Metamorphize Our Symphony 5: A Matter of Public Interest
Original Kitchener, Waterloo, Canada, July 6 2024.
The last post in this series — Can an Orchestra Have a Soul? — is based on a lunch hour talk I presented to Rotary Kitchener Westmount at the venerable Concordia Club last November. It ends on a hopeful note: "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."
Here's an account of the rest of the talk, which deals with the civic aspect of the KW Symphony legacy, my own commitment to the cause, and prospects for the future. It is for us, the living, and for the next seven generations that the story of how Our Orchestra has evolved over the years matters.
A Matter of Public Interest
The Kitchener Waterloo Symphony can be considered the cornerstone of the arts in our region, partly because of its size. That board of directors put 52 artists out of work who were securely employed to do work they were trained to do, and that they've dedicated their lives to. I can't think of another organization that employs even one artist on a permanent basis. The galleries, the festivals, and the theatre companies may pay artist fees, but not salaries. If an artist is employed full time, it is almost always in an administrative or curatorial role, or as a teacher.
52 artists out of work, with another 50 or 60 support staff: For me, that's reason enough to make every effort to Save Our Symphony in 2024 just as we did in 2006. But the size of the organization is also an indication of how hard it will be to find the resources to keep something like this going. I don't think that it will be enough to just cover the shortfall and put things back on track like we did 18 years ago.
Instead of a rescue or restoration project, we should take the current crisis as an opportunity to apply some creativity, some courage, and some of that smart city innovation Waterloo likes to brag about. We should demonstrate what we are and what we can do by defining and building the civic orchestra of the 21st century.
We should set out to lead the world in the precedents we set over the next, say, three years.
I'm especially interested in three aspects of the KWSO situation: The first is that LEGACY I've been going on about: 140 years, 7 generations. I have a peculiar viewpoint on these things, because of my age, my origins, my training as a historian, and my civic engagements over the last 30 years. I like to describe myself as a "conservatory progressive," or a "Neo Loyalist," which I like to think of as a distinctly Ontarian way of looking at things.
A conservatory approach means building on what exists. That was a key principle of Kitchener's first “CulturePlan” in 1996; today, it is sometimes called "asset-based community development." Conservatory means conserving, adapting, repairing, and reusing.
Neo Loyalists don't like revolutions, especially not when they sow enmity, divide, maim, kill, and destroy. Being a conservatory progressive means looking ahead, moving with the time, shaping the future. It does not mean resisting every kind of change, and it certainly doesn't mean returning to some imagined golden past.
It makes sense for those Revolutionary Republicans south of the border to want to Make America Great Again, because their day has passed. The same with those Brexit types longing for a return to the time when Britannia ruled the waves: Those days are gone. But it doesn't make sense in Ontario, Canada, because THIS is our time to shine: The 21st century belongs to Canada. If we can't believe it, let's make believe that it is so.
So for me, the legacy comes first. The second aspect of the KW Symphony crisis I'm interested in is the CIVIC dimension: I'm interested in what a symphony orchestra, a great choral tradition and a world-class concert hall can mean to a mid-sized Canadian City that happens to have reasonable claim to be the birthplace and capital of allophone Canada — all of us "others" whose origins are neither francophone nor anglophone.
Any city can hire a public relations firm to polish the brand and produce all sorts of promotional material. "We're a Smart City." "We're the True North." "We're all about innovation." "We're the future of Learning and Work." But saying so doesn't make it so.
It may be possible to hire some experts, and with ample time and deep pockets, start up a symphony orchestra with paid players from scratch. I heard of a rich man in Toronto doing just that recently. Starting something, however, is easy compared to sustaining an organization with 52 artists employed year after year, especially in a mid-sized, non-metropolitan centre built on industry, not finance, political power, or tourism. That's an accomplishment that is hard to match. It stands as irrefutable proof that Waterloo really is smart, innovative, resourceful, and otherwise capable.
The third aspect of the KW Symphony situation that interests me is the VISION aspect. This is where the Raffi Armenian part of the story becomes prominent. He came here from Vienna via Montreal in 1971. Howard Dyck arrived at the same time, and they got to work. The orchestra was made up of volunteers, played in an old movie theatre — the Lyric, downtown, right on King Street.
What Armenian added to the mix was vision, ambition, and drive. He was inspired by what Tom Paterson had been able to set in motion in Stratford, and got involved with the scene there. The principal players of the new professional orchestra he was building were called the Canadian Chamber Ensemble. They served the Stratford Festival for a time. Inspired by the example of what Shakespearean drama had done for Stratford, Armenian hit upon the idea that opera, specifically Wagnerian opera, could be an equivalent for Berlin-Kitchener, Waterloo.
Raffi Armenian's vision was international in scope, yet he made his home here in Waterloo Country, immersing himself in the regional communities and integrating the orchestra into their daily workings. That includes the academic communities.
Besides Stratford, the other inspiration for transforming the city's musical legacy into a top rank professional orchestra was the University of Waterloo, an accomplishment that stands as a demonstration of what the university itself once summarized as "the spirit of 'why not?'"
My first experience with the KW Symphony was after they started playing at the newly-built Hagey Hall of the Humanities on the University of Waterloo campus. The arts and humanities, however, have never been a priority at UWaterloo, and eventually it was Wilfrid Laurier University (which was still Waterloo Lutheran University when Armenian arrived in town) that became a centre of excellence in music.
A first rate orchestra needs a world class concert hall as its instrument, so Raffi pushed ahead, and against all odds, managed to steer the project they ended up calling "Centre in the Square" to completion, including the concert hall that now bears his name.
Those three accomplishments — Stratford Festival, the University of Waterloo and the KW Symphony-Grand Phil-Raffi Armenian Concert Hall configuration — exemplify the spirit of “why not?” here in our neck of the woods. I can't think of any better examples.
Centre in the Square opened in 1980, which, sadly, turned out to be the highpoint of Raffi Armenian's project: He spent another 13 years here trying to move things forward, but the community — the local and regional business and civic leadership — never embraced the vision. The economic downturn didn't help either. So he decided to go back to Montreal.
Armenian gave up just as Kitchener's new City Hall was opened. That's when I attended something called the "Visions '93" conference, and had a conversion experience that turned me towards getting involved in various civic pursuits. These civic pursuits would soon lead me to become part of the team that shaped Kitchener's first Culture Plan, which was officially endorsed in 1996.
Raffi Armenian was gone by that time, but not forgotten: CulturePlan I Recommendation #10 of 24 reads: "that City Council support efforts toward development of an international Richard Wagner 'Ring Cycle' by the year 2000." But that didn't happen.
So here's my take on why we've never been able to get behind Raffi Armenian's vision: Stratford and the University of Waterloo were products of the 1950s; the 1970s were a time of diminished expectations. The spirit of "why not?" seems to have departed around 1973, and has not breathed on us again, at least not with the same intensity.
This is 2024, not 1971. It's time to start working on imagining something feasible and desirable that matches the scope and scale of what Raffi Armenian imagined 50 years ago, updated to suit the 21st century.
Among all the other benefits that arts-related pursuits can offer is meaningful, satisfying, and desirable work that is also sustainable. There are 8 billion of us, and for making our contribution to achieving full employment in that vast global workforce, it is much better to have 30 orchestras serving a population of 5 million (as, according to what Howard Dyck said on my radio show, there are in Finland) than 30 more auto plants, even if they are all electric cars and trucks. And Ontario, remember, is three times the size of Finland, so that would work out to ninety symphony orchestras.
Symphonic music isn't the only form of music, and music is only one of the seven arts, as they used to count them. There are many more. Classical Indian literature counts 64 fine arts disciplines. If I had more time, I'd start trying to explain why I think that the full spectrum of artistic and creative pursuits should be at the centre of a revised conception of what real prosperity is, appropriate for 2024 and beyond.
It is no longer 1924, when the dream was a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. We're even farther away from 1824, when manifest destiny meant yearly multiplying millions dominating the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico.
The consumerist dream of a century ago led to a kind of prosperity that had never existed before, but that we know now is unsustainable, especially in a global context: if 8 billion of us were to live this way, we'd destroy the planet and ourselves.
Continental expansion from 200 years ago, first in the republic to the south, and soon to be adapted by a new Dominion of Canada determined to extend from sea to sea, created much of what we celebrate on July 1st here and on July 4th down there. But it was a disaster for the land, and for the nations, peoples, and cultures who stood in the way of this kind of progress.
In 2024 we need a new kind of prosperity. There are indications of a new destiny, national, regional, municipal, corporate, and personal, manifested in the ways these various stories are unfolding day by day, year by year, including the KW Symphony-Grand Phil-Raffi Armenian Concert Hall story.
Concord. Harmony. Peace. Prosperity: The extraordinarily strong music tradition that has flourished here for so long touches on all these qualities — longed-for objectives that have been part of the origins and development of the City itself, within the County/Region, which is an integral part of the watershed, the province and of Canada.
So I'll say it again: What we have here is an opportunity waiting to be seized, and a promise that is in the process of being fulfilled.