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Nineteen-year-old opera student Charlotte Siegel is getting frustrated as she sings an aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro over and over again in a cramped rehearsal studio at the University of Toronto. She wants to impress her new teacher and is concentrating hard on getting every element right. But the more she tries, the more her body tenses and the notes get stuck in her throat. 

“[Singing] is not a gentle thing,” says her teacher, Frédérique Vézina. “It’s like jumping off a cliff – you have to just let go.” 

Siegel takes a deep breath. She turns off her brain and lets her instincts take over. The song’s energy pumps from the ground to her face; every part of her vibrates like a pitchfork.The pounding pulse of the music takes over her being, annihilating her worries. The moment shimmers. Times like these, when the “controlled scream” of opera whisks her right out of herself, make all the effort worthwhile. “It’s the most luxurious feeling in the world,” says the soprano. 

Learning to immerse herself in the moment has benefitted Siegel in both music and life. But it hasn’t been easy. Like many musicians, Siegel tends towards perfectionism, over-analyzing situations and undercutting actions.

Letting go is another of many life lessons that music and her mentors have taught her: learning to communicate and collaborate have bolstered her confidence both in singing and in general. “I question who I would be if I hadn’t had those experiences,” says Siegel.

After nearly two years unable to perform, the lucky among us found it was possible in the latter part of October 2021 and into November to begin rehearsing with larger groups. We saw friends and colleagues in bands and orchestras, large and small, grinning in Facebook and Instagram selfies – duly masked (except during the selfies) and double vaxxed of course. But as Omicron swept through, lots of ground was lost where live performance was concerned. 

Here are four – I hope inspirational – stories from this particular variation on the two-year musical rollercoaster ride.

Labyrinth Ensemble: Winter Launch, Spring Concert

Responding to venue closures, last year the multifaceted Toronto music organization Labyrinth Ontario created a summer video series in parks across the city, in several small-scale outdoor summer concerts, and in October took part in the Music Gallery’s X Avant festival. More significant, perhaps, was the late year launch of its 14-musician Labyrinth Ensemble, long a dream of Labyrinth Ontario’s founding artistic director Araz Salek. Playing some 20 instruments in more than a dozen “modal music” genres among them, LE musicians were finally able to rehearse in-person in early November with Montreal-based guest vocalist, oudist Lamia Yared.

The ten-day intensive focused on the study of the history, forms and other musical aspects of classical Arabic music, learning repertoire and fostering a sense of ensemble, culminating in a sold-out debut concert at the Aga Khan Museum on November 13, 2021 that I was honoured to attend. Under Yared’s able on-stage leadership, the group unravelled a series of elaborate classical Turkish and Arabic musical songs and instrumentals, a notable few in complex metres. An impressively democratic, if inherently risky, element was that each musician was given a solo feature. You can view the entire concert on the Aga Khan Museum’s Facebook page.

It’s only when you leave a country – a culture, a language, a family – that you can really see it. And it’s only then that you can consciously, rather than by inertia, belong to it.

This wisdom comes to most immigrants, expats and refugees by mid-life, but it came to Montreal-based composer Ana Sokolović early in her career, after the first performance of her music in her new country. “Critics described my music as having ‘Slavic soul,’ which stunned me. ‘Slavic soul’?! I’m a contemporary, avant-garde composer, I thought, I’m as far from any kind of national folklore and nostalgia as possible,” she recalls. When she moved to Montreal to work on her master’s degree in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia, in which she grew up, the multicultural egalitarian experiment, was already disintegrating in ethno-nationalist acrimony, and she was eager to say goodbye to the rising ethnocentrism. The point for her was to say something new, not blindly follow the established tradition. But the talk of Slavic flair back then got her thinking about whether she was entirely in control of her own sound-making, or if something else voiced itself in the process, something less conscious. “I realized the local audience detected a certain openness to emotion that they translated as ‘Slavic soulfulness’. Crucially, I realized that it wasn’t a bad thing. And that perhaps I should bring it to light more.” 

We are sitting in her quiet home in Montreal, our only other company her Siamese cat sleeping in a patch of sun on the windowsill. Svadba-Wedding was about to be performed the following week by a young ensemble from Toronto’s Glenn Gould School – her much travelled a cappella opera that uses idioms of Balkan singing techniques and South Slav language phonemes but is musically more like dissonant, rhythm-addled Stravinsky than the Balkans. “It’s only when I physically removed myself from my place of birth that I understood this conversation between tradition and invention,” she says. It’s nothing to do with genes, she says. It’s to do with different spices of how to be in the world. The dialects of humankind. It’s like keeping Occitan in Languedoc alongside French, and not subsuming it under it. “Imagine if the only thing that divided us was this difference in style, the variety in the taste of the terroir? And religions would be there just to serve this cultural side of us. Just so we could sing to God in all kinds of idioms.” 

Once upon a time (the spring of 2021, actually) I made contact with some colleagues and friends known collectively as Pocket Concerts, and individually as Emily Rho and Rory McLeod, interested in knowing how their particular brand, based on house concerts, was holding up in response to the new paradigms of pandemic performance. 

Their biggest news back then was a book in progress, expanding on what they’d learned in developing Pocket Concerts, explaining how other artistic entrepreneurs might get their own ideas off the ground. Envisioned as an online publication, the book was at that point already more than 75% complete. 

Life, however, intervened, as it will, and the book has been sidelined. The two remain committed to it, but have each found they have too many other irons in the fire to give it their complete attention. The goals they originally had for it haven’t shifted but life has. As Rho says: “It will take a different shape in the future, I believe, because everything is changing around us so fast, all the time; it’s one thing to put pen to paper, another to find time for the ink to dry… [when] the dust settles … then I think we’ll have more clarity on how to continue.”

At uneasy moments, I often look to nature and the human imprint in it, in a search for equanimity. In 11 years with The WholeNote, I have repeatedly begun my musings with a description of the view from my window of the busy midtown Toronto park across the street. 

As I sipped my coffee this sunny morning, a coach’s shrill whistle and shouts grabbed my attention. It gladdened my heart to see the little league taking over the baseball diamond for the first time in a year. The sand infield was prepped well over a month ago, but today is as early as the provincial pandemic “Three Steps to Reopening” rules allow for organized activity. The groomed green outfield highlights the kids’ yellow jerseys and white knickers as they warm up. And just beyond, behind the tall chain link fence, the community tennis courts are full once more with bouncing singles and doubles. 

I’ve been dragging my heels all week trying to get my head around a story about what the Ontario live public music scene for the balance of this summer might look like. I’ve done my research. But stepping back from the data I’ve gathered, one unanswered question keeps getting in the way: despite what has been planned, what will actually get to happen? It’s an uneasy feeling.