Every Friday in Globe B.C., we interview someone who is doing something notable in the arts in this province. For the final Culture Q&A of 2014, I wanted to talk to someone who does great work in the arts all year but remains a bit of an unsung hero. There are a lot of people who fit this bill, but I immediately thought of David Pay.
His innovative Music on Main series, which he launched in 2006, does much to animate Vancouver's arts scene, and thus the city as a whole – well beyond Main Street.
Mr. Pay was in the middle of a big move this week – Music on Main is moving with three other arts organizations into a new cultural space in the CBC building. But he found some time to speak with The Globe and Mail.
How did Music on Main get started?
Back in 2006, I was hanging out on Main Street quite a bit, seeing people who were engaging in interesting literature and visual art and we'd go to cool theatre and cinema, but there wasn't really a lot of musical offerings. The Western Front was there but it didn't really feel like it was on Main Street, which eight years ago was a really different place. It was just becoming what Main Street is today. So I started off with a series at Heritage Hall. We launched on Steve Reich's 70th birthday. The idea that year was to be a bit modest: to do four concerts and see how it goes. But then we started doing concerts at The Cellar. And that first year, instead of doing four concerts we ended up doing 28.
I look back at how the ecology has changed in eight years. It was really novel that you could sit with a glass of wine and listen to a Beethoven sonata; that you could grab a beer and hear some new music. Since then, clubs have opened up around the world doing classical music in this way. Vancouver was part of the beginning. It has become a big global movement – this informal way of listening to classical music.
With alcohol.
Totally. It's a social lubricant, right? And what's funny is at a Music on Main concert, people don't cough. They've got a glass of wine, they have a sip, they feel relaxed. And I think we had our third cellphone go off recently. Around 250 concerts and we've had three cellphones go off. People are really paying attention.
How would you describe the kind of concerts you aim to mount?
I describe the concerts as classical but most of the world describes them as 'new music.' So that's the aesthetic side of it. But then there's the social side of it. For me, there's an essential quality around the social connection. So using intimate spaces, finding ways to make sure people are really comfortable, where they can connect with each other and the artists. Because I think that when you feel comfortable that way, you can listen better. Most people still have classical music in their life in some way – whether it's the memory of going with their parents to the symphony, whether it's putting on classical music in the car on the way home, whether it's using some beautiful choral sounds while they're studying. So many people still have a relationship to classical music, but it's not a live one.
You mentioned The Cellar, which closed earlier this year. What has that meant for Music on Main?
It meant that we lost this wonderful place where we could do weekly events. But we had a chance to experiment with other venues and that's helped us launch our new series coming up in 2015 called Roam that takes us into new venues yet again, with even shorter sets, where there's more opportunity to connect socially. My plan is to reintroduce the weekly series in the fall of 2015.
The Cellar wasn't on Main Street. And Roam obviously won't be all on Main Street. So has Music on Main become a bit of a misnomer?
I've wondered about this sort of from the beginning. Music on Main was the name that I came up with in 2006 and now it's really more of an idea. I thought I was creating a project that was about geography, but in the end it was about how people can connect through music.
Your office is no longer on Main Street either. How did this move to this new collaborative space come about?
Touchstone Theatre and PuSh Festival three years ago started talking about creating a co-location space with other partners. They were courting other organizations to see who would be good partners, and they chose DOXA Festival and Music on Main. It was a really rigorous process before they chose us. But the moment they chose us, we became four equal partners. We knew that this space at the CBC building, which had been vacant and was leased by the City of Vancouver, eventually would be coming up as an opportunity for arts organizations. So when the city announced that it would become available, we had already done all the work to know the space would work for us, and we were ready to go. We've started to move in but we're not going to open officially until the end of March.
It's about creating something that will make the city better – rehearsal space in downtown Vancouver where people won't freeze, where actors and dancers won't get hurt from [a substandard] floor, where musicians can actually read their music and be able to hear each other. It's a thrill. We walk around just with our jaws on the floor still. We're moving downtown but our hearts remain on Main Street. But we outgrew the space. The organization – it was [just] me when we started. Now we have three full-time employees plus additional people. We're looking to 2017 when we're going to co-host this big international festival with the International Society for Contemporary Music and the Canadian League of Composers [ISCM World Music Days 2017] and we'll expand to about nine people that year.
Can you tell me about one or two of the highlights of this past year for the series?
It has been the biggest year of my life professionally and definitely the biggest year in Music on Main's history. With our previous composer in residence, Jocelyn Morlock, we produced a concert of a beautiful string quartet by Nikolai Korndorf. We invited the Emily Carr String Quartet from Victoria to come to Vancouver and we were able to make a video. So that was a big highlight. The biggest artistic undertaking I've ever done was the Orpheus Project, which was an immersive musical experience at The Cultch. It ran for seven shows. We had six world premieres. We had 120 people in the audience moving through different spaces, hearing music simultaneously coming together at different points. It was a giant experiment based on my experiences going to immersive theatre.
And looking ahead to 2015, is there anything particularly exciting on the radar right now?
For me it's like choosing [between] your children, right? But I would say two of the shows that I'm really thrilled about are both violinists. Iva Bittova, a Czech singer and violinist who improvises, was also a Czech film star. She's a beautiful, amazing, crazy visceral musician and we have her during the PuSh Festival for two nights at the Fox Cabaret. And then Jennifer Koh is coming in March to Heritage Hall. She is truly one of the great violinists of the world. And our new composer in residence is Caroline Shaw who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013; she was the youngest ever winner of a Pulitzer Prize for music. She'll be up for some more talks and playing and we'll have her here for the Modulus Festival. She's a stunning musician and it's such a thrill to be able to bring this big-deal composer to Vancouver on a regular basis.
Has the culture scene here changed much over the past decade? When I moved here from Toronto shortly after you started Music on Main, I was told by some that the scene wasn't very dynamic. I don't believe that's the case at all.
I think it has changed a lot. It's amazing the kind of work that has happened in the last 10 years: the PuSh Festival, Music on Main. And I think one of the reasons that great stuff happens here is that we are a little bit out of national and international focus. It means we can try things, we can experiment. If you're living in New York and you have a giant failure, people aren't as ready to let you come back on the stage the next night. You have to hit it out of the park every time. And I think for some artists that means that they take less risks. Whereas I think we have this freedom to just be a little bit more experimental. We can push the envelope here and most often we tend to succeed, but it's also a wonderful climate for failure. You can't succeed every time. I've had some spectacular failures and you learn so much. Ten years ago, we had different conversations about what was happening in the city. And today those conversations are old fashioned. They don't happen any more. Actually, one of my most thrilling oh-my-goodness moments: I was in Amsterdam talking to one of the senior people from Lincoln Center. They had just launched a new festival and I asked her what was successful and she said, 'Well one of the things that really works is we do what you do at Music on Main; we make sure everybody has a drink in their hand.' And I thought, oh my God, she knows what's going on at Music on Main. That was one of those little moments where you're like, 'Oh, I have to tell my mum.' I was so honoured and thrilled that people are paying attention to what happens in Vancouver.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Marsha Lederman