called “Ilgok” by Tanya Tagaq. Harrington was transfixed. “It was an incredible vocal performance,” he told me in a recent interview. “Although I had known about Inuit throat singing for 30 years, I had not heard anything like it. It sounded as if it were two to three people singing at the same time. After listening to it about 30 times in a row, I knew I had to be in touch with her and figure out a way to do music together.” They eventually met in Spain when Tagaq, who was living there at the time, came to a Kronos soundcheck and performed for them. “Knocked out” by what they heard, the quartet resolved to make music with Tagaq.

It was up to Harrington to figure out how this was going to happen. The night before their first rehearsal together in Whitehorse, Yukon, he still didn’t know how it was going to work, but finally at 5am he had an idea. Using his granddaughter’s crayons he made five coloured squares – one for each performer – with the idea that each player would musically interpret their own colour. Later they added more coloured squares and found a way to connect the sounds that each person came up with. This first collaboration, Nunavut, will be one of a full program of works performed by Kronos in the opening concert of the 21C festival on May 25.

Kronos is renowned for charting a wildly different musical path for the string quartet as a chamber ensemble, and for their work in mentoring emerging artists. This vision continues at the heart of Fifty for the Future, their latest project, designed to create a repertoire of training works for young string quartets to introduce them to contemporary music. Starting in this current concert season, Kronos will be commissioning 50 new works by 25 women and 25 men over five years. Four of the works from Year One will be performed on the May 25th concert, including the world premiere of a new commission from Tagaq.

Reflecting on the Nunavut project, along with other pieces Kronos and Tagaq have created together, Harrington says: “Tanya is an amazing composer, even though she doesn’t necessarily think of herself as a composer, she just does music.” Harrington so values his experience of having worked with Tagaq that he invited her to be one of the first ten composers to participate in the Fifty for the Future project, because their collaboration over the years has been one aspect of his own musical life and that of Kronos that he wants to be sure other musicians, especially young musicians, are able to experience.

Why a vocal performer as a model for string quartet players, I asked? “Because it sounds to me like she has a string quartet in her throat,” Harrington replied. “And because Tanya is very connected to nature and the way she thinks of music is a natural part of her life, it’s effortless, even though she works very hard.”

For anyone who has had the experience of hearing Tanya Tagaq perform, this statement will ring true. Something exudes off the stage that seems rare yet also distantly familiar, like a calling back to our primal roots. I asked her about the nature of this place it seems she goes to when performing. “It’s not so much a place I go to as a place I come to,” she responded. “It’s a freedom, a lack of control, an exploration, and I’m reacting to whatever happens upon the path.” She spoke about the limits we put upon ourselves as humans, and exclaimed “Things need to happen to raise us to live in the moment!” This place she comes to “requires being in the present, for when you are in the present, it doesn’t matter what else is happening, what’s going to happen or what has happened. That’s what I like about improvisation – it’s all new and it’s all happening.”

She also loves collaborating, describing the process as like adding different rooms to a store. In her collaboration with regular band members, percussionist Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot, she said it’s like “going to see really good friends to have a conversation. We have our own language that we speak, and when there’s a gap in time of not being together, I can feel this anticipation and urge to speak again.” She described singing with the improvisational Element Choir directed by Christine Duncan, who are increasingly accompanying her on stage and will be included on her next recording due for release later this year, as “like having a wind from behind, or someone pushing really really hard in a super positive way.”

Tagaq’s Fifty for the Future collaboration with Kronos is titled Snow Angel-Sivunittinni (meaning “the future children”). Tagaq met with the quartet in a recording studio in San Francisco where she recorded two improvisations –a single track first, then a second improvisation laid down on top of that one. Longtime Kronos collaborator, trombonist/composer Jacob Garchik then transcribed Tagaq’s studio vocal tracks for the quartet, spreading the two layers out amongst the four players, after which  Harrington then had a further idea – wouldn’t it be wonderful if she came up with four vocalized introductions to the piece, each about one minute long and each interpreting a different member of Kronos. One of these four “Snow Angels,” as the introductions are called, is spontaneously selected each night the work is performed. (Harrington is hoping that his will be the one chosen for the Toronto premiere.) Final element of the work: Tagaq will add an additional live improvised layer to the piece during the performance!

Garchik has collaborated on more than two dozen Kronos projects to date; his work will also be in evidence in two other pieces that Kronos will perform on the May 25 program – by composers Geeshie Wiley and Laurie Anderson. And speaking of the May 25 program, Harrington was, as he described it, “smiling from ear to ear. There are works by seven female composers and each one of them is so different from the other, it will be like this incredible meeting of unforgettable people.” The program includes three other commissions from Year One of the Fifty for the Future project, as well as two earlier works by composers who are scheduled to be part of Year Two of the project: Canadian Nicole Lizée’s piece from 2012, The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop, which pays homage to the pioneers of electronic music in Britain, and the aforementioned piece by Laurie Anderson, Flow, arranged in 2010 from a track on her Homeland album.

The key feature of the Fifty for the Future project will be the easy availability of all the commissioned works. Scores, parts and recordings by Kronos of each of the pieces will be accessible for download from the Kronos website, with the first five pieces being available now. Tagaq’s piece will be ready in about six months and will include an interview, a video and the original studio recordings as auxiliary material. After the entire project is completed, it will be an incredible mosaic of music by composers from around the world destined to introduce future string quartets to the diversity of contemporary musical ideas.

DARKNESS: Imagine yourself entering a completely dark concert hall in a line, conga style, with your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you, like a small train of people, ushered by someone using an overhead highway system complete with roads and intersections. Following “driving directions” received from the head usher who is outside the hall with a map, your usher is feeling their way along this overhead tracking system to deliver you to your specific seat. And it’s complete darkness, with absolutely no light being emitted from exit signs, computers, soundboards or windows.

This is how “Blackout”, a late-night 21C concert, May 27, created by Toronto-based composer and saxophonist John Oswald, will begin. Once the audience is seated, what will unfold will be a one-hour concert of music by Oswald, including a 21C new commission, intermingled with quotes and perhaps intact works from Oswald’s previous repertoire. The late-night concert will be more like a variety show, he told me in our recent phone conversation. Not surprisingly, the 10:30pm concert sold out as of mid-April, so an additional concert is being planned starting at 8pm.

Performers will be spatially distributed throughout the room, intermingled with the audience. The piece is scored for up to 50 musicians, including members of Radiant Brass, the Element Choir, a percussion quartet, piano, electroacousmatic elements and three secret singers, all interwoven over the hour. The identities of the singers will be secret in order to create the surprise element of “what is that that I am hearing? Since there will be a celebrity element, people will be surprised at WHO they are hearing,” Oswald said.

Creating a work where all the performers will be in the dark requires different compositional strategies, as there will be no scores. Oswald selected musicians who are used to improvisation “as they know how to navigate through unknown musical territory by listening rather than staring at a score. Simple procedures will be used, so that once you know the seed idea, you just need to listen your way through it.” Even the Element Choir, who are used to performing with visual cues coming from conductor Christine Duncan, will have to rely exclusively on listening. Duncan already uses some sonic cues in the choir’s regular performances, such as singing specific musical gestures or notes to different sections of the choir and her voice is often part of the overall choral soundscape. These features will be the starting place for their role in “Blackout.”

Creating pieces to be heard in a completely dark environment is not new to Oswald. Back in 1976, he spent a summer working with R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in BC. Out of that context he began thinking about the best way to listen to something, and how a concert could be set up so that the attention is focused on sound. His first darkness concert was performed at the Western Front that summer in collaboration with Marvin Green, and from there, the two created other events in Toronto at the Music Gallery, the Mirvish Gallery and at Comox Theatre. Oswald adds: “Marvin and I called that field of inquiry and those concerts PITCH, a reference to pitch, but also to the idea of pitch black.”

Oswald admits that a concert in the dark may not be for everyone, but it will be made clear beforehand what to expect. His goal though is for it to be a wonderful and joyful listening experience. Towards the end of our conversation I asked him whether he thought we listen differently when we are not visually stimulated. To answer, he relayed the experience in one of his earlier darkness concerts when photographer Vid Ingelevics came in with an infrared camera to take photos. What the pictures revealed was that many people had their eyes open and were staring off in all directions, especially looking upwards. People were cuddled together and the various poses were unlike any audience Oswald has seen. I guess the best answer is to come and experience for yourself.

KOTO & SHO: Imagine a sound palette with no boundaries between Eastern and Western instruments, where the traditional Japanese koto (a zither-like instrument) and the sho (a mouth organ) blend seamlessly with an oboe, viola and clarinet. Welcome to the world of the UK-based Okeanos ensemble. Known for their fascinating mix of Japanese and Western instruments, they are actively engaged in commissioning and interacting with the Japanese contemporary music world. Two members of Okeanos will join Continuum Contemporary Music for a May 26 21C concert titled “Japan: NEXT.”

The idea for the concert began when Continuum artistic director Ryan Scott travelled to Japan in 2014. There he was introduced to the music of the younger generation of Japanese composers, and was inspired to put together a program of their music. One of the younger composers Scott researched was Dai Fujikura, currently living in the UK. It was through Fujikura’s five-piece Okeanos Cycle, written between 2001 and 2010 that Scott discovered Okeanos; three of the five pieces will be heard at 21C. Interestingly, even though Fujikura lived in Japan for the first 15 years of his life, he had never heard nor been in contact with traditional Japanese instruments (a curious parallel with Tagaq never having heard throat singing until she moved to Nova Scotia). When Okeanos approached Fujikura to write music for their ensemble, he had to learn about the instruments from the British players. However, wanting to avoid exoticism, Fujikura brought his own energetic and distinctly European style to this hybrid of sound worlds.

Another composer Scott came into contact with while in Japan was Misato Mochizuki, whose piece, Silent Circle, written for a 21-string koto will be performed at the festival, but not without a few snags along the way. Because the koto player from Okeanos had to cancel her appearance, Scott reached out to Mitsuki Dazai, the leading koto player in North America, to perform the piece. But Dazai travels with a 13-string koto, a problem for the proper performance of Silent Circle. The solution? Dazai has developed a way of getting the 21 different pitches on the 13-string koto by splitting the strings on the harmonic points. (Apparently this has caused quite a stir in the koto community.)

The program will also include two world premieres by Canadian composers Hiroki Tsurumoto and Michael Oesterle. Oesterle’s work is a new arrangement of a piece he originally wrote in 2010 for marimba and the virtuoso koto player Kazue Sawai, and for which Oesterle has subsequently made other arrangements for Continuum’s instrumentation. However, for this event, he has pulled out all the stops: another arrangement which takes advantage of all the available instruments. Look on Glass, scored for two shos, koto, harp, guitar and marimba as well as Continuum’s regular sextet, gives Oesterle the opportunity to combine western and eastern instruments in his own unique way.

This portrait of three 21C concerts is just the tip of the iceberg, with so much more to explore. The festival continues to be a unique opportunity to take in the diversity and genre-bending trends of how music is currently being created and conceived. Similar to the mosaic of music that will eventually end up in Kronos’ Fifty for the Future project, the 21C festival series, spread out over its five years, will be creating its own unique tapestry of collaborations, creative exchanges, and experimentations. It’s too early at this stage to see what its long-term effects will be, but hopefully the festival will stand as a significant venture in creating the attention that contemporary music deserves.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.