Keep the Music Playing in Toronto

Hershell E. Ezrin, Chairman and CEO, GPC International and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; The Reverend Dr. John Niles, Victoria Park United Church; Charlie Cutts, President and CEO, Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall; Peter Simon, President, Royal Conservatory of Music; Arlene Perly Rae, Wife of The Hon. Bob Rae; Andrew Shaw, President and CEO, Toronto Symphony Orchestra; David Agnew, Principal, Digital4Sight and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Arthur Scace, President, Canadian Opera Company and Partner, McCarthy Tetrault; Bob Weese, Vice-President, GE Canada Inc.; and Gordon K. Mclvor, President, The Canadian Club of Toronto and Vice-President, Public Affairs, Canada Lands Company Limited.

It is my pleasure today to introduce Bob Rae who is going to be addressing our Club on the subject of the new Toronto Symphony.

In the history of the modern world, music and orchestras have played a very important role in the advancement of mankind. All great civilisations have enjoyed music and have advanced the art considerably. You can tell quite often the health of a city by the state of its arts and particularly its symphony.

My interest in classical music started in public school with my grade 8 teacher at Humber Valley--Harry Leroyd--who got me hooked on pieces such as the Grand Canyon Suite. Then it was on to Etobicoke Collegiate and Don Strathdee's band where I played and studied such pieces as Stravinsky's Petrushka.

Teachers can play such an important role in introducing the importance of classical music to young people. They in turn become listeners and potential followers of symphony orchestras like the Toronto Symphony.

Bob Rae served as Ontario's 21st premier and was elected eight times to federal and provincial Parliaments before his retirement from politics in 1996.

Currently Mr. Rae is a partner at the Goodman's law firm where his list of clients includes companies, trade unions, charitable and non-governmental organisations and governments themselves.

He was appointed to Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada in 1998 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000. His list of professional memberships is quite extensive.

He is a panel member of the Canadian Internal Trade Disputes Tribunal and is on the International Commercial Arbitrators list of the Canadian Council for International Business and ADR Chambers.

Mr. Rae is the Chairman of the Forum of Federations, Chairman of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Institute of Research on Public Policy. He also serves as spokesperson for the Leukemia Research Fund.

In addition to serving on numerous committees and foundations, Mr. Rae is an accomplished author; two of his books have been published entitled: "From Protest to Power" and "The Three Questions."

Mr. Rae was born in Ottawa and received his BA and LLB from the University of Toronto and was a Rhodes Scholar from Ontario in 1969. He obtained a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University and was named a Queen's Counsel in 1984.

Mr. Rae received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the Law Society of Upper Canada in 1998 and from the University of Toronto in 1999.

He is married with three lovely daughters and is truly a unique individual. We are very fortunate to have him here as our guest. I'd like to introduce to you Mr. Bob Rae.

Bob Rae

Thank you very much. You have just demonstrated the proof of what I call Rae's law, which is that the warmth of the reception grows with the distance from political office.

I am delighted to be back at this podium. I see so many friends in the audience from a variety of walks of life active in a number of organisations including the Symphony, the Conservatory, the Ballet, TVO, the Art Gallery and the ROM. The theme of my remarks is that the health of our cultural institutions says a lot about the health of our city itself. The challenge for us is to ask the questions: "What kind of community do we want to live in?" and "How do we intend to build this community together?"

Let me make it clear that I have no political aspirations in giving this speech. Arlene is here to make sure that I stay on the straight and narrow as probably the best known, recovering politician in the city.

I have the good fortune now, in addition to being a partner at Goodman's, to chair two great cultural institutions in the city--the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The Royal Conservatory goes back well over 100 years. The Toronto Symphony in its current form is 80 years old. I remember walking down the street not too long ago in the middle of the well-publicised crisis with the Symphony. A woman stopped me in the street and said: "Bob Rae, can you imagine anything worse than the City of Toronto not having a symphony orchestra?" I looked at her and said: "Well, actually I can imagine a few things worse than that. I can. What did you think of the Symphony last week?" She said: "I haven't been to the Symphony in years."

I say this because the Symphony has a new motto: "We are all yours." The Symphony and the Royal Conservatory are civic organisations. They receive support from government but, as I am about to make clear, it is not sufficient to keep them going. I saw a commentator on the news last night talking about support for sports and he said: "In Europe it all comes from the government and in the United States it all comes from the private sector." In Canada we are kind of caught between these two stools. It is true for sports. It is also true for the arts. We are caught between these two stools. But there's no point in complaining about it. We have to make do with what we have and make it clear that the challenge is not just one for a few organisations or for a small elite group. The challenge is one for everyone.

Let's look at the community and see how much it's changed and perhaps find in those changes some of the explanation not only for the challenges but also for the possibilities. We have gone from being essentially a monocultural city to being a multi-national, multi-racial, multicultural city. We've gone from one where men worked and women stayed at home to being a city in which both men and women are working in virtually equal numbers and in which the whole cultural life of the city has been transformed. Thirty years ago when you had tickets to the Royal Alex, you had tickets to the Ballet, you had tickets to the Symphony, and that's what you did. There were a series of things that you went to and the confines and the boundaries of the city were relatively small. You had Port Credit and other outlying towns but Toronto was geographically a much closer place. So to go to Massey Hall to see the Symphony as a regular subscriber was not a difficult move. The same people went and you knew the people who were going and you went as a group. It was a social and general cultural event.

Now the city has completely changed. None of us should be surprised when we read the headlines in the American newspapers about the fact that the Symphony in Chicago, the Symphony in St. Louis, the Symphony in San Diego and other symphony orchestras are in trouble. The cultural institutions in each one of our cities are subject to an enormous challenge. What is the challenge?

Well it takes a variety of forms. One challenge is that these organisations are not always very well run. And so when I say: "We're all yours," we take the "we" very seriously. We take the importance of working together very seriously, we take the importance of working effectively and efficiently very seriously and we take our responsibilities in terms of our own finances very seriously. That has not always been the case. It isn't possible to have a revolving door of executive directors and say this organisation is doing well. I'm delighted to see that our new president, Andrew Shaw, is with us today. He takes office in March. He has been the President of the Frederick Harris Music Co., Limited for 15 years and what I like about Andrew is that the Frederick Harris Music Co., Limited has always turned a profit under his leadership. And this is something that we expect to start happening on March 11.

The second challenge is that the symphonic form itself has been subject to the accusation that people are no longer interested in this kind of music. We've seen this with the Symphony and we see it with the Royal Conservatory. But let me explain something to you. People in fact are very interested in this kind of music. There are thousands and thousands of children who are taking lessons and who are signing up for the Conservatory exams as we speak. There is an enormous range of people who are learning about classical music every day. I don't accept the argument that somehow classical music in and of itself is what makes the Symphony a declining institution.

The other day I got a call from a CBC reporter who said he was doing a series called "Walking Dinosaurs." I told him I couldn't help him. I didn't work at the Royal Ontario Museum. He said: "I'm doing a series on symphony orchestras in North America and why they are in trouble." There's this perception that somehow the symphonic form and symphonic organisations are unresponsive and incapable of change and in fact represent something that happened in the past and not something in the future. It is something that we have to deal with directly and that we have to recognise as an organisation.

What does it mean? Somebody said that whenever you talk about this it sounds as if you are talking about dumbing down the musical repertory. I'm only the Chairman of the Board and I don't have anything to do with the musical repertory. You will be glad to know I will not be performing in any of this year's performances. This is the challenge that we face in terms of the music we present. But I think that we have to demonstrate in the music that we perform that we are ready to engage the people of Toronto in all of their diversity and in all of their interests. There is a constant process of engagement and mutual education that has to take place.

The comment made by the lady in the street was based on a sort of notion of entitlement. That is to say that we are entitled to have a symphony orchestra and the converse of that seems to be that the symphony orchestra is entitled to have an audience.

No one is entitled to an audience unfortunately. It is a simple fact of life that you have to earn your audience. You have to earn your audience every day. You have to engage the people of Toronto. There is a wonderful comment by the president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who said that he asked the electrician who was fixing the lights in his house: "Have you ever been to the Chicago Symphony?" The fellow said: "No, I haven't been to the Chicago Symphony. I don't own a tuxedo."

If the average person in Toronto thinks that it takes a degree to get into the Roy Thomson Hall, that you have to be of a certain social class in order to be able to listen to the Toronto Symphony, then we're in trouble because the makeup of our city is changing. When we say: "We're all yours," we don't just mean that we (all of us at the Symphony) are yours, we also mean that you are part of us. And we have to respond to that in the most creative and positive way.

Now I want to say a word about a couple of myths about the orchestra, a couple of myths about classical music and some things that we need to do. I'm then going to sit down and give some of our musicians a chance to play.

There's a myth that says that this organisation has been badly run and we haven't had support from the private sector. That's why we face the troubles that we face. Well I just want to tell you that in 2001 we received about 20 per cent of our revenue from the three levels of governmentthe city, the province and the federal government. That compares with 54 per cent from government grants for the Montreal Symphony, 31 per cent for the National Ballet and 24 per cent for the Canadian Opera Company. We get about a fifth of what we need from the government and the Montreal Symphony gets more than half of what it needs from the government. So when people say to me that they have all these recording contracts in Montreal and we hear so much more about them, I say that it is just a different picture there. We have a bigger audience, we have more people buying tickets, we have more people going, we have more performances than they do in Montreal yet we have this different structure. The Quebec government takes a very different attitude and the money just happens to be there for them in a way that it isn't for us.

The other reality is that many people in this room have given generously to the TSO. The major donors to the Toronto Symphony have been more generous and more effective in their giving than to any other arts organisation in Canada. In the last 10 years we more than doubled the size of our endowment and we have year after year raised well over $5 million a year. It's a phenomenal donation and it is a remarkable tribute to the generosity of individuals and to their continuing commitment through difficult times. They have been the lifeblood of this organisation and have made it what it is today in terms of its funding position.

We have a huge endowment compared to all the other cultural organisations. No other cultural organisation in the country can point to an endowment of that size. And yet on the operating side we are facing this continuing struggle. We are going to be focussing on fundraising for the next while. And here's my brief commercial plug. The federal government has said that we can get another million dollars if we can raise a million dollars by the end of June. We have raised nearly $400,000 and we have about $600,000 to go simply to get us to that one-million-dollar mark. If anyone here has their chequebook with them (I'm only half joking) I would say to all of you the commitment that is required to get us there is not an impossible target to reach. There is more that we have to do but it is profoundly necessary and important that people know that we're on our way to that goal and it is going to require an extra boost from the public.

I suppose that all this raises the question: "Why are the arts important to Toronto?" Well I believe that Toronto really is a city that's at a crossroad. As I said at the beginning the place we grew up in has changed tremendously in just a few decades. Our home has grown from a regional centre to a national hub and now we realise that we are at the centre of an increasingly global society. We've managed to preserve a lot of the good things--tolerance, respect for law, respect for one another, respect for our diversity--and we've added an energy that attracts people from around the world. It's been a terrific transformation but we have some clear challenges. Some of us have been worrying about the future of this place. For me the personal clincher was the financial crisis that was faced by many of our arts organisations particularly the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Whenever we come back from a great city such as Barcelona, Vienna or Paris, we don't think of the big towers and we don't think of the material wealth. We think of the vitality of the cultural life that we've been able to see and experience. It is impossible to imagine a great city that does not have great musicians, great ballet, great symphony and great art. There's no such thing as a great city that doesn't have these things.

Peter Simon was telling me the other day about the founding of the conservatories in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century and how those great musical schools transformed the world of Russian music and transformed our own sense of music. We had a fantastic series of concerts--a wonderful Rachmaninoff and a wonderful Shostakovich. Both these musicians are graduates of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A whole world was created because of the commitment that people made to musical education and not only to musical education but also to musical performance. The two go together.

We have to recognise that we have not only a challenge but we have an opportunity. The opportunity is to do something wonderful with what we have. We have to be playing in a better hall. We have to have better acoustics in Roy Thomson Hall and there's a proposal to renew the Hall. The Conservatory wants to put itself in a position where we can pull together Tafelmusik and the children's choir and have a place where they can perform properly with acoustics that are appropriate. The Glen Gould School and the Learning-through-the-Arts programme need a new facility that takes us through a path from the nineteenth-century facility that we're in. These are all projects that are underway.

I want to say this. It is not a big number. It's not a huge amount that people are looking for. I say to all of you: "What kind of city do you want to live in and what kind of city do you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?"

I can't answer that question for you. I am answering it myself by spending as much time as I have in helping these organisations to grow, to change, to renew and to recognise that you can't do things the same old way. The boards have to get smaller, they have to become more representative, we have to reach out to all the city and all of its diversity, we have to make sure that every cultural group and every individual and people of all backgrounds feel comfortable and at home and feel that the Symphony is theirs, the Conservatory belongs to them, and not just to a small coterie of people. Our success in making this transformation is not up to me. Fundamentally it's up to you. It's up to you in your workplaces; it's up to you in the lives that you choose to lead and the extent to which you are prepared to support these organisations because without support they will die. When someone says to me: "Can you imagine anything worse?" the answer is: "Yes, I can." And I can also tell you how it happens. It happens because of neglect; it happens because people say it is somebody else's job to give and it's somebody else's job to care. That's the beginning of civic decline.

The choice is ours to produce the kind of city we want to live in--one where we can be proud of great institutions, great experiences and great moments. I don't think there's anyone in this room who has not been moved by great art, great ballet or a great piece of music. That's how we express ourselves.

I want to close with a quotation from Duke Ellington who said: "We aren't worried about posterity; we want it to sound good now" And with those words, I want to hear from our friends in the TSO.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Gordon K. McIvor, President, The Canadian Club of Toronto and VicePresident, Public Affairs, Canada Lands Company Limited.