Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

REMEMBERING
Remembering
Michael
Snow
(1928-2023)
Music as Shared Experience
ANDREW TIMAR
MICHAEL TOROSIAN
Michael Snow, artist-at-large
Sorry, but I’m going to have to skip over much of Toronto-born
artist Michael Snow’s vast and diverse body of work, including milestone
experimental films, sculptures, paintings, prints, photographs,
holographs, slide projections, videos, books and recordings (78, LP,
cassette, CD, streaming), among other media. While primarily highlighting
his lesser-known career in live music, I’d be remiss if I didn’t
first mention a few of his large scale Toronto public artworks.
Perhaps like countless thousands you’ve walked past Michael
Snow’s 1989 confrontational gold-painted fibreglass sculpture suite
The Audience mounted on the brutalist concrete face of Toronto’s
Rogers Centre.
Or you’ve gazed up at Flight Stop, the 1979 site-specific sculptural-photographic
work hanging from the ceiling in the Eaton Centre
shopping mall. Appearing to depict a flock of some 60 Canada geese
whiffling in for a landing, each Styrofoam and fibreglass goose is
actually enrobed in a photographic sheet, the image taken from a
single goose. This dynamic work evocatively freezes indoors an iconic
outdoor Canadian aerial migratory event, while also confronting
viewers’ preconceptions of photographic illusion.
Then there was the controversy around his Walking Woman, first
exhibited in 1962 at Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery. This iconic stylized female
silhouette appeared in many guises and in many locations afterwards.
A multiple highly reflective stainless steel version was featured in the
Ontario Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67. The figure could be perceived
variably as a presence to be looked at, or an absence to be looked
through, manifesting the sort of duality that was a guiding principle
in Snow’s work.
Michael Snow, jazz pianist
But before any of these public projects, came music. A self-taught
pianist, the teenage Snow began by improvising on blues and jazz
standards. In 1948 he cut several 78RPM recordings of them. (There’s
a covert jazz connection even in Snow’s Walking Woman, supposedly
modelled on his friend and fellow jazz musician Carla Bley.)
Snow graduated to gigging as a pianist in downtown Toronto’s first
smoky jazz clubs, a scene Don Owen evocatively captured in his 1963
NFB film Toronto Jazz. We see Snow in action on the piano bench, in
his artist studio and on the street carrying his Walking Woman.
Right to the end, Snow’s enthusiasm for Jelly Roll Morton, Earl
Hines, boogie and Thelonious Monk bubbled just under his fingers,
though it had long since evolved into an elegant, richly multilayered
idiosyncratic pianism. “Of course I always wanted to have my own
style,” he acknowledged in a 2019 interview, “Free playing makes that
more achievable than playing tunes and variations on them.”
Moving to the Big Apple for the better part of the 60s, his film
New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) was an important document
of free jazz’s formative stage. On his return to Toronto, Snow brought
that musical approach with him, sharing it with his jazz and artist
colleagues here. In 1976 it was manifested in the foundation of the
ensemble CCMC, which opened The Music Gallery the same year.
Yet when asked in 2014 who his favourite composer/musician was,
his (perhaps not so) surprising reply was “J.S. Bach.”
GIORGIO-GALEOTTI.
STEPHEN BEST
(l-r) Michael Snow’s Flight-Stop
at the Toronto Eaton Centre; The
Audience at Toronto's Rogers Centre
Mike White’s Imperial Jazz band at the Westover Hotel, 1958.
Ian Arnott, clarinet; Ian Halliday, drums; Mike White, cornet;
Bud Hill, trombone; Peter Bartram, bass; Michael Snow, piano.
COURTESY ESTATE OF MICHAEL SNOW
28 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com