Volume 23 Issue 6 - March 2018
In this issue: Canadian Stage, Tapestry Opera and Vancouver Opera collaborate to take Gogol’s short story The Overcoat to the operatic stage; Montreal-based Sam Shalabi brings his ensemble Land of Kush, and his newest composition, to Toronto; Five Canadian composers, each with a different CBC connection, are nominated for JUNOs; and The WholeNote team presents its annual Summer Music Education Directory, a directory of summer music camps, programs and courses across the province and beyond.
In this issue: Canadian Stage, Tapestry Opera and Vancouver Opera collaborate to take Gogol’s short story The Overcoat to the operatic stage; Montreal-based Sam Shalabi brings his ensemble Land of Kush, and his newest composition, to Toronto; Five Canadian composers, each with a different CBC connection, are nominated for JUNOs; and The WholeNote team presents its annual Summer Music Education Directory, a directory of summer music camps, programs and courses across the province and beyond.
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fieldwork and academic study of ethnomusicology into the realm of<br />
practical musical experience and eventually performance. (I well recall<br />
a visit by the dramatic, black cape-wearing Hood to my undergraduate<br />
York music class circa 1970, the visit arranged by Sterling Beckwith,<br />
the Music Department’s first chair.)<br />
The world music ensemble was one way in which Hood’s notion<br />
of bi-musicality, a term he coined in a 1959 paper, could be acquired<br />
within an educational institution. His approach encouraged the<br />
researcher to learn about music “from the inside,” and thereby experience<br />
its technical, conceptual and aesthetic challenges. Another of<br />
its aims was to enable the learner to better connect socially with the<br />
community being studied and have increased access to that community’s<br />
performances and musical practices. Many institutions all over<br />
North America have since incorporated a myriad of world music<br />
ensembles, presenting many music genres, into their course offerings.<br />
York’s Music Department was among the world music ensemble’s<br />
very early Canadian adopters, in part perhaps because of its need<br />
to make an adventurous virtue of its isolation from the well-established<br />
downtown musical mainstream. Its world music courses have<br />
continued to grow in number and variety over the decades. I’m a<br />
first-person witness to that evolution as a member of the first Music<br />
Department undergrad class, and then later establishing its first<br />
Javanese gamelan music performance course there in 1999.<br />
Perhaps what is most significant, however, is not so much the individual<br />
careers of professors or their courses, but that collectively they<br />
and thousands of their students have in many ways fed the interest<br />
and appetite for world music discovery, creation, appreciation, making<br />
and public performance in our community. In this way, York’s world<br />
music ensembles have served as a sort of R&D studio. They have made<br />
a substantial contribution to establishing the Toronto region as one of<br />
the most welcoming and productive hybrid music-friendly places on<br />
the globe – a real music city!<br />
York University Music Department’s World Music Festival<br />
Every year the Music Department holds a series of late winter<br />
concerts celebrating its near five decades of introducing yet another<br />
cohort of students to learning musics new to them. It also affords<br />
audiences – potentially coming from across the region care of the<br />
shiny new TYSSE – to explore musics they may never have heard live<br />
in student performances. Bonus: it’s all free.<br />
This year the World Music Festival includes ten concerts representing<br />
many music traditions at halls located in York’s Accolade<br />
East Building, just south of the new giant white boomerang-shaped<br />
subway station.<br />
(Please refer to the WholeNote listings for exact concert times. But<br />
here’s an appetizer.)<br />
<strong>March</strong> 15 promises to be a long world music-rich day at York.<br />
Audiences can take in six concerts, starting at 11am with the Cuban<br />
Ensemble, directed by Latin music scene veteran Rick Lazar and<br />
Anthony Michelli at the Tribute Communities Recital Hall. It’s<br />
followed by guitarist and dedicated klezmer expert Brian Katz’s<br />
Klezmer Ensemble, upstairs<br />
York University<br />
Subway Station<br />
in the Martin Family Lounge.<br />
All the remaining concerts<br />
also alternate between these<br />
two venues<br />
After lunch, master<br />
Ghanaian drummer and longtime<br />
gifted instructor Kwasi<br />
Dunyo directs the “West<br />
African Drumming: Ghana”<br />
concert, then the Escola<br />
de Samba takes the stage,<br />
directed by the multitalented<br />
Rick Lazar.<br />
At 4pm the West African<br />
Mande Ensemble performs,<br />
directed by Anna Melnikoff.<br />
The day closes with Lindy<br />
AT THE AGA KHAN MUSEUM<br />
Cutting-edge jazz meets transcendent,<br />
traditional music during Sand Enigma,<br />
a world premiere by Montreal ensemble<br />
Land of Kush, co-presented with Toronto’s<br />
centre for creative music, The Music Gallery.<br />
Saturday, <strong>March</strong> 24, 8 pm<br />
$40, $34 Friends, $34 Music Gallery<br />
members, $30 students and seniors<br />
Includes same-day Museum admission<br />
Round-trip shuttle service from 918 Bathurst<br />
(Bloor/Bathurst) available for $5<br />
Tickets at agakhanmuseum.org<br />
A co-presentation with<br />
With support from<br />
Mophradat<br />
thewholenote.com <strong>March</strong> <strong>2018</strong> | 25
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