Jennie Punter

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

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