Volume 28 Issue 1 | September 20 - November 8, 2022

OUT OF THE BOX
FUJ|||||||||||TA
FUTURESTOPS
FESTIVAL
Expands the
Organ Envelope
VANESSA AGUE
COURTESY HEAVY TRIP
FutureStops Festival is by no means Toronto’s first organ
festival, but it is the first to expand the envelope to the
contemporary potential of “the king of instruments”,
highlighting the versatility of the centuries-old instrument
and renewing interest in its capabilities.
“[It’s] about trying to create a
program that will bridge the many
different silos of activity that are
going on around the organ that
have so much in common,” said
organist Blake Hargreaves, the festival’s
curator.
The inaugural FutureStops
Festival will be held September 29
to October 1, presenting a series
of concerts and free talks across
Downtown Toronto. It’s a global
hub for 21st-century pipe organ
Blake Hargreaves music, convening artists from many
different countries in three venues
with three of the city’s most distinctive organs – Roy Thomson Hall,
Cathedral Church of St. James and Metropolitan United Church. Roy
Thomson Hall is an architectural gem whose pipe organ, the Gabriel
Kney Pipe Organ, turns 40 this year and is one of the largest mechanical-action
instruments in Canada. Metropolitan United Church’s
organ, the largest pipe organ in Canada, was built by Casavant Frères
of Quebec in 1930 and, according to the MUC website “has a tonal
palette that places it among the finest recital instruments in the
country.” And the organ at Cathedral Church of St. James was originally
built in 1888 and has 5,101 pipes. Hearing cutting-edge organ
players perform on these special instruments will be a treat, but for
those who can’t attend in person, the festival will also be broadcast
online, extending FutureStops’ community to the virtual world.
Recently, the pipe organ has received new attention across the
contemporary music landscape. The instrument, which was one of
the most complex creations invented before the Industrial Revolution,
has long been lauded for its symphonic capabilities. Currently, one of
the oft-explored aspects of the organ is its distorted, resonant sound
that’s similar to electronic music, but purely acoustic. For reasons
COURTESY BLAKE HARGREAVES
like this, the organ has become a fertile place for experimental music,
launching a revival in interest in the sound of the instrument.
What I find exciting about FutureStops is how it highlights the
wide range of organ music being made today, uniting some of today’s
most adventurous artists: At the festival, Sarah Davachi’s meandering
drones, Amina Claudine Myers’ jazz improvisations and Sandra
Boss’ homebuilt instruments unite, for example. Hargreaves shares
this interest in exploring the organ’s potential, and inspiring connections
with it.
“There’s so much to discover, and there’s so much character,”
Hargreaves said. “It’s not surprising that suddenly people are going,
‘wait a minute, here’s this instrument that can absolutely create sounds
that span the complete spectrum of human hearing and go beyond it.’”
Stasis and recharge
Hargreaves himself has had a long relationship with the organ
that went through a period of stasis and recharge. During Sunday
church services as a child, he improvised on the instrument while the
churchgoers took communion. He later left the organ behind for electric
guitar, but found it again by chance, and now, it’s the centre of
his life. “There’s just something that the organ can do that nothing
else can,” he said. “I love music that has a really rich harmonic and
melodic language and the organ is a place where one person can
explore all of that in real time.”
In 2016 and ’17, Hargreaves and other artists and presenters,
inspired by the growing organ revival, came up with the idea to start
an organization that would unify the different facets of modern organ
playing. The idea became FutureStops, which is a three-pronged
organization comprising the festival, a podcast hosted by Hargreaves
and an online community of organ enthusiasts.
This year’s FutureStops Festival programming fulfills its promise to
be a wide-ranging celebration of the 21st-century organ. The festival
opens its weekend with a series of performances by leading organists
and composers at the Cathedral Church of St. James, including
acclaimed drone artists Kara-Lis Coverdale and Kali Malone. Then, on
Saturday, the weekend’s centrepiece will be the Canadian premiere
of Diné composer Raven Chacon’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning work,
Voiceless Mass, at Roy Thomson Hall. The work meditates on gathering
spaces – who has access to them and the land they sit on –
exploring how string instruments and pipe organ musically interact
within the performance space. The Pulitzer Prize entry questionnaire
10 | September 20 - November 8, 2022 thewholenote.com