Music guide learns new tune during COVID William Littler
“A couple of hours from now, as my final action in the extraordinary roller coaster ride of putting together this second last magazine of the Whole Note’s 25th season, I will call up our designer and ask her to place the final missing piece of the puzzle, on page five, so we can go to press.”
And so began For Openers, David Perlman’s column introducing the May-June issue of Toronto’s indispensable free, monthly (except in the summer) guide to (mostly) classical music.
Perlman is the editor-publisher-co-founder of the Whole Note, a publication whose points of distribution, thanks to the COVID-19 shutdown, plunged in the month of April from 960 to 10.
Rather than reach for a bottle of cyanide, he and his team set about redesigning what was, basically, a publication built around monthly concert listings, roughly 300 to 500 of them, for a time in which concert activity has all but ceased.
Listings in the April issue had already been accompanied by the designation “postponed” or “cancelled” and with the resumption of large-scale concerts and operas now likely months away, the magazine needed a new rationale, not to mention a restoration of its distribution outlets.
Recovering those outlets, phone call by phone call, proved easier than expected. Within a month more than 400 had signed up and the number keeps growing.
As a controlled circulation magazine, this is the way the Whole Note works. Individual businesses agree to take 10 or 20 copies and make them available free to their customers.
Paid advertising helps pay the bills (the listings are free), along with a grant from the Ontario Arts Council’s publishing program. Perlman nevertheless finds it a constant challenge “to keep the wolf from the door.”
The magazine has always been about more than listings.
Signed record reviews fill its back pages and articles of musical interest occupy the front. Moreover, specialist writers continue to lobby for greater diversity, with Jim Galloway championing jazz and Karen Ages, world music.
What is different in the JulyAugust issue is the replacement of listings with essays covering specialized subject areas, with Brian Chang, for example, writing about how choirs face the challenge of social distancing and Lydia Petrovic interviewing Katherine Carleton, executive director of Orchestras Canada, on how orchestras are coping.
Just as Perlman asserts there was no actual model for his enterprise in the first place, there is obviously none for the age of COVID-19. “We are always improvising,” he says.
He began improvising back in 1987 when he co-founded the Kensington Market Drum as a neighbourhood newspaper similarly based on controlled circulation, with local merchants paying a small fee to act as its distributors.
It was Allan Pulker, one of the newspaper’s columnists and now board chairman of the Whole Note, who convinced his South African colleague of the viability of a similarly structured music magazine.
Perlman had arrived from South Africa in 1975 to enter an MA program in English literature at the University of Toronto and it was one of his professors, the near-legendary Northrop Frye, who recommended him for a job in educational publishing, Among his early projects? Editing a Canadian version of the Harcourt College Handbook.
It was his publishing experience rather than a professional musical background that convinced him to subscribe to Pulker’s suggestion. The idea clearly had legs. Less than a year following the establishment of the Whole Note, he took a call inquiring about the feasibility of launching something similar in Montreal. The result, La Scena Musicale, is a wholly independent sister enterprise.
What the future holds for such publications remains very much in doubt, at least until concert presenters are able to reopen their doors. In the meantime, with its September issue just out, the Whole Note reminds me of a dinner I attended many years ago at which I sat next to the octogenarian and very deaf American composer Virgil Thomson.
Part way through the dinner someone came up to our table and said what a pleasure it was to see the venerable notesmith. “Yes,” Thomson barked. “Everyone expects me to be dead but I’m still here.”
William Littler is a Toronto-based classical music writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star.