This Evening Muse offering is based on a lunch hour talk I presented to the Rotary Club of Kitchener Westmount at the Concordia Club in Kitchener on November 1, 2023.
The question raised here is not as urgent today as it was last fall, when we weren't sure if the KW Symphony even existed. Since then, we've learned that a board of directors has to do more than just declare bankruptcy and walk away in order to wipe a membership-based corporate entity out of existence. The ongoing legal existence of Our Symphony was confirmed on June 6, when the remaining members of the society gathered online to appoint a new set of trustees.
The issue, however, remains broadly relevant. It's related to the case I've been trying to make in my Culture as Capital musings about organic cities and towns: Over and above their legal existence as municipalities with corporate charters issued by the province, such polities have an actual existence that has developed over time, and that no one has the power or the authority to control. Organic cities and towns are lived into existence.
The question can be applied to other fields of endeavour as well: Can an entity like Waterloo Lutheran-Wilfrid Laurier University; the Berlin-Kitchener-KW-Waterloo Region Record; Trinity United Church in Kitchener; Wired World Inc / 98.5 CKWR; the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, or even a corporation like the legacy J.M. Schneider started in 1890 have something like a soul?
I’m inclined to believe, or at least make believe, that they can and do. But let’s stick with “Our Symphony.”
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Can an Orchestra Have a Soul?
On Sept 17, 2023, the news went out that the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony was canceling its 2023-24 season, and would need something like $2.5 million to get back on track:
Subscription sales had not recovered from the depredations of the pandemic. The numbers indicated that without a major infusion of working capital it would be impossible to carry on with the season as planned. Five days later, the board of directors announced that they were declaring bankruptcy, terminating the operations of the organization, and resigning.
Done. Finished. An abrupt end to a 78-year legacy, without even a whimper, only a cold silence from the abdicating trustees that has not, as yet, been broken.
What they walked away from is a legacy of which we as a city and a region had been justly proud. At least some of us had a sense of its value; I’m not sure this part of our heritage was ever appreciated as it could and should have been.
The story actually goes back much farther than 1945: It begins in 1883, when citizens of what was then still the Town of Berlin, Ontario, launched the Berlin Philharmonic and Orchestral Society.
That was 10 years after the foundation of the venerable Concordia Club and Choir. To me, these are all parts of the same legacy, along with the famous Sängerfeste (singing festivals), Turnverein gymnastic clubs and various citizens bands. Together, these constitute one of the foundational elements of the arts in the Waterloo area.
The Berlin Philharmonic and Orchestral Society hit rocky ground when the war came, and had to suspend operations for a while. But in 1922, the association re-organized to become the society behind the Kitchener Waterloo Philharmonic Choir.
In 1945, the leader of the KW Philharmonic choral organization, organist, conductor and composer Glenn (Clarence) Kruspe, founded the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony to accompany the choir, and stayed on to serve as musical director of both organizations until the 1960s.
There’s a third strand in this story which that begins in 1971, when Raffi Armenian arrives in Kitchener from Vienna by way of Montreal to lead the KW Symphony. He sets out to transform what had been a good local-regional musical organization run mostly by volunteers into a top rank professional orchestra. A top rank orchestra needs a world-class concert hall, so he made what they ended up calling “Centre in the Square” happen, with the concert hall that bears his name.
To my mind, these three entities -- the Choir, the Symphony and that magnificent Concert Hall -- are inextricably interconnected.
So, in relation to the question “Can a Symphony Orchestra have a Soul?” I’m going to start with a qualified yes for the KW Symphony Orchestra: It certainly does have a soul, but only in relation to its parent, the Philharmonic Choir, and its primary instrument, the Raffi Armenian Concert Hall. And only in the context of the place that gave birth to it: Berlin, now Kitchener, in Waterloo County, Upper Canada / Canada West / Ontario.
The soul of the KW Symphony can only be understood in relation to the full timespan of the story:140 years, seven generations, from the late Victoria era through the entire 20th century, to where we are now, near the end of the first quarter of the 21st.
Now by “soul” I don’t mean a kind of inner spirit that exists inside a physical body, transcends it after death, and lives forever. “Soul” can have many meanings; in Latin, the word for soul is anima: the life force of an organism, of which the body is a kind of vessel or mechanism.
Some even say a physical entity like a river or a mountain can have a soul, or a city, a region, a country. The ancients talked about the genius locii, the spirit of a place, and so did the moderns: Charles Lindburgh’s airplane was called the “Spirit of St Louis.”
When I refer to our community and our part of Ontario, Canada as “Waterloo Country,” I’m talking about the spirit or soul of the place, which is much more than just the governance regime set up by the province in these parts 51 years ago.
We also talk about the zeitgeist -- the spirit or genius of the time. The life of Our Symphony has spanned several eras, each of which have helped shaped the soul or life force of the orchestra as an actual organism, with or without a set of documents and a seal recognizing its existence by the government.
These are all examples of what can and should be taken into consideration as we imagine what the KWSO is, what it signifies, whether it matters, and if it does, how?
If we’re going to rally to Save Our Symphony like the community did in 2006, we’re going to have to explain what it means, and how it benefits not just concert goers but the community as a whole. And one of the ways it serves us is that the presence of the KW Symphony, and the story of how it developed over time, is part of what distinguishes us.
If the Symphony has a distinct soul of its own, part of what distinguishes it is how it distinguishes us, the community that gave birth to it, and that sustained it for 78, 101 or 140 years..
That’s the main point I want to make, but I had an even more basic consideration in mind when I first thought of the question of whether an Orchestra can have a soul as the theme of this talk: And that was the question of whether the KW Symphony even existed.
A couple of days before my talk, Howard Dyck, artistic director emeritus of the Grand Philharmonic Choir, had been a guest on the “community radio magazine” that I produce every week in conjunction with 98.5 CKWR, Canada’s first community radio station. Dyck described Our Orchestra as, quote, “an organization that grew and prospered, eventually scaling artistic heights that no one in the community could have possibly imagined. Now, 78 years later, the KWS has declared bankruptcy and, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.”
I’ve argued against this. What the board set out to dissolve was the KW Symphony as a legal entity, a corporation recognized by law as an "artificial person", invisible, intangible, with a discrete legal personhood, perpetual succession, and a common seal.
The modern corporation is a wondrous construction. Unlike actual human persons, an artificial personage can go on forever. But you can also wind it all up, put an end to it, willfully, deliberately, with a simple show of hands. You can also stifle its vitality through apathy, or drive it over a cliff, into oblivion. And you won’t be charged with murder or manslaughter.
Behind that artifice, that legal construction, there’s something even more wonderful: an association, formed and sustained deliberately and voluntarily by individual citizens, for purposes that go beyond what any single human being can do. The end result is something that has soul-like qualities.
In this case, we’re talking about purposes such as philharmonic and orchestral pursuits -- i.e. making music. Making music of any kind is a lofty and mysterious undertaking. Philharmonic means love of harmony; the root word for orchestra is a Greek term meaning, originally, to dance.
Today “orchestra” has come to mean a large group of musicians who play many different instruments together, usually, but not always, led by a conductor. It doesn’t have to be a formal corporation, but it must be a joint effort: Harmony is something that cannot be accomplished by one person alone. It’s the association that matters, which includes the musicians, the organization that brought them together and sustains them, the subscribers, who “underwrite” them, as well the governors, management, staff and, of course, audiences.
That legal construction the board decided to shut down and walk away from is to the association what a birth certificate or a passport is to a living person, or what a license is to a marriage. Losing or giving up one's citizenship can have terrible results. But it doesn't erase your very existence.
So I contend that the KW Symphony remains alive, and can serve many intents and purposes. As an association, it exists as long as there are two or three people left who care about it, and are willing to keep it in motion. There’s a mysterious, transcendent quality to efforts to keep it in motion, to keep the music going beyond 140 years.
This legacy includes both the sound made by people who have played music together and integrated new musicians into their playing without interruption for 78 years, and a community - city and a region - including generations of audiences, donors, sponsors and volunteers that have sustained this work and been enriched by it.
The region’s extraordinary musical tradition is a manifestation of the spirit of the place. It has played a significant role in shaping what is distinct about the “Waterloo Way” of doing things.
Postscript
That summarizes the first part of my talk. I went on from there to say more about the civic aspect of this legacy, my own commitment to the cause, and about prospects: t is for us, the living, and for the next seven generations that the story of how Our Orchestra has evolved over the years matters.
The Citizens Supporting the KW Symphony group had started to take shape at this point. It became a kind of forum that allowed people from the community to add their voices and energies to those of the Musicians of the KWS, who had valiantly launched and led the campaign to save the orchestra. I ended my talk with a reference to the precedent set 18 years ago, when the community as a whole rallied to launch a “Save Our Symphony” -- “SOS” -- campaign. I told the Rotarians that “I’d like to follow the precedent set in 2006, and call this a Save Our Symphony 2024 movement.”
SOS, of course, is the distress sign in morse code: It means “save our souls,” or “save our ship,” `which brought my talk back to the question at hand: As we consider the current state of the arts in the communities of Grand River Country, and throughout Canada as a whole, does the rather old-fashioned idea of a soul or spirit of a legacy, a corporate entity or a place have any relevance?.
If we make this a Save Our Symphony 2024 movement, the “ship” or the “souls” we’re praying for in the distress call become, not just a musical legacy, but the City itself, and the County/Region, which is an integral part of the watershed, the province and of Canada.
This would make Save Our Symphony 2024 far more than just the special interest of a segment of the population who love a certain kind of music. It becomes a public interest that, while it isn't an issue that each and every one of us needs to be burdened with, does concern us all.
I’m not sure, however, that it is fitting or wise to think of the task before us as a rescue operation. I don’t think the crisis at Our Symphony, or the current state of the arts in Grand River Country in general, is a problem that needs to be solved. What we have here is an opportunity waiting to be seized, and a promise that is in the process of being fulfilled.