James Strecker Reviews the Arts

JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?

DANIEL CABENA: I’ve been working on a program of Vivaldi cantatas for a concert with Scaramella in Toronto next week on April 6. So, we’ll be a quartet of musicians: Joëlle Morton, Paul Jenkins, Neil Chen and me. These cantatas are secular – mostly about love and its…let’s say ups and downs. …Especially its downs! And there’ll be instrumental pieces too, thank heavens; for I’ll need the rest: these pieces are good old-fashioned hard work! It’s funny: had it not been for this question of yours, I certainly would have prepared rehearsed and performed this program of music without any heed to why or how it matters to me or should matter to you. I’m not sure if I just take for granted that it ‘matters,’ that to make music together is just simply good, or if I actually don’t think that it ‘matters’ in any specific or easily expressed way…. Thanks for this question. How would it be if I were to say that it doesn’t matter: that it’s actually just lovely to get together and share some music? That’d be one approach to the question, one that I quite like. Another would be to say that it matters terribly, that, in the face of all that’s so painfully and disorientingly wrong in the world, we simply must and perhaps can only respond by getting together and making something together – like music. I like that answer too. Would either of those do?

JS: How did doing these projects change you as a person and as a creator?

DC: To make friends with these Vivaldi cantatas has been a humbling experience, for the virtuosity that they demand is, though almost manageable, still beyond me! So, they’ve helped me to develop some new skills and to really dig deeply into my method of practice and preparation. By that I mean that I’ve really had to trust in my methods and that, over the course of times and through careful work, I would grow into the demands of this music. This process so far – and we haven’t even begun rehearsals yet; so, I’m still speaking now of my own study and practice – has also allowed me to return to first principles and especially to the…let’s say, ‘shared primacy’ of text, rhetoric and music. (For, in Vivaldi’s time and tradition, those three were understood to be equally important.) So, it’s been a fruitful challenge, and it’s allowed something of a shoring-up in my practice and thinking. I can’t wait to get together with my wonderful colleagues at Scaramella and start rehearsing!

JS: What might others not understand or appreciate about the work you produce or do?

DC: I think people might be surprised to know how much time and work it takes to mount a program of music. I won’t quantify that, as it varies so widely from program to program, piece to piece; but I will say that it’s a considerable investment of effort. It’s wonderful, too – really like forging and growing into a relationship. There’s an encounter to be made… Visually, through the score, or aurally, through listening; then there’s a kinaesthetic encounter with the work, the feeling out of the singerly demands. Then there’s all kinds of messy and multi-layered study of the music and text. There’s analysis, research into meaning and structure and character. And, alongside all of that, there’s a growing familiarity that’s taking place – you and the music and text start to get comfortable together, likely through fits and starts, and sometimes through conflict! So, yes, I think people might be surprised by how similar this preparatory work is to getting to know a person.

JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work?

DC: Well – and that’s another potentially surprising thing – I think it’s really a whole person sort of job. There’s analytical work. There’s emotional work – sampling from the smorgasbord of affect and motivation. There physical work, the ongoing experimental process of learning to coordinate yourself in the particular activity that is singing the music. Then there’s all the ‘self-care’ sort of stuff – the rest and repose – that’s essential to the integration of the work and, later, the sharing of that work in performance. The whole self is the instrument.

JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?

DC: It’s a bit like in the Tom Petty song: ‘the waiting is the hardest part.’ It’s hard to wait off-stage before the concert starts, hard to cope with the lively and occasionally confounding stimulus of that particular brand of expectation. But it’s also hard to do the kinds of waiting that the profession demands; for one often has to wait for opportunities to arise in which to offer whatever it is that one has to offer. …All of that despite the knowledge – and sometimes something of an urgent feeling – that one has something to give and say. One has to let all of that simmer and find a way to do the work, even when one’s waiting. I’m getting into pretty deep stuff there, so I don’t mean to belabour the point! But I’ll turn it over towards the practical and say that I’ve never found this area of experience to be challenging in the busiest times. So, if we were all just making a heck of a lot more art, I suspect we’d have found a cure to the angst that I’m describing!

JS: Imagine that you are meeting two or three people, living or dead, whom you admire because of their work in your form of artistic expression. What would you say to them and what would they say to you?

DC: I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of my musical heroes, one of whom is Hervé Niquet. I found singing with him to be an exquisitely freeing and clarifying experience, so based upon the reality of being joined together in a single purpose and doing so playfully. I’ve not sung for him for five or six years now, so I’d like to chew the fat with him now, and ask him to be a fly on the wall in my teaching studio (he’s a great voice teacher!) and give me feedback. I’d thank him for his example and guidance. I’ve also had the huge privilege of meeting with and studying with one of my countertenor heroes, Paul Esswood. Nor have I any specific questions to ask him, for I found all my questions to be answered in his singing and his fellowship (over meals in the village of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges). The simple elegance and generosity of spirit that he evinced in his conversation and teaching are of the same substance as his singing. I’d thank him again (also for his Dichterliebe, which is beautiful!). I’d thank my teacher, Wendy Nielsen, who manifests in her work and her friendship this extraordinary constructive acceptance and cheerfulness, and I’d ask her just how she manages to know exactly what to work on in exactly which moment – for she embodies that and many other virtuosities! Finally, I’ve had the privilege to be brought up by a musical hero, my father, Barrie. His rhythm, his sense of fun, his commitment to text, his respect for craft, his refusal to take himself seriously while, at the same time, taking the work seriously, his devotion to the forgotten, the overlooked, his encouragement to go my own way…. For all of this I’d thank him. And I get to thank him in person, too, as he lives just ‘round the corner.

JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that helped to make you who you are as a creative artist.

DC: I had an extraordinary experience in a masterclass once that was really THE door that I needed to pass through in order to get…anywhere at all. The teacher (the wonderful Margreet Honig) stopped me in the midst of my struggle with ‘Che faro senza Euridice’ and said, ‘Hey, Daniel: you are thinking in muscles.’ To which I replied, ‘Well, yes, of course I am. What else is there?’ ‘But, Daniel: I think in air,’ she replied, without missing a beat. That insight allowed me to tap into an organizing principle, something of a higher…no: I think I mean deeper…plane by which to coordinate myself in singing. That moment brought together and clarified decades of voice study and liberated me to continue in my work. It also confirmed me in my feeling of being called to teach. So that’s one turning point. There have been lots of others…. And I find that so many of my singing lessons – with Richard Cunningham, Daniel Lichti, Jan Simons, Catherine Sévigny, Suzie LeBlanc, Mark Pedrotti, Victor Martens, Gerd Türk, Margreet Honig, Paul Esswood, and Wendy Nielsen – have been major turning points in my life; and, since undertaking Alexander Technique teacher training with Susan Sinclair in Toronto, I find that there are more and more of these turning points! But I do like that one that I described. ‘I think in air.’ Ain’t it grand to be a breathing person!?!

JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?

DC: I think it’s hard for an outsider – and for an insider, to boot – to understand how it works. …Practically, I mean, and financially. It’s not only that a person in the arts is almost always precariously and only occasionally employed, but to grow to a certain level and then to maintain that level of craft is a costly proposition. This wouldn’t be hard to understand, I think, if we hadn’t so willingly abandoned in our quotidian speech all language but the language of business. I’m not antagonistic towards business by any means, but I think we should rethink our adoption of business language in other arenas of work. I’ll get to the arts; but first I would suggest that it behooves us to reject the use of business language in our discussions of governance and citizenship. At some point I went from being a ‘citizen’ to a ‘tax-payer’ and then to a ‘consumer’; and it’s disorienting, because I am still, in my bones and purposes and sense of belonging, a citizen. Anyway, the artist has undergone same process, I think: and we’re now expected to speak of ourselves as ‘products’ and then to ‘sell’ those products. But I just don’t think that we function that way, and our work doesn’t function that way. So why don’t we use language that better reflects the lived reality of arts and craftspeople (not to mention of citizens)? Different paradigms require different language. And maybe different language would allow us to notice that, in fact, it is working – and we are working: that there is ongoing activity in our cultural life, even if, for a business person, I mightn’t appear to ‘add up.’ Can we be ‘practitioners,’ or ‘craftspeople,’ or simply ‘artists’ (though I sometimes worry that that last one may have taken on too much weight!)? Anyway, I think there’s a language barrier around some of these things. Nor does that barrier limit our understanding only of the life and value of artists and craftspeople: it’s also very much a theme, I would suggest, in other fields, like in medicine, say, or parenting. All of these disciplines and activities are essential strands in our social fabric, and their value is not easily described in the language of business and commerce (even though all of these fields interact with one another, smooshily).

JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts? Why the delay so far?

DC: I would like to spearhead a big old messy musical ensemble project of some kind, one that enfolds under its auspices students, professionals and amateurs, music-makers of a variety of stripes and ages and interests. I’d like for that to explore at the same time early and contemporary music, and I’d like it to blur the lines between the educational and the performative. Nor am I sure that there’s been a delay, exactly (though I’d sort of like to get going right…now!) …. I have been ruminating considerably over how to ‘house’ a project like that, whether to look for an institutional framework or something less permanent. So that’s something of a hurdle; but I think I’ve mostly just been picking up steam. So, look out! Or listen up, I suppose!

JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts, how would you change it and why?

DC: I’m blessed to be able to say that I haven’t any tremendous regrets. Nor do I think that there’s a perfect formula for how to live a life in the arts or a life, full-stop: for each of us, it’s a grand and messy cobbling together of interests and skills and opportunities, of needs and desires and capacities. I would say, though, that there’s something fruitful in having the fullest and widest possible exposure to and understanding of the arts. And I think that, therefore, a full and deep arts education is extremely important. So, with all of that in mind, I’d say that, if I were to change anything, re-live my own life in the arts, I’d devote more time to the visual arts and dance, with both of which I’ve fallen in love later in life. But, instead of through re-living, I’m keen to redress that lack – and many others! – in my current living.

JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?

DC: Well, I guess I touched upon one element just a moment ago that worries me: education. I’m concerned that the arts have become too much of a niche or set of niches and that their value is too often understood conditionally…along the lines of ‘Mozart is good for the developing brain,’ or ‘a study in music develops good soft-skills.’ I believe that both of those things are true; but it’s also depressing to have music or the other arts reduced in that way: for I think it’s much more important to acknowledge that the arts are not only just plain good but also an essential part of a person’s life and of our shared cultural life. I also worry when the arts cease to be understood as informed by craft and tradition. In the absence of those things, I worry about our losing our moorings; and I worry about our ongoing obsession with ‘genius.’ I know I’m expressing that a bit stridently…but let’s take an example, like J.S. Bach. I couldn’t possibly count the number of times that I’ve read and heard Bach’s name and ‘genius’ in the same sentence; but surely, though he must have had a fairly generous intelligence quotient, and though he was magnificently creative, I suspect that he would have been appalled at our focus on his ‘genius,’ which utterly misses the point. His music works, fulfills a practical cultural purpose. And his musical voice emerged from the great chorus of tradition; and he was a musical craftsperson. I think we need to celebrate those elements – of craft, function and tradition – and let go of our obsession with the idea of ‘creative genius,’ upon which our cultural programming, not to mention our curricula, are too often based.

JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create and/or do?

DC: I love that it’s, by its nature, collaborative: the making is done with others, and the whole team is gorgeously essential; and the sharing is done with others, by and for the performers and by and for the audience. I love that. I also love that the work really is a full-person sort of work. And I wish that that experience – of working with the whole – were celebrated in other fields. I’ve done a bunch of construction and renovation work, and I find in those fields a lot of togetherness; and teaching certainly demands a holisticness of approach. But I hope that that’s possible also in the non-Handwork disciplines – administration, finance, research, and countless others. So, yes: I love collaboration and to work with ‘all of me.’

JS: In your creative life thus far, what have been the most helpful comments you have heard about your work?

DC: I must say that encouragement is hugely helpful. I know that it’s sometimes suggested that our society at large is suffering from an excess of unconditional positive regard, but that is not a condition that I have ever so far observed in the arts. We’re really hard on ourselves and really self-critical. One of the hardest things for my students to do, for instance, is to name even a couple of things that they liked about a performance that they’ve just given. The negatives pour forth effortlessly, by contrast; and they’re of terribly little pedagogical value! So – and this might seem silly or facile or childish – but just to hear from an audience that they appreciate what you did or are doing is a gift without price. And, you know what: I believe that we just simply learn more from that, that those gifts bear fruit.

JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising things about you?

DC: I don’t know what might be particularly surprising or intriguing about me, but I must say that I never cease to be surprised by and intrigued with every single person that I meet. We’re, each of us, so magnificently ourselves. I do have a lot of extra-musical interest, though. I collect vintage clothing and am fascinated with textiles and design. I think that’s part of a wider fascination with ‘how humans lived then.’ I’m blessed to have a partner, my wife Mary, who’s keen on such things; and we have a grand time making the ‘garden’ of our shared interests to grow. (That’s an odd metaphor for me to choose, though, since Mary and I have about 13 grey thumbs between us!) I’m also very keen on cocktail-making (nor do I have a strong objection to cocktail-drinking, mind you). And I simply adore reading fiction (quietly) and poetry (aloud). I’m very interested, also, in this Alexander Technique work that I’m involved in and which I hope within a few years to be qualified to teach. It’s a long and wonderful adventure, and it has the benefit of making everyday things, like tying one’s shoes and emptying the dishwasher, fabulously interesting.