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Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022

Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.

Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.

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BACK IN<br />

FOCUS<br />

Worth weighing in on<br />

Previously covered in<br />

The WholeNote,<br />

and topical again<br />

Compiled and edited by David Perlman<br />

The renewed Joseph Burr Tyrrell Park<br />

Joseph Burr Tyrrell has his own Canadian Heritage minute (or,<br />

spoiler alert, just google “Albertosaurus” to find him doing what<br />

he loved best.) He also has at least one school and a Toronto park,<br />

on Brunswick Avenue, named after him. Well, more like a parkette<br />

aspiring to be a park, actually. One of a dozen or so “don’t blink<br />

or you’ll-miss-it” strips of green along the Line 2 subway right-ofway,<br />

between the backs of the north-side Bloor St. buildings, and the<br />

adjacent neighbourhoods (in this case the Annex).<br />

For a parkette, aspiring to parkhood is a good thing, by the way. The<br />

city is dotted with gems of the genre: right-sized, community-defined,<br />

and neighbourhood-enhancing – healthy common ground. Typically,<br />

at some point enough neighbours are enthusiastic enough about park<br />

revitalization for the city to get involved, and city and neighbourhood<br />

stakeholders thrash out a plan for renewal. As reported by Joshua<br />

Chong, (Toronto Star, January 24), the renewed Joseph Burr Tyrrell<br />

Park, unveiled in December, included in its new and improved play<br />

area, wonder of wonders, an octave set of colour-coded tubular bells,<br />

with beautifully satisfying hammer handles for any neighbourhood<br />

child wanting to whale away at the bells. Musical pennies from heaven!<br />

Until “one neighbour complained,” and the bells were gone within<br />

days. ‘Right idea but wrong location” tends to carry a lot of weight<br />

when rate-payers (a.k.a. voters) get irate.<br />

Richard Marsella, executive director of<br />

Regent Park Music School, wrote a wideranging<br />

March 2021 WholeNote article on<br />

the whole idea of “Musical Playgrounds,<br />

Virtual and Real”, and how and where<br />

to implement them. “With community<br />

music models out there such as Luke<br />

Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours project<br />

(which has seen over 2,000 street pianos One of the pianos from the<br />

installed in 65 cities) and others that<br />

Play Me, I’m Yours project<br />

allow public access to musical experience, the notion of noise in a<br />

public space cannot simply be ignored”, he acknowledges.<br />

“[But]” he continues, “on this particular topic, I have always<br />

supported the concept of choosing, even helping shape, the noise<br />

and sonic landscape of one’s community. I can think of a lot less<br />

constructive soundscapes in a city or neighbourhood than a<br />

musical playground.”<br />

Amen to that.<br />

Tale of Two<br />

Butterflies<br />

It was shaping up to be an<br />

intriguing study in contrasts.<br />

On the one hand was the<br />

Canadian Opera Company’s<br />

Madama Butterfly scheduled<br />

to run from <strong>February</strong> 4 to<br />

26, to be conducted by rising<br />

Canadian conductor Keri-<br />

Lynn Wilson, and featuring<br />

the COC directing debut of<br />

Aria Umezawa, co-founder of<br />

Toronto-based, experimental<br />

Amplified Opera. With lots<br />

of mutterings all round about<br />

the COC resorting to warhorse<br />

repertoire for their<br />

safety-first relaunch, and<br />

Aria Umezawa<br />

amid more general rumblings<br />

about the outdated premises of the opera itself, it was going to<br />

be very interesting to see what kind of contemporary rabbits the<br />

artistic team was going to be able to pull out of the hat. Outright<br />

cancellation of the run unfortunately means we won’t get to find<br />

out first hand.<br />

The COC cancellation is all the more disappointing because<br />

<strong>February</strong> 11, a week into the run, their Butterfly was on an<br />

eagerly anticipated collision course with a Confluence Concerts<br />

online-only presentation titled Butterfly Project: The Ballad of<br />

Chō-Chō San, described as a “meditation on the ongoing controversies<br />

surrounding Puccini’s Madama Butterfly [and] the problematic<br />

nature of this opera in today’s environment of growing<br />

cultural awareness.” The presentation features Teiya Kasahara, who<br />

describes themself as “a queer, trans/non-binary, multi and interdisciplinary<br />

creator-performer based in Tkarón:to.” Most interesting<br />

in this context, perhaps, Kasahara is co-founder, with Aria<br />

Umezawa, of Amplified Opera. So maybe we will get some hints<br />

after all, in the Confluence show, regarding the trajectory the<br />

COC’s cancelled Butterfly was on. So I’d say double underline<br />

Confluence’s <strong>February</strong> 11 show, rather than crossing it off your list.<br />

And, before that, for some interesting insights into what<br />

motivates Amplified Opera and its founders, take a look at Sara<br />

Constant’s “Deep and Slow Thought: Amplified Opera’s artistfirst<br />

mandate” in the July 2020 WholeNote.<br />

Teiya Kasahara<br />

62 | <strong>February</strong> <strong>2022</strong> thewholenote.com

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