Michael: I had three concerts left in this 2019-20 season. Please see www.lesamisconcerts.org. These had to be cancelled. I am doing my best to reschedule them for the 2020-21 season. Of course, rescheduling requires a lot of communication with the artists, venue, and a million other things. A lot of time is wasted but we’ll do it. 

Les AMIS Concerts are staged at The Loft, in Cobourg, Ontario, and here are additional comments from Ken Prue, the proprietor of The LOFT.

Ken: At The LOFT Cinema and Concert Hall we do live music, classical & jazz, paired with documentary and foreign film.

For the month of May we have had to cancel all films, a documentary Film Festival and the following live music events: Robert Sherwood/Dave Young/Reg Schwager – Music of Oscar Peterson; Al Lerman Solo Blues; Jerzy Kaplanek Quartet with Nancy Walker, Roberto Occhipinti, Ethan Ardelli playing the music of Grappelli, Ponty, Lockwood; and Les AMIS (Laurence Kayaleh, violin and Bernadine Blaha, piano).

All live music events will be rescheduled when Health Authorities give the ALL CLEAR. Meanwhile The LOFT is closed. During the closure we are improving stage lighting, and tuning pianos.

People reading this can stay in touch via our website, www.cobourgloft.ca.  From there they can also subscribe to the The LOFT Newsletter.

UCC retreat photo 2014 1I am a free-lance musician and founding artistic director of the Upper Canada Choristers, a non-auditioned community choir based in mid-town Toronto. We have had to cancel two public concerts, one of which we have rescheduled for October 2, 2020. We have also cancelled our early summer fund-raising garden social. 

In addition to our usual spring and winter concerts, community service is the cornerstone of our choir and each year we typically visit over a dozen venues where people do not otherwise have the opportunity to hear live choral music.  We share diverse music with audiences at long-term care facilities, seniors’ residences, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and schools.  In May 2019, we celebrated our 25th anniversary of this mission with our ‘Peace Through Music Tour,’ rehearsing and performing with community-based choirs throughout Japan.

This is the aspect of our work that has taken the hardest hit in the current circumstances and we are actively exploring new ways to continue practising together and to serve our audiences. 

We are also taking this time to refresh our website, including the addition of a ‘virtual’ choir performance.  I also host regular online choir visits, sectional rehearsals, and “Choir Cocktail Parties” where we sing repertoire chosen by our singers.  Online technology is effective as a means to learn new music but not for experiencing the magic of ensemble performing, and we all miss the synergy and support of actually singing together, with or without an audience.

Visit our website: www.uppercanadachoristers.org

For the map, The Upper Canada Choristers rehearse at Grace Church on-the-Hill, 300 Lonsdale Road.

Christina Petrowska Quilico head shot by Tim Leyes 70 I am a concert pianist and a full professor of Piano Performance and Musicology at York University. I am speaking for myself.

What’s been taken away from me most at this moment is peace of mind and family vacations. I had been planning to take some time away from work and piano to spend time with my family and go on vacation. I had booked time away from professional concerts and work to do so.

Instead, except for FaceTime and Skype, I will be home isolated and learning new repertoire (four concertos for future performances and recordings, and music for a solo CD recording and performance) after I finish grading and adjudicating two music competitions online.  I will also be preparing PowerPoint lectures for online teaching in the fall.

You can always find me at York University email. Check the Faculty profiles or on my website www.christinapetrowskaquilico.com and my channel on YouTube. I am always adding new videos of performances.

cquilico@yorku.ca

Nick Storring photo by Green YangI wear a number of hats in the music community. I'm primarily a composer and musician, but work as critic, curator/presenter, and publicist.

Just as COVID-19 was ramping up, American imprint Orange Milk Records released my sixth full-length recording entitled My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell digitally and on LP/CD,  composed in my home studio by overdubbing my own performances on a wide variety of instruments. On the writing end of things, I'm a regular contributor with Musicworks Magazine and my work has also appeared in publications such as the Wire and  Exclaim! I've been the guest curator of the Canadian Music Centre's CMC Presents Series for the past two seasons, and have also devised programs for Soundstreams, the Music Gallery, New Adventures in Sound Art, and my own independent productions.

Publicity is the newest facet of my career, but it is expanding rapidly. Most of the work I've been doing has provided support to Canadian artists and events within my orbit.  

For the most part I've actually been very fortunate in terms of the impact of COVID-19 on my various endeavours thus far.  In a funny way, I feel as though it has created a receptive climate for recorded music and that's had a positive impact on the critical reception of my own record. That's been tremendously heartening. 

There are a few things that have been suspended: a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Gary Kirkham and vocalists Bó Bardos and Pam Patel;  Yvonne Ng has been working on a new full-length quintet dance entitled Wéi since 2017 and the plan had been to premiere it in the coming half-year. Thin Edge New Music Collective and I have been working (very slowly) on an album of my chamber music with Jean Martin at the controls. We've already recorded over half and hour of music, and it would be nice to wrap it up. 

There's not really much that can be done to prepare this work in any way, except to remain positive, and I've been doing my utmost in that domain. 

Instead, I've been continuing with other work of various kinds, publicizing new and forthcoming recordings by various artists, mixing some intriguing new recordings from multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher that will no doubt surface, and been writing various grants for clients. 

I also recently started a solo piece for baroque cello for Elinor Frey that poses an interesting challenge. As a cellist myself, I'm trying to imagine the music away from the cello as much as possible, to prevent my own habits and limitations on the instrument from seeping through.  I want to be writing for her, her interpretive gifts, and her instrument, rather than merely transcribing myself.

Apart from that: various studio pieces, including a set where everything is recorded through those cheap humbucker pickups that one mounts in acoustic guitars for amplification.  They only respond to the vibration of magnetic metals, which makes for a strange cocktail of serious restriction and peculiar sonic possibilities—everything from a Slinky to barbecue skewers, from tape measures to steel wool.

To find me: My website www.nickstorring.ca offers the most thorough overview; my Soundcloud serves as a kind of audio scrapbook: https://soundcloud.com/nick_storring; and my commercial recordings are all available from my Bandcamp: http://nickstorring.bandcamp.com

I am Sterling Beckwith, PhD.  Former singer and conductor,  retired professor of music at York University. 

My active musical involvement has for some time been limited to reading about, reflecting on,  and occasionally sampling the incredible richness and variety of our local music scene.  The present issue of The WholeNote demonstrates once again how much we owe to this magazine's indefatigable support   –  as catalogue,  catalyst,  and cattle-prod – for all this activity.  Without it, I doubt such an impressive  level of quality and diversity could have been so soon attained.  Whether, for how long, and to what extent our various musical lives can survive a total lockdown is anybody's guess,  but today I'm feeling optimistic.....

Neither of my two lifetime musical projects has yet been interrupted:

1)  Bridging the language and culture gap for young Canadian performers,  by providing some of my favorite European vocal works with singable new English texts.   Done so far:

Brahms: Liebeslieder-Walzer Op. 52. Monteverdi: Ballo delle ingrate. Rimsky-Korsakov:  Mozart & Salieri. Schuetz: Johannes-Passion; Weihnachts-Historie. And most recently (while self-isolating)  Shostakovich: Babi Yar (not yet performed).

2)  Expanding the everyday teaching and learning of music, currently heavily slanted towards performance training, to include thoughtfully-designed computer-assisted exercises in composing,  as well as guided listening to more than the latest pop hits. For the latter, I am actively looking for individual and institutional partners, and taking steps to insure that software development work can continue.

I can still be reached via my York U email address: beckwith@yorku.ca

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