Someone forgot to tell the students at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering that classical music is dying.
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These gear- and circuit-heads have their own symphony orchestra — the Skule Orchestra — and chamber ensembles. They rehearse every week and give a handful of concerts every school year. At the auditions in September, 14 clarinet players showed up to vie for the two customary positions.
“It was so funny to see all these people clustered around one music stand,” says Haruna Monri, the Iron String Quartet’s first violinist, the Skule Orchestra’s concertmaster and occasional conductor.
But while there is an overabundance of some instruments, others go begging. “We have no bassoon this year,” points out violist Jack Chao, also a member of the string quartet and the principal conductor and programmer of the 55-member orchestra.
But they make do. “We’ll ask a cello to play the bassoon part, if necessary,” Monri says.
The orchestra’s members are all students in Engineering, known for its intensive classes, labs and mountains of homework. They plan their programmes, rehearse and perform without any faculty or professional supervision. And, judging by a conversation I had had over coffee with Monri and Chao yesterday morning, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
I found out about the Skule Orchestra a couple of years ago from soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, who was a Biomedical Engineering student at U of T before she turned her sights on the opera stage. She described the juxtaposition of study-room concentration punctuated by the distant sounds of an orchestra rehearsal as being perfectly natural, even among budding engineers.
It was an inspiration that Bayrakdarian returned in kind by performing a special programme of opera arias with the Skule Orchestra, led by special guest Julian Kuerti, in 2009.
You would think that the Skule Orchestra would have its roots somewhere early in the 20th century, at a time when classical music was closer to the mainstream, but the ensemble is only seven years old. It was born in the supposedly unclassical 21st century, and has been growing, not shrinking.
It’s members aren’t failed music school auditionees but enthusiastic engineers. “We’re all people who took music lessons when we were growing up and want to find some way of keeping up with our instrument,” says Chao, who is in his final year of Mechanical Engineering.
Neither he nor Monri, a Civil Engineering student with a 30-hour-per-week class load, ever considered becoming professional musicians.
“Well, I’ve thought of it recently, but it’s too late,” admits Chao with a smile.
Chao grew up in Vancouver, Monri in Japan (“with a short time in New Jersey”). Both took violin lessons that didn’t follow the usual Royal Conservatory-style levels with annual exams. They are also founding members of the Iron String Quartet, which gives its first concert of the school year tonight in the Debates Room at Hart House.
Chao picked up the viola for practical reasons, because the orchestra needed more. He shakes his head when I ask him if he has studied conducting. He says he organised a little orchestra back home over the summer to help him figure out how to do it. “It wasn’t a very big orchestra,” he smiles.
When asked about the quartet’s name, Chao says it comes from the iron ring that all graduating engineers in Canada receive to remind them of the social responsibility that comes with their chosen profession.
The Skule brass ensemble is called the Brass Ring. The orchestra’s wide umbrella also includes a regular stage band, a blues stage band and a jazz band.
The orchestra rehearses once a week for two hours. This isn’t much, but both Chao and Monri admit that school work does get in the way. “By the second week of October, it’s very hard to get everyone out to practise,” says Monri.
Her own rationale for taking the time out every week is very practical. “It’s a very creative way to procrastinate,” Monri explains. “Everyone needs to take a break from studying. I could easily spend two hours watching YouTube videos, but I go to rehearsal and come back feeling refreshed.”
The 2-1/2-year-old quartet gets together twice a week for three hours. They picked their repertoire for tonight’s concert last spring so that they could look at the parts over the summer. And they’ve been working hard on the pieces — an ambitious programme of quartets by Felix Mendelssohn and Philip Glass, as well as Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet — since September.
Their next recital will feature pieces by Tchaikovsky and Dvorák’s String Quintet, which will give the foursome a chance to work with their new violist, who will replace Chao when he graduates at the end of this school year. “This is our first change of personnel,” Chao points out.
Both Chao and Monri admit that the Skule Orchestra is not known by all of the Faculty’s students, which number approximately 1,000 per year, “so we’re always trying to find ways of getting the word out,” says Monri.
They also know that their performances will never compare to those of the student orchestra from the Faculty of Music. But that’s not the point.
States Monri: “We play for friends and we play as friends.”
Is there a better reason for anyone to make music?
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The Skule Orchestra is very much a community group, so it’s probably more fun to make the music than to listen in some instances. Here is a sample from a Nov. 2008 concert:
U of T’s Engineering students strike me as a particularly creative bunch. Here’s a video on the making of last year’s annual talent show, which looks pretty slick:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
