A Time for Everything
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Having spent now close to 2 weeks living under the COVID-19 restrictions here in Edmonton, I hear these lines from Ecclesiastes slowly surfacing in my mind. The amount of news in the last months, coming at us via so many different channels, combined with the restrictions on public life, has, in my mind, the image of a massive Tsunami mounting on the horizon. It seems we’re only at the stage where water ripples around our ankles. And so, the repetitious ‘a time’, brings some anchoring and solace, helps with the acceptance and pragmatism that I find myself resorting to.
I came across Ecclesiastes for the first time about 10 to 12 years ago, while researching a concert with the theme ‘time’. The work A Time for Everything by Danish composer Bo Holten stood out for me. I subsequently used the title for the concert with Pro Coro Canada in September 2013, the full program was curated around this particular work. A Time for Everything starts in the tenors and basses with an ascending motive, slowly building and cycling with the words ‘a time’. This mantra develops over time, at one point adding the sopranos and altos, into a chorale which is quietly sung by the lower parts. The higher voices are cascading over this low accompaniment, almost as if wanting to distract from the calm, underlying mood. This section moves into the intense build up to A Time for Anger and Wrath; a violent, dissonant outburst with a sudden breaking-off of all voices. As if this eruption cleared the air, there is now a shimmering and light echo, fading into the final, affirming chorale, sung by all voices together. The piece ends quietly with the words ‘A Time we lost eternally’.
Later, Pro Coro Canada commissioned Canadian composer Cy Giacomin to write a work using the same text. The resulting piece was premiered at the national choral conference, Podium, Halifax in 2014, with Pro Coro Canada and Halifax Camerata Singers joining forces. Ah, what a great performance it was, alongside my dear colleague Jeff Joudrey, and all the amazing singers. On the program was also the monumental The Nightingale by Ugis Praulins, a composition which became a signature piece of Pro Coro, and which led to the Grammy-nominated Latvian composer taking on a two year residency role with the choir.
It seems fitting that these lines of Ecclesiastes evoke a trip down memory lane, digging through archival recordings and programs, taking stock of things accomplished and achieved.
A Time to Tear Down
Like most non-essential businesses and organizations across the globe, Pro Coro Canada shut-down its main activities. Our staff is healthy and well, and working from home for the foreseeable future. We had to cancel the Good Friday concert at the Winspear, a staple in the Edmonton concert calendar and beloved tradition for many of our patrons and our singers. We have a concert lined up in May and one in June, and we’re holding onto those dates for the time being. In my role as Artistic and Executive Director of the organization I am reviewing the imminent schedule for rehearsals and concerts, checking in on singers and assisting the Board of Directors in the long-term planning. This means that, while our 2020-2021 season was pretty much ready for release, I am revising every concert and outreach program between September 2020 and July 2021, and beyond. There are some crucial considerations on my mind, some questions to which I don’t have the answer to (yet), and some straight-forward logistical challenges.
Empty Echoes
For the first time in years, the Francis Winspear Centre for Music will sit empty on Good Friday due to the COVID-19 epidemic
Pro Coro Canada’s main purpose is to hold rehearsals and present concerts to the public, and through doing so, to provide employment to professional singers. This very core activity of our organization is not possible at the moment and might be at stake for months to come, as are in effect the livelihoods of all the artists we work with. What does a performing arts organization do, when public performances are not possible? How will our singers and our audiences experience a concert under further ‘distancing’ restrictions? What is the human potential within our organization and how can it serve the community and the art form? And, is our organization the channel through which this should happen?
As a non-for-profit organization producing a professional chamber choir, we are among very few in this country. A list of groups with similar structure, comparable number of concerts and productions, and with an equivalent budget would number under 10. There are countless community choral organizations addressing the needs of passionate amateur singers, and we’re working alongside provincial and national organizations to understand, assess and mitigate the current situation. I’m very thankful to all my colleagues across Canada and also in the US and Europe for sharing documents, strategies, policies and generally anything that can be of help to our art form and the arts sector in general.
I’ve been reading analyses and poring over data every day, deciphering to my best ability what the commonalities are across Canada, the US and Europe, and which facts keep coming to the fore. In this rapidly changing environment, it is a Sisyphean task, but also one that keeps me engaged in my ability to re-focus programmes, and resources. Have I come to a solution?, a sustainable way forward for the next 18 months for Pro Coro Canada? No, but I believe I have been forced to focus on the substantial questions that will highlight the raison-d’être of Pro Coro Canada, and that will carry the organization and the choir through the next phase.
As I was alluding to earlier, the image of the Tsunami keeps coming back, and I observe myself as a pragmatic bystander, watching as wave after wave crashes onto the beach, and washes away the sand-castles, towels, chairs and the wooden structures that we’ve build over the years. Those sand-castles and structures are, for example, some of the newer programmes that Pro Coro initiated in the last seasons, initiatives that have had concept to field-testing success, but have not yet been fully established in our yearly program. Swept away are the invitations we have received from Switzerland, Germany and the UK to perform at upcoming summer festivals. Also our highly-successful Choral Art program at the Banff Centre, which has only had its third edition this past month, is at the risk of disappearing in the turmoil. Since those elements of our season only happen on a yearly basis (or even less frequently in the case of touring), I would consider them the wooden structures, and the sandcastle that’s being washed away with no shape to be remembered by.
Some structures remain standing. Pro Coro Canada is celebrating its 40th anniversary in the 2020-2021 season, as it was January 1981 when the organization was incorporated. Our subscription season now includes 8 core concerts plus two to three extra productions, resulting in a yearly offering of approximately ten performances; a season programming blueprint that has been tried and tested over many decades. The form, location and presentation of a specific concert might change with the heightened awareness and restrictions around infectious disease, but the choir will gather and will continue to share great choral art with the community.
A Time to Build
While I believe that come September things will be more flexible, I currently have the mammoth task ahead of putting the alternatives - the Plans B, C, D, E, - onto paper and into budget form. New avenues of presenting Pro Coro Canada will be tested and put in place for a potential roll-out, more collaborations with other disciplines and with technology-oriented companies will be explored and the logistics around the concert experience for our patrons will be re-defined.
“The form, location and presentation of a specific concert might change with the heightened awareness and restrictions around infectious disease, but the choir will gather and will continue to share great choral art with the community. “
At the moment, I observe an abundance of digital versions of the choral community experience on social media. Every day there is another virtual choir or orchestra appearing in my news feed, interspersed with an image made up of many small computer screens where people interact with each other through videoconferencing. Zoom and Skype and Google Meet are the go-to tools to stay connected and to make some music together. For over a decade, major organizations have poured tremendous resources and funds toward spearheading live streaming of concerts in programs like the Berlin Philharmonic’s excellent Digital Concert Hall, and now community organizations are going online to find their own possibilities for digital music-making initiatives within the limits of the technology we have available at the grassroots level.
So, what else can technology help us with in these times? Well, looking at it from the two perspectives that I have shaped above: the tsunami will wash over everything, and sort the temporary necessity of the virtual meeting place from the essential purpose of what we want and need to do with choral music: technology might not be the medium. I believe at this moment today, it is a time for Pro Coro to be silent while we search and plant for the future.
These are some of my thoughts that underpin my work, and the preparations for the remainder of the 2019-2020 season and the upcoming two, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. Meanwhile, my days have remained the same here at home: I get up between 6 and 7 AM, have my cup of coffee while taking in the morning view outside the window. My next steps are then to continue the artistic and administrative planning of Pro Coro Canada, while having a break here and there for a run in the river valley, to work on a puzzle or to get dinner prepared. Personal reflection and self-care in a physical and mental way are my priorities, and in that spirit, I will end with another excerpt from Ecclesiates.
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north
round and round it goes
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;