Author Bio:
Jennie Punter is the editor of Musicworks. For more than two decades she has written regularly on music, film, the arts, and the entertainment business for Variety, The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star, and has worked for or contributed to many other Canadian and international publications. For a dozen years, she maintained a parallel career as a documentary-film field producer, researcher, and writer. Her music and film journalism is included in various anthologies, and she has served on many film, music, and magazine awards juries. She studied classical piano for fifteen years.
Emilie LeBel’s Field Notes
For many composers, a work in progress comes with strings attached—no pun intended. There are arts councils and concert presenters to satisfy, musicians to liaise with, premiere dates that draw ever closer. Deadlines, of course, can get the juices flowing, and creative constraints ([...] Read more
In the Works Jennie Punter Issue 120
We Are All Connected
I have often stopped to listen to the trees during a walk in a forest on a breezy day. Only recently, however, did I realize that it is possible to stop and listen to the fungi.
Mycelium is the underground network of fungal threads that connects the roots of different...
Jennie Punter
'Greedy Music'
“In 1993, I was making word clouds because I wondered what my computer’s hard drive was thinking about during its idle time,” Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland said in a 2013 interview. This summer, I wondered what my hard drive (aka my brain) was doing when I was...
Jennie Punter
Who's Telling the Story
This is Musicworks’ final issue of 2018, our fortieth-anniversary year. You will find no best-of or top-ten lists here, no reprints or “where are they now” pieces. The retrospective activity, both casual and curatorial, has largely taken place offline, so to speak, at...
Jennie Punter
Getting Out More Often
In my five years as editor of Musicworks, I cannot recall a more action-packed time than the three-day whirlwind of stimulating events, conversations, and music I experienced last May. All the chatting and typing and reading and listening that I do in front of (or holding) a screen certainly...
Jennie Punter
The Journey: Editor's Note, Musicworks 130
In late 1977, somewhere in Toronto, the poet and noted arts programmer Victor Coleman, Music Gallery cofounders Peter Anson and Al Mattes, and music artists John Oswald and Andrew Timar convened to discuss establishing an artist-run print forum to serve the Canadian creative-music community. In...
Jennie Punter
the art of crowdsourcing
I “Like,” “Love,” “Follow,” and otherwise engage with an array of working musicians and music people—from coast to coast and beyond—through my Musicworks and personal social-media channels. They share news of residencies or gigs or recordings,...
Jennie Punter
GONGS ARE US
My childhood memories of gongs in action are mostly associated with entertainment spectacles: snooze-interrupting crashes at symphony matinees, the bare-chested Gongman swinging a mallet in the Rank Organisation’s film logo, a minor celebrity banishing a contestant on The Gong Show....
Jennie Punter
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