Never pander. Perform work that matters. Give it your all.

With Brad Cherwin on what lies ahead for this music that we call classical

May 23, 2022

Brad Cherwin. Photo credit Beata Rasitsan and Kristian Podlacha

Brad Cherwin is not worried about the future of classical music.

The industry has been trying to pretzel itself into something that would appeal to the bigger and younger crowds for decades now. Please like us has been the posture. We’ll get DJs to our symphonic concerts, bring the coolest pop stars to our fundraising events, want hors d’oeuvres we got all the hors d’oeuvres, we’ll play Hollywood dross on Wagnerian orchestras, we’ll arrange Taylor Swift songs for you, don’t care about the number of women in orchestras any longer but you want us to diversify faster and reflect exactly the population - we’ll eliminate auditioning behind the screens, no problem, you only want ethnically-correct casting, well alright let’s do that then, you don’t fancy Russians at the moment no problem, we’ll cancel the Russians. It’s desperation station.

So it’s unusual to find young musicians who prefer to obsess about the thing itself, and downvote the marketing, the selling, the dreamt-up frictionless access (not to mention the redressing of historical injustices, as if it’s music that created them in the first place) from the top of the agenda. It’s as if, god forbid, the thing itself is its own best PR.

Let me rewind to 2018. I first noticed the loosely formed band of musicians now known as the Happenstancers at a small concert in the Heliconian Club in Yorkville. Clarinetist Brad Cherwin, soprano Adanya Dunn and pianist Alice Gi-Young Hwang were the core group, with other musicians engaged depending on the program. The concert was a sort of a dialogue between the late (overripe might be the right word) Romanticism and the modernism and serialism that appeared immediately after, seemingly chalk and cheese but actually, the program was suggesting, tangled in a permanent tango. I can’t remember being taken by an Anton Webern chamber piece before—but I was positively stunned by the one they played. Everything in that concert was well thought-out, including the superbly designed and printed programs. I might have rhapsodized a bit about the novelty of them and their potential to reinvent what classical music concerts look like.

A lot of water has passed under the Prince Edward Viaduct since. Dunn has moved to the Netherlands in pursuit of an operatic career; Alice, now better known as Nahre Sol, pianist, composer and internet educator with almost half a million YouTube subscribers, has returned to her native US. (You’re likely to have seen the video in which she plays the Happy Birthday melody in the styles of 10 classical composers.) But Brad Cherwin, born in Rochester, NY but calling Toronto home, stayed. And built on the Happenstancers or whatever the thing that Brad and friends are doing any given season is called. Branding is, again, bottom of the agenda. They prefer to do music. Which is not to say that nothing but the music is on offer: Cherwin creates the visuals for each concert which appear in the printed program and on Instagram.

They’ve since performed in a private gallery, a program titled Paper which involved drawing in real time in response to the music played, and viceversa. I’ve listened to them in one of those post-industrial-turned-concert-spaces on Geary Avenue, where they got me hooked on Pascal Dusapin for life (I took home four J.S. Bachs in hot pink from that adventure, purchased before the concert, which still live on the walls of my apartment.) As soon as it was allowed after covid, they threw a three-day festival of chamber music and called it Mozart is Dead. The last thing I saw them in was Chimaera, a concert in which the musicians moved to three different stations of instruments for each segment of the program. It opened with Julia Wolfe and Nahre Sol’s own Korean-folk response to it. It then proceeded to a regular Mozart oboe quartet which was interrupted by an Oliver Knussen piece on same instruments to finish with the final movement of the earlier Mozart piece. The third part was another mash-up, a Kurtag woodwind piece from one side of the hall in a call-and-response situation with a Saariaho quartet on the other end.

While larger music organizations hammer on about their diversity initiatives, and Canada Council talks of nothing else, groups like Happenstancers & friends neither program along ethnic or single-culture lines nor market themselves in that way but are in actual fact diversifying organically - except they’d probably call it friendship, musicianship, living in Toronto or the twenty-first century. Too, I can’t imagine Cherwin ever programming a woman composer out of redress or justice or whatever: he will program Saariaho, Julia Wolfe, Augusta Read Thomas, Ann Southam, Ana Sokolovic because, a shocker, he loves their work as much as he loves Dusapin’s or Kurtag’s.

He is now a one-man, many-jobs artistic director of the whole indie enterprise. He writes the grant proposals, does all the press releases himself, and designs and prints the supporting materials for each concert. The old-fashioned postering is gradually being replaced by Instagram and similar social media (absolutely not Twitter). While a music student at Oberlin, Cherwin took some studio art classes on the side and has kept at it over the years. He mostly sketches on tablet and electronic pen these days. “Visuals are all free because I’m doing them for free”, he told me when we met for coffee earlier this month and my first question was about the always impeccable design. “But for me it’s all part of the same thing; it helps me work through the ideas. And think about things from a non-musical angle, which sometimes ends up helping the musical side.” You’ll find no composer bios, no headshots, no musicological essays in their programs; they’ve shrunk over time into neat glossy cards with just the composer names, the pieces played, and the graphics. “The audience has only so much attention.”

He’s recently returned from Germany, where he got together with mezzo Ema Nikolovska and two other musicians for another concert of Cherwinian shenanigans, this time in Berlin and Hamburg. They planned to make a concise video about the program and pitch it various places for potential touring, but the filming turned into its own project, a sort of classical music-video-reportage hybrid. “It ended up being this 30-hour project, out of which we’ll get a 10-min reduction. The concert itself is 65 minutes of continuous performance with poetry improv, contemporary music, Romantic music – all about night and dreaming,” he says. “The video reduction is going to be the first 25 seconds of Schubert’s Nacht und Träume, then an excerpt from a Lori Freedman piece, then spoken word poetry improvisation with a piano, followed by a folk song, then the Ana Sokolovic excerpt, which then goes into a Purcell piece from King Arthur for two mezzos and piano. After which we found this cool unison connection into this Saariaho piece and I did the first 40 seconds of that, which then went into an improv piece that we kind of composed together. We worked hard on all the transitions.”

And while his friend Ema Nikolovska moved permanently to Germany, Cherwin tells me he’s not tempted. “I like that there’s a lot of room here. In NYC there are like a thousand people trying to do what I’m trying to do, and 10 new ones every single day.” [Allow me to interject here: No there isn’t! They should be so lucky!] “And that’s fine, but here there’s a lot of more space. Plus the funding is so accessible. That, in the States, is really complicated. They have barely any public funding for the arts. For what does exist you’ll have to have a non-for-profit 501(c) status. And I don’t know if I want to have a board for what I’m doing. Not right now.” What about the donors, will the Happenstancers be expanding in those directions? “It would be nice to have a couple of donors! But it’s also nice not to be beholden to anybody else’s tastes. That way I can try what I want to try. If you get $10,000 from someone, it’s never without strings attached. I’ll rather struggle a little for a while than sell what we’re trying to do. I remember when I was doing things with Alice and Adanya, somebody who lives in the Bridle Path came to one of our concerts. We’d love to have you perform in our home and we’d love to support you, they told us, but we would love to hear you in this other repertoire.”

Which is not to say that Cherwin is a contemporary-only kind of guy. “We’re not a contemporary music ensemble, I don’t want that label.” It’s a label that puts a lot of listeners off, I tell him. “It puts *me* off too. If you could have 500 years of music, why would you only take 50? That’s stupid.” I tell him I’ve been noticing the intra-classical snobbery wherever I look: contemporary music people don’t listen to the nineteenth century. The historically informed performance people don’t look past 1820. The opera fanatics can’t stomach contemporary opera. “Yeah, I know. I actually think we can have our cake and eat it, why not. You usually can’t. But if you can do whatever you want to do, why wouldn’t you. A lot of it is laziness… ignorance about the repertoire… fear of the audience.”

LP: What is going to happen with symphony orchestras? Are we still going to have them in twenty years?

BC: I think so. There’s some good orchestras out there doing really cool stuff. It’s just a difficult model. But I think musicians and people in the industry have this idea about contrast within the repertoire that is naïve… “Oh it’s a really varied program, it has Vivaldi and Wagner.” Maybe to me, those are very different but I don’t know if that is a truly monumental contrast to a lay person. It’s weird that so many people who take on self-consciously this mantle of an artist are completely uninterested in a dialogue with the world they actually live in. How can we reach modern audiences, blah blah? Being aware of the world you live in is probably a good start. People don’t realize that An Evening in Paris-style programming is not compelling. At all. We have a different cultural relationship to this music in North America than they do in Europe. The context for doing an all-Beethoven program is completely different in Berlin than it is in Toronto. There’s a history there, the art connects to all other kinds of art that is much more immediate… It’s still bad programming in Berlin BUT it has a completely different context. Here it’s completely detached from history and culture.

But see that argument is often used by the people who say, why are you performing classical only, we’re North America, you should always have some pop, or gospel, or jazz, or musical theatre in your programming.

If your mandate is you’re an outreach organization, a community-building organization, maybe you should be doing that. Think about those genres critically… you can do a lot of interesting things with pop. No one does interesting things with pop here.

Are you into pop at all? Does it feed into your work in any way?

I don’t listen to a lot of pop music. For me it’s very passive. I am trained to look for complexity. I’m just not super fluent in that portion of the music. Though I don’t subscribe to the pop music is naïve and bad and classical is complicated and good binary. But I spend all of my time listening to music and I’m just not interested in listening to any of it passively. I really want to be listening to it.

That’s the musician way of listening, no?

D’you know, I’m not convinced that most musicians really like classical music that much. I think they like to *play* it, but there’s a very big difference between playing and listening to it.

Whenever the COC programs a contemporary opera, they say their ticket sales go down. Why is this. What to say to people terrified of contemporary music?

I think contemporary music is challenging. I don’t think that’s something to paper over… that’s just where the vast majority of really great artists working today are at. And it’s the same kind of criticism that was levelled at Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner –

Would you ever release online-only music? I noticed you haven’t during covid.

I would never do online stuff only. The beauty of music is the effervescence of it… and you shouldn’t try to turn it into a stone. Recording can be really fun but I like that with live music, you do it once, you try your best, and it’s gone, you’re on to the next thing. I like performing … whether there’s audience or not.

WHAT?

Logistically I need a live audience, artistically do I need live audience for motivation? Not as much as you’d think.

I don’t buy that for a second.

Because performance is an important part of the this cycle of presentation, it is important. Could I motivate people to work really hard, learn stuff, and then just blast it into the ether at the end, and then move on? I don’t know.

That’s a different art form though, performing without audience.

Maybe. I love rehearsing, the rehearsal process is my favourite part. OK OK I’m being contrarian. The audience is great.

A lot of contemporary music appears to have been bitten by “I don’t care if you listen” bug.

You have to have someone listening, yes, OK, fine, agreed. For me what is important is this exchange, this communication of the idea. The intimacy of that.

So, between the artists? Not between the artists and the audience?

Between the artists and to the audience. To me the beauty is when the audience can see the honesty of the artists. When they can experience the honest communication of the idea. That’s what the art is. And that honesty can only exist if the artists are being honest with themselves about creating work that speaks to them.

Ah right, and not for the popularity, for the likes and so on. I see your point.

If people like it, great. But people liking it can’t be the point. And I think that is where these somewhat corporate art organizations get into trouble. They’re trying to get the people to like what they’re doing, and that leads to insincerity and detachment from the work they’re creating.

Okay but do you think that contemporary music ensembles, curators, composers should do a better job of “introducing” themselves to the audience.

Everybody could always do a better job of framing, curating, communicating – always, one hundred percent. And in contemporary music very much so because the music is on the surface harder to understand. Contemporary music is hard, but it’s primarily presented by the organizations with smaller budgets, and limited rehearsal time… it requires most rehearsal time of all classical music but gets the least amount of it. It benefits a lot from being programmed with other types of music, but is most often programmed with similar types of music. In reality it should be the most easily communicated because it is from now, from the world that we understand most intuitively. So why is it supposedly the hardest to understand? The composers are reacting to things that we experience most directly.

You’d probably agree with Brian Current who always says, contemporary music is our time captured in sound.

Absolutely, and that has been true of all music ever. Music being composed right now – we are in THE most stylistically varied period of music that has ever existed. If you’re saying you don’t like contemporary music, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There is so much going on.

Would you ever do introductory videos to various works and composers, like the Opera 5’s videos about operatic canon?

No… I’m not doing Kurtag puppets. I wanna play music. That is my method of being ambassador. My method is to think about the music deeply and perform it the best I can.

LOL what about performing in non-traditional settings?

The idea of doing classical music in a gym… I hate it. I know we’re supposed to be on the outreach bandwagon. The people who like doing outreach should do outreach. If there’s a reason I am performing in a gym that’s related to art, I’m there. But I don’t like feeling that I have to – I really bristle when I’m told to adapt. “Oh this is too severe, this is too contemporary” – I don’t care. Take it or leave it. I’m not making any money off it anyway. That’s the freedom of being “unsuccessful”. Right now, I have opportunities to do things that are really interesting, and I wouldn’t sell that. There’s always the opportunity to take a job and play what somebody else wants you to play. And I’m lucky that I’m in a position that I can make that choice. For as long as I can make that choice, I will probably continue to make it.

Classical music. Shall we keep the term? You could argue it’s outdated, or that scares people away..

Contemporary music envelopes a lot of things and there’s a wing of it that is closer to installation and the performance art than classical music. A lot of those people don’t identify as classical musicians. I’m on this other side, the affirmative side. I do identify as a classical musician. I want to play music in that lineage. That doesn’t feel limiting to me. I don’t mind doing improvised stuff, theatrical stuff, but I do really like this chamber music. To me, it doesn’t feel like a box that I’m put in.

I don’t like the argument that “music is a universal language” because it’s not. It speaks deeply to the people that it speaks deeply to and to other people it doesn’t. People should have expansive, curious perspective, but – listen, I don’t really like Mahler… pop music… I don’t play tennis. We have a really self-centered way of doing this, and a lot of people have hard time separating I don’t like this from This is bad. There’s plenty of things that I personally don’t connect to that are good, and that’s fine. But it’s difficult. You want to evangelize but you have to also be aware that not everybody would want to listen to Vivier.

Do we need to educate our ear for Vivier?

Yes.

So you’re not one of those people who say, just come in listen to any classical music and it’ll grab you. Speaking as a listener who doesn’t have a music degree, I know when I am taken by a piece immediately, and when I encounter a piece that requires some sort of work.

Some of it is performance, some of it is the piece. Sometimes even – I don’t know that people have to be educated-educated, but sometimes just listening to something two times really changes the way you hear something.

Ever thought of doing that?

I have. There is some interesting potential in doing something twice if there is a difference between those instances that is immediately perceived. To do the same piece back to back… maybe, conceptually, you could make the case for it, but realistically… no. I was once doing a concert in NYC with Alice and this guy was like Let’s do this sonata twice and in the middle I’ll talk about what you are going to do differently, and we were like… no. Just no. I did consider doing a fanfare piece at the beginning of a concert once and then again at the end, and the music in between would be connected in various ways to the musical material, but eventually abandoned the idea.

I like that you often program contemporary and classical pieces as if they are variations on one another, and in some sort of a dialogue across the centuries.

I love that shit.

And there’s no excessive reverence toward famous composers.

I’m very much The author is dead on the topic of classical canon. The only way to be truly reverent to those pieces is to be creative as honestly as I can. Dialogue between the artist and the composer is a good thing. That is reverence. Even while performing works by contemporary composers, little edits and interventions here and there don’t matter to them that much; what matters is the integrity of the idea. If you can get at that one way instead of another, it’s all the same. And some pieces are very long. For next season we’re toying with this idea of splitting a big piece over two programs. And what effect does that have.

Ever thought of messing with the audience, giving them things to do, seating them among the musicians, encouraging them to lie down or dance?

Yes. There’s a million cool things you could do. Giving them something to do is tricky. Some people don’t want to be part of the performance. It’s difficult and takes a lot of thinking. How do you get the audience to collaborate without breaking up the performance for instruction. The best thing to do is putting a plant in the audience. They first do it and then the actual audiences follows. That’s the control freak way to do it.

I had this idea once about an app that people download and the app tells them when to take part in the concert – it could record and play back, or you can choose which of the two tones on offer to press… that could be very cool.

UPCOMING: