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.
the centre is wherever
Are you experienced? Even if you haven’t strapped on a virtual reality headset to interact with brave new computer-simulated worlds or to visit real-life remote locations (Mount Everest!) or to watch 360° music videos, news documentaries, and pro-sports games, you know that V.R. is...
Jennie Punter
How We Listen
In the summer of 2013, I was on the hunt for photos of Charlemagne Palestine and was put in touch with crys cole, the artistic director of Winnipeg’s Send + Receive festival. She had invited Palestine to perform at the festival, and our friendly email exchange (with attachments!) not...
Jennie Punter
The Power of Voice: Musicworks Spring 2016
TWO YEARS AGO, TANYA TAGAQ LANDED ON THE COVER OF MUSICWORKS. Her unforgettable voice has been in my head, so to speak, ever since. Our Spring 2014 CD opened with “Tulugak,” a wild evocation from her album Animism, which won the Polaris Prize later that year. Our cover story,...
Jennie Punter
Friendly Exchanges: Musicworks Fall 2015
The title of this post is borrowed from Toronto percussionist Germaine Liu. You’ll have to read Mary Dickie’s lovely story in the Fall 2015 issue to see how Germaine uses the words. You'll find an entirely different spin on the notion of friendly exchanges in Greg J. Smith...
Jennie Punter
Beautiful Contraptions
On a breezy afternoon in early May, I met composer Allison Cameron and photographer Claire Harvie in the cheery little garden oasis behind Trinity St. Paul’s United Church in downtown Toronto. Allison’s compact studio is in the building, so she fetched her banjo, as well as an...
Jennie Punter
The Joy of Discovery
When I was working at the Kingston Whig-Standard in late 1980s, when the daily was still independently owned, I would make my way up the city’s main drag at least once a week for some serious crate-diving (back then, people were replacing their vinyl with CDs like mad), then head home...
Jennie Punter
Play Your Piano
For twenty years I’ve been roommates with a mahogany-stained Heintzman upright piano that has been in my family for five decades. I’ve played numerous black Yamaha uprights and Steinway grands; once, I performed Chopin pieces on an enormous brown Bösendorfer that put me so...
Jennie Punter
The Intimacy of Summer Listening
One Friday evening in early May, I jumped on my bicycle and dipsy-doodled to the Music Gallery along Toronto’s pothole-ravaged streets. Musician–producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh was premiering a new work by Jerusalem In My Heart, the evolving performance project he founded in 2005....
Jennie Punter
Pages
