Features

International Women’s Day, which was celebrated globally this year on March 8, is still fresh on my mind as I write this article casting the spotlight on two inspirational, in-demand and industrious musicians, celebrated for their contributions to Canadian music: virtuoso pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico and award-winning composer Alice Ping Yee Ho. My first encounters with each of them occurred during the early stages of my career – Christina, through the Christina and Louis Quilico Awards Vocal competition and Alice, through being cast in her opera The Lesson of Da Ji.  They joined artistic forces in 2023, and released the album Blaze, featuring solo pieces for piano. And we re

Many composers over the years have declared Christina Petrowska Quilico as their “dream” pianist, including composer Frank Horvat.  In early February of this year, Petrowska Quilico and Horvat celebrated the launch of their collaborative album More Rivers at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto. Horvat composed this suite of solo piano pieces, evoking the flow of water, as a tribute to composer Ann Southam and her seminal work Rivers, also championed and performed by Christina. 

I was a lucky member of the audience that evening, witnessing Christina’s fingers flowing effortlessly across the keyboard. Listeners were immersed in the overlapping and looping textures of Frank’s water music. Based on my own personal experience and on what I gleaned both from the surrounding silence during the performance  and the audience chatter after, the music induced a trance-like state. It calmed and cleansed the mind, providing a much needed reprieve from the everyday chaos of the world.  

For more than a year now, I have been using this little bit of column space to explore the landscape of arts and culture in Ontario from the viewpoint of my home in a remote community in the north of the province, a hop-skip-jump over the 49th parallel.

I was living in New York, completing my master’s degree in classical voice at the Manhattan School of Music. Worries about being successful in my burgeoning career were constantly on my mind. Truth be told, I felt like a headless chicken. I knew something was off when I missed my bus stop more than once, and when I knocked over a bowl of hot soup in the cafeteria. A mentor of mine told me that she could feel my energy ten feet in front of me – like I was always grasping for something ahead. She was right. My mind was already in the future – on the professional artist I wanted to be, not on where, and who I was at the moment. This was the start of my own personal journey with mindfulness, and the root of inspiration for this interview series – “When Music Meets Mindfulness.”

For angsty teenagers (and I know this from personal experience), relatably disillusioned literary characters can provide a feeling of connection as the reader works through their own age-appropriate sense of despondent ennui. J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield was (and perhaps still is) the standard bearer in this regard. But it was, even more so, the work of Jack Kerouac (think October in the Railroad Earth, backed by pianist Steve Allen) that for many proved to be an even more intoxicating elixir, introducing readers and listeners to not only hitchhiking and counterculture, but to jazz and poetry.

The “up here” in this month’s column is (mostly) Timmins, where Angela Garwood-Touw has a busy schedule. The New Brunswick born violinist is Concertmaster for the Timmins Symphony Orchestra, regular First Violinist for the Sudbury and North Bay Symphonies, and is an active contributor to the chamber music scene with an array of ensembles – as well as teaching students from across the region and raising a family. We talked about her musical journey north, and the joys (and challenges) of playing classical music (and beyond) in WholeNote’s “Zone 10” region.