Sustainable Futures Regional Meetings Reports

In the spring of 2023, the Cana­di­an New Music Net­work (CNMN) ini­ti­at­ed a series of region­al con­sul­ta­tions to find out what, how, and whether the cre­ative music and sound com­mu­ni­ty is think­ing about sus­tain­able futures for our prac­tice. These meet­ings (which con­tin­ued until the sum­mer of 2024) some­times includ­ed a pre­sen­ta­tion, but were large­ly focused on gath­er­ing the respons­es of both indi­vid­ual artists and rep­re­sen­ta­tives from pre­sent­ing and cul­tur­al organ­i­sa­tions. CNMN’s goal with these meet­ings was twofold: to estab­lish what would be most use­ful and suit­able in terms of its own sus­tain­able future, and to deter­mine what the com­mu­ni­ty might need in terms of resources that CNMN could pro­vide or help organize. 

The fol­low­ing are short nar­ra­tive reports of each meet­ing, with a very sum­ma­rized account of what par­tic­i­pants shared. For a sub­stan­tial dive into the con­tent, each sum­ma­ry is fol­lowed by light­ly edit­ed and anonymized tran­scrip­tions of par­tic­i­pant comments.

CNMN is very grate­ful for the sup­port of FACTOR in real­iz­ing the Sus­tain­able Futures Region­al Meet­ings Project.

St. John’s (NL) meeting

CNMN would like to thank Sound Sym­po­sium for its gen­er­ous hos­pi­tal­i­ty and for their help in mak­ing this con­ver­sa­tion possible.

This con­ver­sa­tion took place on July 17, 2024 at the First Light Event Space, in St. John’s, NL

CNMN acknowl­edges the finan­cial sup­port of FACTOR, the Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da and of Canada’s pri­vate radio broadcasters.

The dis­cus­sion fea­tured an intro­duc­tion and a con­clu­sion in the form of a short musi­cal activ­i­ty lead by Kathy Kennedy.

This dis­cus­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture and Ter­ri Hron, respec­tive­ly cur­rent and for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tors of the CNMN/RCNMN.

This con­ver­sa­tion was attend­ed by sev­er­al artists and musi­cians who par­tic­i­pat­ed in this edi­tion of Sound Sym­po­sium as well as mul­ti­ple local musi­cians and art work­ers. We thanked them for their gen­er­ous inputs.

In order to bet­ter expose the real­i­ties and dynam­ics at work in the field of cre­ative music and sound prac­tice, this report includes an exten­sive tran­scrip­tion of the dis­cus­sion that took place. Only min­i­mal edits were made in order to facil­i­tate the read­ing experience. 

Par­tic­i­pants are ini­tial­ly labelled alpha­bet­i­cal­ly, lat­er resumed to X for anonymi­ty. Apart from spe­cif­ic inter­ven­tions from the mod­er­a­tor and keynote speak­ers the con­tri­bu­tions of every oth­er par­tic­i­pant is anonymized.

Topics Covered in the Conversation

Artis­tic Prac­tices and the Cli­mate Crisis

• Artis­tic resilience: How cre­at­ing music helps artists cope with cli­mate anx­i­ety and oth­er crises
• Explo­ration of cli­mate-relat­ed themes in artis­tic prac­tices and sound art projects
• Ques­tion­ing the role of music in rais­ing aware­ness ver­sus find­ing solu­tions to eco­log­i­cal issues

Grass­roots vs. Insti­tu­tion­al Approaches

• Grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions often lead in sus­tain­able prac­tices despite lack­ing for­mal policies
• Larg­er insti­tu­tions focus on lan­guage and optics but may lack sub­stan­tive actions
• Fund­ing should pri­or­i­tize exist­ing sus­tain­able ini­tia­tives rather than impos­ing new systems

Per­son­al and Sys­temic Responsibility

• Bal­anc­ing indi­vid­ual actions (e.g., trav­el choic­es, con­sump­tion) with col­lec­tive sys­temic reforms
• Debate over whether sys­temic inequities or con­sumer behav­ior dri­ve cli­mate impact
• Calls for clar­i­ty on the roles of indi­vid­u­als ver­sus insti­tu­tions in address­ing cli­mate challenges

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty in Music and Arts

• Defin­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty as encom­pass­ing envi­ron­men­tal, eco­nom­ic, and social dimensions
• Eco­nom­ic pre­car­i­ty and its toll on sus­tain­ing cre­ative prac­tices long-term
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties to align sus­tain­abil­i­ty with decolo­nial and rela­tion­al artis­tic values

Fund­ing Mod­els and Capitalism

• Cri­tique of project-based fund­ing and its role in per­pet­u­at­ing unsus­tain­able artis­tic cycles
• Advo­ca­cy for uni­ver­sal basic income as a sys­temic solu­tion for sup­port­ing artists
• Chal­lenges of com­pet­ing for lim­it­ed resources, lead­ing to burnout and inequities

Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and Col­lab­o­ra­tive Practices

• Strength­en­ing con­nec­tions between music and oth­er dis­ci­plines like visu­al arts or theater
• Exam­ples of suc­cess­ful mod­els such as Sound Symposium’s inte­gra­tive and col­lab­o­ra­tive approach.
• Recon­nect­ing with his­tor­i­cal prac­tices of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary pro­gram­ming in the arts

Edu­ca­tion and Accessibility

• The impor­tance of men­tor­ship pro­grams to build resilience in younger generations.
• Expand­ing access to music edu­ca­tion beyond urban cen­ters and priv­i­leged spaces.
• Shar­ing knowl­edge through work­shops and com­mu­ni­ty-based projects to broad­en participation.

Pol­i­cy, Lan­guage, and Action

• Con­cern over per­for­ma­tive lan­guage in sus­tain­abil­i­ty poli­cies over­shad­ow­ing action.
• Impor­tance of trans­paren­cy in how funds and efforts are allo­cat­ed toward cli­mate-relat­ed goals.
• Recog­ni­tion that grass­roots prac­tices often achieve sus­tain­abil­i­ty with­out for­mal policies.

Post-Pan­dem­ic Perspectives

• COVID-19 as a peri­od of reflec­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion with alter­na­tive practices.
• Increased appetite for col­lab­o­ra­tion and sys­temic change across the arts sector.
• Post-pan­dem­ic chal­lenges of nav­i­gat­ing fund­ing and com­pe­ti­tion in a sat­u­rat­ed field.

Imag­in­ing a Bet­ter Future

• Encour­ag­ing artists to author new sys­tems and envi­sion alter­na­tives to the cur­rent frameworks.
• Artists as sto­ry­tellers: Inspir­ing action and imag­in­ing health­i­er futures through cre­ative work.
• The impor­tance of opti­mism and long-term think­ing in address­ing sys­temic issues.

CNMN’s Evolv­ing Mission

• Tran­si­tion­ing to the Cre­ative Music and Sound Net­work to reflect broad­er practices.
• Fos­ter­ing con­nec­tions between grass­roots ini­tia­tives and national/international networks.
• Expand­ing the man­date to pri­or­i­tize inclu­siv­i­ty, activism, and under­rep­re­sent­ed voices.

-Ter­ri Hron: Thank you all for being here. This is an ongo­ing stream of con­ver­sa­tions about what we as artists are doing, can do, or are con­cerned about in terms of the cli­mate cri­sis. In terms of CNMN, we had a whole series of these con­ver­sa­tions across the coun­try. We were just talk­ing as we were set­ting up that one of the sin­gu­lar things about the “Cana­di­an New Music Net­work”, soon to be the “Cre­ative Music and Sound Net­work”, is that we have this very large area that to rep­re­sent in terms of cre­ative cul­ture. That’s quite unusu­al glob­al­ly and that it makes it dif­fi­cult to come togeth­er around any kind of thing oth­er than that we all like mak­ing weird and wacky sounds. 

Our com­mu­ni­ty seems to be increas­ing­ly con­cerned and want­i­ng to be able to be active in cli­mate issues. And so, one of the things that the net­work has done his­tor­i­cal­ly is to have con­ver­sa­tions. Those con­ver­sa­tions series start­ed in 2016 with the rolling con­ver­sa­tions on diver­si­ty. And then, each year there was some kind of series of con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pened most­ly online, even before the online space that hap­pened for all of us dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Sub­se­quent­ly, that was part­ly because of the size of the coun­try and the fact that we can’t often get togeth­er like this. And in 2020/2021, we start­ed these con­ver­sa­tions on sus­tain­abil­i­ty. This is the eighth, or the sev­enth. And I’ve been to all of them. Most of them have had a very sim­ple for­mat, we have pro­vid­ed this list of ques­tions that you might have read in the invite or in the pro­gram, but most of the time we’ve just had a talk­ing cir­cle, but not all of them are very active. So we want­ed to share how these con­ver­sa­tions have been. I think that this is a real­ly good way to kind of share what and how we’ve been doing stuff as artists and as communities. 

I think that real­ly has shared how [par­tic­i­pants| are feel­ing around what they’re doing or what they’re anx­ious about, how they feel around these ques­tions of artis­tic prac­tice, music and sound prac­tice and the cli­mate emer­gency. And, the sec­ond con­ver­sa­tion was in Ottawa and there were a lot of peo­ple who are involved in orga­ni­za­tions. So that con­ver­sa­tion had a lot of peo­ple talk­ing about pol­i­cy, talk­ing about how orga­ni­za­tions are being asked now to be respon­si­ble, and the added weight of that. Then there was a con­ver­sa­tion that hap­pened in Bran­don with the par­tic­i­pants of the Eck­hardt-Gra­mat­té com­pe­ti­tion and their col­lab­o­ra­tive pianists. And so those were very young artists just start­ing out in their careers and their con­cerns were very dif­fer­ent. They did­n’t have any imme­di­ate projects or activ­i­ties around the cli­mate cri­sis, but their latent anx­i­ety around it and how they were going to be able to move through the world was much greater and that’s what they expressed. We have had two con­ver­sa­tions in Van­cou­ver, both of which were very dif­fer­ent. The first one had a lot of artists whose work is direct­ly relat­ed to cli­mate or the envi­ron­ment and they were describ­ing their projects. These were peo­ple whose work has cen­tered around these issues for many, many years. So they had, again, a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on this. And then the sec­ond meet­ing was in the con­text of a get-togeth­er of music pre­sen­ters and all they want­ed to talk about was can we still fly in this time of cli­mate crisis? 

I just give you some of these exam­ples of what the dif­fer­ent meet­ings have been about to give you an illus­tra­tion of how wide this top­ic is. It’s not like we’re going to sit here and talk about any one thing specif­i­cal­ly, but the Sound sym­po­sium is a real­ly incred­i­ble com­ing togeth­er of prac­ti­tion­ers from all over Cana­da. It’s real­ly spe­cial in that way. And many peo­ple have land-based and cli­mate-based projects hap­pen­ing. And so we’re very pleased to be able to have them. I did­n’t men­tion the meet­ing that hap­pened in Mon­tre­al. Just to give you a more com­plete pic­ture, there were a num­ber of fun­ders who were also at the meet­ing. And in Que­bec at the moment, the main fun­der has start­ed to imple­ment cli­mate pol­i­cy for the grant appli­ca­tions. So all orga­ni­za­tions have to have a sus­tain­abil­i­ty pol­i­cy. And so it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. That con­ver­sa­tion was a lot around who was going to do the labor to cre­ate those poli­cies. And what did that mean for extra work for small orga­ni­za­tions. So it’s a real­ly com­pli­cat­ed issue. You can read the report on that, which is essen­tial­ly a very short digest of what was talked about in each of these meet­ings, as well as a whole num­ber of anonymized quotes from peo­ple and what was said. So if you’re inter­est­ed in this top­ic, then there’s a resource for you to take a look at. 

I’d also like to men­tion that we’re record­ing this meet­ing, and I hope that that will be okay for all of you. Please let me know if any­body is against that. And like I said, if we do pub­lish any­thing, it is anonymized. So it’s not used in any oth­er way than main­ly for archival pur­pos­es. And in terms of CNMM, we’re also real­ly excit­ed, Raphaël and I, because we haven’t actu­al­ly been at a meet­ing togeth­er. And I start­ed this project because it was the last large project that I was respon­si­ble for at the net­work. And it’s an issue that has com­plete­ly con­sumed my life since then, as I’m sure for many of you. It’s a very huge thing in our world. And so I’m hap­py to have this oppor­tu­ni­ty to be here with Raphael and to do this kind of  joint thing. And we have quite a lot of time today, which these meet­ings have been dif­fer­ent in terms of time. Some of them are very short. this one is fair­ly long. So per­haps we could start by briefly intro­duc­ing our­selves and doing a round of the table. And per­haps just men­tion one thing that is of con­cern to you or that you’re think­ing about in terms of your artis­tic prac­tice and the cli­mate emergency. 

I’ll start. So I’m Ter­ry Hron. I’m a cul­tur­al work­er and cre­ative per­son. And I do some writ­ing, some per­form­ing, and some art mak­ing as well as try­ing to do some com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing. And for me, this last peri­od start­ed with a lot of these con­ver­sa­tions. I want­ed to see whether the com­mu­ni­ty could be mobi­lized. And that made me start to read more and more around cli­mate and gen­er­al plan­e­tary real­i­ties. And I find it, there are days that I find it very dif­fi­cult to see a pos­i­tive way for­ward. But those are the days in which my artis­tic prac­tice has been able to do that. But those are the days in which my artis­tic prac­tice has been able to do that. Play­ing my instru­ments and feel­ing the vibra­tions, as Kathy was say­ing, feels like a real gift that I can turn to because I feel like dark times are com­ing. And I don’t like to be a par­ty-poop­er, but I’m very grate­ful for my artis­tic prac­tice in those moments. So that’s what I’m going to say… So I’ll pass it to you. 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I am Raphael Foisy. I’m an impro­vis­er and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er. Most of my work is based on grass­roots prac­tice. I’ve been orga­niz­ing dif­fer­ent music series, ran DIY venues, and most­ly work out­side of the insti­tu­tion­al frame­work for music. So my posi­tion as a direc­tor of a music orga­ni­za­tion is an inter­est­ing posi­tion for me. This is my sec­ond meet­ing that I’m hav­ing with CNMN about this sub­ject. The last one was in Yel­lowknife, which was also very interesting. 

I just want to raise that also the idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty is also touch­ing the pre­car­i­ty of the field right now and the dif­fi­cul­ty of how we are able to make music [or not], espe­cial­ly the ten­sion between the old ways of work­ing that were more insti­tu­tion­al­ized, and the fact that my gen­er­a­tion and younger peo­ple have to kind of go through a lot of grief toward the sys­tems that were in place before, and how we can keep mak­ing music and how we can keep orga­niz­ing and how we can get togeth­er as a com­mu­ni­ty to be able to still do the work. So with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly being direct­ly linked to sus­tain­abil­i­ty in terms of an envi­ron­ment lev­el, I also think about the struc­ture that it rep­re­sents and how we can do that. So I just want­ed to say that. Because I think it’s impor­tant also if you have any oth­er things that you want to share about your prac­tice or sus­tain­abil­i­ty that you think is linked to the state of the field right now. It’s impor­tant to have a place to voice these things with­out them being direct­ly linked to the eco­log­i­cal or the envi­ron­ment. Because I think the envi­ron­ment obvi­ous­ly being a holis­tic phe­nom­e­non in which we are involved, it’s impor­tant to name the dif­fer­ent chal­lenges that we’re going through as well. So thank you so much for being here. 

- A: Thank you for orga­niz­ing. I’ve had a land-based prac­tice, most­ly out­door inter­dis­ci­pli­nary. Late­ly, I’ve gone through the dark times also. And I’ve sort of rede­fined how I think a lit­tle bit about our roles as artists. And Sound Sym­po­sium for me is like a total­ly renew­ing time. Because it always reminds me that artists are change mak­ers. And we’re prac­tic­ing dif­fer­ent ways of ques­tion­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, even just through sound and vibra­tion that are I think super impor­tant and nec­es­sary. Espe­cial­ly if we’re going to dis­rupt some of the pat­terns that have been going on that are lead­ing us not in a good direc­tion. So I’m very appre­cia­tive to hear all the sound that every­body’s been mak­ing and look for­ward to the rest. Because I think that’s an impor­tant way for­ward also. 

- B: I’m here at the sym­po­sium on a tech­ni­cal lev­el this time. Although I’ve been here in the past per­form­ing mod­u­lar ana­log elec­tron­ics. But my main work or prac­tice is pro­duc­ing and record­ing music. And so all those things I’ve described use elec­tric­i­ty. And so one thing I’ve been think­ing about is how I do it when it comes to the envi­ron­ment. You have to look at your indi­vid­ual self and then the com­mu­ni­ty around you. And then it sort of expands from there. And I appre­ci­ate this orga­ni­za­tion because it’s sort of the larg­er expan­sion of that. But think­ing about how I per­son­al­ly can kind of make a change, it’s tricky. Do I get a whole bunch of solar pan­els? Is that a sus­tain­able thing to charge bat­ter­ies to run all my gear? I don’t know. These are big ques­tions that I’m uncer­tain about. So I’m always kind of look­ing and seek­ing infor­ma­tion on that. 

- C: Thank you. I’m a peer sup­port­er and I’m trained in restora­tive jus­tice. But I’m also a local super­vi­sor. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty of cli­mate change, think­ing about land and nature are things that should be more impor­tant to us, and a part of decolo­nial prac­tices. I often think about rela­tion­ships, com­mu­ni­ty, rela­tion­al­i­ty, or lan­guage and arts, and [the] decolo­nial prac­tice around that. But I think like when it comes to the envi­ron­ment, I think we’re all kind of com­plic­it in some ways. I trav­el a lot because my musi­cal part­ners live in oth­er parts of the world. And some­times I think about how the deci­sions that we make on a day to day can influ­ence our car­bon imprint. How sus­tain­able are some of the things that I do to con­nect with peo­ple and make music. I think being mind­ful about bring­ing aware­ness to it is impor­tant. When we bring aware­ness to those things is when we start to make changes. 

- Kathy Kennedy: Kathy Kennedy. Singer, music advi­sor and com­mu­ni­ty artist. Pri­mar­i­ly been mak­ing large scale pieces out­doors. There’s a book com­ing out called Singing Off the Grid ear­ly next year. I’m kind of just here to lis­ten to you all. 

- D: I’m work­ing now with elec­tron­ic music, but I have a back­ground in sculp­ture and poet­ry. I’m read­ing lots and work­ing on lots of instru­ment mak­ing. The his­to­ry of instru­ment mak­ing with­out [its] mean­ing in nature. Basi­cal­ly the instru­ment was some­thing that some­body owned. Hunt­ing [activ­i­ties and the resul­tant] bones and the skins they’re using. They were all repur­posed for instru­ment mak­ing. Ver­sus now, the mass pro­duc­tion of instru­ment mak­ing. And many peo­ple who play the instru­ment don’t think about their instru­ments and the mate­r­i­al they’re using. So how [can we] repur­pose mate­ri­als and make instru­ments that are not mass pro­duced. So I make my own instruments.

- E: I man­age high per­for­mance com­put­ing sys­tems. Those are sig­nif­i­cant fac­tors in high use of elec­tric­i­ty. From the stand­point of per­son­al engage­ment, I have a long stand­ing desire or belief that the way things change in the world is by chang­ing your­self. And so con­sum­ing less, dri­ving less, etc. Recy­cling. All those things that we all know about but don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do. [With] respect to prac­tice: Reuse and Repur­pos­ing things. Cre­at­ing instru­ments out of old chil­dren’s toys etc. There’s so many dif­fer­ent ways to avoid throw­ing things away and still be able to make art. 

- F: I’m a song­writer and com­pos­er. I’m a start­ing music teacher too. And I’m kind of here to listen.

- G: I guess I’m just most­ly con­cerned about future job oppor­tu­ni­ties, like hav­ing a career, espe­cial­ly with the cli­mate crisis. 

- H: I’m a bass, gui­tar, and har­mon­i­ca com­pos­er and sax­o­phon­ist. And sort at the very ear­ly stages of my career and already with a lot of trav­el­ing. I’ve been think­ing about what it’s going to be like? Am I going to be tak­ing air­planes this much? I’m look­ing to deal with that guilt, and learn about new ways for­ward where they don’t want to take the air­plane so much. That’s just one aspect of how I’ve been think­ing about cli­mate in terms of my practice. 

- I: There’s some­thing that real­ly inter­ests me about this big com­po­si­tion. It’s the con­flict between indi­vid­ual action and gov­ern­men­tal action. Because it’s very easy as an indi­vid­ual to say the gov­ern­ment needs to change. And noth­ing’s going to hap­pen if I don’t change. It’s also very easy for the gov­ern­ment to say noth­ing’s going to hap­pen unless every sin­gle per­son changes. And it’s the inter­nal strug­gle through the ill­ness. I think it’s a very impor­tant time. It’s some­thing I haven’t heard a lot, but it’s a big strug­gle that I have. So we need to help the bal­ance of those. But I think it’s an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion to be had in this sort of space. I’m inter­est­ed and excit­ed to learn. 

- J: I’m a wide range visu­al artist. I’m also inter­est­ed in the role of the indi­vid­ual with­in larg­er sys­tems. That’s one thing I’m inter­est­ed in. 

- K: I’m a com­pos­er and also a founder of an online learn­ing resource focused on learn­ing. I’m also inter­est­ed in music tech­nol­o­gy. So, I’m very inter­est­ed in this because I’m rel­a­tive­ly new to music tech­nol­o­gy. It has a lot of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties, espe­cial­ly for artists who don’t have that back­ground in clas­si­cal music. So, I’m very much inter­est­ed in how can I fill this gap. And what you’re doing is just very short videos, which are very easy and acces­si­ble as an ani­ma­tion. How can I help that and pro­vide it to artists who are inter­est­ed to have their feet in the music tech­nol­o­gy? To try it and see if this is some­thing that they’re inter­est­ed in get­ting into. 

- L: I’m a per­cus­sion­ist. And I would not say that I’m a com­pos­er even though I recent­ly per­formed a piece I wrote. I am inter­est­ed in cli­mate change and the envi­ron­ment. Also, I am from [a large city] and I just moved here. And I have the feel­ing that I know the dif­fer­ences between a big city and here. I just love it here and being in con­nec­tion with nature. I think that is very pow­er­ful and keeps me ground­ed. It brings me sta­bil­i­ty. It encour­ages me to go and try things, new things. And enjoy­ing being here. Since the first time I came here and to the Sound Sym­po­sium, I was relieved because all the time I’ve been in clas­si­cal music teach­ing. It’s like a belief… And to know what is hap­pen­ing and meet­ing peo­ple. Thank you for being here and sharing.

- M: Hel­lo every­body. I’m hap­py to be here and meet­ing you guys. And actu­al­ly, I’ve been a mem­ber of CNMN for many years, but vir­tu­al­ly, I’m hap­py meet­ing you guys. I’m actu­al­ly a musi­cian. I’m pre­sent­ing very spe­cif­ic music. My peo­ple are actu­al­ly a native group of 60 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in West Asia or the Mid­dle East. And I’m try­ing to decol­o­nize our music. And I play many instru­ments. I’m try­ing to present the tra­di­tion­al music, the vocal music from the ancient singers. For­tu­nate­ly, I played with the Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra this year. And yeah, it’s impor­tant because I need to men­tion. And I’m going to sus­tain­abil­i­ty and how we should be sus­tain­able. I think we should start from our­selves. All artists know this sit­u­a­tion. We need to focus on our­selves. Okay, how can we be sus­tain­able? And if you look at this table, how did a lot of the peo­ple [arrive here] by planes. This is our state. And anoth­er thing, why are we using cars? Because we don’t have great pub­lic trans­porta­tion. If you go to the Unit­ed States, you will see that. If you go to the UK or Europe, you can go every­where with trains and bus­es. But unfor­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have any way. We should just take a plane. If I’m com­ing from Ontario. It’s a long way. And a few times, actu­al­ly, the flights can­cel. And that’s why I’m here. I’m hap­py to be here and I’m learn­ing from oth­er peo­ple. Thank you so much. 

- N: I have a his­to­ry with the Sound Sym­po­sium. And I real­ly appre­ci­ate its abil­i­ty to inte­grate dif­fer­ent forms of art, visu­al, dance, the­ater, music, sound, envi­ron­ment, etc. With regard to the elec­tric­i­ty con­ver­sa­tion ques­tion, I think it’s very com­plex because use of bat­ter­ies is also tox­ic. We’ve all spo­ken about being con­scious of the use of ener­gy. […] We are work­ing togeth­er to try and envi­sion some alter­na­tives. And on that same lev­el, I see the con­nec­tion between all of the dif­fer­ent arts prac­tices rep­re­sent­ed here in the room com­ing togeth­er. And there were times in music his­to­ry when dif­fer­ent kinds of music were anti­thet­ic toward one anoth­er. So if we bring that col­le­gial­i­ty to a broad­er scale, coop­er­ate rather than com­pete, maybe that’s a way of not wast­ing our own ener­gy. Thank you. 

- O: My pro­nouns are they, them. I’m by pro­fes­sion a music tech­nol­o­gist, but here as a com­pos­er. I’m gen­er­al­ly con­cerned about a lot of things that have been echoed here. And is there such a thing as sus­tain­able music tech­nol­o­gy? Liv­ing in a large city, I’m very lucky that I can trav­el quite a lot by pub­lic tran­sit for gigs. But com­ing to New­found­land, these ques­tions of fly­ing. And also with­in my own prac­tice, I work a lot with field record­ings. I work a lot with video. Kind of this ques­tion as a col­o­niz­er, is this just a con­tin­u­a­tion of col­o­niza­tion prac­tices? Or can this be decol­o­nized in a way? Or am I just using tech­nol­o­gy to find new and excit­ing fron­tiers for colonization? 

- P: I’m from New-Brunswick. I’m an Aca­di­an fran­coph­o­ne from there, [vis­it­ing from] Québec. My prac­tice is usu­al­ly drum kit and elec­tron­ics. I work a lot with dance as well. But every sin­gle project that I do usu­al­ly involves tech­nol­o­gy at a great degree. So I’m always con­cerned with that. But I don’t have a solu­tion for that because I’ve been psy­ched over the last like five years as the tech­nol­o­gy has become more inter­est­ing and I’m able to process more things quick­er and every­thing. My con­cep­tion has just gone real­ly high. Archiv­ing projects has been quite nuts as well. Like 4K footage of a live con­cert, sev­en cam­eras, etc. So I’ve just been con­sum­ing so much and I just don’t know any solu­tion to that. But I find it’s nice to come here and see how peo­ple are doing art in dif­fer­ent ways. And I think that can also change my reflex when approach­ing a project. And maybe I don’t have to do every­thing in 4K or maybe I don’t have to con­sume that much for that par­tic­u­lar project. I can prob­a­bly or maybe find a way that is more organ­ic that might con­sume less. But just hav­ing that thought. And hav­ing seen some artists do it in that cer­tain way. I think that’s def­i­nite­ly part of what I find moti­vat­ing about being here and learn­ing about this. 

- Q: My pro­nouns are they, them. I’m a drum­mer and per­cus­sion­ist, com­pos­er and impro­vis­er, an edu­ca­tor, a schol­ar, a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er. And I’m a musi­cian. I’ve been liv­ing and mak­ing music in big cities since the late 90s. And I’ve just moved home with my fam­i­ly to a small­er town. This all res­onates with me thor­ough­ly. I’ve spent time think­ing about all of these ques­tions. I think it’s all a big some­what neb­u­lous ball of wor­ry for me. And con­cern. And actu­al­ly most­ly frus­tra­tion and anger. And I’m con­cerned for us all. I have teenagers at home. And I’m real­ly con­cerned about what their lives look like going for­ward. And the anger is, I think we all have our parts to play as indi­vid­u­als, of course. But these are tiny deci­sions. And there are few peo­ple in this world who could make rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple deci­sions. And solve this prob­lem. And it’s real­ly frus­trat­ing to me to hear peo­ple say “if I plug a thing in and press a but­ton to make it go boop. I’m a part of the prob­lem.” When, you know, there are bil­lion­aires who could just say, “Let’s do this. I’ll pay for it.” And all of these ques­tions are gone. And they’re not going to make those deci­sions. So this is where I’m at. It’s very vis­cer­al for me. And I don’t have a lot of words. Thanks every­body for sharing. 

- R: I def­i­nite­ly feel the frus­tra­tion for sure. I’m an artist, cre­ator, and men­tor. I am based in Ontario. I’m just try­ing to find ways to be a loud­er voice for nature. That’s the way I kind of think of it. It’s a jour­ney that I want to con­tin­ue to be on for a long time. So I’m just try­ing to align myself with like-mind­ed folks. I say just a voice because there’s so much. It’s such a com­plex sit­u­a­tion. In my mind, there’s no one way. But the way is just to do some­thing. Because it could inspire some­body else. Even if it might seem small and insignif­i­cant. For exam­ple, I did a show recent­ly talk­ing about trees. It might seem like a small thing. But that could open up a gate­way for some­one younger or just any­one to start think­ing in a cer­tain direc­tion. So that’s kind of the jour­ney that I’m on. Thank you. 

- Ter­ri Hron: Thanks, every­one, for the intro­duc­tions and for shar­ing those expe­ri­ences. I just want­ed to men­tion one more thing. As a result of some of these con­ver­sa­tions and div­ing into these issues, I felt in my life I was tak­ing a lot of planes. And I was think­ing, is this life as a musi­cian? And I real­ized that that was also how I was mea­sur­ing how good a musi­cian I was at so many oppor­tu­ni­ties. “Oh, I’m get­ting to trav­el a lot.” And this sort of slow real­iza­tion. So I decid­ed for a year, I was­n’t going to take any planes. I’m going to trav­el a lot by car / train etc., not because it’s some kind of big res­o­lu­tion or I’m mak­ing some big state­ment, just to see how it felt in my body. And so I drove from Mon­tre­al to St. John’s. It’s tak­en me quite a long time to get here. But it’s also made me real­ly aware of exact­ly how many times I’ve gassed up the car and the fer­ry over, and the time that it takes. And it’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship to the space between these two places. And also the fact that there is no sep­a­ra­tion between myself and nature. It’s not us and nature. We are nature. We’re all part of it. Elec­tric­i­ty is nature. Also the, the, the ter­ri­ble syn­thet­ic plas­tic things that we make are nature. So I real­ly love nature. And I real­ly relate and res­onate with every­thing that you’re say­ing also about per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. But, you know, if the bil­lion­aires in the world just gave half of their mon­ey to us, glob­al pover­ty could be solved. These are real­i­ties too. So we can only do so much as indi­vid­u­als. We have pre­pared some great ques­tions. And maybe we can use those as start­ing points for a more pop­corn style conversation. 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I can read the first one. We have this list that we’ve used. And I’m just going to be very hon­est. Usu­al­ly we ask one or two and the con­ver­sa­tion just kind of fol­lows and peo­ple are hap­py to touch on dif­fer­ent sub­jects or engage in where the con­ver­sa­tion is going. So I’ll just read one. We don’t have to go through the list. It’s not the goal. It’s just a way to start. And if there’s a sub­ject or any­thing that any­body wants to raise dur­ing their time or the ques­tions, feel free to also bring it up because that’s why we are here, to talk about what­ev­er every­body here feels pertinent. 

“How can orga­ni­za­tions sup­port artis­tic works and ini­tia­tives that both pro­mote greater aware­ness of cli­mate issues and engage in the author­ing of a health­i­er world?”. So if any­body wants to start answer­ing this, that’s fine. 

- X: First with research. First start to sup­port the research inside insti­tu­tions. So what ele­ments need to be worked on. What can we change? What can’t we change? What can we con­trol? What we can’t con­trol? And from there mov­ing for­ward with mak­ing change. Also sound, I think it has a vibra­tion because our audi­to­ry sys­tem is very lim­it­ed. So we can’t con­trol how we describe sound at all. There are lots of pol­lu­tion com­ing from some­thing that we can­not hear. So there are lots of things that we can just do research and then start from there. Insti­tu­tion or anything. 

- X: I think just open­ness, espe­cial­ly about what they’re doing so peo­ple can know what to sup­port. There are fes­ti­vals that hap­pen and it’ll involve home­less encamp­ments being moved, or fund­ing cer­tain things that could not be very good. Open­ness, peo­ple can decide what they want to sup­port and what they don’t want to. And also action as well. Being active in sup­port­ing cer­tain good things. 

- X: Just to be sure, you mean like open­ness as in also transparency? 

- X: Yeah, trans­paren­cy. That’s the word I was look­ing for. Thank you. 

- X: That’s a big ques­tion. I think a lot about what Ter­ry men­tioned, this idea that we are nature. That we’re not sep­a­rate from nature. And that con­nec­tion, I think we have a lot we can con­tribute to help­ing peo­ple make that con­nec­tion. That’s some­thing I’ve found espe­cial­ly doing out­door things. If we’re real­ly lis­ten­ing and aware of all the things that are hap­pen­ing around us, it’s a reminder to every­body that we are a part of that. And the more you feel like you’re part of it, the more you’re going to care about that. 

- X: I’d like to echo the pre­vi­ous state­ment. And I was think­ing about home. I love to make sounds out­doors. Large­ly because when we live in the city, we nev­er get a broad hori­zon of sound. And real­ly as humans, I feel we need that. But I also think that tak­ing music out­side of the con­cert hall is real­ly impor­tant to get to the pop­u­la­tion at large. Because we are effec­tive­ly preach­ing to the choir. And we need to get these con­cerns out­side our own milieu.

- X: What we do, what those of us who are here do is a part of envi­sion­ing that world that you’re talk­ing about. I think adven­tur­ous music, I think music is always about lis­ten­ing first. I think that the work that cap­i­tal­ism has done is that we’ve been forced to take our music from a prac­tice of lis­ten­ing to one anoth­er and we’ve had to make it into a prod­uct to sell to one anoth­er. And so I believe that we have the respon­si­bil­i­ty as indi­vid­ual artists and as com­mu­ni­ties of artists to push the lis­ten­ing for­ward and to try and side­step the prod­uct aspect of it, even though that’s unescapable right now. I think that orga­ni­za­tions can pri­or­i­tize the lis­ten­ing part. Because I think it’s in the lis­ten­ing part that we start to imag­ine some­thing else. 

- X: To fol­low up on what you said, I’d say adven­tur­ous music helps us to chal­lenge our habits of per­cep­tion. And that would affect all of us, all of our dif­fer­ent areas of life. So that we aren’t quite as used to stick­ing to the old habits if we allow our­selves to expe­ri­ence the new. That’s just a foot­note to what you said.

- X: Yeah. But not the same old new thing. It’s the same old new that’s been new since 1940. 

- X: But There’s also new old things. (Everybody’s laugh­ing)

- X: Absolute­ly

- X:  I think that right now for me as some­body who’s obvi­ous­ly … I don’t even know how to describe it. Under­ground cul­ture, alter­na­tive cul­ture, grass­roots cul­ture, I think that’s the thing. As an orga­niz­er who’s real­ly been work­ing, usu­al­ly with zero bud­get, for all of their projects. But still facil­i­tat­ing tour­ings for artists from all around the world. Hav­ing peo­ple sleep in my house almost week­ly, shar­ing my back­line and shar­ing my musi­cal instru­ments. Shar­ing knowl­edge. I think that some­times, there’s a thing that I’m expe­ri­enc­ing a lot with the fun­ders is the dis­con­nec­tion. I feel like we’re talk­ing about trav­el­ing too. Since I got this job, I’ve trav­eled more than the last 10 years. I’ve trav­eled more than I’ve had most of my life. Most of my music has been very anchored into my town, my com­mu­ni­ty, cre­at­ing a cer­tain cir­cuit of prac­tice and reg­u­lar­i­ty, and that has­n’t been val­ued by fun­ders at all. And it’s also fun­ny because I feel like, espe­cial­ly with Arts Coun­cils, they’re expect­ing big music orga­ni­za­tions to become small non-prof­it grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions. And it’s the same thing with indige­nous resur­gence and all these things. When these things have been hap­pen­ing for so long, there’s a cul­ture, a way of doing things. They’ve been strong, they’ve been in the com­mu­ni­ties, and now you’re valu­ing them out of nowhere when you’ve been mak­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly a very strong effort of invis­i­bi­liz­ing these efforts and prac­tices, and not rec­og­niz­ing them.

I think it’s also hard to hear some­times these per­cep­tions of fun­ders com­ing and being like, “now you need to do things like that”. And well, a lot of peo­ple have been doing all these things for a very long time. You haven’t val­ued them. You haven’t even giv­en the cour­tesy to call them pro­fes­sion­al prac­tice. Let’s remind our­selves that most of indige­nous arts were not qual­i­fied as art until very recent­ly, and we can talk about oth­er frames of social prac­tice. So I think it’s also very chal­leng­ing to some­times recom­pose all these things and have them come togeth­er and be sus­tain­able. We’ve been exist­ing for­ev­er and so many ways of oper­at­ing, and impro­vis­ing music or exper­i­men­tal music has this his­to­ry of work­ing out­side of that frame. And now sud­den­ly it’s pho­ny because what I see is expect­ing a mul­ti-mil­lion fes­ti­val to become a small mom-and-pops orga­ni­za­tion that is going to recy­cle or some­thing. (Peo­ple laugh­ing) So it’s inter­est­ing. For me, that’s one of the things that I’m feel­ing a lot in the last few years, that shift where I’m feel­ing like there’s peo­ple already doing the work. Could we just go to them? And empow­er their work and their voice as opposed to expect­ing a lot of peo­ple to sud­den­ly become con­cerned about these issues? 

- X: That’s a sys­tem change thing too, because I feel like I’m try­ing to get away from those grant­i­ng orga­ni­za­tions where a lot of the val­ues, they’re not reflect­ing the kind of work I want to do or the peo­ple that I want to work with. Where else can we find the resources to do the things that we want to do rather than try­ing to wait for these old­er sys­tems to kind of change? There’s pos­i­tive change hap­pen­ing, but like you said, there’s already peo­ple doing all these inter­est­ing things. I think there’s some­thing in there, too, about rur­al and urban areas. I was an urban artist and now I’m a rur­al artist, but it’s like liv­ing peo­ple in my com­mu­ni­ty, which is real­ly small. There’s a lot of inter­est­ing artists that are liv­ing very sus­tain­ably and have very inter­est­ing art prac­tices that aren’t part of the grant world. Indige­nous artists and things like that too. For a while, I was help­ing peo­ple write grants and then I felt like so many things went wrong with doing that, like bring­ing peo­ple into this sys­tem that does­n’t real­ly always work as it should. They’re already doing some­thing great, you know: like hav­ing to sup­port peo­ple who are already doing these great things with­out try­ing to fit them into this box?

- X: And yet the box is get­ting big­ger and big­ger. My expe­ri­ence of late is that some­how mak­ing sound is not enough. It has to be inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and I also have to direct­ly address cli­mate con­cerns in a very spe­cif­ic way. It just keeps get­ting piled on. And that’s the oppo­site of the diver­si­ty of prac­tice that we need to fig­ure this out. You know, I can’t be all of the diver­si­ty in myself. That’s not the way diver­si­ty works, right? It’s a very strange thing to wit­ness. As much as we do need to take indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­i­ty, again, all of these things can’t be on each indi­vid­ual to solve. So, it’s a very strange kind of pres­sure. And I think it dis­tracts us from the fact that there are very pow­er­ful peo­ple who can make some very sim­ple deci­sions and change what this ques­tion is. And I’m sure the ques­tions would still exist, but we would at least be able to ask the next set of questions.

- X: I dis­agree that the pres­sure should­n’t be on indi­vid­u­als. It should be on all of us to change the way in which we engage the world. We have to stop buy­ing SUVs, we have to stop fly­ing, but so much is down to bad con­sumer behav­iour. Look at the growth of the use of SUVs. It’s absolute­ly dis­gust­ing. And it’s all in the past 15 years and because of our behav­iour. So it is impor­tant that we take on the respon­si­bil­i­ty of our­selves to do this. 

- X: Yeah, I’m not say­ing not to. I’m just say­ing the idea that it’s entire­ly there feels like a dis­trac­tion from some­thing big­ger and more sys­temic that we also need to be aware of. 

- X: Absolute­ly. Of course there are larg­er sys­temic needs to be involved, but you can’t then take the pres­sure off. And say, let’s ask these wealthy indi­vid­u­als to save us, because that’s not right. 

- X: Well, I’m not sug­gest­ing we ask them. (Peo­ple laugh­ing) And you know, to be fair, it’s the deci­sions of those peo­ple who are caus­ing us to want the SUVs. I don’t want an SUV. It’s maybe more com­plex than con­sumer habits. I go to the gro­cery store, for exam­ple. I don’t have a choice to buy an apple that’s not wrapped in plas­tic. I don’t have a choice. Right? In the mid­dle of the win­ter. Obvi­ous­ly, I can shop for local farm­ers. Not every­body is priv­i­leged enough to be able to do that. But yeah, there are big­ger deci­sions that are being made that are con­trol­ling their habits and lock­ing our habits into the envi­ron­ment and into these unsus­tain­able things. So I’m not sug­gest­ing we ask. 

- X: I think that both indi­vid­ual changes and sys­temic changes are impor­tant and nec­es­sary. Artists are sto­ry­tellers who take what they see of the world around them and present it in their art. They change the minds of peo­ple watch­ing. That influ­ence is what we as artists can har­ness to cre­ate change. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the most pow­er­ful tool we have.

As a Gen Z per­son, cli­mate change is at the fore­front of my life. If artists are bold enough to make inten­tion­al, delib­er­ate art about it, they can make peo­ple stop, think, and spread aware­ness. An artist work­ing with a sup­port­ive orga­ni­za­tion can cre­ate art that changes peo­ple’s per­spec­tives and sparks con­ver­sa­tion. It’s like an infec­tion spread­ing from one per­son to the universe.

For orga­ni­za­tions, the most pow­er­ful action is putting mon­ey, fund­ing, and cre­at­ing pro­gram­ming with projects that inspire oth­ers to make change. As artists, we can moti­vate and inspire oth­ers to join us in cre­at­ing mean­ing­ful transformation.

- X: Main­tain­ing a prac­tice nowa­days is also a very chal­leng­ing thing to do, with eco­nom­ic stress, dif­fi­cul­ties of mak­ing every­thing work. I think putting all the [envi­ron­men­tal] work in the art world is a very chal­leng­ing thing to do. I think putting all the respon­si­bil­i­ty on you or on the art in gen­er­al is also too much. If you’re a musi­cian or an artist, and you are able to sus­tain some kind of reg­u­lar prac­tice nowa­days, what­ev­er the scale. You’re kind of suc­ceed­ing in a very strong way, because there’s so many musi­cians and peo­ple around me that have kind of quit or [are] dis­en­gaged because it’s get­ting to be so com­pli­cat­ed to have two/three day jobs, mak­ing music, try­ing to make ends meet and every­thing. There’s also some things to be said about the stress of fos­ter­ing and main­tain­ing just like a reg­u­lar­i­ty of cre­ative ener­gy in your life. And I think this is some­thing that isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly addressed either. Which is a real challenge. 

- X: But through­out his­to­ry, all these artists had a patron to sup­port them and that [art] was their job. And it’s inter­est­ing, tech­nol­o­gy also helps to know where to lim­it your­self, when to stop. Because in tech­nol­o­gy there’s always some­thing new. And peo­ple just hav­ing these things, it’s too much infor­ma­tion. Every­thing is too much. How can you know your lim­i­ta­tions, know your­self, what your strengths are, what… and we can say “I stop here”. Because I’m a musi­cian. Because you can cre­ate so much stuff with lim­it­ed things. And you don’t need to always have more and more; to cre­ate more stuff. And also with cre­at­ing art, it’s not just one cli­mate issue. It’s just like, part of it is aware­ness and part of it is solu­tion. Like mak­ing a body of work is just kind of like rais­ing aware­ness. But what’s the solu­tion? It’s just learn­ing. Lim­i­ta­tion is a strength. It’s not a weakness.

- X: Pick­ing up on what you were say­ing about the ques­tion of what arts, music and sound orga­ni­za­tions can do, I’d like to see them work togeth­er in the fund­ing mod­els that we have. To move away from this piece­meal, project-based, essen­tial­ly a cap­i­tal­ist prod­uct-based mod­el where we’re paid for the projects that we do. It forces us as artists to con­stant­ly be mak­ing more work. We only get paid when we make a project. What about bring­ing that project out into the world and play­ing it more times? We can’t afford to do that in this cur­rent sys­tem because the only thing we get paid for is a new project. And there’s too many projects out there. We all know this. We all know this because we’re all being forced to con­stant­ly invest our time into these grant appli­ca­tions. What if we just all stopped with those grant appli­ca­tions? And all of that time was lib­er­at­ed. I’m just pie in the sky right now. (Ever­body is laugh­ing) And what if we just pushed towards uni­ver­sal basic income or some kind of a sys­tem where we don’t have to be mak­ing products?

We don’t have to be mak­ing more projects. But we can be artists. And we’re talk­ing about patron­age. That’s what patron­age was about. It was­n’t about “you have to make me 25 sym­phonies this year”. No. You’re the Meis­ter… We’ve been cor­nered into this cap­i­tal­ist way of think­ing about art mak­ing. And we’ve been indi­vid­u­al­ized in that by being forced to com­pete with each oth­er, not only as indi­vid­u­als, but also as orga­ni­za­tions. And I think it’s tox­ic. It’s real­ly made it very hard to feel a lot of sense of com­mu­ni­ty, and also to just make it for more than five, ten years as an artist. So I think that the orga­ni­za­tions should push for that. And I know that there’s talk of it. But it’s just like every­body’s scared to stop doing what they’re doing. Stop being in the ham­ster wheel that we are in now. Because what if I stop? Then I won’t have a liveli­hood. That’s where we’re at.

- X: But we did stop in the pan­dem­ic. And it was like hav­ing uni­ver­sal basic income. And a lot of artists that I know, that was the best year of their lives finan­cial­ly (Peo­ple agree­ing loud­ly). And I think there was a lot of real­ly great cre­ative work… To a cer­tain extent… I don’t know every­body’s back­ground in this room. It seems like artists that are able to be sus­tain­able, they have some­thing else going on. Like you have a part­ner that has a reg­u­lar job. Or you come from a cer­tain lev­el of [wealth]. Like, not all the time, but there are a lot of artists that I’m very con­cerned about. That we’re not going to hear much more from them. Because, they’re going to slip away and get into oth­er things, so they can sus­tain their lives.

- X: One of the prob­lems is like you were say­ing that there’s too much pres­sure. You have to, you know, always [pro­duce]. And basi­cal­ly acad­e­mia, they’re pro­duc­ing artists. But it’s not the way that art works. It’s just like if artists should be: some­body who goes to school to be able to cre­ate. And you think “if I go to school, I will become an artist”. It’s not the [right] way to think. So there’s just all these peo­ple who come out of the pro­duc­tion from acad­e­mia. And acad­e­mia trains you in a very sys­tem­at­ic way; not based on cre­ative thought. But based on how we want to pro­duce things and gain prof­it out of the mate­r­i­al that we present. So com­ing out, many of the stu­dents become engi­neers. And they’re just going from that under­stand­ing: “why do you not put this in the world of art?”. So, it’s just that the mind they cre­ate in acad­e­mia is very much against sus­tain­abil­i­ty. And so you’re going out for prof­it: “how can we make prof­it out of the art ?”. And just like prof­it-mak­ing art to me is a wider form of think­ing. Either you’re cre­at­ing [art] or [you are] not. This is a neces­si­ty of your life. You have to do it. […] The insti­tu­tion from the begin­ning is just kind of wrong. 

- X: I’ve def­i­nite­ly found as a recent grad­u­ate from Uni­ver­si­ty [that] I had a great time. [But] it was also def­i­nite­ly exhaust­ing. But as a com­pos­er, I feel like I can’t com­pose the way I did in school. With­out that exter­nal pres­sure I can’t com­pose the way that I did. When I’m out of school I write such dif­fer­ent music. It’s just dif­fer­ent. I don’t know why. I pret­ty much went from a com­pos­er to song­writer. I’m not real­ly sure why.

- X: (With an encour­ag­ing tone) Because you’re sup­posed to write songs!

- X: (Peo­ple agree­ing enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly) Yeah, sounds like it!

- X: For now! Sounds like it to me. Sor­ry to be so upfront

- X: That’s it. That’s some­thing I’ve been find­ing out about myself.

- X: I total­ly appre­ci­ate what you said.  I’ve been from an anar­chist self-taught and com­mu­ni­ty-taught back­ground. Often due to class­es, clas­si­cism and with the con­ver­sa­tions around acces­si­bil­i­ty… Some­times edu­ca­tion isn’t acces­si­ble for every­one. Often we don’t view peo­ple who are com­mu­ni­ty-taught or self-taught or their artis­tic prac­tice as legit­i­mate. I think con­ver­sa­tions around sus­tain­abil­i­ty and cap­i­tal­ism are impor­tant. But I also see the ben­e­fit of peo­ple pur­su­ing post-sec­ondary if they’re able to. And it’s some­thing I think a lot is: “Do I want more edu­ca­tion? How do I get that? What can I do with that?”. And that can be used to help oth­er peo­ple and lift oth­er peo­ple up: “What pur­pose would it have for me?”. I real­ly appre­ci­ate your analy­sis there. Thank you.

- X: Yeah. It’s not only you have to do lots of stuff, but you have to work towards dif­fer­ent awards, you have to do this. So they push you to cat­e­go­rize your­self in a way that you might not want to cat­e­go­rize your­self. So some­times, I nev­er say that I am a musi­cian. “What do you do?”: “ Noth­ing!”. I make some stuff. I don’t want to cat­e­go­rize myself. Because it comes to expec­ta­tions. Expec­ta­tions from the least ener­gized peo­ple, I do my own thing. 

- X: I real­ly like the use of the term cul­tur­al work­er. I feel like that describes it well, because our soci­ety has this insane focus on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. And it’s unre­al­is­tic to think that it’s only the artists who pro­duce. Art is a big process. And there are many ways in which we can get involved in the process, like this. 

- X: I like that the con­ver­sa­tion includ­ed the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions, because I’ve been think­ing about this a lot. But I noticed, like you men­tioned men­tor­ship last night, and you also men­tioned it today. I’m just curi­ous about oth­er mod­els for pass­ing along knowl­edge and what your expe­ri­ence has been with that.

- X: The chil­dren, for sure. Try­ing to get it to them, because they’re the future for real. So at a lot of fes­ti­vals talk, I still just see a cer­tain crowd base when I think about most exper­i­men­tal or elec­tron­ic fes­ti­vals. But it’s always the chil­dren that are not in that pic­ture. So I think that’s a good way to start to fig­ure out how to get into schools with some of that knowl­edge about things like the envi­ron­ment and all the many oth­er issues. But there must be clever ways of get­ting there. I think we have to be just as clever as [the peo­ple] sell­ing the SUV. (Everyone’s laugh­ing) Adopt some of that strat­e­gy and [those] big cor­po­ra­tions think­ing on how to pro­mote and just kind of put it in anoth­er way, and fig­ure out how to get that into the right heads.

- X: You do a lot of that?

- X: I do work­shops with kids. I go into schools and talk about this stuff. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, it was a good time for sure. But it was busy for me too, because I was doing a lot of online work­shops across Cana­da, which was pret­ty cool. Fig­ur­ing out how to get the access is a big thing. I’ve had tons of dis­cus­sions about this in my city, just how to get it out­side of that down­town core, and into the schools and into the peo­ple who can’t get the bus to get downtown. 

- X: And that’s an issue in all rur­al communities. 

- X: Yeah, so mov­ing out­side and find­ing spaces out there. Yeah, acces­si­bil­i­ty is key. 

- X: The essence of think­ing about music and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. It’s a very col­o­nized idea. And on oth­er parts of the board, there is mass destruc­tion hap­pen­ing and peo­ple are think­ing about their day-to-day lives. It’s a lux­u­ry to think about sus­tain­abil­i­ty, to pres­sure peo­ple on this. So just think­ing about those big­ger issues about sus­tain­abil­i­ty oth­er than music.Talking about how music is destroy­ing the world while the world is actu­al­ly being destroyed. So that’s my prob­lem some­times with this kind [of talk] on music and sustainability. 

- Ter­ri Hron: That actu­al­ly kind of relates to the next ques­tion that we have, which is also a ques­tion around lan­guage and the words that we use. In this con­text, what does the word sus­tain­abil­i­ty mean in terms of music when the world is unsus­tain­able? So the sec­ond ques­tion that we have is: How is lan­guage and pol­i­cy shift­ing to address, or not address, the impact of cli­mate issues, and the impact of cli­mate on music and sound prac­tice and presentation? 

I think this ques­tion came up in our prepara­to­ry group because a lot of arts coun­cils and gen­er­al pol­i­cy is now ask­ing artists to have poli­cies for sus­tain­abil­i­ty and to address this issue in a more pub­lic way. And so we’re won­der­ing, should the onus be on artists to be deal­ing with these ques­tions or is that a pass­ing along of the hot pota­to to us as an artis­tic community? 

- X: You mean, should indi­vid­ual artists or small­er orga­ni­za­tions have to have a pol­i­cy for sustainability?

- X:  Because that’s sort of com­ing down the pipeline, at least in the arts.

- X: I think artic­u­lat­ing what your val­ues are is always going to be help­ful to you as an indi­vid­ual. [It’s] Like how we have a prac­tice of devel­op­ing land acknowl­edge­ments, right? Like at first nobody under­stood what that was or what we were sup­posed to do. But I think it’s a process, right? It puts you in a sit­u­a­tion where you need to actu­al­ly do some learn­ing and think­ing about your lan­guage, what your val­ue sys­tem is and how it’s con­stant­ly devel­op­ing. So I think it could be a sim­i­lar prac­tice in terms of how sus­tain­able your orga­ni­za­tion is or what it helps you artic­u­late and think about. I’m not sure about what you were say­ing about pass­ing the buck. Like it could be. It does­n’t have to be either or, I think. 

- X: Yeah, it’s both of those things for sure. 

- X: Well I oper­ate in the clas­si­cal music world, lan­guage is used like a fix-all, kind of like what we did with the land acknowl­edge­men: “ It’s up to you to think about it. We don’t actu­al­ly have to take any action because we said these words.”. And I think action is always more impor­tant than words. And devel­op­ing a pol­i­cy is one thing. Hav­ing a para­graph say­ing what you’re doing is one thing. But actu­al­ly tak­ing con­crete action is anoth­er. And I think we need to put more respon­si­bil­i­ty on the latter. 

- X: Do you think a fund­ing body ask­ing for the folks and the orga­ni­za­tions that it is fund­ing, or they are fund­ing, are being giv­en the direc­tive to address these issues them­selves? And the clear­est way to do that is to expect the peo­ple that they’re giv­ing funds to, to do that work on their behalf. Is that the sys­tem that we’re talk­ing about? So for exam­ple, Cana­da Coun­cil. Are they get­ting a cer­tain pile of mon­ey, a pile of tax dol­lars, and being giv­en cer­tain respon­si­bil­i­ties with the ways they use that mon­ey? And one of those is to address cli­mate issues. And they have no abil­i­ty beyond expect­ing all of us to do that work, right? And if we go up again, up the lad­der, like who’s giv­ing them that mon­ey and what work are they doing to address these issues? Or are they putting the onus on this orga­ni­za­tion to address the issues? Who is putting the onus on us to address these? Like I guess I’m repeat­ing the same refrain over and over again, but it just feels like there are peo­ple at the tops of these hier­ar­chies that are push­ing it down.

- X: I think some­times too, like even these kinds of con­ver­sa­tions, but in gen­er­al, with the orga­ni­za­tions… I’ve been involved in con­ver­sa­tions notably through a ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion con­ven­ings that was orga­nized by CCA. And I think a lot of the dis­course, espe­cial­ly about lan­guage and best prac­tices, for exam­ple, is about pre­ven­tion when real­ly it’s already too late all the time. Like for exam­ple, how are we going to address the upcom­ing cli­mate issues? It’s already here. Or how are we going to address the work­ers who will burn out, deal with the art work­ers? And I don’t know how it is around you, but [to me] it’s like every­body’s burned out. It’s not about how we are going to [actu­al­ly] address the health issues, or how we are going to [actu­al­ly] address the cli­mate issues. And I think some­times, best prac­tice would be ide­al if this was done before it’s too late in some way. But in lots of ways it’s already hap­pen­ing. And I think once you’re into that chaos, best prac­tice kind of falls out the window. 

It’s like we’re some­times mak­ing lan­guage for things that are not real­ly the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what is hap­pen­ing at all. And also to come back [to you] (by address­ing one of the par­tic­i­pants), we’re talk­ing about you singing the same refrain but I’ll come back to maybe mine about grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions. Lots of DIY or small­er orga­ni­za­tions don’t have any kind of writ­ten pol­i­cy, but their prac­tices are almost way more effi­cient, bet­ter, and health­i­er than all these larg­er orga­ni­za­tions. And then there’s like all these more com­plex asso­ci­a­tions that have the talk, they have the big lines in their poli­cies. But then you look at their actu­al work, and you are left won­der­ing: «what is hap­pen­ing here?». And then you walk into a com­mu­ni­ty music series and you feel that there’s actu­al­ly a process and that things are being thought of in a very organ­ic and nat­ur­al way. And it cre­ates just bet­ter habits. But it has­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly been intel­lec­tu­al­ized either. So that’s, I think, a com­plex sit­u­a­tion too. 

- X: I’ve been involved with a lot of insti­tu­tion­al groups where I have pushed for ini­tia­tives to hap­pen and it’s been a “no this won’t hap­pen… Oh no FRQSC [Fonds de recherche du Québec — Société et cul­ture] requires this now, great we have an EDI [Equi­ty, Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion] com­mit­tee”. And then action final­ly starts hap­pen­ing. So I hate to see it hap­pen­ing too late, but on the oth­er hand I like to see it hap­pen­ing at all. So it’s one of these things where I don’t want to con­grat­u­late peo­ple for doing the bare min­i­mum because as a per­son from the Trans com­mu­ni­ty that’s my entire life, but on the oth­er hand I am hap­py to see that things are chang­ing. I don’t know if you can’t be hope­ful about things chang­ing, then what’s the point of get­ting up in the morn­ing. So I don’t want to com­plete­ly dis­count the kind of push­ing down of things because I am very slow­ly see­ing things change. I mean insti­tu­tions are very slow to change which is part of the prob­lem of why we’re here but it’s good to see some change at all. 

- X: It’s fun­ny. I feel like yelling at them, or like try­ing to con­vince them, or any­thing like that, nev­er worked. Because I remem­ber being on a stu­dent com­mit­tee and I kept going to the same per­son that told me in a pro­fes­sion­al field they would­n’t do that. Then I do all this work to find so many pro­fes­sion­al orches­tras doing this, and then they change to, “we’re not a pro­fes­sion­al orches­tra, we’re a uni­ver­si­ty, these are students.”. 

When you’re in an orches­tra you have like a lit­tle rou­tine. In two months, I’ll have this rehearsal week, but at school it was up to mid­night the night before. They would have full con­trol up until the last minute to say if you’re com­ing in or not, and they would also change what they would say depend­ing on the sce­nario. Is it bet­ter to say: «no we’re treat­ing this pro­fes­sion­al­ly», or «we’re doing it like it’s a school, you’re stu­dents so you have to be there all the time». But it’s nice because I found myself fight­ing a lot to make changes, and I hon­est­ly feel like I did­n’t make any changes but when they came from the top… that’s when they were forced to fol­low, so it was just like gam­bling on like who’s the cool Dean who is gonna make cool changes and not accept these gov­ern­ing bod­ies to say no to stu­dents. Very aca­d­e­m­ic parallel.

- X: This is a Que­bec exam­ple, but the Que­bec Arts Coun­cil recent­ly insti­tut­ed this require­ment to have some kind of state­ment about sus­tain­abil­i­ty. For this round of four-year fund­ing for orga­ni­za­tions, there were a num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions that were inter­est­ed in this, and there were a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ty eval­u­a­tors who were brought in to assess these state­ments. They weren’t going to be influ­enc­ing whether those orga­ni­za­tions did or did not get the fund­ing that they got, they were going to leave that for the next round in four years, but they want­ed to do this exer­cise so that they could give the orga­ni­za­tions feed­back about how they were doing and to see where the com­mu­ni­ty was. Where the com­mu­ni­ty is at about these issues, I was one of the eval­u­a­tors for music orga­ni­za­tions of the biggest vari­ety, like Orchestre Sym­phonique, so we’re talk­ing orga­ni­za­tions that take up maybe 40 per­cent of the bud­get of music and sound in Que­bec. It was a real­ly inter­est­ing thing to see how orga­ni­za­tions spoke of what they were doing, and what small orga­ni­za­tions were doing. I still had to keep going back down to the bud­get line. “What per­cent­age of your bud­get are you putting into this ? ”, because some­times they’re like “blablablablabla $500” and I’m like, well you can’t do any­thing for that. Then oth­er small orga­ni­za­tions, try­ing to do many things in the future, were real­ly putting quite a big per­cent­age of the total bud­get towards these issues. And I thought, this is inter­est­ing. And so then you see what an orga­ni­za­tion like a sym­phon­ic orch­ses­tra is doing, and it’s huge what they’re doing. But then you look at the total enve­lope, and then you do the math quick­ly — that’s only 0.5% of their bud­get. That’s nothing. 

And I just give this exam­ple as a kind of par­al­lel. We have these huge orga­ni­za­tions that talk a lot about all these things that they’re doing, and they get a lot of kudos for it. But when you actu­al­ly look at their bot­tom line, how much per­cent of their total bud­get does this actu­al­ly rep­re­sent? It’s noth­ing. And we need to also nor­mal­ize those things. So when I think about lan­guage and pol­i­cy, I’m always also think­ing, well, lan­guage is like a beau­ti­ful wrap­per. And you can real­ly make things look good by say­ing you’re doing all of these things. But where are the big bucks that are actu­al­ly going into this? And what are you actu­al­ly doing? And how are you get­ting artists into schools to talk about this? These kinds of things that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly about: “we have a way to recy­cle the props for our the­ater pro­duc­tion”, but how much are we actu­al­ly get­ting in and edu­cat­ing peo­ple about things. So I’m always a lit­tle bit wary of lan­guage because some­times things can look real­ly pret­ty, but what’s real­ly going on under the car­pet? How much are they actu­al­ly giv­ing towards these things? And each of us, what are we all giv­ing? I think about that too. 

- X: Yeah, we have to keep chal­leng­ing those orga­ni­za­tions. I think that’s the thing because change does­n’t just hap­pen like this. I think with a lot of the poli­cies that look all shiny, they have to be test­ed and chal­lenged a few times. I’ve dealt with a num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions who say a cer­tain thing, but I am just that per­son who fits the check­mark… And it’s not a nice thing to feel that for sure. Where you go in, and there’s just no real sup­port. To be hon­est, it’s dan­ger­ous. I’ve expe­ri­enced that. I will say from the con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music world, I’ve def­i­nite­ly had that in there where it’s fill­ing what the grants are ask­ing for, but then it’s not like that inside. So I think it’s just chal­leng­ing it every time. And it will change. The more they get the pres­sure, it’s kind of like the less grants they will get once the word gets out. Because of the arts com­mu­ni­ty, every­one starts to know each oth­er. So if some­one treats you a cer­tain way, and you start talk­ing about them, they’ll have to real­ly think about chang­ing and hon­or­ing those policies. 

- X: And also many of those grants in non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions are for artists and not for oper­a­tions. And that in itself can be prob­lem­at­ic because you need sup­port from oth­er peo­ple if you want to enforce a pol­i­cy or some­thing. And not hav­ing enough oper­a­tion bud­get, I think that’s a big thing. It comes down to the per­son who works there and whether their bud­get can serve to pay the play­ing artists ver­sus the per­son who works there. […] The oper­a­tions, usu­al­ly there are few or no grants for oper­a­tions. They’re all for the cre­ation. Sup­port groups are as impor­tant to art as artists most of the time. 

- X: And there’s a lot of uneven­ness in that too. Large orga­ni­za­tions have bud­get lines for admin and stuff. And I see a lot of small orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als where they’re doing every­thing. Well, that’s a lot of admin, and it takes away from your artis­tic prac­tice time. But I think there’s oth­er sys­tems dis­rup­tion, which is a term I don’t real­ly use… But sit­ting on juries. It’s very edu­ca­tion­al, too. Because one thing I noticed for quite a long time, is that quite a few juries I’ve sat on, it’s not even said out loud, but it’s there a feel­ing like: “Well, of course we have to fund the Beethoven Fes­ti­val. Of course we have to fund this cham­ber music ensem­ble. We’re going to fund the sym­pho­ny, of course… And then let’s kind of talk about what’s left over.”.  It’s not said out loud, but it’s some­times real­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate. Like, you know, I live in the mar­itimes, and I love clas­si­cal music. But we have a lot of clas­si­cal music pre­sen­ters. And a lot of orga­ni­za­tions that are white, Euro­pean. I mean, it’s close to my heart, but it’s a lit­tle like a his­tor­i­cal reen­act­ment society.

 But I feel like if we’re going to make sys­temic changes, there are a lot of com­mu­ni­ty-based orga­ni­za­tions and exper­i­men­tal artists and a lot of oth­er peo­ple who are clos­er to the front lines. That’s what they’ve always been prac­tic­ing in their own com­mu­ni­ties. Every­body’s sort of say­ing the same thing. But I think if orga­ni­za­tions were rec­og­niz­ing that those are the peo­ple who have already been doing the work, that are doing the work, and fund­ing pro­por­tion­al­ly. And those are also the orga­ni­za­tions that seem to be a lit­tle more sus­tain­able. Also, they don’t have these mas­sive infra­struc­tures. Like, I’m not say­ing we should­n’t have orches­tras, by the way. Thank god this is anony­mous (Everybody’s laugh­ing)! But our arts com­mu­ni­ty should look the way that our com­mu­ni­ties look. Not 90% pow­dered wigs. So if your own orga­ni­za­tion does­n’t look like that, then I think you need to start ask­ing ques­tions. About who’s not being included. 

- X: Yeah, because the ques­tion. Com­ing back to the ques­tion, I think it’s about sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Is a sym­pho­ny orches­tra actu­al­ly a sus­tain­able thing? I’m not say­ing it isn’t, but that’s an impor­tant ques­tion. And I’m also say­ing it isn’t. But, like, yeah, we’re not ask­ing those ques­tions. Right? And I say that as some­one who, sit­ting in that room, wit­ness­ing sounds being orga­nized by that many peo­ple, it’s mag­i­cal. But we’re talk­ing about these exis­ten­tial ques­tions. And like you’re say­ing, the sup­port for these mas­sive, gen­uine­ly unsus­tain­able things is not actu­al­ly part of the question. 

- X: Though on the flip side, they are sus­tain­ing musi­cians. Like, it’s one of the only jobs you can have where you’re pay­ing union dues and get­ting paid. That’s the only time I ever get paid. But it’s sus­tain­able for the peo­ple that had that edu­ca­tion priv­i­lege and all that.

- X: But would they be sus­tained? There are so many grass­roots, small orga­ni­za­tions that are sus­tain­able in the com­mu­ni­ty because of the work that they do. There’s no sym­pho­ny orches­tra that’s going to sus­tain itself with­out huge amounts of gov­ern­ment funding.

- X: Hav­ing been in New­found­land specif­i­cal­ly, a lot of my clas­si­cal music train­ing was paid for by the Oil Com­pa­nies. So the arts orga­ni­za­tions can get their mon­ey else­where, and I think the sym­phonies will be fine. 

- X: Inter­est­ing. Who can then write that off. (Loud sigh, fol­lowed by laugh­ters)

- X: Just as an aside, for a long time I was real­ly into… From quite far back, read­ing these sort of dystopi­an future nov­els, I think it start­ed with Mar­garet Atwood. But I noticed that a lot of this, a lot of the authored futures that we have are bleak, and ter­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing after an apoc­a­lypse. And it’s easy to imag­ine that hap­pen­ing. But there’s not very much author­ing of the world that hap­pens after find­ing solu­tions and mov­ing into a bet­ter prac­tice and a bet­ter way of being. And there is this lan­guage here about engag­ing and author­ing a health­i­er world. And I think that one of the things that I think about, is what we do as artists is to imag­ine this world into being. And so, a lot of these things that we’re touch­ing on. We’re talk­ing about this world. Crit­i­cal talk of how the sys­tem is now, but I also won­der whether we need to engage in imag­in­ing a dif­fer­ent sys­tem and real­ly ‘the pie in the sky’ and writ­ing it out or imag­in­ing, with­out hav­ing to be shack­led by the sys­tem that we have now. But in crit­i­ciz­ing the sys­tem that we have now which is nec­es­sary, we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have anoth­er vision to be attach­ing our­selves to or to be mov­ing towards. I just throw that out there as a chal­lenge to every­one to think about this ide­al world that maybe it’s pos­si­ble, instead of being in a dark place where every­thing is awful. What would that bet­ter place look like? 

- X: I think the Sound Sym­po­sium is kind of… Yeah. I mean, let’s just live like this.

- X: It could be. 

- X: I don’t know, I feel like there’s so many things hap­pen­ing all the time on a very small lev­el that are very inspir­ing, espe­cial­ly in arts and com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment. I feel, in my expe­ri­ence, I’m mind blown con­stant­ly by the lev­el of engage­ment, cre­ativ­i­ty, what peo­ple are putting togeth­er. I think it’s just at a cer­tain lev­el, if it isn’t sup­port­ed, it comes again to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty thing. If every­thing is always pow­ered just by the ener­gy of the peo­ple with­out any kind of sup­port. There’s always two big dan­gers here, mon­ey and burn­ing out, because it’s kind of the only two things that are sus­tain­ing a lot of the things. I think what you’re describ­ing, all these oth­er futures, are just burned out. Like, peo­ple do some things for a cer­tain time, and then at some point if there’s not some kind of com­mu­ni­ty or mon­ey sup­port, you can only take them so far. But I think there’s hun­dreds of ini­tia­tives, like in terms of com­mu­ni­ty music orga­niz­ing, or mil­i­tant orga­ni­za­tion, food banks, like com­mu­ni­ty mobi­liza­tion, espe­cial­ly now, we’re just see­ing it through all sorts of protests, with like all these stu­dent camps for Pales­tine, this is all about the com­mu­ni­ty. They’re all very inspir­ing things we’re see­ing in the future, and how we can kind of mobi­lize; about how the world can be dif­fer­ent. But then how are they wel­comed into the greater pic­ture of this cap­i­tal­is­tic vio­lence and the world we’re liv­ing in. So I think the vision is there, it’s just we need to maybe trust our­selves more, empow­er it more, and fight a bit more for it in some ways. I don’t know what it rep­re­sents exact­ly, but the seeds are there. A lot of it is ready.

- X: But what does the tree look like? (Peo­ple laughing)

- X: We won’t see if you cut it at the root all the time.

- X: Do we have to know what the tree looks like? 

(Long silence)

- X: You just have to water it. 

- X: Yeah, I feel like it’s our chil­dren and great-grand­chil­dren who are in charge of the foliage. Our job is just to actu­al­ly plant the thing and get it going. 

- X: Sor­ry, I came late and missed most of your dis­cus­sions, but some­thing just crossed my mind. I sit on a num­ber of boards and coun­cils both in Cana­da and the US. What’s hap­pen­ing around the cul­tures that I’m involved in is peo­ple are build­ing exact­ly this. And I think Sound Sym­po­sium that’s a real­ly good exam­ple of bring­ing the dis­ci­plines togeth­er more active­ly and more struc­tural­ly. And there’s a lot of good mod­el­ing that hap­pened in Que­bec city, where all the dis­ci­plines found places togeth­er, insti­tu­tions that they formed togeth­er. I also teach at a uni­ver­si­ty. We’re talk­ing about those things now. We’re work­ing togeth­er to cre­ate com­mu­ni­ty-based orga­ni­za­tions across dis­ci­plines. And there’s a lot more fund­ing avail­able for that kind of nego­ti­a­tion. It seems to be, even on the art gallery boards that I’m on, find­ing that there’s way more diver­si­ty. I think Sound Sym­po­sium is a very good mod­el. So there’s some­thing here that needs to real­ly be parsed to see what else can be done in our own var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties.[…] There was a time when art gal­leries worked pret­ty close­ly with music, for instance. Some of you remem­ber that. When insti­tu­tions were much more open to pro­gram­ming, that also includ­ed the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines more active­ly. […] Maybe it’s time to go on a Fish­ing expe­di­tion, to see what else can happen.

- X: So what’s the first step in approach­ing the muse­ums? “We’d like to take some of your bud­get thanks and please pro­gram some con­certs?”. (Every­one is laugh­ing)

- X: I keep telling peo­ple to make pro­pos­als and have a con­ver­sa­tion. We can do that. You can have a con­ver­sa­tion, make sug­ges­tions, and throw it in. I’m work­ing on my boards, try­ing to get peo­ple to open up. 

- X: Well, because you come from the visu­al arts com­mu­ni­ty, I’ll ask you that ques­tion. Would it be of ben­e­fit to an art gallery if they sud­den­ly put a sec­tion of their bud­get in for per­for­mance art? And a few work­shops, so would that be of ben­e­fit to them? Or is it just a ben­e­fit to the peo­ple who want to do the per­for­mance art? 

- X: It’s a ben­e­fit to them because you’re going to bring in a dif­fer­ent audi­ence that’s going to have a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence inter­act­ing with what they have. I’ve done a lot of gallery col­lab­o­ra­tions, but it’s real­ly a win-win. 

- X: Yeah, you can increase the atten­dance, absolute­ly. Peo­ple love more diver­si­ty, more mem­bers, more pos­si­bil­i­ty, more community. 

- X:I’ve worked with many peo­ple, and the high­er posi­tions they come and talk to us, they’re very open, you can share ideas but even­tu­al­ly they make a deci­sion, and that’s not up to you. 

- X: But some­times, their fund­ing is now depen­dent on this diverse think­ing. And some fund­ing is not com­ing to them right now when they’re not doing that. That’s the dif­fer­ence between now and then. That’s what I see hap­pen­ing. So that’s why you don’t want to give that up.

- X: Well, ear­li­er at Sound Sym­po­sium, there was a strong con­nec­tion with the Visu­al Arts com­mu­ni­ty. And they com­mis­sioned a lot of sound-based sculp­ture or spa­tial­ized sound instal­la­tions or what­ev­er you want to call it and fund­ed it. And they worked real­ly hard to get fund­ing for that, to include that com­mu­ni­ty. But since the last, I don’t know how decade, they’ve kind of retract­ed from that. And I won­der why. I don’t know. 

- X: They kind of stopped in the ear­ly 2000s. 

- X: I think Sound Sym­po­sium is very unique. For exam­ple, you’re hous­ing peo­ple with locals. That just usu­al­ly does­n’t hap­pen when you go some­where to trav­el. You have to get the hotel or some­thing. But here, it’s very unique that you stay with peo­ple who are locals. Because of that as an artist,  I’m learn­ing a lot about the his­to­ry of this place, liv­ing with the locals, and talk­ing to peo­ple. Now I appre­ci­ate it, it’s an under­stand­ing of peo­ple in a dif­fer­ent way. So I feel that I’m learn­ing a lot, ver­sus peo­ple who just per­form and leave. For exam­ple, this is one of the mod­els that can be sus­tain­able. It’s about going and just using the resources already there. 

- X: Oh, the flight ques­tion too. Like fly­ing in and being here for this extend­ed peri­od of time. I know a lot of us flew here and I know that’s prob­lem­at­ic, but it was­n’t three times as many peo­ple fly­ing in, play­ing one gig and then fly­ing away. I think this is a prefer­able mod­el to fes­ti­val cul­ture where it’s just a one-off gig for every­one. And it’s the kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion this can imple­ment is huge. So I do think that, that’s been said a num­ber of times, but this is a mod­el for how to do things more sus­tain­ably. It’s not going to be immi­nent­ly sus­tain­able, we’re not going to solve the prob­lem, but as an infi­nite­ly more sus­tain­able mod­el, this is a great one. I think.

- X: It’s a way of shar­ing what is there, that you don’t own every­thing. The own­er­ship of every­thing is shared.

- X: It’s why it’s a symposium.

- X:Yeah!

- X: I’ve heard a lot of artists are strug­gling more and more, there’s a finan­cial bar­ri­er with com­ing to a fes­ti­val for 10 days. Because it means you’re not gig­ging some­where else or you’re leav­ing your fam­i­ly for 10 days. So there are lots of rea­sons why peo­ple come and go. But the ini­tial idea of com­ing and stay­ing for the whole time and mak­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions, that’s one of the big rea­sons why I’m doing my project. Because for a long time, we’ve been talk­ing about, like, how can we get artists con­nect­ed with each oth­er quick­ly at the Sound Sym­po­sium, so that we’re kick-start­ing some new con­nec­tions. That’s one of the big val­ues of that. 

- X: I have a ques­tion. It’s a lit­tle unre­lat­ed, but I’m curi­ous. First of all, what is the actu­al man­date of CNMN? I kind of know what you do, but how does it exist and what is it exist­ing for? What are the big goals? But also, how has your orga­ni­za­tion changed and shift­ed, like, fund­ing-wise? Like, I’m curi­ous about that. I don’t know if that’s part of this conversation. 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I will do my best to answer as the new direc­tor. CNM­N’s been found­ed in ear­ly 2000. Orig­i­nal­ly, it was more as a net­work for exist­ing new music ensem­ble, fes­ti­vals, and orga­ni­za­tions. And I think rapid­ly, there clear­ly was a need for a lot of music prac­tices that are loose­ly relat­ed to new music. I can include impro­vi­sa­tion, sound art, more exper­i­men­tal music, and hav­ing a way to con­nect. And also, as an orga­ni­za­tion, one of the things that was inter­est­ing from the start was that it was­n’t just aimed at musi­cians, orga­ni­za­tions, and book­ers. It had this desire to expand and to include many more peo­ple. The first mis­sion is to build a net­work, to have a struc­ture for con­nect­ing all these prac­tices, and to have a place where peo­ple that feel a link or con­nec­tion to these music prac­tices or sound prac­tice have a place to engage. First It’s about cre­at­ing this pool of peo­ple. It’s about build­ing a resource, a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple just talk­ing togeth­er. Because Cana­da is such a big geo­graph­i­cal area. If you’re in St. John’s, you might not know what is hap­pen­ing in Van­cou­ver in the same way that some­body else would. So, there was also just that need, at first. 

And then the orga­ni­za­tion has also expand­ed to offer guid­ance in cer­tain ways. So, there’s a men­tor­ship pro­gram. There’s also rep­re­sen­ta­tion for cer­tain top­ics and con­ver­sa­tions like what we are doing now. There’s a desire to bring ques­tions of activism into what we do, whether it’s about nature, whether it’s about rep­re­sen­ta­tion or diver­si­ty. These things are being tak­en with some true desire to be seri­ous about them and to actu­al­ly voice these con­ver­sa­tions and con­sid­er them. But I’d say the first thing about CNMN is its mem­bers. And I think that’s one of the biggest ques­tions that we also have as a net­work, is every­body has a dif­fer­ent vision of what a net­work should be doing, what’s the goal, what the net­work should be talk­ing about or how it should be sup­port­ing the musi­cians. And I think what I am try­ing to do right now, as a new direc­tor, is to real­ly come back to what a net­work is sup­posed to do. Get peo­ple to talk, to con­nect, to fig­ure out what’s the com­mon way to go for­ward with these issues and expand it as much as it can in order to rep­re­sent a lot of dif­fer­ent musi­cal prac­tices across the country. 

Per­son­al­ly as a com­mu­ni­ty music orga­niz­er, I did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly feel very seen by a lot of these new music orga­ni­za­tions. So one of the things that I’m doing right now is real­ly try­ing to con­nect a lot of these dif­fer­ent series and small ini­tia­tives across the coun­try. Some of them have been exist­ing for 30 years, but they’ve nev­er had any kind of fund­ing, so they were kind of invis­i­ble. Maybe my more per­son­al vision of it. A net­work of net­works, because I feel like in this day and age every­body is a net­work. They have resources, they have knowl­edge, they have things to share. So it’s about cre­at­ing a way to have a place to gath­er that infor­ma­tion, share that infor­ma­tion, and val­ue dif­fer­ent musi­cal expe­ri­ences across the whole country. 

But then, we have a lim­it­ed bud­get, we’re a very small orga­ni­za­tion. I’m one of the only per­ma­nent employ­ee and I’m part-time. There’s two oth­er peo­ple that are there between five to ten hours a week. So it is a very small orga­ni­za­tion with a very wide and ambi­tious objec­tive, but the means to do it are quite limited.

- Ter­ri Hron:  His­tor­i­cal­ly also, it start­ed with the main event was the Forum. The pur­pose was, at least in the found­ing per­son­’s vision, to cre­ate a show­case for new music. So that’s a very par­tic­u­lar vision. The peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions who were going to that were orga­ni­za­tions that were already quite estab­lished. Then there was a shift away from that at some point to try and move towards some­thing that was serv­ing a much broad­er rep­re­sen­ta­tion of artists. And now mov­ing more into the grass­roots, peo­ple who can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly go some­where to be rep­re­sent­ed, but that we go to rep­re­sent them. And I think that in that shift, in the last six years when I was work­ing for the net­work, I think the project that real­ly defined the new direc­tion was the Par­tic­i­pa­to­ry Cre­ative Music Hub, which I encour­age all of you to go check out. The Par­tic­i­pa­to­ry Cre­ative Music Hub, the PCM Hub. And there’s so many projects there, and those are projects done by facil­i­ta­tors where the par­tic­i­pants play a cre­ative role in the project. And most of those projects are with non-pro­fes­sion­als. And the process of doc­u­ment­ing all those projects and bring­ing all of those facil­i­ta­tors and all of those cre­ators and bring­ing all of those peo­ple into our com­mu­ni­ty made us real­ize that the whole pro­fes­sion­al aspect of musi­cians was some­thing that we may want to take out of the mis­sion state­ment. Because, again, that’s like anoth­er nar­row­ing and not an expan­sion of the com­mu­ni­ty. So I think that real­ly changed a lot. Just last year, when there was a refor­mu­la­tion of the man­date, that’s when this activist aspect came in as a part of the man­date of the orga­ni­za­tion. That there’s this activist bent. So you can check out the word­ing of that as it was devel­oped by the board. 

- X: Has it out­grown its name? 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: We’re chang­ing names next year. The new name has already been in the works. It’s going to be the Cre­ative Music and Sound Net­work. So no more new music. Because I think we all know at this point that new music might be too lim­i­ta­tive as a term. It does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly rep­re­sent the full vari­ety of prac­tices. But doing a name change is a very com­plex oper­a­tion on paper and it requires a lot of things. So we’re in the process of doing that. The name change is offi­cial and it will happen. 

And I think in gen­er­al, the cul­ture of the orga­ni­za­tion is also chang­ing a lot com­pared to what it orig­i­nal­ly was. Even the more exist­ing tour­ing net­work, or an idea of a very estab­lished tour­ing net­work revolv­ing around fes­ti­vals, or basi­cal­ly com­mis­sion­ing for new work has also changed in the way it’s hap­pen­ing. So it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the best mod­el that rep­re­sents the prac­tice in gen­er­al. There’s an effort made to also be more present among things that are already exist­ing, as opposed to sim­ply cre­at­ing new works. That’s one thing that we want­ed to do with the HUB. So we’re work­ing with a lot of dif­fer­ent music prac­ti­tion­ers, ther­a­pists and peo­ple work­ing in very com­mu­ni­ty-based music set­tings. There’s 4 main sec­tors, which is health, so peo­ple work­ing in hos­pi­tals and care cen­ters for exam­ple. There’s also a whole ressource focus­ing on com­mu­ni­ty, grass­roots works. Anoth­er ressource is about music in school and edu­ca­tion­al set­tings. And there’s also a whole ressource about peo­ple work­ing in carcer­al set­tings. Which is also very interesting.

I think one of the things that was very pow­er­ful about that project was that it made a lot of music work­ers dis­cov­er and know about each oth­er, because they did­n’t even know that there could be a con­nec­tion between the larg­er prac­tice and what they did. So it empow­ered work that already exist­ed as opposed to cre­at­ing yet anoth­er new project or a new thing. 

This is also one of the things that’s great about being at Sound Sym­po­sium or hav­ing these dis­cus­sions where there’s oth­er things hap­pen­ing. We can ben­e­fit from peo­ple already being there. And we don’t have to make anoth­er thing where peo­ple take 20 planes. We’re already out there. We’re already meet­ing there. So we try to have these meet­ings and con­ver­sa­tions in these con­texts now. Where there’s already a mobi­liza­tion that feels more organ­ic and nat­ur­al. So hope­ful­ly that’s also a way that we can be more sustainable. 

- X: I applaud the name change and all of what you said. I would encour­age you to, speak­ing of lan­guage, to look into the his­to­ry of the term cre­ative music and its roots in the AACM [Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Cre­ative Musi­cians] in Chica­go if that’s not a major con­cern about the name change. It should be.

- X: Can I ask a sim­ple ques­tion? Has every­body noticed that this desire for con­ver­sa­tion is real­ly a lot stronger since COVID? The desire to kind of make these new con­nec­tions with each oth­er? To kind of expand the lan­guage and find bet­ter models? 

- X: I think we had time to think, right? We had time to rest and pause. And now this feels like a real­ly ener­getic recon­nec­tion time. But I’ve also ques­tioned […] that it’s because it feels like it’s also a real­ly hard time to be an artist finan­cial­ly. And I think there’s free­dom in that. I don’t want it for any­one. But it’s like there’s a free­dom in that, because I feel like that’s the sys­temic change we can accel­er­ate. There’s an urgency to prac­tice in cre­ative ways of think­ing and doing. Or even just through your music. I don’t mean that you have to stand up and talk about things,  through your music, for me, that’s enough. I get very ener­gized when I see peo­ple. At the con­cert last night and all the things that hap­pened yes­ter­day, for me, that’s very essen­tial for my men­tal health, to my sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty for the future. Now that I’m old­er, I feel that I want to cre­ate some­thing that younger peo­ple can come to and still feel like we can work togeth­er. We can com­mu­ni­cate out­side of these para­me­ters. It’s like an anti-cap­i­tal­ism thing too. We can­not do some­thing sim­ple, but it’s real­ly an embod­ied exam­ple of how we can do things dif­fer­ent­ly. It’s real­ly pow­er­ful. Often in our dai­ly lives, we don’t feel like we’re all super impor­tant. We can’t be front­line work­ers. That’s real­ly impor­tant. But there is also some­thing very impor­tant about this, at least for me. So, I just appre­ci­ate it. Com­ing togeth­er. We nev­er get to be all togeth­er, peo­ple from all dif­fer­ent backgrounds.

- X: I do also think post-COVID did enable peo­ple to imag­ine that there could be a bet­ter future. I mean, I often felt before that peo­ple were stuck in this “I can’t think of a way that things could be bet­ter, so why change for things?” And then when we got to COVID. I was no longer the crazy per­son for think­ing about uni­ver­sal basic income. We did it, and we could do it again. And I think that has rein­vig­o­rat­ed a lot of that. 

- X: With the pan­dem­ic, there were no oppor­tu­ni­ties, except maybe to cre­ate your­self and to work on your own prac­tice, which I think is real­ly impor­tant. I think that’s a real­ly impor­tant thing. But there was not a con­cert series that you could apply to. Now there’s so many oppor­tu­ni­ties that have opened back up. You have all these great artists fight­ing for very few slots. And I find this is a real change in the way you see your­self. And there’s a lot of space for this dif­fi­cult ques­tion­ing, like how sus­tain­able is a career fight­ing for all these same oppor­tu­ni­ties. Then each of them [series/festival] have a dif­fer­ent man­date, some­times very point­ed. Either I try to make what I do work with­in their man­date and then sud­den­ly my prac­tice is being shift­ed there. Or I apply with what I do and they don’t care about that because they would want some­thing else. I find that just a bizarre thing to work around. Receiv­ing a bunch of no’s is kind of tough. Some of these no’s I’ve had feed­back and I feel like their man­date was just too hard­core. I don’t know what to do with it. I’ll nev­er be able to play because they want par­tic­u­lar groups of music. I’m not invit­ed. It’s a chal­lenge apply­ing to those things and tak­ing a piece of me out.

- X: It’s [maybe] a fun idea; but I have good news about that: With lots of no’s comes a lot of yes’s. You just got­ta keep doing what you believe in and just stick with it. With the pan­dem­ic for me, there was that moment where I was like, “What am I doing? What is art?” Every­thing I’ve been doing meant noth­ing at that moment, so it real­ly made me rethink how I want to come back. “What do I want? What issues I want to talk about more?” In my expe­ri­ence about the no’s, I actu­al­ly kind of like them because the same ones that say no, they come back around lat­er. Then what you do is: you just get bet­ter at your message.

- X: Excuse me, as a piece of expe­ri­ence from the oth­er side, I can tell you. I’ve been a mem­ber of the orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­tee for the Sym­po­sium for many years now, and we tried for a long time to spec­i­fy who might be able to per­form. We pro­vid­ed a theme, we’re talk­ing about a man­date. The result was that we got these appli­ca­tions from artists who were tor­tur­ing them­selves to try to fit in and we hat­ed it. So we just stopped because it was just obvi­ous, it was ridiculous. 

(Peo­ple laughing) 

- X: Yeah, we’ve all done that.There’s a call that’s real­ly spe­cif­ic, and you’re like hummm…

- X:: “Oh yeah my piece is about water”  (Gen­er­al laugh­ters). 

- X: Or at least it is now. (Laugh­ter continues)

- X: It’s not about the music, it’s about what you write. We’ve all seen some peo­ple that have real­ly good writ­ing, but then you lis­ten to what they do and they don’t connect.

- X: I want to say thank you guys for orga­niz­ing this conversation. 

Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: Thank you all so much. Thank you every­body for being here and being very gen­er­ous with your time. It’s been a good few hours. Thank you so much. We have a music activ­i­ty to close this meeting.

CNMN would like to thank Michelle Lacour, Kathy Clark Wher­ry and Sound Symposium

CNMN would also like to thank and con­grat­u­late all the artists who per­formed and this edi­tion of Sound Symposium.

Yellowknife meeting

Date: June 9th 2024

Loca­tion: Car­ment Braden’s stu­dio, in Yellowknife.

Co-pre­sen­ter: Long­shad­ow festival

CNMN acknowl­edges the finan­cial sup­port of FACTOR, the Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da and of Canada’s pri­vate radio broadcasters.

This con­ver­sa­tion was opened by land acknowl­edge­ment deliv­ered by CNMN cur­rent gen­er­al direc­tor Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture rec­og­niz­ing that this con­ver­sa­tion took place in Chief Drygeese Ter­ri­to­ry in Treaty 8, the tra­di­tion­al land of the Yel­lowknives Dene and home to the North Slave Métis, and the Tłı̨chǫ people.

Foisy-Cou­ture also took a moment to thank and con­grat­u­late the Long­shad­ow team and artists for the amount of artis­tic care and respect that went into mak­ing this fes­ti­val pos­si­ble and for let­ting CNMN con­tribute to it. Foisy-Cou­ture also took a moment to thank his hosts Rob Elo, Naima Jutha and For­est for wel­com­ing him into their home; and to express an enor­mous amount of grat­i­tude to Car­men with­out whom CNMN’s pres­ence would not have been pos­si­ble. All par­tic­i­pants also took a moment to go in a cir­cle to present them­selves to the group.

This con­ver­sa­tion fea­tured short keynote inter­ven­tions about the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor from guest Rob Elo and fea­tured Robert Uchi­da and the Gar­neau String Quar­tet as guest con­trib­u­tors. It was mod­er­at­ed by Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture in tan­dem with Longshadow’s co-artis­tic direc­tor Car­men Braden. Apart from spe­cif­ic inter­ven­tions from the mod­er­a­tor and keynote speak­ers the con­tri­bu­tions of every oth­er par­tic­i­pant is anonymized (X).

This con­ver­sa­tion was attend­ed by sev­er­al artists and musi­cians who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Long­shad­ow music fes­ti­val as well as mul­ti­ple local musi­cians and art work­ers. We thanked them for their gen­er­ous inputs.

In order to bet­ter expose the real­i­ties and dynam­ics at work in the field of cre­ative music and sound prac­tice in Yel­lowknife, and the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries, and to cel­e­brate CNMN first con­ver­sa­tion in the region, this report includes an exten­sive tran­scrip­tion of the dis­cus­sion that took place. Edits were made strict­ly in order to facil­i­tate the com­pre­hen­sion and the read­ing experience.

Topics Covered in the Conversation

Con­text and Chal­lenges in Yellowknife

• Geo­graph­ic, eco­nom­ic, and artis­tic unique­ness of Yellowknife
• Lack of artis­tic infra­struc­ture and bar­ri­ers to access­ing funding
• Chal­lenges for North­ern musi­cians: iso­la­tion, trav­el costs, and lack of venues

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty in Music

• Envi­ron­men­tal and struc­tur­al sustainability
• Bal­anc­ing the car­bon foot­print of tour­ing with local enrichment
• Eco­nom­ic and social impact of small, com­mu­ni­ty-focused events

Com­mu­ni­ty and Collaboration

• Impor­tance of rela­tion­ship-build­ing with­in the artis­tic community
• The role of fes­ti­vals and orga­ni­za­tions in fos­ter­ing collaboration
• Cross-cul­tur­al and inter­gen­er­a­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties in music-making

Youth Engage­ment and Education

• The need for music edu­ca­tion in schools
• Impor­tance of acces­si­ble venues for young musicians
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties to fos­ter ear­ly expe­ri­ences with music and performance

Bar­ri­ers to Career Devel­op­ment for North­ern Artists

• Lim­it­ed access to resources like grants and managers.
• Lack of local per­for­mance oppor­tu­ni­ties and tour­ing support.
• Chal­lenges in nav­i­gat­ing grant sys­tems and the music industry

Advo­ca­cy and Policy

• Gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ty in sup­port­ing the arts
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties to lever­age Yellowknife’s unique­ness for cul­tur­al branding
• Calls for bet­ter infra­struc­ture and cor­po­rate sponsorship

Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor (CMI) Experiences

• Reflec­tions on the val­ue of the pro­gram for pro­fes­sion­al development
• Insights on roy­al­ties, rights, and the impor­tance of reg­is­ter­ing music
• Chal­lenges with social media, self-mar­ket­ing, and per­son­al growth in the industry

SOCAN and Music Licensing

• Impor­tance of reg­is­ter­ing with SOCAN and under­stand­ing rights
• Roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties of artists and venues in licens­ing and royalties
• Prac­ti­cal steps for musi­cians to secure their intel­lec­tu­al property

Cul­tur­al Iden­ti­ty and Diver­si­ty in Music

• Inte­grat­ing Dene, Métis, Inu­it, and oth­er cul­tur­al tra­di­tions into the music scene
• Oppor­tu­ni­ties for cul­tur­al exchange and collaboration
• Embrac­ing diver­si­ty to cre­ate a uni­fied, dis­tinc­tive artis­tic community

DIY Approach­es and Exper­i­men­tal Music

• Insights from exper­i­men­tal and DIY music practices
• Build­ing alter­na­tive venues and fos­ter­ing grass­roots communities
• Expand­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty to non-tra­di­tion­al forms of music-making

Eco­nom­ic and Social Impact of Music

• Research into the eco­nom­ic mul­ti­pli­er effects of com­mu­ni­ty-based music.
• Com­par­i­son with inter­na­tion­al mod­els like Reyk­javik and Daw­son City.
• Music as a low-con­sump­tion eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty with poten­tial for growth.

Fes­ti­val Reflec­tions and Artist Experiences

• Col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ences dur­ing the Long­shad­ow Festival.
• Per­son­al growth, inspi­ra­tion, and mutu­al learn­ing among participants.
• Emo­tion­al and cre­ative ful­fill­ment through col­lec­tive music-making.

Open­ing ques­tion from Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: 

So I’ll just ask a first ques­tion to open the dis­cus­sion and then we can dis­cuss about this: “How can music and sound orga­ni­za­tions sup­port artis­tic work and ini­tia­tives that both pro­mote greater aware­ness of cli­mate issues and engage in the author­ing of a health­i­er world?”. I know this is already a fair­ly big ques­tion. I’ll answer first that as an orga­ni­za­tion, this is some­thing we’ve tried to do by hav­ing these meet­ings. To, first of all, think about it, but also, by engag­ing more and more in com­mu­ni­ty ini­tia­tives that also share, I think, a lot of resources and engage with chal­lenges of that per­spec­tive. I think that’s per­son­al­ly what I’ve noticed a lot here. I’ve been amazed by the shar­ing of resources and how every­body kind of real­ly seemed to have a very col­lab­o­ra­tive mind­set. To be able to do things that prob­a­bly would­n’t be pos­si­ble if you were hop­ing to do them alone or in a more tra­di­tion­al or com­mer­cial way. That’s been very inspir­ing for me to see. If any­body wants to maybe share some­thing on the par­tic­u­lar­ly, very rare, sit­u­a­tion of Yel­lowknife, I’d be hap­py to hear [more] about this. 

-You’re ask­ing about how to use music to help pro­mote such things as envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and that sort of thing. Is that the point of your question? 

-Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: It can be. 

- And that’s also part of the ques­tion is, does it have to be explic­it in the music or per­haps it’s more on an orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­el or how we col­lec­tive­ly organize?

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: If you think it needs to be more in the music, that’s some­thing that is very valu­able and inter­est­ing and I’d be hap­py to hear you say more about this. 

- I’ve not thought about it before, but the first thing that came to my mind when you posed the ques­tion there was some­thing like Folk on the Rocks, the music fes­ti­val here every year. Hav­ing some sort of a pres­ence from an orga­ni­za­tion [deal­ing with cli­mate, envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues] at the fes­ti­val, whether on stage or in one of the booths or some­thing like that. And using that kind of an occa­sion to inter­act with peo­ple and pro­mote the pur­pos­es of the orga­ni­za­tion that way. That would be one idea any­way. Just a quick one. And maybe even […] say some­thing at NACC (North­ern Arts and Cul­tur­al Cen­ter).

-  I was going to say that.

- Yeah, so maybe have a poster board or a booth of some sort at the big per­for­mances at NACC, some­thing like that.

- Maybe I feel like what comes to mind right away is some­body who’s not here, like Mun­ya Man­darus. His videos that he makes him­self and the videos that he made of Long­shad­ow, the events that we have here.I guess Long­shad­ow was more indoors, but the music videos he films of his music, it’s African music, com­ing in our land­scape, in the Yel­lowknife land­scape. And hav­ing an orga­ni­za­tion like yours that could share that sort of thing.  And Folk on the Rocks […] brings up artists that engage with our land­scape and our com­mu­ni­ty. And just […]mak­ing nation­al aware­ness to the beau­ty that we’re sur­round­ed with here and to the com­mu­ni­ty that we have here, both artis­tic and oth­er­wise. I think that’s real­ly nice. It’s cre­at­ing more art, essen­tial­ly, that has to do with the com­mu­ni­ty. […] Songs that Ryan McCord writes, […] you know, folk music. This is great folk music, but that’s talk­ing about Yel­lowknife specif­i­cal­ly. Visu­als that are dis­play­ing what Yel­lowknife is all about and hav­ing some­one like the Cana­di­an New Music Net­work to share that with the rest of Cana­da. Hope­ful­ly that’s inspi­ra­tional in a way that can affect the rest of the coun­try, I guess. Like:  “wow, there’s a com­mu­ni­ty that real­ly works and real­ly inter­acts with its nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment!”.

- I think also some­thing that would help musi­cians to have a clear sense of how, what’s the way to describe this? […] Ways that can direct peo­ple’s activism to pres­sure the gov­ern­ment with­in the music indus­try specif­i­cal­ly to address things like the con­sol­i­da­tion of the live music indus­try around real­ly huge, very car­bon-inten­sive per­for­mances. So we see this in the US, and here and in oth­er places to a less­er extent, major tick­et providers real­ly stran­gling small­er music venues and skew­ing the music indus­try towards these huge­ly finan­cial­ly and car­bon-inten­sive per­for­mances and tour­ing sys­tems that are shut­ting out an awful lot of musi­cians. […] I don’t know real­ly [know] what [is] sort of the over­all eco­nom­ic impact on the music sec­tor. Even just fund­ing some research into that specif­i­cal­ly would be real­ly inter­est­ing, just to see how much peo­ple who are con­sid­er­ing careers in the per­form­ing arts, […] how much are they rely­ing on get­ting into this, that end of the indus­try that relies on these very big per­for­mances? And what can we do as activists, what can the gov­ern­ment do as pol­i­cy­mak­ers to address that a lit­tle bit? […] It’s kind of a lit­tle bit dry maybe, but it’s sort of a prac­ti­cal con­cern for how we might, as musi­cians, push for a less car­bon-inten­sive indus­try overall. 

-  I [orig­i­nal­ly] had some thoughts about min­i­miz­ing car­bon impact on trav­el­ing musi­cians and just flights and things like that. But then my thought kind of spun 180 and I real­ized we brought up four musi­cians and the whole com­mu­ni­ty gets to expe­ri­ence an enrich­ing cul­tur­al moment; so now a hun­dred peo­ple did­n’t have to trav­el some­where else. So because Yel­lowknife is iso­lat­ed, I think the more great enrich­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that we can bring up here for this com­mu­ni­ty, the less peo­ple have that itch to trav­el down for a festival. 

-  It would be won­der­ful to fund some research into the eco­nom­ic mul­ti­pli­ers of exact­ly what you’re describ­ing. What is the impact of these sort of small­er, more inti­mate events that are made pos­si­ble through small inde­pen­dent venues ver­sus, the thing you’re talk­ing about, a hun­dred peo­ple trav­el­ing to go and see a big land­mark show where it’s maybe 200 bucks or 300 bucks a ticket. 

-  Which [peo­ple] will still do because it’s awe­some, but maybe less often if and because we have more going on here. […] It’s prob­a­bly more eco­nom­i­cal to bring the action here.

- Gar­neau String Quar­tet: Because we were here, we were able to go to schools in lit­tle com­mu­ni­ties out­side of Yel­lowknife and play for peo­ple there who would oth­er­wise prob­a­bly not con­sid­er tak­ing a plane to Edmon­ton. […] I would imag­ine that once you get them here (artists) you want to make sure that you bring them places so peo­ple can hear dif­fer­ent things in their own envi­ron­ment… You bring the artist there.

- I think it’s also very valu­able to have these small groups come up and have these inti­mate per­for­mances and inter­ac­tions with peo­ple here because I remem­ber the first time I saw — I grew up in where there was lots of fid­dle play­ers —  a full string quar­tet, it was at the open sky fes­ti­val in Fort Simp­son which is very small — So good! They do some real­ly cool stuff —  and I was a young kid and I saw this for the first time and It Imme­di­ate­ly real­ly cap­tured my inter­est. And kind of going from there, I got here (study­ing com­po­si­tion and play­ing). And so [to] bring those expe­ri­ences to com­mu­ni­ties that wouldn’t real­ly have them is a real­ly good way to inspire that. And then ten years lat­er you have this group of young musi­cians, com­posers, per­form­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty doing stuff which is also a real­ly great way to bring it up.

- That brings some­thing up that I was think­ing too. There are oth­er fes­ti­vals here in the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries in the small­er com­mu­ni­ties, such as the Open Sky. There used to be one in Fort Smith called the Friend­ship Fes­ti­val; there’s the Great North­ern Music Fes­ti­val up in Inu­vik; there was for a while Mid­way Lake Fes­ti­val right in the mid­dle of nowhere near Fort McPher­son… Those fes­ti­vals like that could stand sup­port as well. It is very impor­tant that we keep what we have going on here. Those oth­er small­er fes­ti­vals have val­ues as well. You were tak­ing about the effect and the influ­ence it had on you, it could be (influ­en­tial) for oth­er peo­ple there as well. It’s not just here in Yel­lowknife but also in oth­er places as well, that there are peo­ple inter­est­ed in the issues that we are talk­ing about here.

- The NWT (North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries) econ­o­my is very resource based, or at least that’s cer­tain­ly what’s pro­mot­ed most­ly by the gov­ern­ment, but they are also talk­ing about the diver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my and music as a whole, it is very low ressource use, right? So just envi­ron­men­tal­ly, those huge fes­ti­vals aside, for the most part it’s a non-con­sump­tive way of liv­ing and we should pro­mote that more and cel­e­brate that in our econ­o­my a lot more. I mean this (many) num­ber of peo­ple mak­ing at least part of their liv­ing with music is huge and so much less con­sump­tive than the oth­er kind of stuff and eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties that are usu­al­ly pro­mot­ed up here.

-  That’s a real­ly impor­tant point, and you’ve artic­u­lat­ed it real­ly well. Doing what we can to help peo­ple pur­sue careers in per­form­ing arts. I think that maybe we face bar­ri­ers up here that peo­ple don’t have in oth­er places. I grew up in a mid-sized city about an hour away from Lon­don (UK) with a thriv­ing music scene. There was lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ties to expe­ri­ence music and (cul­tur­al) things. Peo­ple are sort of told that pur­su­ing a career in per­form­ing arts is sort of fan­ci­ful, where actu­al­ly we see in all parts of the world that the per­form­ing art sec­tor is a huge­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly impor­tant sec­tor full of mean­ing­ful jobs. The more we can help peo­ple to pur­sue these jobs, the less like­ly they are to end up in more con­sump­tive and con­sum­ma­tive type jobs. That is a real­ly impor­tant point.

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: Thank you so much for these answers.

- I want to say some­thing about this ques­tion, too. I remem­ber in 2017, I was in Mon­tre­al, and I had one of my cousins here.  He want­ed me to come over and to vis­it. But I talked to some of my friends. I said, I’m going to leave Mon­tre­al to go to Yel­lowknife. A lot of peo­ple, almost all, even me, did­n’t know where [it was] exact­ly. And first thing, I’m a French speak­er, but I’m going to try to give my idea in Eng­lish, but it’s not going to be easy for me (laughing).Talking about music, I think music could be real­ly one thing can help a com­mu­ni­ty like Yel­lowknife and then to be of val­ue, to be in the spot­light. But I’m ask­ing myself, if the gov­ern­ment has a plan to use the musi­cians, the music indus­try, to help to real­ly give that val­ue, to put Yel­lowknife on the front of things. Because if the musi­cians start talk­ing about Yel­lowknife, make video clips that val­ue this space, show the land in their videos. These videos could be seen every­where in the world […] .Music could be some­thing that encour­ages tourists to come but also help Yel­lowknife and the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries make the news. I don’t know, but some­times I feel [that] a lot of peo­ple want to help but they don’t want to go on the floor to grab some­thing on the floor, some­body on the floor to help them stand. They’re just wait­ing until that per­son tries to stand by him­self, and then when he stands [they] go to [them] to say, “okay, now I want to go with it” […] 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I would have anoth­er ques­tion that I think a lot of peo­ple brought up. What tools and sup­port can orga­ni­za­tions like mine, but also on a nation­al lev­el, oth­er musi­cal orga­ni­za­tions or gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions could do to con­tin­ue to offer sup­port and to ensure rel­e­vance and via­bil­i­ty of the music sec­tor and what would be rea­son­able or what would you con­sid­er radical? 

- In terms of gov­ern­ment sup­port, the North­west­ern Ter­ri­to­ries feels twen­ty years behind every­body else. For me one of the biggest strug­gles I have right now is that it’s very dif­fi­cult for me to ful­ly sus­tain a career just in Yel­lowknife so I do trav­el a lot. I rec­og­nize that I have that priv­i­lege but it’s like I can’t real­ly [do oth­er­wise]… I’m doing that at this point in my career to get known in more places and in some cas­es tak­ing a hit and not even mak­ing mon­ey by going down to Cal­gary, or Edmon­ton, or wher­ev­er to do those things. And I approached the gov­ern­ment […] about where is the tour­ing sup­port for musi­cians in the NWT. I don’t real­ly like doing that because it feels pret­ty enti­tled, but at the same time, I am already fac­ing these bar­ri­ers: I am fur­ther away in the coun­try than every­body else is; I incur these addi­tion­al costs; and my oth­er North­ern coun­ter­parts have way more fund­ing and sup­port to be able to do that. And so I think an orga­ni­za­tion poten­tial­ly (like CNMN), and oth­ers could be help­ing us into lob­by­ing the gov­ern­ment into say­ing: “Hey in terms of mak­ing this acces­si­ble to some pret­ty tal­ent­ed North­ern musi­cians…”. Like there is so much tal­ent com­ing out of the NWT right now. Not only in music but also in writ­ing. It’s pret­ty crazy. It feels like we have so many more bar­ri­ers to over­come to get to the mar­kets that we need to get to in order to make it on the scene. What­ev­er which scene you are in. I left a full time teach­ing career just before COVID. 

- Ouch ! (Laugh­ter from the audience)

- I just have been like slam­ming against this for, you know, for four years, which I know is noth­ing com­pared to many oth­er folks and it’s just to have addi­tion­al sup­port from oth­er folks who have the resources to do research. (…) And there is some research out there in terms of what you guys are talk­ing about, I can’t remem­ber who it was, […] but they specif­i­cal­ly did the impact of indige­nous music on like in com­mu­ni­ties and the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of it (See the link at the bot­tom of the page) and I pulled that out and put that in busi­ness plans and dif­fer­ent things but more sol­id research on that kind of stuff for maybe north­ern musi­cians in gen­er­al, I think would help folks musi­cians, to real­ly […| prove our val­ue and worth if we need to jus­ti­fy it in a bot­tom line, which often we do in terms of fund­ing and gov­ern­ment support.

- We always have to (Peo­ple agreeing).

- It’s not like peo­ple are: “oh here go cre­ate your art, we expect noth­ing”. And so lob­by­ing to make that voice stronger, pro­vid­ing research would prob­a­bly be valuable. 

- There was sup­port for the North­ern Per­form­ers grant. Which I thought was a great pro­gram. […] That’s no more. I don’t know why is that no more. There’s not less mon­ey but there’s been a whole trans­for­ma­tion of the art fund­ing that we are all still get­ting to know. Basi­cal­ly it comes down to Small, medi­um and large asks. Large you have to be a soci­ety and it’s a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars, but it’s not just for an indi­vid­ual to do every­thing, small is like five thou­sand dol­lars, which we could prob­a­bly all access, but it’s once a year you can get that. And it does not work for some­body who actu­al­ly needs to go 3–4‑5 times a year to do a tour. Then you are going for Cana­da Art Coun­cil and Fac­tor, which is fine but you are wait­ing half a year with your fin­gers crossed that this will come through or you going to have to go into debt to go on this tour. It’s hard.

-  And they are not super acces­si­ble (the grants). This might sounds weird but I think about myself as a pret­ty edu­cat­ed per­son, hav­ing the sup­port of my entre­pre­neur set­tler dad also who helps me nav­i­gate the colo­nial sys­tem of apply­ing for grants and for all of those things. I see many tal­ent­ed folks who just can’t nav­i­gate that sys­tem. I am here slam­ming my head against the wall and I have a lot of ressources behind me. It’s just sad to see real­ly tal­ent­ed peo­ple not being able to get (the grant). I think maybe we do a bet­ter job of that in Yel­lowknife but I think com­mu­ni­ties get forgotten.

-  I’m going to use a swear word and I am sor­ry and I apol­o­gized in front of every­body but: “What about hav­ing a man­ag­er ?”. Who does that kind of paper­work and slug­ging, and dig­ging and so forth for you?

-  I’ve been try­ing to find a man­ag­er for 4 years now! […] In the north… Before a man­ag­er is going to take you on, they want to be assured that you are going to bring enough mon­ey to give them their 10 to 15% per­cent. You have to prove that on your own first. With help and con­nec­tions I tried to go after big names, and small names too. They give me advices.  The advices: I need to get my social media pro­files up. — Which I hate! That’s not how I want to inter­act with the world. — And to be essen­tial­ly more well know. There has to be a step­ping stone and we don’t have that step­ping stone right now. And that’s what I think orga­ni­za­tions can do, to advo­cate for that step­ping stone.

-  That works yeah.

(Par­tic­i­pants are dis­cussing about their spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ences in apply­ing to small­er project based grant in NWT)

- My expe­ri­ence is good. For exam­ple, If you want to make a new album you apply. It’s between 15,000 to 20,000$ to make an album now. Which I don’t think that’s high end at all, I real­ly don’t. If you get it they [usu­al­ly] give you half of that typ­i­cal­ly. Which is super frus­trat­ing. I get it, I talked to the folks and they do that because they want more mon­ey to go around to more peo­ple which is fair and fine. But then as a musi­cian you have to go around and try and find oth­er folks who are will­ing to invest in that. And that’s the job of a musi­cian I guess. And so I think there is sup­port for small­er projects, which I think we’ve been good at in a bunch of sec­tors actu­al­ly. Like [the] film sec­tor is pret­ty decent with pro­vid­ing pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment to begin­ners and mak­ing that acces­si­ble. But it’s a cer­tain stage that you get to[…] |There’s just so many road­block into get­ting the access and into get­ting down south. So you go away and I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want to spend as much time away as I do… but I need to. And that’s hard. And I don’t have kids. Besides my love of Yel­lowknife and my home, I don’t have as many things tying me down as many peo­ple do, so I actu­al­ly have less bar­ri­ers than I think a lot of peo­ple do.

- I think the flip side of this coin is how as artists do we make our way into the larg­er south­ern mar­ket but as far as the sus­tain­abil­i­ty ques­tion, there is how do we, again, get more artists up here to inspire cre­ation up here? So we can open for peo­ple, we can do that. I’m just putting this on record, I know I’ve prob­a­bly had this con­ver­sa­tion with many peo­ple in this room. We face a real prob­lem in Yel­lowknife specif­i­cal­ly of not hav­ing a per­for­mance spe­cif­ic venue oth­er than NACC (The North­ern Arts and Cul­tur­al Cen­tre) which is tai­lored to be a very spe­cif­ic type of artis­tic expe­ri­ence. Which is awe­some, let the record show they’re awe­some. But there’s no stand­ing room, let’s dance, let’s have fun for gen­res that are not for this (kind of setup).

-  Espe­cial­ly if you are under 19 (peo­ple agree­ing). I remem­ber wit­ness­ing the most ridicu­lous thing. A band here had a drum­mer join­ing them. The drum­mer was sev­en­teen, and the drum­mer had to be escort­ed to the stage by the secu­ri­ty guard. The secu­ri­ty guard wait­ed by the stage to the end of the set and then escort­ed the poor lit­tle guy out. It is a huge thing for me. Peo­ple who are look­ing at careers into per­form­ing arts, they have noth­ing in those for­ma­tive years between say 14 and 19. Those were the years where I devel­oped into the lev­el of play­ing tour­ing cir­cuits and sup­port­ing big bands and things like that. That’s a huge, huge thing to get that expe­ri­ence. That’s when you are exposed to the indus­try, you see how it works, you see how shows are orga­nized, you meet tour man­agers, mer­chan­dise peo­ple, oth­er musi­cians, all that kind of stuff. There’s noth­ing for young peo­ple like that here, except Folk on the Rocks and it real­ly comes down to, I think, the lack of phys­i­cal spaces. But I might be huge­ly biased in this regard.

-  It’s also a time when it’s more accept­able to fail when you are young. 

- Absolute­ly

-  Now I’m com­ing in at thir­ty some­thing and I’m learn­ing all this stuff and peo­ple are expect­ing more per­fec­tion but it’s like how the hell should I know how to do this because I have not done it like this before.

-  It’s where the acces­si­ble inde­pen­dent venues need to come in. There was a pub in my home­town where we would play. When my band was all four­teen. It was 2 bucks a tick­et, you kept a buck for every tick­et you sold and then they would make their mon­ey from the bars and oth­er things but the  entry was non-exis­tent. We f***ing sucked (every­one is laugh­ing) but we would bring in like 50 high school kids to come and have a great time and in the process of doing that you [learn so much|. We were a met­al band we, sup­port­ed Napalm Death. That was a huge expe­ri­ence! You get to see the pro­fes­sion­al bands, it’s such an impor­tant growth experience.

- I would say that we have this coin with the dif­fer­ent side, the way larg­er art orga­ni­za­tions could poten­tial­ly help sup­port more artists com­ing here and more artists going down south is with more [venue sup­port].  But before we can actu­al­ly set some kind of exchange pro­gram we do need more phys­i­cal space. With the end goals, to cre­ate a more sus­tain­able music com­mu­ni­ty, one of these means would be hav­ing very well pre-estab­lished exchanges. Artists in res­i­dence exchanges where we can send peo­ple from here down south and in exchange we can bring south­ern artists up. I think there would be such val­ue in doing that and hav­ing art larg­er orga­ni­za­tions like CCA (Cana­di­an Coun­cil for the Arts) or CNMN help­ing in cre­at­ing the infra­struc­tures to do these kinds of exchanges.

- Speak­ing direct­ly to that, one of the things I found the most valu­able in this idea of build­ing rela­tion­ships down south and with­in the com­mu­ni­ty is an expec­ta­tion of being inte­grat­ed into the com­mu­ni­ty; being hum­ble; and com­ing back. And so If I look at the peo­ple here who have come back mul­ti­ple times, I’ve told them: “I’m not let­ting you go”, but the idea of peo­ple com­ing in and going away once it’s great and it brings this lit­tle bolt of ener­gy, but that’s not sus­tain­able. So, If you are going to start build­ing rela­tion­ships with peo­ple, I feel that one of the strongest things you can do from the start is say­ing how long are you in this for. Are you in this one time ? And if you are, what is the val­ue in that ? There might be huge val­ue, but I think there’s longer val­ue and deep­er val­ue in more stay­ing pow­er; in build­ing things where peo­ple come back, or you go there. Then it builds and builds and builds.

-  I also think that anec­do­tal­ly there’s that attrac­tion right ? I think about Desirée Daw­son who came up for a res­i­den­cy in Folk [on the the rocks], she since, on her own dime came up two more times because she enjoys this place which I think is pret­ty cool. There’s a prece­dent to sug­gest that actu­al­ly, once peo­ple are out there they are like: “oh we could come back again…”.

-  That’s some­thing we can all do as well, we should have a lit­tle infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion who just show­ers vis­it­ing musi­cians with love.

(Everybody’s laugh­ing)

- Every­one is so nice here

- We do a great job of that! 

(Audi­ence agreeing)

- Car­men Braden: I mean just with the peo­ple here. There is already a lot of Edmon­ton con­nec­tions here. We just had four Edmon­to­ni­ans who came up.  Peo­ple go to school there. You guys hang out in Edmon­ton, you’re like the clas­si­cal cov­er band (jok­ing­ly talk­ing about the Gar­neau String Quar­tet). I call the TSO that (audi­ence Laugh­ing). For me this is a lit­tle seed that can grow roots.

-  I think artists […] [we do] a pret­ty good job of bring­ing north­ern artists up through dif­fer­ent res­i­den­cies, but also hav­ing north­ern artists go down into the oth­er ones… Just being part of the Folk on the Rocks res­i­den­cies, like Mo Ken­ney came up here, we did shows; same pro­gram as Désirée Daw­son, and I was like: “this is cool and I am real­ly hap­py to meet some­one and col­lab­o­rate and do all those things, but it would be cool if I could also go there.. The fund­ing is not set up to do that, and that would be true reci­procity I think. There’s a big draw to Yel­lowknife for sure because it’s remote, it’s this part of Cana­da that a lot of peo­ple don’t know, and we are real­ly suc­cess­ful in doing that. But I think in terms of that reci­procity, that also is impor­tant that we are putting our musi­cians out into the rest of Cana­da as well.

- I feel that musi­cians from Yel­lowknife, the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, and the North in gen­er­al, have always such a unique­ness to the art that they cre­ate, think­ing of Leela Gil­day and Miran­da Cur­rie and a lot of peo­ple who start­ed in the north, stayed in the north, we just have a lit­tle bit of a dif­fer­ent approach to music and also just through the con­nec­tion to the North. I feel like send­ing you South to go talk to south­ern musi­cians and inter­act with peo­ple would be very valu­able to us and also for them because it’s a very unique point of view that we have.

This part of the dis­cus­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Rob Elo who shared his expe­ri­ence in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Cana­di­an Music Incubator

-Rob Elo: I went down to do the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor pro­gram which is in Toron­to, and that’s where I applied to do this pro­gram where they take musi­cians from all over the coun­try and basi­cal­ly, it’s a five week long busi­ness course about how to be a musi­cian in the mod­ern world, how to kind of explore all the avenues that you can make mon­ey with; and learn about all the dif­fer­ent types of peo­ple, pro­duc­ers, engi­neers, co-writ­ers, per­for­mance coach­es, video­g­ra­phers and every­body that you need to work with. How to work with these peo­ple and learn who they are, or at least who they are in the Toron­ton­ian com­mu­ni­ty. And that was a real­ly cool expe­ri­ence to go down there and do that and every­one in this pro­gram […], start­ed about twelve years ago, with this guy who is a pre­vi­ous Sony Exec who was like: “I want to help young musi­cians I want to give […]”.

- I did the pro­gram too. I was in Cal­gary last year.

- Rob Elo: I wan­na ask how [it went for you]. The way I felt about it, I felt like it was great and that every­one there, they real­ly want­ed to gen­uine­ly help. We are very far from where they are, it was real­ly help­ful for me to get in. Did you go ?

- Yes I went to Cal­gary, to Bell Stu­dio for five weeks.

- Rob Elo: Oh right on! You should total­ly talk about that too! My expe­ri­ence taught me so much about rights and roy­al­ties that I can get; It gave me a lot of ressources for actu­al con­tents. I filmed live per­for­mances videos, I did pho­to­shoot, I did col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing ses­sions with peo­ple. Made a lot of con­nec­tions. And every­one in the pro­gram was basi­cal­ly like, just call any­time […] every­one seemed real­ly excit­ed about Yel­lowknife. That was the thing when, when I was like, I’m from Yel­lowknife. I’m a pos­er. (Every­one laugh­ing) I’m not like the rest of you but now I’m mak­ing Yel­lowknife my home, and I’m so excit­ed to be here and work­ing with every­one. But I just got here, like, a cou­ple of years ago. So, I mean, some of you are true yel­lowknifers. Who can I think the rest of Cana­da is just so excit­ed about when­ev­er you men­tion Yel­lowknife. “Oh my god!”. I’m work­ing with this pro­duc­er, and he’s like, “so where are you from exact­ly?“, and I showed him on the map where’s Yel­lowknife. He’s like, “holy crap!” (Audi­ence laugh­ing). But I found that… and I’d love to get just every­one, espe­cial­ly, yeah, if peo­ple have done the pro­gram, could we use some­thing like that here? The nice thing about the pro­gram was it gave you, all these infor­ma­tion on rights and roy­al­ties, all these con­nec­tions, lists of peo­ple, list of grants you could apply for, or what peo­ple […] who are deep in the indus­try, who work with the Juno Awards and who are affil­i­at­ed with… They’re in every­thing, and again, trav­el­ing to places all over the coun­try to do these types of work­shops. Not Yel­lowknife yet, but maybe…  It was all kind of con­densed, and you’ve got a fold­er of, here’s all the con­tacts, here are the grants. Here’s all the orga­ni­za­tions. Here’s a plan that you can fol­low, where you can take what you choose, your direc­tion. Because as musi­cians, I find that it’s it’s not like: “and this is what you do? Oh, you want to be a musi­cian. Okay? It’s like, this. Like that.”  No! It can be crazy. It can be what­ev­er, and it can change at any time, depend­ing on what you want and depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion you’re in. And I feel they under­stood that. You’ve got one on one sit downs with peo­ple who are like: “Okay, here’s what you want to do. Okay, here are the peo­ple you want to meet”.

-  Quick ques­tion, you are ask­ing direct­ly if it would make sense to invite this same orga­ni­za­tion? To host a Yel­lowknife like week?

- Rob Elo: yeah

- Do you, from your expe­ri­ence of what you expe­ri­enced there, going back to this ques­tion of infra­struc­ture, do you think the pro­gram can run with the cur­rent infra­struc­ture that’s in Yellowknife?

- Rob Elo:  I think a ver­sion of it can, yeah,[…] I think every­thing you’re say­ing, we need more venues. We need more sup­port for venues and to have that sort of vibran­cy that a city should have, and where you can go to lots of places. And yes, there’s an awe­some cof­fee shop where they have folk music every week. And yes, there’s a bar type atmos­phere. And yes, there’s an all ages venue where kids who are inter­est­ed in what­ev­er type of music they are inter­est­ed in can host their own shows , and can have their friends come out and don’t get escort­ed out by secu­ri­ty. The thing about the Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor at first, I came in at quite a cool time, because they used to be out­side of Toron­to in this kind of enclosed space where they were doing every­thing in house. And so this was the ten years before I start­ed the pro­gram. I came in the twelfth year, and for ten years they were out­side of the city doing every­thing. Had a record­ing stu­dio in there. They had con­fer­ence rooms and writ­ing rooms and all this stuff. So they brought every­body in, and they could do all this stuff in there, and that was great. But one of the things that I got out of the pro­gram the most was that they moved it to right down­town. Their cen­tral office, they did­n’t have all that set up yet. So one of the things that we all had to do was trav­el all over the town to dif­fer­ent places that would host these things. We went into local music stu­dios, and we worked with local pro­duc­ers. We went to venues to do my live video. We went to a venue that had live shows all the time, and they were also set up to do a live video record­ing… And so you not only got the expe­ri­ence of work­ing with all these peo­ple and doing all these things. You got in the city. And I think it could be valu­able to be: “This is what Yel­lowknife is!”. Obvi­ous­ly under con­stant improve­ment, hope­ful­ly get­ting new venues and new places to do that. But if a pro­gram like that came up, maybe we could host it in dif­fer­ent places, in Yel­lowknife, and have local musi­cians, young, any­where in our musi­cal careers, doing things at dif­fer­ent places and see­ing how it could work. Does any­one have any opin­ions on that?

- Some­one actu­al­ly had one, like with CMI (Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor), four years ago, that was like a two day work­shop, did­n’t you? Did­n’t we? I have a pic­ture… (Peo­ple laughing)

-  The thing that I appre­ci­ate about that was that there were peo­ple there who were famil­iar with North­ern real­i­ties, right? And then there are peo­ple there who are famil­iar with, and very skilled about, Cana­di­an music indus­try busi­ness and roy­al­ties and all of those things. And I think that obvi­ous­ly […] on my mind is tour­ing, okay ? Like this is on my mind, I admit maybe no one else cares about it (Peo­ple laughing).They pro­vid­ed […] “you can go to FACTOR and you can do this, and you can do that”. Okay, if I want to go to Cal­gary com­mu­ni­ties, and this is how you would do it. But, if I want to do a north­ern tour in NWT, the logis­tics and the like, what­ev­er, of doing that, it’s almost impos­si­ble, unless you part­ner with NACC. […] Hav­ing a hybrid, kind of of CMI, and then folks who real­ly […] pull a lot of knowl­edge around, you know, grants and fund­ing. […]  And so doing a hybrid of “here’s the music indus­try.”. But then here’s the north­ern real­i­ties that I think don’t get addressed when we go to south­ern things. 

- Sure, yeah.

- So you’re talk­ing when you say tour­ing, you’re talk­ing specif­i­cal­ly about North­ern tour­ing or about going [South]. Both, yeah? 

- I would love to do a north­ern schools tour, for exam­ple, in all the dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, because I think the music that I make for kids is, you know… It’s a north­ern indige­nous music specif­i­cal­ly. Why would I not want to bring this mes­sage to school kids, right? And then, also bring­ing that to [reser­va­tions] and dif­fer­ent places down south and not. I’d also like to play soft seat the­aters. I’d also like to play… I want to know about the gamut of that […] how to actu­al­ly make that hap­pen with­out a book­ing agent, because I can’t get one.

- Sure, sure.

-  Well, yeah, I almost feel like, like […], even see­ing every­one here now, we could almost have the resources to make a pool. Pool the resources togeth­er. Because I know some peo­ple here know about the north­ern…  I cer­tain­ly, [peo­ple] have been amaz­ing as always, shar­ing infor­ma­tion about the grants that we can apply for, what they’re for. […] You have a lot of infor­ma­tion about this, about the dif­fer­ent places around Yel­lowknife, where they can host per­for­mances like that. Some folks have that infor­ma­tion. It’d be nice to have… CMI had all this in a nice lit­tle pack­age. And we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need CMI to do that for us, but if we could some­how ral­ly the troops and have kind of this, this acces­si­ble thing, you know, maybe in the form of a program.

- I think the hybrid is […] yeah, both of those things are cool

- What was the name of that program?

- Rob Elo: Cana­di­an Music incubator

- Cana­di­an music, egg that you hatch from, they hatch new music. 

- Rob Elo: That’s right, yeah (Audi­ence laugh­ing). I feel that. I don’t feel that I ful­ly hatched yet, do you have any expe­ri­ences you had of the program?

- I was super stoked to get into it […]. When I went, I was like: “Okay, this is the tick­et. This is the con­nec­tions that I need to do, the things that I need to do in order to get where I want to get.” […] I put a lot of weight in it. 

- Yeah.

- it’s a great pro­gram […] and I did make a lot of con­nec­tions. I think the thing that I came away with was, I had a lit­tle bit of like a midlife cri­sis after I got back from it to tell you the truth, because […] the folks who were in that pro­gram, they map out very clear­ly this cer­tain path­way to suc­cess and my path­way […]  looks a lot dif­fer­ent than what they mapped out as the path­way to suc­cess. And, I mean, that’s just me as a per­son. I just like doing hard things. (Every­one is laughing).

-  That is true. They def­i­nite­ly like, you know, they’re like “social media!”. So if you weren’t into social media…

-   I did after going there, I was on Face­book, and I hired a media per­son after­wards, and now I’m on Tik­Tok and Insta­gram […]. We cre­at­ed con­tent on a cal­en­dar, putting it out every week, we were able to cre­ate that con­tent six months in advance. So they taught me a lot of skills that way. […] and it’s up to me to keep that going, which I don’t real­ly. […] I’m just gonna be real­ly hon­est, because I think it’s impor­tant, and I think we all have these thoughts. I was like, “Wow! I’m just not as good as most of those oth­er peo­ple in the pro­gram […], they real­ly have some tal­ent!” […] they also, […]  most of the peo­ple I felt, looked a cer­tain way to be real­ly mar­ketable down there. And, I don’t look like that. That’s not me. And I came away feel­ing like: “Oh, my God, am I like, Am I doing the right thing, right?”.  And I think we all have that, which is why I just want to share that. We all have doubts some­where there. 

- Total­ly.

-  And then […] I’ve just felt like my voice was­n’t good enough. I did­n’t look the right way, and my social media sucked. That’s what I came out of that pro­gram know­ing. But it was, real­ly awe­some, because no one else would have told me that. 

-  Yeah, right. (Every­one is laughing)

-  And so then, last sum­mer, I spent the sum­mer in Van­cou­ver tak­ing pri­vate voice lessons from a teacher down there. […] You know: “Okay, I’m gonna improve my voice”. And I went and […] I have been learn­ing more about social media, and I still suck at it. I would hire that out.

-  Total­ly

-  100%

 —  I’ve spent the win­ter writ­ing two albums, like a new [album for] kids and a new [album for] adults, this thing […] talk­ing to peo­ple from that pro­gram, yeah, was real­ly help­ful. And being like: “hey, what do you think of this”. And hav­ing a real cri­tique, an artis­tic cri­tique of peo­ple’s work is real­ly valu­able as well. And you don’t need to go to that pro­gram to do that, but it did. It brought me down to build me back up.

- Rob Elo: Yeah. I felt the same, yeah. And I feel like […], this, you know, talk, or what­ev­er, talk­ing to all of you. I was like: “okay, I kind of struc­tured it out”. And, of course, it’s noth­ing like what I thought, but I think that a big theme of that was kind of musi­cal direc­tion and feel­ing. That’s why I took the pro­gram to begin with, I was like: “okay, what’s my direc­tion?”.  I spent so much time play­ing in bands, play­ing with oth­er peo­ple, being a part of a group, which I love, and I still do that, and it’s like the best thing ever, but I real­ly want­ed to have that musi­cal direc­tion for myself. To feel like I was tak­ing the reins a bit, and I did­n’t know exact­ly how to do that, and this, this was almost an alter­na­tive to for­mal edu­ca­tion, which is still total­ly awe­some and great. But it was like, some­thing […] “okay, you want to be a musi­cian and try some sort of alter­na­tive, writ­ing your own music that’s like, pop or rock cen­tric and doing that…”. So that was cool, but it def­i­nite­ly took me to that same place where I went. “Oh…” […]  It was great, because every­one in the pro­gram was kind of in that space, like a lot. Some peo­ple were amaz­ing. Some peo­ple I was : “Oh, my God, you’re so good!”. And then oth­er peo­ple […] maybe I did­n’t vibe with their music as much, but every­one had that feel­ing of: “What are we? Which way are we going?”. And I feel every­one had a reck­on­ing of sorts. Mine was in per­for­mance, and that’s why it’s so cool […] because I real­ized I play cov­er songs a lot, and I play in bands a lot. I love the music that I play in bands, and I love play­ing cov­er music and groov­ing and stuff like that. And I real­ized because we had sev­er­al per­for­mances that we had to do, which I think is a great thing for any­one to do, we had per­for­mances that we had to do in front of the whole team. We had the live per­for­mance video, we did a mock show­case per­for­mance at the end, where every­one did a set. And I real­ized that just me as a solo per­form­ing. I’ve been doing back­ground music for so long[…]. I don’t know how it feels to just be me doing, putting on a show. And I real­ized I did­n’t like my music the way I played it, [the way] I was play­ing it for peo­ple. […] It was my own epiphany. And I was like: “Oh my God!”. It was a per­for­mance coach who kind of told me that […] you have to find what you real­ly enjoy, and then that can trans­late to peo­ple[…]. The pro­gram kind of helped me notice where, whether it was by what they told me, what I had to fig­ure out of my own. […] Just so much immer­sion with all these musi­cians, all these dif­fer­ent peo­ple, what I need­ed to work on, what and where I want­ed to go […] and I felt despair in some ways, but it was good. it has been lead­ing to…

-  To the Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor and despair! (Every­one is laughing)

- Exact­ly, incu­ba­tor of despair!

(peo­ple laughing)

-  I think, if I were to offer some­thing to folks in the group, is that this came out of that for me too. […] I worked with [sev­er­al peo­ple] quite a bit to real­ly hone what I want­ed my music to be and come up […] I thought of this, like, a the­sis state­ment.  because I do kids stuff and I do adult stuff, right? […] The exam­ple for me: “Oh, I cre­ate authen­tic north­ern indige­nous con­tent that is acces­si­ble to chil­dren and fam­i­lies” […] and try­ing to tell peo­ple, what kind of music do you play, right? That’s always real­ly hard. But if you can have some­thing sol­id and suc­cinct around that; it takes a lot of back­ground work to go into your­self as a musi­cian and be like: “What am I about? What do I want to be about?”. And then have that line. I think if every per­son in this room came up with that, we’d all be bet­ter musicians.

-  Yeah, Yeah.

- Rob Elo: […] I picked up a lot of things from the pro­gram, but the dif­fer­ent rights orga­ni­za­tions that you can reg­is­ter your orig­i­nal music with, and all the dif­fer­ent sources of fund­ing that can come in, [it’s] real­ly impor­tant now, to mem­o­rize them (Jok­ing­ly). Every­one has heard of SOCAN, right?

-  Not every­one. 

- Rob Elo: Okay, so, SOCAN is this orga­ni­za­tion where you can put your music, you can reg­is­ter your music there and get roy­al­ties from them. Get quar­ter­ly pay­ments for every time your music is played. […] you can get paid when it’s played and streamed in ways that you know, not just your pub­lish­er, your music pub­lish­er will give you. But basi­cal­ly, Cana­di­an Music incu­ba­tor ham­mered in for me that every time I would always for­get to reg­is­ter with SOCAN. […] I played in lots of bands when I was grow­ing up, and we nev­er had SOCAN accounts.[…] We were just like: “that’s a mys­te­ri­ous kind of thing that I don’t want to be con­cerned about…”. But you can go to SOCAN web­site, you can sign your­self up, and any­thing you’ve writ­ten, any­thing you’ve been a part of with oth­er bands, you can put all your all your music on there, and then any­time that music is played or used, you’re going to get paid for it.  And one of the things they kind of ham­mered home about that, is you nev­er know when these things are going to come up, where your music might be used or might be played, and if you’re not set up prop­er­ly, then it’s gonna bite you when you don’t get paid. […] One of the things I don’t know is, does any­one else here play in projects like bands, […] sce­nar­ios where there’s splits going on ? […] Who gets what?

- Yeah, I think that’s one of the big things that, whether it’s about work­ing with bands or play­ing in the band, is that that dis­cus­sion hap­pens as ear­ly as pos­si­ble for trans­paren­cy. Because if some­thing is bring­ing in a fair amount of mon­ey, you want to make sure that every­one knows who is going to get what and you’re not try­ing to fig­ure that out at the wrong time. 

- Rob Elo: Yes, exact­ly. That’s def­i­nite­ly, again, talk­ing about what was said, I real­ized that. And now I’m doing my own solo stuff, and so I’m gear­ing up to every bit of music I release, I’m going to reg­is­ter it with all these places that I’ll talk fur­ther about. But from bands I’ve been in that have got­ten plays in var­i­ous areas, I’m going: “Ah! We nev­er talked about that!”. And so it’s great to always talk about the splits of things. One of the things that struck me when I was doing my inter­view for CMI and the pro­gram, because they call me: “Hey, you’re one of the appli­cants we’re con­sid­er­ing. Can we talk to you more about what you do and how you’d be suit­ed for this.” And they ask you a bunch of ques­tions and one is: “What are the rights you’re enti­tled to. Do you know about that stuff?”. I know about Socan for some rea­son, but that’s about it. You can sign up for SOCAN for your song­writ­ing cred­its but you can also sign up for your pub­lish­ing rights as well and that’s a dif­fer­ent process to sign up for this. So those are the song­writ­ing rights that you have. 

On the oth­er side, you have your record­ings, so you can reg­is­ter the record­ings of your music, the mechan­i­cal piece every time your song is played on radio […]. When­ev­er they [CMI] talk about your music being played, they talk about it as a per­for­mance, which I thought was inter­est­ing, because you only think of live per­for­mance, but it’s actu­al­ly a per­for­mance dig­i­tal­ly, too. […] And there’s also the Mas­ters side, how your record­ing is financed. That’s anoth­er area of your rights. 

So I found it real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing learn­ing about all these things. I have a to do list now for all my music, and you kind of just have to. It does make you feel, […] when you have this list of where you can reg­is­ter all your music, to get all your dif­fer­ent rights, it does feel like you’re mak­ing progress. Because, […] you have your bases cov­ered. When you’re doing these steps, these actu­al, […] con­crete steps to mak­ing sure that, on the back end, your music is actu­al­ly going to be mak­ing you mon­ey, and that you’ll be ready if your music sud­den­ly gets picked up by [some­body] in some way. And if you start get­ting a lot of plays, you’ll be ready to receive those royalties. 

- Just on that very same top­ic. I inter­ject here, I wish to brag a wee lit­tle bit, because of SOCAN, I make about $100 a year from SOCAN. Some­body some­where, I don’t know who or where, is play­ing my music. […] It’s gonna have to be radio, because I don’t have any videos or what­ev­er. So it’s going to be radio, but some­where in the world, and that’s been in New­found­land, and it’s been in Nova Sco­tia, and it’s been in New Zealand, and it’s been in Poland, and var­i­ous places around the world that have played me some­how, So SOCAN found out that my music has been played. Now $100 a year is going to buy you a box of beer or some­thing, right? But it’s bet­ter than absolute­ly noth­ing, and it means that some­body some­where out there is play­ing or lis­ten­ing to your music. So if you haven’t done it already, you know, get on there. It’s my advice for what it’s worth,

-  I don’t think you said it explic­it­ly, but the oth­er side of song­writ­ing is, if you’re not a song­writer, but you’re a musi­cian in a record­ing of an album, which can hap­pen for a lot of peo­ple. That’s oth­er roy­al­ties you can col­lect. It’s almost like you’re dou­ble dip­ping, if you’re a song­writer and you’re play­ing on the album, singing… 

- Exact­ly. 

- Those are dif­fer­ent pots of mon­ey you can access.

- Rob Elo: Exact­ly. Yeah, that’s right. And every­one who’s on record­ing [might be] deserv­ing of rights. So yeah that’s the inter­est­ing thing. When you’re […] a sole pro­pri­etor, essen­tial­ly, when it’s your music and you’re mak­ing record­ings and you’re doing all this, you have access to all those rights. If you have a record com­pa­ny and they own your mas­ters or what­ev­er, you know you’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly col­lect­ing rights. They are col­lect­ing the roy­al­ties for a par­tic­u­lar por­tion. Anoth­er thing I want to talk about is sync licens­ing and get­ting your music in shows and in movies and things like that. […] Have any of you had your music in movies ?

(Some of the par­tic­i­pants are nodding)

Yeah, that’s so cool! I’d love to hear about that expe­ri­ence, because what I’ve heard and learned from CMI and from oth­er friends of mine who’ve had this hap­pen is that a lot of the time for sync licens­ing… And they call it sync­ing because you’re syn­chro­niz­ing your music to video[…]  but it’ll be kind of on a dime, where if you have a ver­sion of your song, you should have it instru­men­tal too. If there are vocals, you should have these ver­sions ready to go, because if a TV show or a movie wants to choose your music. They’re going to be say­ing: “Hey, we want to sub­mit it. We want to use this and get it going, like, tomor­row. So can you give me the wav files? Can you give me the mp3 files and all the files that we need?”. So, if you don’t have your music pre­pared and orga­nized like: “Okay, here’s the instru­men­tal ver­sion, here’s the clean ver­sion, here’s all this stuff.” You’re going to miss an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Has any­one had that experience?

-  I’ve kind of had the oppo­site [expe­ri­ence] in terms of rela­tion­ship build­ing and know­ing… Because some projects start off as friends: “Oh, we’ll just do this, this and this, and it’s not for­mal.” . But I think I do need to learn a lot more about this, because some songs that I’ve made have end­ed up on shows and I had no idea because of the rela­tion­ship part of who I’ve lent or let some­one else hold my own music. So it’s the paper­work… I’ve learned friends are not just friends, you know, right? 

- So, did you sign, sign off on your music so some­body else could con­trol that and give it…

- No, no, they just did. It was a small town, old high school friends, and prob­a­bly should have got that on paper.

-  Strict­ly speak­ing, although this isn’t much help, you own the copy­right to a song. As soon as you write it, you don’t have to apply for it. You don’t have to sign it up in any way. Sim­ply by writ­ing it, you own it. All you have to do is be able to prove that at the right time.  Be that as it may, it’s def­i­nite­ly, def­i­nite­ly some­thing that should show up if you’re going to record a CD or what­ev­er, and you’re going to write it down: “This song is by John Smith, SOCAN, or John Smith pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny”.. That sort of thing is worth doing. You know, no mat­ter how much you trust your friends and so forth, it’s always very worth­while to make sure that your name is on it some­how, somewhere. 

- Well, when you’re in your ear­ly 20s and you don’t know. I did­n’t even real­ize that SOCAN was a thing, or that you can sign up for these things.

- Well, that’s the thing. I’m sor­ry. I remem­ber think­ing this when I was tak­ing the pro­gram and I’m in my 30s. I was like: “Oh, my God, I would have loved this when I was 20 some­thing!”. Get­ting start­ed with, keep all your files, orga­nize your rights when your song is writ­ten, have it in that fold­er that’s “this is the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the record­ing” in addi­tion to sign­ing up for SOCAN and reg­is­ter­ing it. That’s some­thing that should always be done.

- I think with SOCAN, and I think with MROC (Musi­cians’ Rights Orga­ni­za­tion Cana­da) too, it can be set up so that when you put in your infor­ma­tion, there’s a retroac­tive piece, yeah? I don’t know how far back it’s going right now. 

-  I did it, and it goes, it goes back, like, I think a year or two…

-  They used to go back like just a few years ago. They go back into the 90s. 

- Oh, my god, yeah?

- I think so. 

- Anoth­er inter­est­ing piece that I found out through CMI also was that they found me sur­prise mon­ey, which was real­ly awe­some! [Peo­ple laugh­ing]. So in terms of per­for­mances I’ve played for, say, folk on the rocks, for exam­ple. Every set list that is played is reg­is­tered to SOCAN, and then SOCAN pays out that per­for­mance that you made. So major fes­ti­vals, venues, maybe it’s not the bar down the road who does that. But I would say prob­a­bly most soft seat the­aters would do that and so when went back and looked for those per­for­mances, there was like, sev­en of them for me, and they were like: “Oh, you get, like — I think, you know, not much — maybe 250 or 300 bucks pay­out!”. or some­thing like that.  But if you’re not even reg­is­tered, they might have still reg­is­tered your songs for you. So when you join SOCAN, you may have some per­for­mances sit­ting there that haven’t had roy­al­ties claimed on. That’s right and you can upload setlists.

- Car­men Braden: Okay so Long­shad­ow moment here. As the host of Long­shad­ow, I have a respon­si­bil­i­ty, I know so you and you and you (jok­ing­ly point­ing musi­cians around the room)We’ve got some work to do still, because I don’t know what set, what the names of your songs are from your set. You either have to send that to SOCAN, or you have to tell me, and I have to send it to SOCAN. And there’s always been, for me as a com­pos­er, this: “No, it’s your job. No, it’s your job!”. Who’s actu­al­ly respon­si­ble? So maybe the Gar­neau could even pitch in here. When you guys do a con­cert, do you reg­is­ter your set list with SOCAN? Or do you trust the venue to, or do you expect the com­pos­er to know when you play your works? […] 

- Well, that’s why it’s prob­a­bly our respon­si­bil­i­ty as artists. 

- Car­men Braden: It’s a bit of a shared one too. […] Hold each oth­er account­able. So like, if you play some­where, you should ask them, like, who’s reg­is­ter­ing this with SOCAN? Did you buy the license for it? […] My code of con­duct is that I’ve tried to, like, up the busi­ness game for what I’m doing in Yel­lowknife, and make it a lit­tle less [about] my friends. We can be friends, but we’re work­ing togeth­er, and when and if it goes sour, we’re gonna be pro­fes­sion­al. So, we keep each oth­er account­able, and that’s what I think I need a lit­tle more of in this town too, is like oth­er peo­ple learn­ing about this and hold­ing each oth­er to account, so I don’t miss three years of reg­is­ter­ing peo­ple’s songs. I should do it tomor­row, but I’m gonna be tired (every­one is laugh­ing). I’m curi­ous, Gar­neau, what do you guys do when you go and play?

- We gen­er­al­ly just trust that the venues are doing it right.

- And it depends very much on which music that we play. 

- Why would it depend? 

- Well, Mozart’s fam­i­ly’s not get­ting paid out. (Every­body is laughing)

- But it’s a good point. I think we should let the com­posers know every time we per­form their music, because I think you have to be a mem­ber of SOCAN to…

- And you have to have your song reg­is­tered, yes? So if you just wrote a new song yes­ter­day, and it’s not reg­is­tered and say it’s on the set list, you haven’t reg­is­tered it. You’re not going to get mon­ey for it.

- No but it’s retroactive.

- They’re expect­ing the mem­bers to do the work. So for us, we can tell the com­posers that we’re performing. 

- That’s always real­ly appreciated.

- That’s a good point, because we don’t alway have the reflex of doing that. 

- No, I don’t think about this all the time.

- Nor­mal­ly, it would be con­nect­ed to the actu­al sheet music process, right? 

- Offi­cial­ly, my under­stand­ing is it’s the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the venue. It can be us that kind of fol­lows up with them and just checks in if it’s a venue that we think might not have things up to date, but it’s the venue’s responsibility

-  But they might not want to pay that licensing 

- Exact­ly! 

- Then you get into some awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions there.

- I was pro­gram­ming  for a con­cert that I did in May. And we played a Dutch piece by a Dutch com­pos­er who has passed away, but not that long ago. So I bought the music, and I had to buy a license with the sheet music for a per­for­mance on that date. So the music that I down­loaded said at the bot­tom: “licensed to be per­formed on May so and so…”, and I hap­pened to be the great grand­daugh­ter of this com­pos­er. So then my fam­i­ly kept like, you know, three euros for that performance.

- (Jok­ing­ly) Rea­son to cel­e­brate right ? 

(Every­body laughs)

- Car­men Braden: We have only like, 10 more min­utes left, and I kind of don’t real­ly want our awe­some con­ver­sa­tion to end on roy­al­ties. Could I ask maybe some of the col­lab­o­ra­tors in the room just to talk about what that process has been like dur­ing the Long­shad­ow fes­ti­val. So either the song­writ­ers, com­posers, arrangers or the per­form­ers. Just in that idea of rela­tion­ship build­ing and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, how what you’ve done here res­onates? What are you maybe going to take away from this time?

•  I split my time between Edmon­ton and Yel­lowknife, most­ly in Yel­lowknife now, and I am very grate­ful to have four new friends in Edmon­ton. Of course, the artists that I got to work with this week­end as well. It’s a small town, and maybe I’ve seen your faces before, but now I feel like I know these peo­ple. It’s a pret­ty inti­mate con­nec­tion to work on your song for a week, and I just sit there and lis­ten to your voice over and over and over again (peo­ple are laugh­ing). It’s not a bad thing at all. It’s a real­ly won­der­ful thing, but, you know, I had to just lis­ten to your song that many times. So that’s a unique expe­ri­ence for me to be able to real­ly immerse myself with these artists for a chunk of time, and then I’ll walk away from that song for a lit­tle while, and I’ll lis­ten to it enough that it gets stuck in my head. Because then, usu­al­ly when it’s stuck in my head and I’m singing in the show­er, that’s when the oth­er lines start to emerge. “Oh, okay, that’ll be cool in the high reg­is­ter of the vio­la!” because, it’s more nasal­ly and I sound nasal­ly in the show­er, (every­one is laugh­ing) and it’s this whole wild ride. A lot of peo­ple ask me through the process, how long does it take to write a song? 

•  I asked you that 17 times I think.

• And I was like I don’t know. I could prob­a­bly smash one out in eight hours if we had to, but ide­al­ly it’s eight hours over, like 16 small chunks of time. Where I can spend some time in between let­ting things steep and fer­ment and change. Any­way, my take­away is that over­all I’m grate­ful to real­ly get to meet some peo­ple on a per­son­al lev­el through the music. So thanks for hav­ing me along for that.

•  Yeah, It’s just such an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence. I was just over­whelmed grate­ful­ness for you arrang­ing the songs, for Car­men putting this togeth­er, and all of you in the string quar­tet for doing it. One of my favorite moments was when we had played it a cou­ple of times, and at first it was like, you know, me and a string quar­tet play­ing the thing along to it, and then as we played it and lis­tened to each oth­er, and then got ideas and made sev­er­al tweaks. I got a feel for when things were hap­pen­ing and play­ing over the piano in the sec­ond verse and every­thing. It was just like,“whoa!”. That was real­ly when you got the cel­lo line of the rhythm that I had in the left hand, […] that’s so that’s so great. Yeah, it was just such an amaz­ing feel­ing. It’s one of those, again, I was feel­ing stag­nant in play­ing my own music and this was def­i­nite­ly a rem­e­dy. Like, “Oh, this can be great, yeah?”. Just a thrilling expe­ri­ence that makes me see my music in a dif­fer­ent light. 

• Yeah, that was so amaz­ing. I don’t know if all the artists that col­lab­o­rat­ed with the audio got the same feel­ing as me. I remem­ber 2013, 2014 I used to play in a band in Brazil. It’s not the same thing when you just have a gui­tar or key­board and you play in solo, but when you play with a full band. For me, I feel you breathe real­ly nice, and then you feel the enve­lope, […] it gives you that con­fi­dence. […]You feel you’re in a dif­fer­ent world. But that is the feel­ing I get, you know, that was so amaz­ing. That’s why I can’t wait to play with a band. […] That was so nice guys and you did a good job, and then to arrange the music. […] And then that was so nice and thank you, Thank you!

• I feel like it was a very mean­ing­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion for all of us. The four of us, we play in the Edmon­ton Sym­pho­ny as well. And I feel like… Oh, now I’ve paint­ed myself into a corner.I guess. (Every­body laughs) I just think the ide­al when peo­ple get togeth­er and play music togeth­er, is that they go in with open hearts and lis­ten and are open to one anoth­er. And I think when we all leave, we’re all a lit­tle bit rich­er in hav­ing had the expe­ri­ence. So that’s what it felt like to me. It was real­ly great. And some­times not, not all the time does it feel that way, but cer­tain­ly with the Quar­tet and with all of you, is just yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what I take away from it, is just meaningful…

• (Abrupt­ly ask­ing) Did you have fun? 

• Yeah, we had a lot of fun. 

• There you go! You win! You win! 

• Yeah!

• I would like to add to that 100 years ago, when I was a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian, I did get a few gigs with the Edmon­ton sym­pho­ny, and the lev­el of play­ing is amaz­ing, but the expe­ri­ence is a bit scary. You’re just scared of mak­ing a mis­take, and the ama­teur music I’ve done here at a much low­er lev­el is just done for the sheer love of music. So you’re kind of free from hav­ing to pay your rent from play­ing music. And those expe­ri­ences, they’re bet­ter. You know, you’re not play­ing at the same lev­el as you did at a pro­fes­sion­al lev­el, but the right spir­it is there, and you’re just doing it because you love music, and I think it’s chal­leng­ing in your occu­pa­tion to keep that love in doing what you do. 

• I can assure you we make lots of mistakes. 

• (Everybody’s laugh­ing)

• Yes, I just want to add to that too. I mean, dis­cus­sion here has been, you know, sup­port­ing musi­cians at a pro­fes­sion­al lev­el, but we’ve got peo­ple here that came through the music edu­ca­tion sys­tem in the ter­ri­to­ries, and right now, we’ve changed music cur­ricu­lum, and it’s at a kind of a pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion as to whether music edu­ca­tion in the schools is going to be done to the same lev­el, and unless you’ve got music edu­ca­tion in the schools, then you’re not going to have the peo­ple around here. I’m part of the music teach­ers asso­ci­a­tion […] I’m try­ing to get to the schools, so that we real­ly do have pro­fes­sion­al music being taught in schools. And it also reminds me of a cou­ple of things. One is that they can also teach, you know, at the high­er lev­els, that there are these career aspects to it;  there is a busi­ness aspect to being a musi­cian, as well as a cit­i­zen­ship aspect. And that whole thing of how impor­tant it is, of lis­ten­ing, of coop­er­at­ing with oth­ers, of hav­ing an open heart, of cre­ativ­i­ty. I mean, aren’t those things so impor­tant for kids, right? And that starts at the school lev­el, and then kids join bands with their class­mates and go on to take music in uni­ver­si­ty and things like that.

•  But there’s anoth­er area of advo­ca­cy for an orga­ni­za­tion like yours, right at the edu­ca­tion right at grade six, grade sev­en, get an instru­ment in their hands.

• Grade One and two get an Instru­ment in their hands, grade one and two!

•  I think that the thing I’m hear­ing is, I’ve been lucky to have the shared expe­ri­ence of cre­at­ing music with oth­ers and there’s noth­ing like it in life. I think every child should have that oppor­tu­ni­ty to do it. And I think that that sort of grass­roots from the very bot­tom up is […]. My hypoth­e­sis now is that it’s some­thing that music NWT can sup­port. And from, think­ing back to your gov­ern­ment ques­tion, like, how can the gov­ern­ment sup­port this? The ideas that have come out here, like spaces, per­for­mance spaces, rehearsal spaces. The infra­struc­ture is not yet in place, but I think there is a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty, because of the skill and the tal­ent and the authen­tic­i­ty of the artists here, that Yel­lowknife could be, or could aim to have a brand of music and a vibrant music scene that is attract­ing peo­ple from around the world. 

There’s a research project about North­ern and remote com­mu­ni­ties around the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit of music. Reyk­javik, Daw­son City, you know, like there are places that have done this before. You know, the quin­tes­sen­tial exam­ple is Nashville. Like, every­one knows what Nashville means, right? It’s like it’s a mec­ca for musi­cians. So I won­der, from a gov­ern­ment point of view, it’s one thing to give out grants for, you know, more devel­oped per­form­ers to go down south, but like there is I think the larg­er oppor­tu­ni­ty  to cre­ate a place where peo­ple can come and every­one who I’ve [met], who have trav­eled from else­where to come here and play, have this feel­ing of, “Wow, this is a spe­cial place…. And there are spe­cial tour­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties here. The snow­cas­tle Fes­ti­val, I think, is unique in the world, and that any­one who’s come through there is like, “Wow, holy sh*t. This is incred­i­ble!” . And so devel­op­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties for per­for­mance spaces and rehearsal spaces, like peo­ple are rent­ing stor­age lock­ers here to rehearse, that’s insane. So I think from a gov­ern­ment point of view, if I was sit­ting in gov­ern­ment or you’re the may­or, Pre­mier, the Prime Min­is­ter… They have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to devel­op cul­ture, because there is eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit, I think that’s clear. 

But also they’re in a posi­tion to influ­ence cor­po­rate cul­ture, the enter­prise, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, who are extract­ing resources from this coun­try and not giv­ing any­thing back. So if I were in the gov­ern­men­t’s posi­tion, I would have poli­cies in place, not only to have them man­dat­ed to sup­port arts because of all the ben­e­fits. Not just the artis­tic mer­it of kids, but the trans­fer­able skills that you devel­op learn­ing how to play an instru­ment. I don’t know any oth­er way of doing that mat­ter. And so, back to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty piece, like, why are cor­po­ra­tions not putting mon­ey for­ward to help tour­ing be more sus­tain­able, from a car­bon impact point of view? There are min­ing com­pa­nies here with mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. I don’t see any of their logos on any of our projects here. That is sort of the col­lec­tive action that  if I think about Yel­lowknife here, like, yeah, we don’t have that much indus­try, we don’t have that much busi­ness. But if we were to expand this con­ver­sa­tion across the coun­try, every arts musi­cian or orga­ni­za­tion is like: “no, we’re not going to f*cking do arts and cul­ture unless you put in your part here.”. Like, there’s an impact to doing this. There’s an impact for our coun­try and our soci­ety as a whole.  That is the aspect of this world we live in that is not con­tribut­ing. They’re not putting in their fair part. So that’s what I would say to polit­i­cal pow­ers if I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty.  And hope­ful­ly on the record here, this will be read by every sin­gle one of them.

- I also want to add on to that, this idea that if we were to devel­op and real­ly have an end goal of  cre­at­ing Yel­lowknife as, like, a sort of musi­cal mec­ca, like a Daw­son City or a Sackville or, these places in Cana­da, there seems to be that attrac­tion to go and make music in these kinds of more rur­al place. One of the things that I have to say is,  there needs to be that col­lab­o­ra­tion and that atten­tion and that focus with con­nect­ing to the Dene and Inu­it peo­ple and Métis.  Because I know that so many peo­ple who are com­ing up, they say: “wow, this cul­ture is so much more alive here than any­where else in Cana­da!”. And, if there is to be that end goal, that needs to be explic­it­ly put in. […] That needs to be so explic­it­ly writ­ten into the end goal because not only is it impor­tant on an eth­i­cal stand­point, it’s as far as a brand­ing thing, it’s some­thing that’s unique. And the same way that I’ve heard so many artists come up here, just Indige­nous, non-Indige­nous artists come here and say, what a spe­cial place. I’ve heard so many Indige­nous peo­ple come up here from oth­er nations and be like, “holy sh*t, like, what is hap­pen­ing here?”. And I think we can’t lose that in the process if we are to make or build that.

- I have some­thing about this. But I think there is some­thing, when you’re talk­ing about the music, I think music could be one thing. […] it could be one thing and then could unite a lot of peo­ple around it. I think we can use that and then to devel­op our music here. That is not to focus on just one cul­ture, but we can mix every­thing togeth­er.  And then to show music could reunite peo­ple togeth­er. […] I’m some­one who does­n’t have cul­ture, because the cul­ture of the world is my cul­ture. […] Then every­where I am, I’m like water. And then if you put me in that cup, I’m going to take the form of this cup. That’s the way I am. […] I meet peo­ple here from dif­fer­ent places all over the world. And then we can put our­selves togeth­er and then make music in maybe dif­fer­ent lan­guages and dif­fer­ent cul­tures and then mix every­thing. Because we’re not going to do music just for Yel­lowknife, just for Cana­da. Nowa­days, the music is some­thing good all over the world. You know. Then that’s why for me, I think we need to put the cul­ture togeth­er, put the rhythms of music togeth­er.  For exam­ple, you can in just one music find dif­fer­ent rhythms inside one song.That is a project […] I’m think­ing about work­ing on it. […] And then if we have a Christ­mas song, and then many peo­ple, and then they talk about dif­fer­ent things, but around the same sub­ject, but in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. To show all we can be togeth­er for one thing, for one reason. 

- I think we’re get­ting close to time. 

- Raphaël Foisy-Cou­ture: I’ve been main­ly ask­ing ques­tions but I feel this con­ver­sa­tion also makes me want to maybe share a bit more of my musi­cal and com­mu­ni­ty expe­ri­ences on every­thing that has been said here too. […] We’ve talked about the stress and the pres­sure of best prac­tices, which is a lot of what we’ve been talk­ing about: the idea of indus­try. But a lot of peo­ple don’t do music for the indus­try. From where I, my music, or the music of the scene I come from, which is large­ly exper­i­men­tal, large­ly very weird by nature or unusu­al. Every­body might like to make a liv­ing with music, but it’s just not pos­si­ble. Even with my music, most of the peo­ple that I work with, we are prag­mat­ic about the fact that we might get gigs some­times and every­thing, but it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the end goal.

 It’s about fos­ter­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice. It’s about fos­ter­ing links and also the acces­si­bil­i­ty to these prac­tices. I was here, just with my [portable audio] recorder. I think kids would also ben­e­fit, for exam­ple, to be exposed to field record­ing prac­tices here because the [envi­ron­ment] is so unique. You could go in nature […]. I think it’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at music too. Even like clas­si­cal, you know, string music, as some­body who’s a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian, I know this is inac­ces­si­ble to me […] because I start­ed music too late and I come from anoth­er back­ground. But you can intro­duce peo­ple to dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing music  and dif­fer­ent ways of approach­ing it. […] I think here you have this already. And that’s kind of what I felt. There’s so many dif­fer­ent streams of prac­tice and ways of doing it. I think this is what’s so great about it is that a lot of peo­ple can find their own way into it.[…] In my com­mu­ni­ty, we build our own venues most of the time, kind of like what you did here [dur­ing the fes­ti­val] you know. In Mon­tre­al, lots of the places I play would be DIY venues. So for exam­ple, a SOCAN license is just not think­able [in such venues] there’s also chal­lenges about these things. I think here [in Yel­lowknife] there’s a lot of things that res­onat­ed with me and with my expe­ri­ence of music, to just be able to sus­tain it, find space to do it, get peo­ple engaged, find new ways to maybe engage [with] it as a com­mu­ni­ty. I just want­ed to say thank you for let­ting me see some of that work; to hear and engage in that prac­tice with you for a week. So for that I want to thank you [all] very much. 

Com­ple­men­tary Informations:

APTN Nation­al Indige­nous Music Impact Study can be con­sult­ed here:

https://www.aptnnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Music-Impact-Study.pdf

ATTI!  Indige­nous Artists Col­lec­tive Research Sum­ma­ry can be con­sult­ed here:

http://www.atticollective.com/uploads/3/4/9/4/34945811/2023aug_researchsummary.pdf

More infor­ma­tions on SOCAN and on the Cana­di­an Music Incu­ba­tor can be found here:

https://www.socan.com/fr/

https://canadasmusicincubator.com/

CNMN would like to thank:

Car­ly Mcfad­den, Tere­sa Horosko and Folks on the rocks

Mike Auty and Music NWT

Bran Ram and West­ern Arc­tic Mov­ing Pictures 

Tanya Snow and ATTI! Indige­nous Artists Collective

Batiste Foisy

Mar­tin Rehak

Pablo Sar­a­van­ja 

CNMN would like to thank and con­grat­u­late all the artists and musi­cians for their inspir­ing performances:

Cas­san­dra Blondin-Burt 

Ryan McCord

LJJ

Rob Elo

Kathryn Louise Oraas 

Kay Sibbe­ston 

Gar­neau Strings Quar­tet  (Robert Uchi­da , Lau­ra Veeze, Kei­th Hamm, Julie Hereish)

Andrew Ball

CNMN would also like to thank Peter Skin­ner, the tech­ni­cal crew and all the vol­un­teer of the fes­ti­val for let­ting CNMN con­tribute to the tech­ni­cal side of the festival

Halifax meeting

Date: March 16, 2023

Loca­tion: The Music Room, 6181 Lady Ham­mond Rd, Hal­i­fax, NS B3K 2R9

Co-pre­sen­ter: Sco­tia Fes­ti­val of Music

The meet­ing was opened by CNMN board mem­ber and sud­den­lyLis­ten direc­tor, Norm Adams, fol­lowed by a short pre­sen­ta­tion of the Sus­tain­able Futures project and upcom­ing nation­al gath­er­ing by CNMN ED Ter­ri Hron. She also named SCALE/LeSaut’s three modes of engagement–Greening the Sec­tor, Increas­ing Vis­i­bil­i­ty, and Reau­thor­ing the World–which CNMN is using to frame its activ­i­ties and dis­cus­sions around Sus­tain­able Futures. She then intro­duced Kim Fry, direc­tor of the Cana­di­an sec­tion of Music Declares Emer­gency.

Kim Fry shared her his­to­ry as an activist and the event that led her to bring togeth­er a Cana­di­an chap­ter of Music Declares Emer­gency, which was a con­cert to mark the 40th anniver­sary of the Amchit­ka con­cert that fund­ed the maid­en voy­age of Green­peace. She shared her vision for activist work: “What we need to do to cre­ate a soci­ety where we are not emit­ting large amounts of car­bon is actu­al­ly a beau­ti­ful world. It’s gar­den­ing more, it’s con­nect­ing with com­mu­ni­ty more, it’s mak­ing more of your own food, it’s so many things that are actu­al­ly a more beau­ti­ful world than the hyper-con­sumerist busy world of peo­ple feel­ing burnt out and work­ing all the time and com­mut­ing for huge dis­tances and dis­con­nect­ed from their fam­i­lies. So it isn’t that what’s being asked is a huge bur­den on most peo­ple. For most of the world, for most of the Glob­al South, there’s the abil­i­ty to actu­al­ly raise their stan­dard of liv­ing, it’s real­ly only in for the wealth­i­est coun­tries that we have to do a bit of adjust­ment. But I think that adjust­ment actu­al­ly will strength­en com­mu­ni­ty and make peo­ple fun­da­men­tal­ly hap­pi­er.” She remind­ed us that “cli­mate is a huge fem­i­nist issue.” She also point­ed out that with­in the pub­licly-fund­ed cre­ative music and sound com­mu­ni­ty, we are lucky not to be as embed­ded with­in cap­i­tal­ism and there­fore have more space to talk and think about these issues. Kim then brought us up to speed on what MDE has been doing, with its Cli­mate Sum­mit last Octo­ber and the next one com­ing in Novem­ber, as well as point­ed us to oth­er ini­tia­tives, such as Bri­an Eno’s Earth per­cent, which has not been inte­grat­ed with SOCAN yet, but with some roy­al­ty-col­lec­tion agen­cies, where artists can mark the earth as a co-writer, and the monies are then dis­trib­uted by Earth per­cent to envi­ron­men­tal causes.

The par­tic­i­pants, which includ­ed local com­posers, per­form­ers, pre­sen­ters and fes­ti­val orga­niz­ers then began to share their expe­ri­ences and con­cerns. Issues that came up included:

• incen­tives for audi­ence mem­bers to use green modes of transportation
• mon­ey to ini­ti­ate incen­tives for audi­ences to use green trans­porta­tion is need­ed. Where is this going to come from? Are fun­ders think­ing about this?
• small orga­ni­za­tions are being asked to do a lot to curb their foot­print, while the big emit­ters are less policed, as in soci­ety in general.
• llivestreams should con­tin­ue with more sup­port to inte­grate them into pro­gram­ming: increased acces­si­bil­i­ty and car­bon foot­print savings
• livestream offers remote work pos­si­bil­i­ties in high qual­i­ty with artists/composers remote­ly. The Hal­i­fax meet­ing took place at The Music Room, which is a hall equipped for livestream­ing that is used by local ensem­bles for remote col­lab­o­ra­tions as well as livestream­ing concerts.
• a net­work of livestream venues would enable col­lab­o­ra­tion across the coun­try and new modes of curation.
• longer and slow­er tours mean more time with artists and high­er costs, which is not in line with fund­ing allowances for per diems, etc. When are fund­ing guide­lines going to catch up? Does this mean there will be few­er projects fund­ed? Where should we go to find the shortfall?
• dis­par­i­ty between actu­al costs for projects, espe­cial­ly with longer work peri­ods and/or livestream­ing, and no way to show this to funders.
• we need more meet­ings with fun­ders in the room, “we all need to work on it togeth­er, all the parts of the whole”

Par­tic­i­pant Comments

“Our fes­ti­val is in the win­ter. So you had men­tioned peo­ple com­ing on bicy­cles, and walk­ing and I thought, ‘Oh, my I can’t pos­si­bly get my audi­ence do that’. But you know, we are pret­ty cen­tral and in Hal­i­fax, you could get peo­ple to con­sid­er walk­ing instead of dri­ving five blocks. And then, offer­ing an award for the inter­est­ing way of get­ting to the fes­ti­val, some­thing like some incen­tive, as part of your pro­mo­tion­al pack­age, to just to get the word out, basi­cal­ly, it’s real­ly just a way of get­ting the word out to peo­ple to con­sid­er the car­bon foot­print of just going to a con­cert. I think those are all the small steps we all have to take in our dai­ly life.”

“Live streams would be my suggestion,even though they’re also con­sum­ing all this ener­gy, but they have been immense­ly impor­tant, I think, for peo­ple like me, espe­cial­ly those who live in far­away places.  I’ve been able to par­tic­i­pate in events all over the globe because of this tech­nol­o­gy that COVID made possible.”

“We’re work­ing with liv­ing com­posers, when we do a lot of back and forth with the com­pos­er, as we’re pre­sent­ing as we’re get­ting ready to present the piece. We don’t have the bud­get to have the com­pos­er here. And you know, to your point about like mak­ing cross-Cana­da or inter­na­tion­al trips worth it, it’s a lot of work on top of a lot of mon­ey. It’s just not prac­ti­cal. But we’ve had com­posers from the UK, we’ve had com­posers up north, we’ve had from all over watch­ing their work being presented”

“It’s an acces­si­bil­i­ty thing. Not just peo­ple who might not be able to go phys­i­cal­ly to con­certs, but what about peo­ple who are liv­ing in places where they nev­er have access to a con­cert. Sud­den­ly, with orga­ni­za­tions all across Cana­da, you could have a con­cert of dif­fer­ent bits from dif­fer­ent places that would be pre­sent­ed some­where where there are no musi­cians, or maybe there’s just one ensem­ble, but they have a col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­er ensem­bles, and it allows us to be able to see things that are not phys­i­cal­ly present for us. But nobody says that we can’t orga­nize events where peo­ple do gath­er, because I think there’s the gath­er­ing part of con­certs that’s impor­tant. We can pro­vide snacks, and maybe there are some musi­cians in the space, and then maybe you might be able to see some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing across the coun­try and be involved with those peo­ple. But we just don’t think about these things yet.”

“Pret­ty hard bulls­eye to hit: be envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious, come in under bud­get, make mon­ey and have a healthy audience.”

“I get angry because it’s being tak­en away, and it’s my lifeblood to go and sit in a the­ater: that’s my hap­pi­est place in the world. And that is being tak­en away. And I see the future. It’s tak­en away, because of what my gen­er­a­tion, I sup­pose, has done to the world.”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit. Ut elit tel­lus, luc­tus nec ullam­cor­p­er mat­tis, pul­v­inar dapibus leo.

OTTAWA MEETING

Date: March 29, 2023
Loca­tion: Car­leton Domin­ion-Chalmers Cen­tre, 355 Coop­er St, Ottawa, ON K2P 0G8
Co-pre­sen­ter: Research Cen­tre for Music, Sound and Soci­ety in Canada

For the Ottawa meet­ing, CNMN part­nered with Dr. Ellen Water­man at the Research Cen­tre for Music, Sound and Soci­ety in Cana­da (MSSC) in orga­niz­ing a two-day invi­ta­tion for Tanya Kalmanovitch and her Tar Sands Song­book. On March 28, MSSC host­ed Lis­ten­ing Café 2: Lis­ten­ing to the Cli­mate Emer­gency through The Tar Sands Song­book, where Tanya per­formed the song­book with pianist Andrew Boudreau, and there­after they, along with dra­maturg Katie Pearl, offered the audi­ence a chance to respond and ask questions.

This pow­er­ful per­for­mance informed the con­sul­ta­tion the next morn­ing, which gath­ered mem­bers of Ottawa’s diverse music com­mu­ni­ty. Once again, a mix of indi­vid­ual artists, edu­ca­tors, and musi­cians, as well as cul­tur­al work­ers from local and nation­al music and arts orga­ni­za­tions in Ottawa were present. These includ­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Impro­vis­ing & Exper­i­men­tal Music of Ottawa and Out­wards (IMOO), Jazz Fes­ti­vals Cana­da Net­work, Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Arts in Schools and Com­mu­ni­ties (MASC), the Nation­al Arts Cen­tre, Ottawa Cham­ber­fest, the Ottawa Jazz Fes­ti­val,Pro­peller Dance, Qu’ART the Ottawa Queer Arts Col­lec­tive, and SCALE-LeSAUT (Sec­toral Cli­mate Arts Lead­er­ship for the Emergency/Leadership sec­to­riel des arts sur l’urgence de la tran­si­tion écologique). We opened the cir­cle with ful­some pre­sen­ta­tions and a short descrip­tion of what sus­tain­abil­i­ty meant to each par­tic­i­pant and then moved towards a “pop­corn-style” dis­cus­sion of the com­plex issues guid­ed by the ques­tions we had sent ahead which includ­ed: How can music orga­ni­za­tions respond to the cli­mate emer­gency and its social impacts? How are peo­ple talk­ing about the cli­mate, emer­gency and music and sound? How are lan­guage and pol­i­cy shift­ing around ques­tions of sus­tain­abil­i­ty? What resources might ben­e­fit music and arts orga­ni­za­tions to engage with cli­mate change? And how can arts orga­ni­za­tions help to move con­ver­sa­tions forward?

Key points of dis­cus­sion included:

• Rural/Urban Divides: Rur­al Strate­gies and Insights
• Fund­ing, Access, and Uni­ver­sal Basic Income
• Lan­guage and Co-option: The Words We Use
• Ped­a­gog­i­cal Strate­gies of Engage­ment: Grief, Empa­thy, Sur­vival and Love
• Con­flict and Rela­tion­ships: Address­ing Polar­iza­tion and Bina­ry Thinking
• Arts and Sys­temic Change: Dif­fer­ent Ways of Being and Doing
• Com­mu­ni­ty Engaged Tools, Cli­mate and Arts
• Cul­ti­vat­ing Rela­tion­ships with Each Oth­er and the Environment
• Logis­tics of Tour­ing and Per­for­mance with a Cli­mate Consciousness
• The Pow­er of the Local and Local Action

There were many peo­ple present for whom activism and cli­mate have been long-stand­ing issues, and so the con­ver­sa­tion ran deep and ben­e­fit­ed from that broad range of experience.

MSSC assis­tant Gale Franklin did a won­der­ful job of tran­scrib­ing and orga­niz­ing what the par­tic­i­pants shared under a num­ber of topics.

Par­tic­i­pant Comments

Rural/Urban Divides: Rur­al Strate­gies and Insights

“I would sug­gest look­ing to lead­er­ship, from peo­ple in small­er mar­kets and small­er orgs, who are work­ing in extrac­tion, heavy towns, and to see how peo­ple in those orga­ni­za­tions, that can be peo­ple out­side of music, see how they’re think­ing about social rela­tion­ships between their board, their fundrais­ers, their donors, their audiences.”

“I’m not an urban prac­ti­tion­er any­more. But as peo­ple who work in an urban con­text, it is impor­tant to also remem­ber the rest of the coun­try, that has a remark­able amount of polit­i­cal pow­er, and a remark­able amount of voice. And in many cas­es it sounds dif­fer­ent than the urban con­text, and so I have nev­er been more aware of that than I have been in the last year.”

“I think we’re real­ly miss­ing mod­els of rur­al. I lis­ten to the CBC, and it’s all very urban, it’s peo­ple from cities talk­ing about city issues. And where are the rur­al voic­es? I mean we need to hear those voic­es. And how get them out there? Because the hyper urban envi­ron­men­tal expe­ri­ence is not some­thing that con­nects with every­body, and nor should it be.”

“If you take what you know as being in from the depth of canon­ic, Euro­pean art music cen­tral­ist prac­tice, you still know from that, what it is to work in mem­o­ry, what it is to work in his­to­ry, what is to work in empa­thy… But we know some­thing of each oth­er with­out need­ing to know lan­guage. So even in the depths of that field, we have capac­i­ty to be in rela­tion­ship. So any­way, I guess I was just think­ing like, who are we not hear­ing? Who do we not see when we say music? Whose music? Do we actu­al­ly mean? And whose music do we not mean? And as music orga­ni­za­tions, there’s some­thing very extrac­tive, I think, about the way that arts orga­ni­za­tions, peo­ple who are fund­ed by arts orga­ni­za­tions, talk about doing com­mu­ni­ty work, they talk about “our” part­ner­ships, “our” com­mu­ni­ties, “our” Indige­nous partners.”

Fund­ing, Access, and Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the cli­mate cri­sis does threat­en a lot of the work that has gone into mak­ing our world more acces­si­ble… [Our work] has an impact that are work­ing to shift­ing people’s focus and bring­ing atten­tion to acces­si­bil­i­ty issues, and acces­si­bil­i­ty lens to the cli­mate crisis.”

“I just want­ed to share an exam­ple of a project that I took part in which was released a data bag, song cycle with the no bor­ders, arts, group choir, and dur­ing COVID. Because peo­ple couldn’t meet in per­son, they were meet­ing online, so prac­tic­ing these choirs through Zoom over the inter­net. And what’s inter­est­ing about that is a new inclu­siv­i­ty where peo­ple could par­tic­i­pate, who, even if they’re local might not, who have mobil­i­ty issues, or were not able to oth­er­wise par­tic­i­pate were sud­den­ly includ­ed. I think it cre­at­ed a com­mu­ni­ty, a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty through that choir, extend­ed choir prac­tice over Zoom. That was, in many aspects free­ing and more inclu­sive. And that com­mu­ni­ty last­ed; those con­nec­tions that peo­ple made last­ed longer than the per­for­mance, in the end.”

I noticed we haven’t real­ly talked about mon­ey. And we’ve talked a lot about acces­si­bil­i­ty, rur­al, urban, and that all inter­sects with eco­nom­ics, too. And I mean, I think how do we, how do we speak to that?”

“I would love to be able to make a liv­ing with­out leav­ing home, with­out hav­ing to go on tour. And I think that would be the biggest drop to my car­bon emis­sions. And I think also for audi­ences, a lot of the “no one turned away for lack of funds” thing. Hav­ing small scale events and bet­ter part­ner­ing with local groups that are small­er, I think is real­ly, real­ly impor­tant. And not as a pater­nal ‘here you go.’”

“I am on the board of the Inde­pen­dent Media Arts Alliance of Cana­da, which is the Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion of many art cen­ters. So, it’s a nation­al body, work­ing with media artists across the coun­try. And one of the biggest things that we’ve iden­ti­fied is uni­ver­sal basic income. And we actu­al­ly have a UBI com­mit­tee now that com­plete­ly works on that. We actu­al­ly have a nation­al artists com­mis­sion, where we have com­mis­sion­ers and artists across dis­ci­plines, but some across the coun­try tes­ti­fy for three sol­id days, in regards to the issue of uni­ver­sal basic income… But that, as a nation­al orga­ni­za­tion, is one of the key things that that we keep ham­mer­ing away at. And I have con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple at Cana­da Coun­cil who are in those strate­gic plan­ning depart­ments, so not the grantors. And we’ve been float­ing the idea that, rather than hav­ing peo­ple com­pete for grants for projects, you need to start chang­ing the sys­tem. And you need to actu­al­ly allow peo­ple who are artists and work­ing as artists to have an income that they can live on. So, one thing that we saw when we all got CERB… when I was direc­tor of a Media Arts Cen­ter in Ottawa, media artists are a whole bunch of very neu­ro­di­ver­gent peo­ple who have their aver­age income in Ottawa at $15,000 a year. These are peo­ple who live in cri­sis every sin­gle day, when they got $2,000 in the bank every month, their men­tal health was unbe­liev­able. Peo­ple actu­al­ly becom­ing cre­ative rather than hav­ing to  sur­vive. So, I think for all nation­al orga­ni­za­tions in the arts, this is a huge, impor­tant issue. While I’m sup­port­ing that in the wider world, too. I mean, our audi­ences, the peo­ple who go to shows, peo­ple don’t go to shows because they don’t have time. I mean, if peo­ple can be relaxed, and have a liv­ing that makes them more open to dif­fer­ent ideas, makes them more open to dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. That’s sort of the biggest thing. So, I think you know, as a nation­al orga­ni­za­tion from strike a com­mit­tee, con­nect with the oth­er nation­al orga­ni­za­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, and then to get a crit­i­cal mass.”

“I was real­ly glad to hear the con­ver­sa­tions [around sus­tain­abil­i­ty]  in Cana­da Coun­cil is hap­pen­ing. And some­thing we can do is [rec­og­nize] that we are all just peo­ple. And these orga­ni­za­tions that some­times seem like they’re big orga­ni­za­tions are still just peo­ple. And the more we can talk to peo­ple, the more like­li­hood there is of change, right? Because fund­ing is a huge, huge thing. And it’s bot­tomed out. And I know a lot of the fund­ing that comes to a lot of board arts orga­ni­za­tions is, for exam­ple, tourism based. And that’s bru­tal, but it’s a real­i­ty that we have to deal with. So, it may be if the fund­ing and that’s com­mer­cial fund­ing, and if that could be actu­al­ly put into more just like into Cana­da Coun­cil, or more fun­neled in ways where you don’t have to pro­duce more num­bers, big­ger num­bers in growth, as orga­ni­za­tions, that would be fan­tas­tic. That would change a lot of things.”

Lan­guage and Co-option: The Words We Use

“Because I also feel like mov­ing away from the word sus­tain­able or sus­tain­abil­i­ty, it has so many dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions, and it can be so eas­i­ly con­strued, you know, finan­cial sus­tain­abil­i­ty. I think I have two main issues with that word. One is that it’s just too broad and can be mis­in­ter­pret­ed or it can be inter­pret­ed in so many dif­fer­ent ways that it is not use­ful. And sec­ond­ly, it has this impli­ca­tion of like things stay­ing the same, which is also real­ly prob­lem­at­ic. I love the word … regen­er­ate, regen­er­a­tive, or regen­er­a­tion, which is feel­ing for me per­son­al­ly, is feel­ing like much more. Like some­body else also men­tioned.… stew­ard­ship, regen­er­a­tion, like these are the val­ues that I want to move for­ward with. And I think, to me, regen­er­a­tion speaks about heal­ing, but heal­ing the plan­et, about heal­ing peo­ple. And so, so I real­ly liked that language.”

“To me, regen­er­a­tion is about rec­og­niz­ing that [cre­at­ing a sense of belong­ing] looks dif­fer­ent in dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties. And I think that one of our most impor­tant chal­lenges, as artists and as arts orga­ni­za­tions, is to find ways to cre­ate a sense of belong­ing for dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, and that’s going to again, look very dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, but to cre­ate that sense of belong­ing in a a regen­er­a­tive future, or regen­er­a­tive futures in the plur­al. And, you know, going in that direc­tion, as opposed to the sort of dual­ism that often sur­rounds this issue, so that we’re actu­al­ly cre­at­ing ener­gy, rather than hav­ing peo­ple shut down.”

“As I look around the world, you know, my trans friends, whose life expectan­cy in Cana­da is 32 years, are real­ly at a point where sus­tain­abil­i­ty doesn’t cut it any­more, as demon­strat­ed last night at the Ottawa school board meet­ing around that, I mean, we’re right back.”

“I want­ed to offer that what­ev­er word you choose, we will find a way to turn it into some­thing that is pal­lid and mean­ing­less. So, what to do about that is to ask our­selves about what are the habits of think­ing, and the habits of relat­ing and the habits of action, that allow us to just sort of pawn off the things we should be doing dif­fer­ent­ly on a word.”

“Words get co-opt­ed … and where it’s get­ting words to change mean­ing and I think what we real­ly have to hold on to is the mean­ing that we have and the way that we inter­act with those words. I mean, you look at words like “woke” and what has hap­pened in the last num­ber of years. And what it means now to most peo­ple, not all of us, is very dif­fer­ent from what it meant a few just even a few years ago. And so, I mean, I think the ques­tion of the word­ing is impor­tant, but I think part of it is we have to be super clear about what it means to us.”

“Now my feel­ing about regen­er­a­tive though the idea of regen­er­a­tion is this, it sug­gests that it’s putting for­ward some­thing that was already was reached. That’s the re- argu­ment. Which is, you know, like the whole notion of the cli­mate emer­gency, like it’s an emer­gency for first world colo­nial per­spec­tive, but for many Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, it’s just a con­tin­u­a­tion of some­thing that’s been happening.”

“But I think the “emer­gency” thing, to me links back to that sort of more of a “first world” def­i­n­i­tion. It’s not as inclu­sive. For my own self, the chal­lenge has been to try and ques­tion my pat­terns of dom­i­nant think­ing. And it’s about iden­ti­fy­ing what those are, like, just in a, like an aware­ness, try­ing to find out what are those things? I don’t have sort of solu­tions for going for­ward, because I’m still in that find­ing out phase.”

“The dis­cus­sion around emer­gency and its prob­lem­at­ics, so that word is used to draw atten­tion to the ways in which epis­te­mol­o­gy, knowl­edges around cri­sis are used to jus­ti­fy all kinds of acts of crim­i­nal­i­ty. So, because it’s an “emer­gency,” we have to cut down these trees, right? Yeah, because it’s an emer­gency. This needs to hap­pen so that the actors and actions tak­en in a space of cri­sis, it’s often used as cov­er. But I think we could just as wise­ly flip that. And think about using a space of cri­sis as a site that’s gen­er­a­tive of wisdom.”

“Think­ing about lan­guage, I wrote down here, there’s lan­guage that feels good. And there’s lan­guage that just right. And then, per­son­al­ly, I’ve been read­ing a lot about these things, and talk­ing to peo­ple and stuff. And my own think­ing is a term that makes more sense to me now is sur­viv­abil­i­ty, which is beyond one type of resilience. But, but that’s per­son­al, you know, I dip into the Doomist world, because it’s so dis­cour­ag­ing to look at the facts. But it feels more com­fort­able to be in a word or a con­cept that feels right, that feels like where we’re at where we’re real­ly at. So, I put a spec­trum and I said, you know, there’s mit­i­ga­tion to a lot of peo­ple are work­ing on now they’re try­ing to reduce the foot­print in any effort is worth­while, we need to slow down the dam­age. And then there’s adapt­abil­i­ty, that’s there are inevitable changes that are com­ing, we have to adapt, we have to antic­i­pate cli­mate, refugee waves, all those things. But real­ly, what’s going to hap­pen, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is that we will get into a peri­od where only cer­tain of our species will sur­vive what’s com­ing. And that’s not very com­fort­able thing to think about. And there’s not a lot you can do about it. Because you want to be work­ing on mit­i­ga­tion and adap­ta­tion. And then this regen­er­a­tion, which is a more hope­ful space, but I think it’s going to come after this peri­od of sur­viv­abil­i­ty. Inevitably, at least unless things change dra­mat­i­cal­ly, that’s where we’re going. All of us all our col­lec­tive behav­ior. So how does that help art? Well, maybe it doesn’t. But it helps me, because it helps me to fig­ure out the lan­guage that makes sense in wher­ev­er I put my ener­gies. So, I think we all have to think through what where we’re at and what con­stant the words and so forth. But what do they mean? How do they feel to where we want put our energy?”

Ped­a­gog­i­cal Strate­gies of Engage­ment: Grief, Empa­thy, Sur­vival and Love

“I think that if you want some­one to pro­tect some­thing, you need to help them love it. What we do is, we com­bine poet­ry, poet­ic prose and music, and high­light what is very inter­est­ing about musi­cal­ly, we name birds, we name lichens, we do all those kinds of things and the work is real­ly an expec­ta­tion. Go and look at nature, go and find your own rela­tion­ship to spend time, stretch time. You know, don’t just walk past the riv­er, down to the edge, and start pick­ing out, you know, what’s there, try to under­stand it. And I think that that’s the key to help­ing peo­ple find the rela­tion­ship to nature.”

“I feel that dur­ing since the pan­dem­ic, peo­ple don’t care, indi­vid­ual peo­ple are in sur­vival mode. I think people’s empa­thy has just run out because peo­ple are on this sur­vival­ist mode. They have eco grief. Teach­ing peo­ple how to love and how to take time, it’s a real challenge.”

“Through my work, both as a com­pos­er and per­form­ing artist and themes that I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with are these themes of belong­ing and using music as a reflec­tive tool. And so, as some­one who goes into schools and com­mu­ni­ties, I feel like my part of my role is being a space hold­er, for peo­ple to ask these valu­able ques­tions. And so, I’m real­ly excit­ed to be here to talk about what is it look like for us to take valu­able steps for­ward and giv­ing peo­ple tools to say, what does sus­tain­abil­i­ty look like in our com­mu­ni­ties? How do we move for­ward not just to talk about it, but to real­ly con­crete­ly have these tan­gi­ble steps of engag­ing with com­mu­ni­ty in this way.”

“[We have] this piece … And it’s about the Rideau Riv­er, what’s in the riv­er, and what you can observe, how you relate to it, from the mus­sels that have been torn apart by the rac­coons to the graf­fi­ti on the cement around them. And before our con­cert, we did a lot of out­reach to groups who, not just the music com­mu­ni­ty, but also to peo­ple who are in canoe clubs and riv­er and water pro­tec­tion insti­tu­tions and things like that, the munic­i­pal coun­cilors, on all the wards along the riv­er. And we end­ed up with an audi­ence which con­tained all kinds of peo­ple I’d nev­er seen before at a con­cert. And I thought, this is inter­est­ing, these guys do not look like a typ­i­cal audi­ence, I think we have some suc­cess in bring­ing peo­ple in, to hear some­thing dif­fer­ent. And to engage with the ideas in, in the music and in the poet­ry… And so, there’s room for reach­ing people.”

“You said some­thing right at the begin­ning that has been res­onat­ing with me the whole time: walk the land and pay atten­tion to the ordinary.”

Con­flict and Rela­tion­ships: Address­ing Polar­iza­tion and Bina­ry Thinking

“I’m inter­est­ed in how is it that we live today? And how do we stand in sight of destruc­tion and pos­si­bil­i­ty? In terms of the idea of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, for what­ev­er moment we find our­selves its roots are con­tin­u­ous and deep. This is not some­thing that just hap­pened. It nev­er went away. And so also, I think solu­tions, lessons for sur­vival and resis­tance are also deep and con­tin­u­ous and every­where around us. I hate when peo­ple just say like, let’s just be solu­tions focused, because I’m like, ‘No, we real­ly need to talk about the prob­lem for a minute.’ But I do like the ques­tion of how it is that we stand both inside of dis­trac­tion and possibilities.”

“Just want­ed to offer that there’s a a ten­sion in the activist move­ment, of know­ing, absolute­ly, with­out a doubt, who’s side you are on, and the impor­tance of that clar­i­ty, that moral clar­i­ty against what it takes to dis­man­tle the post-truth, polar­iza­tion dis­course, of under­stand­ing our inter­de­pen­dence. So, I think in this inter­view­er yes­ter­day asked me, will I do my piece along the rail­way, or if I want to do it and like fes­ti­vals and con­cert halls. I didn’t so much design it to be done in insti­tu­tion­al­ized art pro­duc­ing spaces, but I want­ed to do it in spaces where people’s lived expe­ri­ence more direct­ly maps onto the com­plex­i­ties that I feel in my own life. So that meant along pipeline, the truck rail routes that car­ry Alber­ta Oil into the glob­al mar­ket. And he was like, ‘well, what are you going to do with this piece, and what if there’s some guy out there with  steel toed boots, he’s dri­ven his giant truck up and like, he’s going to tell you…’ And I’m like, well, those guys are my cousins, and my broth­ers and my uncles. And they are yours, too. Which seemed, you know, a pre­pos­ter­ous thing to say to some­body, right? But you can unlock it by under­stand­ing that we are already all in this, and we are already relat­ed. And our fates are always dynam­i­cal­ly inter­linked, whether or not they can see it, it could just be that they’re just not ready for us, that’s what I like to think: that you’re just not ready for me. The oth­er thing I was think­ing about in terms of the strug­gles for the arts, and arts orga­ni­za­tions, they are dom­i­nat­ed by struc­tures of fund­ing and struc­tures of sup­port that are dynam­i­cal­ly and direct­ly linked to the very same struc­tures that are dis­man­tling our right to access to the land to clear water to a future, whole earth. And they’re in inti­mate rela­tion­ships with fos­sil fuel indus­tries, extrac­tion industries.”

“As I’m lis­ten­ing, the thing that res­onates is how impor­tant it is that we all actu­al­ly are okay with our­selves because it’s so hard to live with integri­ty. You would dis­man­tle the entire thing and just start from scratch, but we can’t real­ly do that. If we can just be open to talk­ing about it and real­ize like [a par­tic­i­pant] was say­ing, I have Repub­li­can peo­ple in my fam­i­ly and it’s okay! It is impor­tant to be okay with every­body and be okay with your­self and, and to do your best with­in that capacity.”

“There are just so many points of view, that it’s real­ly hard to sort it all out and decide what’s right. And even myself as an indi­vid­ual, I need a big­ger com­put­er, because I’m work­ing on more projects. I’ve been out to Banff for res­i­den­cies of where the facil­i­ties are spon­sored, the signs are up on the wall, by an oil orga­ni­za­tion. So, it’s just a very stress­ful time to be in and work through all these things. So, it’s real­ly good to have these con­ver­sa­tions and try to sort things out.”

“What I gath­er is that there’s a lot of irony. We have to com­ply with these sys­tems in order to do the work that some­times goes against the grain. Take an exam­ple just from with­in [a dance orga­ni­za­tion], we focus on plain lan­guage to make either audio descrip­tion or to make work or any­thing that we put out a bit more acces­si­ble to folks who are neu­ro­di­ver­gent, who don’t per­ceive things the same way that every­body else would. And yet, in order to achieve the fund­ing to make that hap­pen, we have to write this whole grant appli­ca­tion, which is all this elab­o­rate lan­guage that has noth­ing to do with the actu­al end result. So that’s just one irony. If I can just talk about the acces­si­bil­i­ty of the pan­dem­ic, it was great, we were able to reach a lot more peo­ple while not hav­ing a foot­print our­selves, but then that’s based on the assump­tion that peo­ple have access to the tech­nol­o­gy in order for these things to hap­pen. So, I think that action response to bias is to call out the irony, not to be afraid to say, ‘Hey, here’s this dichoto­my.’ And maybe we do put on a fes­ti­val and say, ‘guess what, this is the fes­ti­val and we are the prob­lem.’ I think it’d be quite chal­leng­ing to see and to be con­front­ed with that as an audi­ence mem­ber, but also as local com­mu­ni­ties, and yet to see what are the pos­i­tive things that can emerge from the urgency?”

Arts and Sys­temic Change: Dif­fer­ent Ways of Being and Doing

“I strong­ly feel noth­ing will change, unless we change the sys­tem. And I think the arts com­mu­ni­ty is an incred­i­ble exam­ple of how this sys­tem can be dif­fer­ent. Because I mean, cor­rect me if I’m wrong, I’m look­ing around the room, none of us are here to become rich, to amass assets, to con­trol sup­ply chains, and things like that. Our mode of liv­ing is already dif­fer­ent from the sys­tem and out­side of the sys­tem, artists gen­er­al­ly have been mar­gin­al­ized as a group and as a demo­graph­ic for eons. So, we actu­al­ly have an incred­i­ble amount of knowl­edge that we can bring to sys­tem change. And I think that it is, requires artists as a crit­i­cal mass to stand up and say, we are liv­ing a dif­fer­ent sys­tem. So t the arts have played a huge role in the fight against AIDS, arts have played a huge role in civ­il rights. We actu­al­ly know how to mobi­lize peo­ple, and we know how to work on mind shift with­in the gen­er­al pub­lic. So, I think we have huge things to bring to this to this bat­tle that is ahead of us.”

“I think that music or the arts can help peo­ple to rec­og­nize that it is that big an issue. And it’s real­ly hard for peo­ple to rec­og­nize that their what they think is nor­mal is actu­al­ly a thing, that there are dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing at the world. And I real­ly believe that chal­leng­ing our West­ern colo­nial per­cep­tions is what’s required to affect change. I believe that decol­o­niz­ing and look­ing at the envi­ron­ment are linked. I liked the words about lis­ten­ing and change. It’s about lis­ten­ing, lis­ten­ing differently.”

“Alter­na­tive musi­cians present dif­fer­ent mod­els of being just from the fact that we’re not in the pop­u­lar cul­tur­al world. Because pop­u­lar cul­ture is dri­ven through with cap­i­tal­ist mes­sag­ing. And, you know, like, if we can cre­ate a space and a com­mu­ni­ty, as musi­cians, also with audi­ences, with peo­ple, and do it in a way that, that presents dif­fer­ent ways of being, I think that’s the best thing we can pos­si­bly do. It it’s hard to find space to be dif­fer­ent. And it’s always been that way… How do we go about carv­ing spaces and invit­ing peo­ple into them that are health­i­er than what we’ve got, even if they’re imper­fect? Because it’s real­ly, real­ly hard to live an intact life of integri­ty. And in our sys­tem, some would say impossible.”

“It would be very cool if the arts took the lead in admit­ting exact­ly what their car­bon foot­print was, you know, and hold it up against oth­er orga­ni­za­tions. Who is going to be the first Arts Board fes­ti­val to say, we unnec­es­sar­i­ly flew in 20 peo­ple because that’s how we work is?”

“One of the one of the thought exper­i­ments that I’ve done in class, it’s been real­ly use­ful for peo­ple is imag­in­ing that the price of oil goes up to $100 a liter, right. And so, it’s actu­al­ly no longer fea­si­ble not just to tour but it’s actu­al­ly not fea­si­ble to get your reeds from Ama­zon. Right. None of this is afford­able. None of this is acces­si­ble and reach­able. So how then do we music? Right. So then to under­stand, for exam­ple, that we must divest of our cap­i­tal­is­tic colo­nial­ist prac­tices, we must under­stand, for exam­ple, that we don’t know ani­mals and plants as musi­cians and friends. I had a stu­dent in my class who actu­al­ly was so blown away by this. He grew up in New Jer­sey, Kore­an immi­grant fam­i­ly, and he’s clar­inetist. And he went on to try to order a bam­boo plant on Ama­zon and tried to grow his own cane. He did not know how long it takes for the plant to mature. He has no knowl­edge, this is not part of his expe­ri­ence. And he thought he could have it done as a final project for the class by the semes­ter. And it said he end­ed up doc­u­ment­ing the process and his process of dis­cov­er­ing what he didn’t know but dis­cov­er­ing the admis­sion of what he doesn’t know, was his rela­tion­ship to the plant his rela­tion­ship to the cane, his rela­tion­ship to his iden­ti­ty to what he was study­ing as musi­cian, and was in the in the effect… But I think it was pret­ty lib­er­a­to­ry because no longer did he have to accept that his val­ue as a musi­cian came from a sys­tem that was deter­mined to destroy him. Right? So, this might mean you do things like maybe we make instru­ments out of like dis­card­ed, like paper tow­el tubes, or maybe we just sing togeth­er, maybe we have to think much more cre­ative­ly, and much more empath­i­cal­ly about who it is we wish to make music with.”

Com­mu­ni­ty Engaged Tools, Cli­mate and Arts

“I was going to bring up Cre­ative Green Tools … And it is inter­est­ing, because it’s not a per­fect tool, but it’s some­thing. And it’s inter­est­ing, because I now work in a rur­al con­text, and when I look at the ques­tions, a lot of it doesn’t apply to us, in so many ways. Iit’s real­ly meant for an urban con­text around fes­ti­vals and insti­tu­tions. I think it’s only a mat­ter of time before it’s adopt­ed by quite a few of the Arts Coun­cils, so, we may all have to famil­iar­ize our­selves with it soon. And, you know, again, it may not be a per­fect tool, but it’s tak­ing a step. But we’ve start­ed to look for oth­er tools and they may not be with­in the arts. For instance, one of the things that we’re most involved with is the Thomp­son Okana­gan Tourism Association’s Bios­phere Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Com­mit­ment, which is, again, not a per­fect tool, but it’s a way for us to actu­al­ly access some real­ly valu­able capac­i­ty build­ing and train­ing to move us for­ward. And that’s through a tourism orga­ni­za­tion, it’s not through an arts orga­ni­za­tion. And so, some oth­er net­works are maybe a lit­tle fur­ther along than we are, and I think we need not be shy about reach­ing out or look­ing for those things that are adja­cent or that speak to us but aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly ful­ly tai­lored to us.”

“In Ima­go: King of Chloro­phyll, I was a musi­cian in the ensem­ble, but the piece took place out­side. And it was this inter­est­ing inter­sect between music and cli­mate. The com­pos­er is an arborist, but also a com­pos­er and musi­cian. And so, we were there, but then there’s the Out­door School and the kids were there with their machetes, help­ing to clear the area. And then as a musi­cian, I was there look­ing at Kim, who is in the trees doing this arbor informed dance. But it was a real­ly inter­est­ing inter­sec­tion, because before the audi­ence mem­bers came to see the piece, they got to meet the local farm­ers and to talk about what we grow, this and how we grow it. And before they expe­ri­enced the art piece, and I feel like there was an inter­sect of many dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties. And for me, as an artist, that was an exam­ple of mov­ing for­ward and talk­ing about the land that we’re on, and in real­ly beau­ti­ful ways.”

Cul­ti­vat­ing Rela­tion­ships with Each Oth­er and the Environment

“And just offer one lit­tle tid­bit, which is that more lives are saved in nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, and nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, cli­mate, or what­ev­er, more lives are saved by ordi­nary peo­ple than by first respon­ders or by gov­ern­ment poli­cies. So, it’s those rela­tion­ships that save us to one anoth­er. And those rela­tion­ships are what we should iden­ti­fy and defend.”

“I’m hear­ing so much that’s just about humans. It’s not about the arts. And I’m not extreme­ly sur­prised by that, but at the same time, it’s an inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion that this group of peo­ple comes togeth­er based on their artis­tic prac­tice or their rela­tion­ship to an artis­tic pur­pose and ends up dis­cussing human­i­ty and crises or for lack of a bet­ter word, emerg­ing issues that we’re see­ing, from very dif­fer­ent perspectives.”

Logis­tics of Tour­ing and Per­for­mance with a Cli­mate Consciousness

“I thought about that, as a musi­cian, when hon­est­ly, I am on a grant fund­ed tour, going from a gig that maybe wasn’t all that well pub­li­cized, and 15 peo­ple show up. The real­i­ty is this is such a waste of resource and foot­print, but the fact is that in what we’re doing, it’s real­ly impor­tant to bring peo­ple togeth­er. So, I still think there’s sort of via­bil­i­ty with­in that.”

“One of the oth­er things that I was think­ing about with in terms of jazz fes­ti­vals in Cana­da, that is actu­al­ly a a cool thing, is we have con­scious­ly tried to work out rout­ing. When somebody’s offered these gigs, they’re impor­tant for people’s careers. And if you do have that crazy tour­ing, that rout­ing, you’ll take it, so it is our respon­si­bil­i­ty to try go, ‘Hey, Cal­gary, do you mind if we actu­al­ly just switch dates, like lit­tle things like that, to make this more viable for everyone?’”

“It’s the impos­si­bil­i­ty of a sit­u­a­tion that we’re in where we’re hav­ing to be two worlds. So, like you say, you have to fly to do the gig because you need the gig. You fly to a con­fer­ence because you need com­mit­ted com­mu­ni­ca­tion, you need face to face inter­ac­tion. You need to pre­pare con­ver­sa­tion. So, as we’re con­stant­ly trapped in these sort of like cycles of say­ing, “Am I doing the right thing? Is this okay?” And I think what I’m laugh­ing at is sort of the Kaf­ka-esque sort of absur­di­ty of this moment where we’re try­ing to moral­ly rea­son with our­selves inside a sys­tem that would just be hap­pi­er to keep us spin­ning around.”

“My point is, pick your bat­tles. There are art forms that are extreme­ly pow­er­ful. They are the things that can trans­form people’s psy­che, and empa­thy and all that. So, I think we have to do every­thing we can to mit­i­gate that to con­tin­ue our work, because what we need to do is tran­si­tion out of this mad sys­tem that we live in. And it’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s prob­a­bly impos­si­ble. But we are going to have to move forward.”

“You know who the biggest foot­print of big music fes­ti­vals is? Peo­ple com­ing to the music fes­ti­vals, not the peo­ple per­form­ing. It’s every­body trav­el­ing to the festival.”

“To me, this still comes back, and I total­ly agree with you about this irony of the cycle, to the idea of what suc­cess is. The word suc­cess, of course, has many issues too. But we hear that you have to go to Mon­tre­al, why do you have to go to Mon­tre­al? Because the sys­tem says that, that’s some­thing that means that you “made it.” And in a sys­tem where you are hav­ing to make it to get the fund­ing, you have to go to the fes­ti­val and to go to the fes­ti­val, you have to have the fund­ing. And for the fes­ti­val to present you, you have to have an audi­ence base. And for the audi­ence base to be cre­at­ed, you have to have fund­ing. And it’s this con­stant cycle. So to me, it’s about nar­ra­tives, and if a dif­fer­ent sto­ry is told, and you can relate to that sto­ry, it val­i­dates some­thing for you as an indi­vid­ual, it val­i­dates some­thing that’s com­mu­ni­ty. And even hear­ing these ideas of 13 peo­ple show­ing up to a con­cert, why is that a prob­lem? It doesn’t have to be a prob­lem. There is a nar­ra­tive around it for both the artist who’s pre­sent­ing and also for the audi­ence mem­ber who shows up and thinks, why am I here, if there are only 13 people?”

The Pow­er of the Local and Local Action

“To answer your ques­tion, what can CNMN and oth­er orga­ni­za­tions do, last week in Flori­da there was a Parks Cana­da per­son who was there because of ecol­o­gy, and he said, “we real­ly need to live in the local.” You know, it just seems like an obvi­ous thing, right? So, I think we need an Ottawa coun­cil, right, even though I worked at the Cana­da Coun­cil for a long time. So, I think we should con­tin­ue these con­ver­sa­tions here in one way or anoth­er, and bring more peo­ple in cir­cles, tell sto­ries. Yes, good sto­ries. And but also share tools. Now there are some things that how these things work, bring some­body in from Green Tools here, here in Ottawa we care. We want to move things for­ward. We are aware of the fact and it makes me feel good just to think that we would work togeth­er, and we don’t have to do it but I think we all want to, I think we just don’t know how, and how is not hard.”

“I real­ly love this, and I need this more. Because I do feel that on a day-to-day basis, I’m in a bit of a sur­viv­abil­i­ty mode like [only focus­ing on] eco­nom­ic sus­tain­abil­i­ty. That’s very much what our board is talk­ing about much more than cli­mate, you know, or any of the oth­er issues, right. So, the more that we do things like this, the more I’ll walk away with that going direct­ly to back to the office, and it’s on the top of my mind, right, and we can act.”

Brandon Meeting

Date: April 21, 2023
Loca­tion: Queen Eliz­a­beth II Music Build­ing, Bran­don, MB R7B 1L6
Co-pre­sen­ter: Eck­hardt-Gram­maté Nation­al Music Competition

The meet­ing in Bran­don was opened with a land acknowl­edge­ment by the E‑Gré com­pe­ti­tion direc­tor Megu­mi Masa­ki, who is also a CNMN board mem­ber. This was again fol­lowed by a short pre­sen­ta­tion of the Sus­tain­able Futures project and upcom­ing nation­al gath­er­ing by CNMN ED Ter­ri Hron. She again referred to  SCALE/LeSaut’s three modes of engage­ment and gave a short descrip­tion of the pre­vi­ous two events. There­after, we encour­aged par­tic­i­pants in the cir­cle to intro­duce them­selves and give us their thoughts about how sus­tain­abil­i­ty inter­sects with their artis­tic prac­tice and life.

Although many of the par­tic­i­pants at this meet­ing were there as com­peti­tors or col­lab­o­rat­ing artists, we were touched by how gen­er­ous they were in their respons­es, and it was spe­cial to have so many per­spec­tives from younger artists at the begin­ning of their careers. Top­ics that came up included:

• the hid­den car­bon foot­print of online activ­i­ties and sites.
• the inten­si­ty of the cli­mate emer­gency for younger people
• insuf­fi­cient fund­ing for sus­tain­abil­i­ty mea­sure on top of every­thing else–where is the bud­get going to come from
• life choic­es and actions are as/more impor­tant than art choices
• most sus­tain­abil­i­ty mea­sures and poli­cies are designed for urban rather than rur­al realities
• have we for­got­ten all the lessons learned from the COVID slowdown?
• should ear­ly career artists be expect­ed to turn down gigs that require trav­el, when they are just try­ing to build their careers? What is fair in this sense?
• local is what is avail­able. Not every­thing needs to hap­pen everywhere.
• we need to change our mind­set and val­ues around local tal­ent and audi­ence numbers

Par­tic­i­pant Comments:

“When we talk about sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and in rela­tion to the envi­ron­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly, yes, we are feel­ing the force field of our gov­ern­ment agen­cies that fund us, and they are pro­duc­ing ques­tions like, Okay, can you tell us about your envi­ron­men­tal audit. And so we’ve done a few things inter­nal­ly as an orga­ni­za­tion. And sur­pris­ing­ly, I didn’t even think or I didn’t under­stand that web­sites even have a envi­ron­men­tal foot­print. And that’s when I real­ly start­ed to take action, because I saw how, in a sense, it was deemed a very dirty site, and not from the con­tent, but just from the point of view that it has an impact.”

“When you hear the youth talk about the envi­ron­men­tal impact on their lives, and what they feel for the future, that’s when you real­ly move to do some­thing, and see­ing it expressed through their art and shared pub­licly means that, if I can’t do enough for myself, I need to do some­thing so that there is a future for these young people.”

“When I hear the word sus­tain­able, every arts work­er just shriv­els, because there is not enough fund­ing for us to be to con­tin­ue on that jour­ney. And as we men­tor young peo­ple into these roles are some­thing has to shift, the ener­gy has to shift, we have to work dif­fer­ent­ly, we have to think dif­fer­ent­ly. And, this is real­ly becom­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal bur­den, because I’m hav­ing to sup­port peo­ple, but also rec­og­niz­ing the mon­ey is dimin­ish­ing, any way that we can advo­cate for the artis­tic space”

“In terms of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, the first thing that comes to mind for me is, I grew up on an organ­ic farm where my dad was very involved with lots of dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions and projects about like, farm sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and how to keep those going while giv­ing back to the land so that we’re not deplet­ing from it. But also, mak­ing life choic­es and var­i­ous oth­er things. So I come at it pret­ty much from that per­spec­tive, of hav­ing that per­son­al con­nec­tion of being out in the wide open being on the land, tak­ing care of the ani­mals and the crops and things. So in terms of how that inter­sects with, with music, and with what I do on that side, there’s cer­tain­ly there hasn’t been a lot of inter­sec­tion for me just yet. How­ev­er, there are many things that we can do more mov­ing for­ward and I’m curi­ous to explore more of those things, but I just don’t have a lot of con­nec­tion again.”

“Some­thing that’s been at the top of the mind late­ly, both in terms of artis­tic sus­tain­abil­i­ty and envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty is because I grew up in a rur­al area. And I’ve moved and lived in a lot of the Cana­da cities, I’ve just real­ized that a lot of the solu­tions that make sense in the GTA, or in oth­er cities are not always avail­able in rur­al Saskatchewan, and just try­ing to fig­ure out how we can include the entire coun­try in these con­ver­sa­tions, and not just think of what peo­ple in Toron­to can do to help, I think it’s won­der­ful, this con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing here.”

“As a cre­ator, as far as sus­tain­abil­i­ty, one thing I think about quite a bit seems to be pret­ty tied to com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment. And because I’m a musi­cian, the idea of music has some sort of com­mu­nica­tive medi­um. So I am think­ing about what sort of infor­ma­tion music is poten­tial­ly actu­al­ly good at con­vey­ing and what is and what is rel­e­vant with­in that.”

“I think those of us who aren’t musi­cians or artists will be lost. Because there’s noth­ing bet­ter than going to a con­cert or hear­ing musi­cians, look­ing at art and it changes your per­spec­tive, tends to give you hope, involves an aes­thet­ic sense and so very impor­tant to me.”

“I was think­ing, okay, when the snow is gone, I’m going to pick up the garbage. Some­times I walk with my grand­kids, I’ll take a garbage bag and just pick up the garbage. It’s real­ly hard to fig­ure out what to do. But I’m think­ing okay, that’s one thing I can do.”

“For me right now, there’s mas­sive chaos in my head. When I think that I know what I’m doing and con­tribut­ing to doing some­thing pos­i­tive. I turn the cor­ner and face more ques­tions and more anx­i­ety and even more ques­tions. I’m find­ing that the more I do, the more I’m con­fused. And that could part­ly also be the rela­tion­ship that I have with the land.”

Julie’s Bicy­cle “have cre­at­ed these won­der­ful tools to mea­sure your, your foot­print. And when I use those tools, I feel very anx­ious, because I can see how much I use and how large of a foot­print I am. And the way that I do bal­ance it. And how I bal­anced it, is to cre­ate projects that raise aware­ness of cli­mate change and use the pow­er and the emo­tion­al pow­er of music and art to soni­fy and to cre­ate a con­nec­tion for lis­ten­ers and per­form­ers on the sci­en­tif­ic data that has been cre­at­ed on cli­mate cri­sis. So that’s one way that I’ve been able to process it personally.”

“I think we all had a lot of time to think about sus­tain­abil­i­ty, both artis­ti­cal­ly and envi­ron­men­tal­ly because of COVID. And there are some very pos­i­tive things to take away from that. I had a con­ver­sa­tion with some artists just yes­ter­day. We were talk­ing about how the world stopped and now it’s start­ed again, but it’s like 1000 times ramped up. And I’m won­der­ing if this is not the time for these kinds of con­ver­sa­tions, to have learned that the envi­ron­ment had a chance to heal for the two years that every­body wasn’t fly­ing around and every­body wasn’t engag­ing in all sorts of activ­i­ties. And now I’m expe­ri­enc­ing this and I’m hear­ing this from col­leagues that it’s so amped up now that we are going to do all of the dam­age again, and do it even worse, because we are also anx­ious to get back into work.”

“When is it good to say no, it’s one thing that I learned way too late. As young artists, we tend to say yes to every­thing because we’re just so grate­ful when that oppor­tu­ni­ty hap­pens. But one thing to learn, per­haps is what is the most valu­able for you? What has the great­est impact on your career?”

“pre­sen­ters and per­form­ers need to real­ly think about whether they need to do this con­cert there? Are there oth­er ways that their art can be dis­sem­i­nat­ed? Can that be sup­port­ed appro­pri­ate­ly? By arts orga­ni­za­tions? I know at the uni­ver­si­ties, this has been a huge issue. Because tra­di­tion­al­ly, inter­na­tion­al events are more high­ly regard­ed than local events. But should they be? You could make the case that local com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment is just as valu­able. And that maybe we shouldn’t be always look­ing at inter­na­tion­al activ­i­ties and hype as being a high pro­file activ­i­ty. The same thing goes I think, when we look at whether sym­phonies need to bring in soloists from far away, when there are per­fect­ly capa­ble soloists local­ly, do opera com­pa­nies need to bring in who they think are the best in the world. And I think that we need to sort of change our mind­set about the per­for­mance, the whole scene of per­for­mance, we’re in a big country.”

“The ques­tion [of focus­ing on local] is for the priv­i­lege of larg­er cities where there are mul­ti­ple resources, what about the rest of us? How do the rest of us sus­tain artis­tic prac­tice with just being focused local­ly, is some­thing I haven’t quite fig­ured out. I’d love to have that conversation.”

“I didn’t know what to expect from this meet­ing here today. Cer­tain­ly not this. Chaos is a very good word. Anx­i­ety is a great word. Fund­ing is a great word. Local is a great word.”

“I find that’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly sticky issue, espe­cial­ly for peo­ple right at the begin­ning of their careers. I dream to one day be in a place in my career, where I can turn down that gig. But as you’re just try­ing to start out, you have to, just from a finan­cial stand­point, there is cer­tain­ly a pres­sure to say yes to every­thing, and also from the stand­point of try­ing to get to know peo­ple and make connections.”

“I’m find­ing that every­body asked that ques­tion at every lev­el of that engage­ment, whether it’s writ­ing that con­tract, book­ing the hall, book­ing the space, if Every­body just said, Wait a sec­ond, how can we mul­ti pack­age this so that it’s more sus­tain­able? I think it would be.”

“So when you think about busi­ness, and what can you do local­ly, it’s incred­i­ble when you start hang­ing your shin­gle up there and offer­ing this not just to the big cities, but you offer to the small, and they grow into these amaz­ing musicians.”

“I think for myself, per­son­al­ly, I’m very con­cerned about the envi­ron­ment and con­sid­er stew­ard­ship of cre­ation a real­ly impor­tant part of my, my being and my pur­pose. How that inter­sects with my music, I don’t think there’s a very direct line at this point; there is con­cern for those issues. And I appre­ci­ate when eco­log­i­cal care is part of the sub­ject mat­ter. I wor­ry that a lot of our efforts turn into guilt and anx­i­ety instead of change. So when I think of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, I want it to include action that makes things sustainable.”

“The chal­lenge of local, I think is also the chal­lenge of what we think we need to do in terms of per­for­mance. So we have to do we have a string quar­tet. So we have to have an opera. Maybe the music we make comes from the place that you are and the resources that you have, rather than insist­ing that we have an opera com­pa­ny or an orches­tra cen­ter. So I think that’s some­thing that is maybe part of the ques­tion, local is what is there.”

“And dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, there was this strange, strange phe­nom­e­non where all we can per­form can go any­where, etc. But sud­den­ly, those col­lab­o­ra­tions hap­pen between peo­ple that would nev­er hap­pen. It was actu­al­ly very pos­i­tive and inno­v­a­tive things that came out of it, some of which con­tin­ues now, stream­ing of con­certs, etc. But the gigan­tic serv­er farms that are skew­ing our data all over the world for our con­certs, for our emails to set up that con­cert, etc, etc, is very dirty. It’s very dirty. So this is a real anx­ious point is that fun­da­men­tal­ly where we have come and it’s not just artists, the entire soci­ety and cul­ture, world, human world, is that we’ve set up an infra­struc­ture, which is, seems extreme­ly chal­leng­ing to transform.”

“Wayne [Short­er] Wayne saw that the role of the artists is to bal­ance soci­ety. And some peo­ple would com­pare it to, in oth­er soci­eties, the role of the shaman, to explain things to the com­mu­ni­ty…  So Wayne would talk about, Per­form, or write music, that is the world you want to see. Play your dreams.”

“I think that there’s no such thing as any one com­mu­ni­ca­tion that doesn’t impair the envi­ron­ment at all, apart from what we’re doing right now. And even then, we have the lights on. And we’re still talk­ing, but it’s I think this is about as low car­bon as you can get right down. So every oth­er form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­pos­ing, cre­at­ing notation.”

“I don’t agree with West­ern nota­tion at any point in time, I just think that it’s an anti­quat­ed sys­tem, whether that again, my fam­i­ly sys­tem was far more anti­quat­ed. My grand­moth­er was very much a com­mu­ni­ca­tor, and every­thing was tran­ferred oral­ly. And so I give my stu­dents the option to do things like this in talk­ing cir­cles, and options to cre­ate music with­out score, or cre­ate music that doesn’t require 300 pages of West­ern nota­tion to com­mu­ni­cate with some­body. I think that as an artist, we have to com­mu­ni­cate these ideas of climate.”

“Where do you get your mon­ey from? Because they’re an Alber­ta based ensem­ble. And if I heard oil at all, I didn’t want any­thing to do with that, because that’s not sus­tain­able and com­plete­ly goes against the view­point of my the­sis. So why would I give up my artis­tic integri­ty for this. And I know I’m ear­ly in my career as well, too, but I don’t care, I stay with my prin­ci­ples. So I think that’s what we do at a local level.”

“some­thing I real­ly strug­gled with is how much is clas­si­cal music engage­ment with the envi­ron­ment, in ser­vice of advanc­ing a com­mon inter­est in pre­serv­ing the envi­ron­ment and how much of it is about mak­ing clas­si­cal music rel­e­vant. So that’s some­thing I grap­ple with as a musi­cian per­form­ing music that has very much been bound up in process­es of colo­nial­ism. The rea­son that I in Cana­da went to a Con­ser­va­to­ry as a kid and stud­ied clas­si­cal music large­ly has to do with colo­nial­ism. And that’s inter­twined with envi­ron­men­tal damage.”

“And as we are all artists here, that’s the pow­er that we have is the emo­tion­al pow­er of music, no mat­ter what we do, and how we do it, and how dirty it is or not. But we have the pow­er to be artis­tic lead­ers, also lis­ten­ers, great lis­ten­ers, but artis­tic lead­ers in the fact of mak­ing art and, and then ask­ing audi­ences for fel­low musi­cians to con­sid­er what we are singing, play­ing, and how we’re lis­ten­ing to that, and how that hope­ful­ly will fill us all with hope and joy. So that we have the ener­gy to act.”

“why is going to Ger­many for a con­cert of 100 peo­ple more valu­able than the con­cert in Bran­don for 100 peo­ple, and I think we have to sort of change our mind­set about who we’re con­nect­ing with and who we’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with. And maybe rethink­ing the val­ues that are asso­ci­at­ed with that.”

Vancouver Meeting

Date: May 23, 2023
Loca­tion: Cana­di­an Music Cen­tre BC, 837 Davie St, Van­cou­ver, BC V6Z 1B7
Co-pre­sen­ter: Cana­di­an Music Cen­tre BC

The Van­cou­ver Meet­ing was gra­cious­ly host­ed by the Cana­di­an Music Cen­tre, BC Region. ED Ter­ri Hron opened the meet­ing and DB Boyko gra­cious­ly offered a land acknowl­edge­ment. Once again, Ter­ri offered an overview of the Sus­tain­able Futures project, a sum­ma­ry of the pre­vi­ous meet­ings, and some details on the upcom­ing nation­al event. The par­tic­i­pants includ­ed many Van­cou­ver artists whose work inter­sects with or is focused on envi­ron­men­tal issues as well as rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the major new music pre­sen­ters. The large major­i­ty of our time was spent with each per­son shar­ing their back­ground and main concerns/experiences around sus­tain­abil­i­ty and resilience.

Themes that came up included:

• col­lab­o­ra­tion with nat­ur­al envi­ron­ments and habi­tats and how/whether to bring these into cul­tur­al spaces
• sus­tain­abil­i­ty as a holis­tic prac­tice, in oppo­si­tion to the sur­vival mind­set. Health and rest some­times come in con­flict with exor­bi­tant rents and pres­sure to accept work that might have less sus­tain­able aspects, such as long travel.
• cli­mate grief and anx­i­ety can be debil­i­tat­ing. Men­tal health issues are ris­ing. How can we trans­form these through creativity?
• how do we move for­ward when all pro­duc­tions seem to cre­ate so much waste?
• per­son­al and orga­ni­za­tion­al unrav­el­ing and unlearn­ing on a dai­ly basis
• lis­ten­ing prac­tices as an anti­dote to par­ti­san thinking
• how do we reframe the skills and prac­tices we were taught from a colo­nial mind­set towards some­thing that can keep serv­ing us?
• what is com­mu­ni­ty? Does it exist to pro­tect what we have, or to encour­age work­ing with less and renounc­ing the per­son­al for the ben­e­fit of all? Who is in the community?
• reliev­ing the scarci­ty and pre­car­i­ty mind­set (through UBI or rent con­trol) will allow people/artists more space to con­nect with their environment
• embrac­ing the local. Shar­ing resources: Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tered Fundraising
• are the arts coun­cils spend­ing the major­i­ty of their resources on sus­tain­able projects (i.e. sym­pho­ny orches­tras and opera com­pa­nies) or do they think they can force large, cur­rent­ly less unsus­tain­able orga­ni­za­tions to improve their foot­print? How do we come into dia­logue with them?

Par­tic­i­pant Comments:

“Since becom­ing more and more filled with this need to come to engage with the cli­mate emer­gency and par­tic­u­lar­ly with wild habi­tat destruc­tion from anthro­pogenic sources, I’ve sort of moved my atten­tion now to habi­tat. And so a lot of the work that I do now has to do with local habi­tats such as urban forests, and also wild, even old growth for­est. And that includes doing work with spe­cif­ic forests that are on the cut block. For me, it’s real­ly crit­i­cal to gain some more momen­tum around pre­serv­ing forests and trees, because if we don’t help them, they’re not going to help us with cli­mate. So you know, forests and trees are great as car­bon sinks, as well as being an incred­i­ble habi­tat for bio­di­ver­si­ty. And we now know that BC forests used to be car­bon sinks, but now they’re actu­al­ly car­bon sources, because there’s been so much log­ging and par­tic­u­lar­ly clear cutting.”

“I’m explor­ing what sound events can be cre­at­ed, either in a for­est with trees, so it’s very much a col­lab­o­ra­tive sort of approach, but also can those meth­ods be adapt­ed into indoor sit­u­a­tions that we are more famil­iar with, like gal­leries and music venues.”

“Sus­tain­abil­i­ty in a holis­tic sense, in my prac­tice, is a lot about small things like hav­ing a sys­tem to recy­cle, reuse mate­ri­als, like build­ing and shar­ing things. Also try to think of sus­tain­abil­i­ty in terms of health, that if you don’t have health and rest, time and space that you can’t make deci­sions that con­sid­er the out­comes or the effects of your choic­es on oth­er peo­ple and artists to get into a sur­vival mind­set. It’s real­ly dif­fi­cult to con­sid­er things beyond your­self, because you’re just scram­bling to make rent or to get to the next gig or to secure the next oppor­tu­ni­ty. So in that sense, I think con­ver­sa­tions like uni­ver­sal income could give artists a lot of agency in the con­ver­sa­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, I think it’s also you’re speak­ing from a posi­tion of priv­i­lege when you are able to, like, say no to fly­ing to this fes­ti­val gig for one day and the next one. And so artists often are stuck tak­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly work for us.”

“I’ve noticed as my career is devel­op­ing, that it’s eas­i­er for me to get oppor­tu­ni­ties abroad. Often­times it’s eas­i­er to get gigs in New York or San Fran­cis­co,  across the coun­try than it is to get some­thing in the city. And so I think there’s still real­ly a lure to the out of town artists. I’m glad to hear that there might be changes in terms of fes­ti­vals and pro­grams. Because I think there’s a lot of room to embrace and explore what’s in our com­mu­ni­ties before fly­ing artists in.”

“There’s a lot of cli­mate anx­i­ety, a lot of men­tal health stuff going on right now around cli­mate obvi­ous­ly, and what pops up for me is just being a mom of a small child and try­ing to pic­ture the future.”

“My lat­est project had real­ly strong envi­ron­men­tal themes. I was research­ing whales and con­nect­ing cli­mate grief and fam­i­ly his­to­ries. A lot of cli­mate grief and anx­i­ety came up dur­ing the cre­ation of that project. And, of course,it was great to get that out into a project, but then at the end, it nev­er ends. You can get it out on a project, you can explore it, you can try to work towards some­thing, but I find myself again, in these peri­ods, get­ting almost par­a­lyzed with that. And so I’m real­ly inter­est­ed right now in try­ing to find a way to trans­form that par­a­lyz­ing anx­i­ety into action. Because that’s the point where it’s just way more pro­duc­tive and help­ful for every­body, and also a more cre­ative state, where it’s more com­fort­able to every­body, and can actu­al­ly cre­ate some change. So I think work­ing with emo­tions and things like that, and try­ing to trans­form both per­son­al­ly, cre­ative­ly, orga­ni­za­tion­al­ly, is very helpful.”

“I’m inter­est­ed in how to move for­wards in an orga­ni­za­tion, because every time we do some­thing, it just seems like there’s so much waste involved. And again, how do we cre­ate things with­out using things and adding to the problem?”

“I’m in this stage of unrav­el­ing every­thing that I’ve ever learned. And which is, I keep say­ing my most favorite word is to be uncer­tain. The unrav­el­ing is real­ly dif­fi­cult because you have to repo­si­tion your­self every sin­gle day and it does make you feel alive and it is dis­con­cert­ing at the same time but I think that’s the only way that we’re gonna make some changes, is to be in that space.”

“What I’m main­ly doing in all these fields, both per­son­al and insti­tu­tion­al, is to try and fos­ter a sort of polit­i­cal activism that is not relat­ed to par­ti­san posi­tion or ide­o­log­i­cal way of think­ing, but  more regain­ing, through lis­ten­ing prac­tices, an hon­est, com­mu­ni­ty, a way of liv­ing togeth­er. But not just as humans but in a con­text of holis­tic and eth­i­cal per­spec­tives, which is actu­al­ly some­thing we are learn­ing more and more when we pay atten­tion to indige­nous philoso­phies and phe­nom­e­nolo­gies So that means instead of declar­ing a spe­cif­ic posi­tion or ide­ol­o­gy, cre­at­ing spaces for peo­ple to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to lis­ten in a dif­fer­ent way, to acti­vate their body and their sens­es of sound through move­ment, with­in an eco­log­i­cal set­ting, with­in a lis­ten­ing set­ting, that can be an environment–and not nec­es­sar­i­ly a nat­ur­al environment–because we know that we can learn many things from any­where. And in doing so, hope­ful­ly cre­at­ing more aware­ness in the com­mu­ni­ty, Changes can only hap­pen if a larg­er group of peo­ple are syn­chro­nized on sim­i­lar ideas and sen­si­tized to sim­i­lar­i­ty. I hope peo­ple will take action, that we take action. We don’t need polit­i­cal dis­course, we need a form of liv­ing that enhances ways of regain­ing touch among our­selves, where human beings know humans, the stones, the plants, the waters and so forth. And so it’s all very utopi­an, but that’s what I’m try­ing to link towards, in every­thing we do now.”

“The pan­dem­ic has been real­ly good, because in cre­at­ing lots of alien­ation, it demon­strat­ed the fact that actu­al­ly we need to be work­ing in forms that are way more con­sol­i­dat­ed around shar­ing, because it’s about broth­er­hood or sis­ter­hood with any­thing and every­thing around us.”

“Every­thing I’ve been doing in the past, from my youth and grow­ing into this idea of becom­ing a musi­cian and com­pos­er was dri­ven by a cap­i­tal­is­tic form of think­ing. It’s not dri­ven by the idea of focus­ing on your being as a form of ener­gy that can be shared and can be pro­duced to the ben­e­fit of every­thing else, not just your­self, but the com­mu­ni­ty you live with­in. And that prac­tice means that I have to rein­vent all things that I’ve been doing, reject­ing the aes­thet­ic dis­course around the prac­tice I was doing before and, while not trash­ing the skills and the knowl­edge I’ve been accu­mu­lat­ing, re-eval­u­at­ing all this knowl­edge and tech­nique and skills from a dif­fer­ent perspective.”

“But there are oth­er forms of tak­ing peo­ple out and about, in which they will be, in a way, more attuned to them­selves and more able to release their anx­i­ety of need­ing to approve or dis­ap­prove, once the process­es are shared and the space is not restric­tive, and is actu­al­ly the com­mon space on our lands. Not even our lands, of lands and oceans. And so I want to fos­ter more of this activ­i­ty and it has been inspir­ing to see peo­ple com­ing out with­out being told to do this or that and allow them to dis­cov­er their own path into a space that offers sound move­ment, images, or just sim­ply lis­ten­ing to each other.”

“Anoth­er thing that real­ly strikes me is the local focus. For me, hav­ing two kids, right out of school, forced me to become a real­ly local­ly active artist. I didn’t real­ly have the where­with­al to fig­ure out how I could trav­el with young kids. And so most of my career has been real­ly local­ly focused. That’s been a bit of a bar­ri­er, for sure. But there’s also a flip side to it, that this com­mu­ni­ty is such a rich place. And also my work is so root­ed in all of this, in this space, this nature. And so it’s a won­der­ful thing when we embrace it.”

“As an orga­ni­za­tion, we also present and make sure that local artists and orga­ni­za­tions and com­posers are also a major part of how we struc­ture our sea­sons. Since we’re talk­ing about inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty and so, from a sus­tain­abil­i­ty point of view, one of the inter­sec­tions I’ve noticed is the ongo­ing trend with dona­tions and look­ing at how we can actu­al­ly fund this work. dona­tions or down over all char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, with­in the last two years and will con­tin­ue to go down as the econ­o­my shifts. How can we afford to be able to con­tin­ue to unrav­el and remod­el and do what we want to do and how we want to do it in a sus­tain­able fash­ion, if we don’t have the funds to do that. So as devel­op­ers, and that’s one of the inter­sec­tions, but also, through Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tered Fundrais­ing, and those guid­ing set of prin­ci­ples. I don’t remem­ber all of them off the top my head, but one of the main guide­lines is that there are enough funds for every­one, why do we have to keep them all to our­selves, and mak­ing sure that we’re able to dis­perse them. And as an orga­ni­za­tion, we can say, ‘We also encour­age you to donate to oth­er organizations.’”

“when you’re unrav­el­ing some­thing in the mid­dle, can you call it riv­et­ing. Some­times you have to soak, rec­on­cile the piece that you’ve unrav­eled and let it reform before you can move into some­thing else. So part of that, the knit­ting back into some­thing else, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of ener­gy, takes a lot of focus and want­i­ng to make it into some­thing else. And so I see a lot of pos­i­tiv­i­ty, just being able to have these con­ver­sa­tions, and also hav­ing so much of these con­ver­sa­tions also simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, the idea of jus­tice, jus­tice, equal­i­ty, diver­si­ty, inclu­sion and acces­si­bil­i­ty, but as well as rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and about the idea of how can we rec­on­cile or change”

“Rent is just over­whelm­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Now also, basi­cal­ly food, gro­ceries, every­thing. So it’s a huge cloud over my com­mu­ni­ty here. That’s a prob­lem. When these things are in place, is there a secu­ri­ty, com­fort, and the basic needs are tak­en care of, then we can more eas­i­ly even spend more time in nature our­selves. The artist can be more con­nect­ed to environment.”

“I’ve been think­ing very much about the cli­mate and the ethics of what I do, even how my ego was involved in try­ing to pur­sue this career. I think about the ethics of tour­ing. As much as I would love to get a tour of Europe again, I actu­al­ly find that it’s an epi­cal­ly irre­spon­si­ble thing. Even tour­ing in Cana­da, such a big coun­try. I would still like to be able to go back and forth. But again, I don’t know that it’s eth­i­cal­ly respon­si­ble for me to keep doing. So I think about this all the time.”

“Think­ing about com­mu­ni­ty cen­tered fundrais­ing, how do we allow there to be more inter­weav­ing of the tools and resources that we have. Think­ing about the safe­ty of the artist: so for me, just try­ing to sur­vive I have actu­al­ly found it quite dif­fi­cult to make enough mon­ey and so again, I’ve been doing a lot of these stu­pid extra gigs which I don’t real­ly like. But peo­ple have been fly­ing me to Prince George and Kelow­na, Kam­loops and I just think, why are there all these orches­tras? Why is there so much mon­ey spent with fly­ing or, or pay­ing musi­cians from Van­cou­ver to trav­el to these places? That, again, why, and I under­stand that for the com­mu­ni­ties that live in those places„ but it’s also self-sustaining.”

“I was told by some col­leagues in the jury, for some peo­ple in Cana­da, Beethoven is an asset for Cana­di­an cul­ture. And if you look at the bud­get this year, what the coun­cil is spend­ing for sym­pho­ny orches­tras and opera com­pa­nies in this province is 85% of the music budget.”

“There are 20 com­pa­nies in this world that make the major­i­ty of the pollution.

Every time they tear down a house in Van­cou­ver, it’s 70 tons or more of waste that goes into land­fill. If I recy­cled for my entire com­plete life, which I have, it’s not going to make a dent in that. It has to be a change that’s going to be big­ger than every­body just doing one thing. It’s not that that lets us off the hook, we should still do our one thing. But we’ve got to get togeth­er and put pres­sure on the big, big pol­luters, because they’re the ones that are real­ly going to be able to make a difference.”

“We have to look for a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent frame­work. I mean, we are too spoiled. Real­ly. Every­one here used the word com­mu­ni­ty. Great. What is this? What is a com­mu­ni­ty? Not just because you’re liv­ing geo­graph­i­cal­ly  in the same space, is there a com­mu­ni­ty. And the com­mu­ni­ty on the Sun­shine Coast is a com­mu­ni­ty of spoiled mid­dle class peo­ple like me, that go in the show­er and have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to change the tem­per­a­ture of the water at any time they want. A com­mu­ni­ty is a place where you renounce some­thing to the ben­e­fit of every­one, Renounc­ing is some­thing we are not accus­tomed to doing, because we are enslaved by this idea of acquir­ing, acquir­ing, acquir­ing or cap­i­tal­iz­ing on this, cap­i­tal­iz­ing on that. Gen­eros­i­ty is some­thing we can cul­ti­vate more and more.”

“We’re hold­ing all the resources, we’re hold­ing the gold, we’re hold­ing all that stuff. I think that there is actu­al­ly some­thing real­ly pos­i­tive in terms of what we have as expe­ri­ence, every­one in this room has that. And how do we go back and unrav­el the knit­ting and all of those things to come? To just keep that fire going, and be the best that we can with that. And then all the oth­er pieces will fig­ure them­selves out. Clear­ly the net­work­ing, who you part­ner with, to know how to start mov­ing walls. I work for the city is the most head­bang­ing place to be. It’s very dis­il­lu­sion­ing. But if I can just keep car­ry­ing that… there are days where it’s ter­ri­ble, but there are days where it’s great and you move for­ward. We have to car­ry that light with­in us. And I’m real­ly not even try­ing to think on any spir­i­tu­al lev­el. We’ve already done our work. And now we have to work again. Just got­ta keep car­ry­ing it on.”

Montreal Meeting

Date: June 14, 2023
Loca­tion: Goethe-Insti­tut, 1626 Boul. Saint-Lau­rent Bureau 100, Mon­tréal, QC H2X 2T1
Co-pre­sen­ter: Groupe Le Vivier

Like the pre­vi­ous meet­ings, our host and col­lab­o­ra­tor, Groupe Le Vivi­er, opened the meet­ing with a word from Gabrielle Blais-Sénéchal. CNMN was par­tic­u­lar­ly grate­ful for this wel­come and Le Vivier’s efforts, giv­en the fire that dev­as­tat­ed their offices and meet­ing places only a cou­ple weeks pri­or, and of the Goethe Insti­tut, which offered us their space for the meet­ing. ED Ter­ri Hron con­tin­ued the intro­duc­tion with a land acknowl­edge­ment and a short sum­ma­ry of the Sus­tain­able Futures project, these region­al meet­ings, and the upcom­ing nation­al event. We had two guests come to talk to us about actions and pos­si­ble sup­port in Que­bec for sus­tain­able actions and trans­for­ma­tions: Car­o­line Voy­er from the Que­bec Coun­cil for Eco-respon­si­ble Events, and Chris­tine Dan­cause and Nathalie Rae from the Con­seil des Arts et des Let­tres du Québec (CALQ), who pre­sent­ed the envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies and tools put in place for the community.

Car­o­line Voy­er, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Que­bec Coun­cil for Eco-respon­si­ble Events, stressed the impor­tance of cal­cu­lat­ing car­bon foot­print before cre­at­ing a coher­ent and adapt­ed action plan. It encour­ages any cul­tur­al enti­ty to try this exer­cise. The cal­cu­la­tion is pos­si­ble in par­tic­u­lar using the Cre­ative Green plat­form, which offers cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tions a self-mon­i­tor­ing tool for mea­sur­ing their car­bon footprint.

The rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the CALQ, Chris­tine Dan­cause and Nathaly Rae pre­sent­ed the ter­ri­to­r­i­al part­ner­ship pro­gram which allows cul­tur­al enti­ties to ben­e­fit from sup­port and assis­tance in their action plans, both in terms of pro­duc­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion, pro­mo­tion and consolidation.

Specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed for mem­bers of Le Vivi­er, the meet­ing con­tin­ued with exchanges that brought out avenues of reflec­tion in the cre­ative music and sound sec­tor and that Le Vivi­er could work on. These included:

• Encour­age slow-cre­ation/s­low-pro­duc­tion
• Pro­mot­ing the notion of “sus­tain­able cre­ation” and increas­ing the num­ber of shows in the region
• Ques­tion­ing sin­gle/one-off per­for­mances, con­sid­er­ing all the logis­tics and the hall coordination/conflicts that this generates
• Lim­it­ing “growth at any cost” thinking
• Mak­ing works last longer thanks to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies (but what is/are also the impact(s) of dig­i­tal on the environment?)

Par­tic­i­pant Comments:

“In pro­gram­ming, we often tell our­selves we should slow down the pace of the cycle of cre­ation, pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, but right now, orga­ni­za­tions are forced to main­tain an inten­sive pace.”

“There is some­thing that basi­cal­ly seems very dif­fi­cult to me: we are pro­duc­tion orga­ni­za­tions, we always have to make new works, so there is a designed obso­les­cence in our work. A cre­ation four years ago is no longer a cre­ation. There are ques­tions to be asked here, about sus­tain­able cre­ation. But then when we are asked to reduce, but my company’s man­date is to cre­ate, to pro­duce. All my efforts are towards try­ing to pro­duce more, and to cut costs. The most effec­tive way for me to reduce my foot­print would be to pro­duce less, that’s for sure.”

“In Mon­tre­al, dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, there was “Quand l’art prend air” [CAM pro­gram]. Espe­cial­ly for chil­dren, when you think about reduc­ing ener­gy, it essen­tial­ly worked just acousti­cal­ly. [Projects] that can be done with­out equip­ment, with­out infra­struc­ture and mod­est­ly, those would be great projects to pro­pose, to cre­ate beau­ti­ful part­ner­ships, and these pro­grams could be pro­duced more regularly. »

“The oth­er thing is growth at all costs. I actu­al­ly think that we shouldn’t go in that direc­tion, that’s pre­cise­ly what we’re try­ing to slow down in many spheres of soci­ety, and espe­cial­ly in the cul­tur­al field, where increas­ing the offer is not no longer a solu­tion, but it’s much more about reach­ing the pub­lic, and in par­tic­u­lar regionally.”

“We should put empha­sis on recov­er­ing and con­sol­i­dat­ing resources.”

“From what I hear of our needs in terms of shar­ing resources towards a con­cern for eco-respon­si­bil­i­ty, I think that Le Vivi­er can real­ly be an impor­tant vec­tor for its mem­bers at this time. I think it’s very impor­tant that we work together.”

“We are work­ing on our dig­i­tal plan. Of course, we won­der if dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy can help works have a longer life cycle. There are many mem­bers who made excep­tion­al projects in the hall and also online, and so, what do we do with this con­tent, so that it con­tin­ues to live? So that’s a real reflec­tion that we have inter­nal­ly, the dis­cus­sion in rela­tion to data. How do we archive all that and how do we cre­ate a cen­ter for the cir­cu­la­tion of works and artists.”