CEE and Exploded Ensemble in the studio, preparing for their collaborative concert at Carnegie Mellon University Feb 2020. Photo by Paul StillwellA significant event in the history of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE) took place during the last week of February, 2020: the nearly 50-year-old ensemble was engaged by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) School of Music for a four-day residency at their Pittsburgh campus. It was one of the most ambitious and impactful tours in the long history of the CEE, a live-electronic music group that Jim Montgomery and I co-founded in 1971, together with David Grimes, who left in 1986, and the late Larry Lake (1943 – 2013) The current membership includes violinist, synthesist, composer Rose Bolton; pianist, synthesist, composer John Kameel Farah; synthesist and composer Paul Stillwell; synthesist and composer David Sutherland, as well as Jim and me. The significance of the residency, which felt at the time like it was opening up new audiences, soon revealed itself as having prepared the CEE members for a creative path through a pandemic. 

The residency was organized by CMU assistant professor of Musicology, Alexa Woloshyn, who is Canadian. She created a plan that had CEE members working closely with CMU students in masterclasses, lecture demonstrations, composition workshops, and of course, live performance. “Pittsburgh and CMU have vibrant electronic music communities,” said Woloshyn. “I thought it would be great to learn from the CEE’s almost 50 years of experience in electronic sound-making and collective improvisation. The week was energizing for the students. I witnessed new and renewed interest in improvisation, modular synthesis, electronic composition and collaboration.” 

Read more: Lessons Learned from the CEE’s – COVID-Era Experiences

Array Space in Toronto. Photo c/o Arraymusic.When I wrote about Arraymusic five years ago in a WholeNote series on Toronto concert spaces, I described it as a “seminal venue”—one that maintained a strong place as both a presenting organization and as a rental space for experimental music in Toronto. Now in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, the same remains true. Despite unprecedented challenges, Arraymusic continues to search for new ways of supporting local experimental music and its affiliated performing art forms—and to find relevance in the changing musical fabric of the city.

Array’s Early Years

Years before it managed a concert venue, Arraymusic was an experimental music ensemble and presenter dedicated to commissioning and programming “full spectrum multimedia works, electronic events, group improvisations, music and dance collaborations.” The group was launched April 20, 1972 by a cohort of University of Toronto composition students. By the early 1980s, the group’s growing activities moved to a refurbished garage on a leafy upper Annex avenue.

From 1991 to 2012 Arraymusic rented a multifunctional space in an Artspace-run building. It was among a cohort of artists and organisations which reinvented Liberty Village as an epicentre of creative sector employment. I spent many happy hours rehearsing with the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan and several other groups there, as well as leading community gamelan music workshops.

Read more: An Array for Challenging Times

Katherine Carleton. Photo by Esther VincentKatherine Carleton, C.M. is the executive director of Orchestras Canada. We talked over Zoom in June.

LP: What are you hearing from the orchestras these days?

KC: I’m hearing several things. They’re looking back on the season that was and endeavouring to see from a financial perspective where they’re going to be at the end of the fiscal year. Some have fiscal years that end in May, some in June, some in July and all are trying to sort through financial impact of the forced closures in mid-March. At the same time, they’re each working on a range of scenarios around what the coming season will look like, potentially. I don’t think there’s a single orchestra that has a complete picture of what next year’s going to look like. Reopening and the speed with which that can happen, the size of groups that can convene, is all decided at the provincial level. It’s different picture in each part of the country.

Simon Rattle and several other musicians in the UK recently published an impassioned letter to their government that says, among other things, “Our entire industry is united, ready, prepared, and desperate to get back to doing what we do best.” They’re eager to cooperate with public health, and are asking for timelines. Do Canadian orchestras need a timeline? What do we need from the government?

Read more: Stuck on Safety: Go Small or Stay Home? The Orchestral Dilemma | A conversation with Katherine...

Middle of April I sent out an email  (you might have seen in your inbox) containing four or five questions that would form the basis of a story planned for the May/June issue of The WholeNote, and inviting anyone who wished to respond, to complete the  questionnaire and mail responses to me at publisher@thewholenote.com

Well here are the fruits of that invite, both the replies that came in in time for publication in the May/June issue, and those that are still coming in, using the online form at the foot of this article. And the invitation is still open.

Responses are still coming in and being added, so consider yourself invited. We are hoping that this compendium of views can online, over time, help us share and compare as our music community, collectively and individually, finds our way through these gnarly times.

I hope you get the same pleasure out of reading it as I have putting it together. If you feel a little less alone at the end of it, that’s a good day’s work done. If you feel like adding your voice to the mix, better still.

David Perlman

 

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Considering Matthew Shepard premiered by Conspirare, February 2016 in Austin, Texas. Photo by JAMES GOULDENThere’s never before been a time like this for the arts community. And we’re all in disarray. I’m feeling disconnected from my musical community, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the wider connected cultural family of the Toronto live classical music world. These are people and friends I spend hours with every week, and hundreds of hours with over the course of a season. They are faces I see and smile with, they are voices I sing with and feel comforted by. But like many of us across the arts community, we’re all separated from one another and the current season for the choir and most other arts organizations is totally up in the air.

A month before you get the magazine in your hands, writers are usually hard at work combing through listings and reaching out into networks to build and develop stories about what matters to everyday people. More often than not, it isn’t an issue about finding something interesting to write about, but rather, how to focus on only a handful of things in the musical chaos and glory that the region has to offer. It is heartbreaking to look at the pages of listings with close to 100 listings, knowing that none of them are coming to fruition. This has never happened before. 

Read more: How They So Softly Rest
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