Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

Removal of “community orchestra”
as a loaded label from the
Orchestras Canada member
directory is an improvement there,
but the word “community” itself
remains fundamental to what
Orchestras Canada is about.
Orchestras Canada
home page
to keep their own information up to date on their websites.” As for
the change from describing orchestras as ‘community’ or ‘regional’
to grouping them by annual revenues, she explains, the beginning of
that shift goes back to project funding they got from the Ontario Arts
Council. (“I’m not going to even try to put a year on it,” she says.) The
money was given, in the terminology of the day, to study “the situation,
interests and needs of smaller budget orchestras” in Ontario. “We
started out, perhaps naively in retrospect, calling them community
orchestras, and put together a research plan that involved travelling
around to five or six parts of the province – and having regional meetings
with folks from these orchestras.”
It was an extraordinarily rich series of conversations, she says: What
became abundantly clear was that there were more differences among
orchestras with “small budgets” (revenues from $0 to $600,000 a year),
than there were among orchestras with “large budgets” (revenues from
$650,000 to $33 million). “There was every shade of music making in
that $0 to $600,000 range” she says, “from orchestras where only the
conductor gets an honorarium through to fully professional ensembles
with very short seasons, but all fitting within that so-called ‘small
budget’ space we had preemptively defined as ‘community orchestras.’”
It became clear, from this exercise, that trying to define the concept
of a “community orchestra” based on budget ran the risk of making
the designation so amorphous as not to be useful, or else trying to
refine it further, to those groups with very little professional participation,
with the danger that “community orchestra” would become
almost a pejorative term – “taken as symptomatic of volunteer
bumbling rather than ‘we are darned proud of being called that’.”
The new way of designating orchestras in the directory, purely
by annual revenue, removes a layer of artistic value judgment from
the equation.
Viewed in this light, the Orchestras Canada member directory in its
current form becomes a much more nuanced resource, amenable to
searching and sorting in all kinds of ways; and with orchestras rising
to the challenge of keeping their own websites up to date, (something
that, from my perusal of the 65 Ontario orchestras in the directory, the
vast majority are managing to do) it makes for fascinating reading.
Removal of “community orchestra” as a loaded label from the
Orchestras Canada member directory is an improvement there, but
the word community itself remains fundamental to what Orchestras
Canada is about, as one digs through the resources and information
on the website. The word may have ceased to be useful in describing
what orchestras are, but that creates, if anything, an even greater
responsibility for OC and the constituency it serves to dig even more
deeply into what the term “community” is useful for in talking about
continues to page 84
FREE NOON HOUR CHOIR & ORGAN CONCERTS
Enjoy an hour of beautiful music performed by outstanding Canadian choirs and organists,
spotlighting Roy Thomson Hall’s magnificent Gabriel Kney pipe organ.
TORONTO MASS CHOIR
The Glory of Gospel
WED APR 17 ◆ 12 PM
OAKVILLE CHOIR FOR
CHILDREN & YOUTH
Here’s to Song!
THU JUN 6 ◆ 12 PM
FREE
ADMISSION
FOR TICKETS VISIT ROYTHOMSONHALL.COM/CHOIRORGAN OR CALL 416-872-4255
Suitable for ages 6 and up. For groups of 15 or more, contact groups@mh-rtth.com. For more information call the box
office at 416-872-4255. Made possible by the generous support of Edwards Charitable Foundation.
18 | April 2019 thewholenote.com