Martyn Wendell Jones

Olivier Latry, organist at Notre Dame, to perform at St. Basil’s Church and give master class to U of T students

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 14:50:11 +0000

Olivier Latry, organist at Notre Dame, to perform at St. Basil’s Church and give master class to U of T students

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 11/18/2019 - 09:50

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Olivier Latry, the titular organist at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris since 1985, will perform a concert Friday in honour of the 100th anniversary of the installation of the organ at St. Basil's Church (photo by Ansgar Klostermann/RMF via Flickr)

Martyn Wendell Jones

Topic

City & Culture

Faculty of Music

France

Global

Graduate Students

Humanities

University of St. Michael's College

After fire destroyed much of Notre Dame Cathedral earlier this year, Paris and the world were relieved to discover that the landmark’s 19^th-century Cavaillé-Coll organ – one of the most powerful and moving organs in the world – had survived the blaze.

Now, seven months after the fire on April 15, one of the few people in the world to play regularly the Notre Dame organ will be performing at the University of St. Michael’s College. Olivier Latry, the titular organist at Notre Dame since 1985, will visit St. Basil’s Church to play in honour of the 100^th anniversary of the installation of the church’s organ.

Latry will also be giving a master class to students from the ��Ƶ’s Faculty of Music a few hours before the sold-out Friday event, which is co-sponsored by the Royal Canadian College of Organists.

“I’m very honoured to be chosen to come for the 100-year anniversary,” Latry says, noting that Notre Dame’s organ will inevitably influence his performance in St. Basil’s.

“I’ve spent two-thirds of my life at Notre Dame,” says Latry, whose January album recorded in the iconic church was the last recording made on the Notre Dame organ before the fire.

“I’m always thinking about the organ and, when I’m somewhere else, I try to reconstruct the sound that I have in Notre Dame on the organ that I will play.”

The Casavant Frères organ Latry will play at St. Basil’s was first installed in 1919. The instrument is one of the few organs in Toronto to be built according to the ideals of the French Symphonic style, which also characterizes the organ at Notre Dame.

“St. Michael’s is thrilled to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the installation of the organ at St. Basil’s, which has been at the heart of our campus community since we opened our doors on Clover Hill in 1856,” says St. Michael’s President David Sylvester.

The organ at St. Basil’s Church at the University of St. Michael’s College (photo courtesy of University of St. Michael’s College)

Since its installation, the St. Basil’s organ has provided an accompaniment to some of the most important moments in academic and liturgical life for the St. Michael’s community, including convocation and invocation masses, presidential installations, weddings, funerals – and, of course, the regular weekday and Sunday mass.

“The instrument Olivier Latry will play marries the academic and liturgical sides of our community. We look forward to welcoming members of our larger university and city community to enjoy Latry’s performance on Nov. 22, a day on which the church celebrates the Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music,” Sylvester says.

Rev. Morgan Rice, the church’s current pastor, says St. Basil’s is “an enormously important part of not just the spiritual life of St. Michael’s, but also the community life of St. Michael’s.”

Students can often be found at the church gathering for events or volunteering with social outreach programs such as Out of the Cold, which provides food and hospitality to members of the homeless population in Toronto.

The longest continuously operating building on the U of T campus, St. Basil’s Collegiate Church first opened its doors in 1856, the day before the opening of the St. Michael’s campus at Clover Hill, its current location. The parish has been administered since its founding by the Basilian Fathers, the same teaching order that helped to found St. Michael’s.

In addition to their presence in college classrooms as professors, the Basilians have remained a central presence at St. Michael’s through their work at the church, providing another point of connection with staff, faculty and students. “I hope that Basilian presence on campus through our ministry at St. Basil’s will continue for many years to come,” Rice says.

Latry’s Nov. 22 performance will follow a special interview with John Paul Farahat, director of music and principal organist at St. Basil’s. Farahat, who has performed on the Notre Dame organ himself, directed a rebuild in 2017 of the St. Basil’s organ by Casavant Frères and the Alan Jackson Company. The rebuild involved lowering a section of the façade enough to allow the rose window on the south side of the church to be visible from the floor.

Farahat had two goals for the rebuild of the St. Basil’s organ: “First, to create an instrument for worship and prayer that was viable for the next generation, and second, to make an instrument well suited to French repertoire.”

The lowering of the organ’s façade was intended to create “a visual component to that [beautiful sound],” Farahat says, adding that a priority during the rebuild was creating “an exceptional teaching instrument for organ students in general.”

Farahat says the organ has become a resource to U of T students studying organ performance, as well as professors and music directors who come from all over the city to play the instrument.

While Latry is chiefly known as a principal organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral, he is also a professor of organ at Conservatoire de Paris. As such, his visit to St. Michael’s will incorporate both his liturgical and educational roles.

In addition to his evening concert at St. Basil’s, Latry will provide high-level personalized instruction to four students from U of T’s Faculty of Music, who will have an opportunity to join him in the organ loft Friday morning for a two-hour master class.

Faculty of Music Associate Professor Kevin Komisaruk says the master class will give these students “a rare chance to experience customized instruction from one of the world’s most experienced and accomplished professionals.

“Latry is a world celebrity among organists,” says Komisaruk, who has also been an organist at St. Basil’s. “It is always a transformative thrill for students who get a chance to see themselves in their role models.

“We are deeply grateful that St. Basil’s has consistently shown such grace and openness in supporting the pedagogic development of our students by allowing them to practise, study and perform at this historic instrument.”

One of the students in Latry’s master class is Stefani Bedin, an associate organist at the church who is also pursuing a doctor of musical arts in performance degree.

“Olivier Latry is one of the custodians of the esteemed French organ tradition, so I particularly look forward to hearing his comments on the French organ repertoire,” Bedin says. “It is wonderful that the collaboration between St. Basil’s, the University of St. Michael’s College and the wider community has made this truly exceptional event possible.”

Latry’s repertoire for the concert will include both sacred and concert pieces meant to showcase the organ’s French symphonic qualities, but the technical virtuosity is an expression of a simple desire.

“It’s nice to share my passion,” Latry says. “You are always touched by the sound of the organ. You will always find something which touches you. I think that related to the music which was composed for the instrument, there is a lot to discover and there’s a lot also to enjoy.”

More than anything else, that enjoyment is what he hopes to provide during his St. Basil’s performance.

“I would say to the people: Just come and listen and enjoy.”

New U of T course to examine #MeToo and the media

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 17:01:30 +0000

New U of T course to examine #MeToo and the media

noreen.rasbach Mon, 08/12/2019 - 13:01

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South Korean demonstrators hold banners during a rally to mark International Women's Day 2018 as part of the country's #MeToo movement in Seoul (photo by Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images )

Topic

Undergraduate Students

University of St. Michael's College

In 2017, major media exposés of predatory sexual behaviour by powerful figures unleashed #MeToo, a hashtag now tweeted and shared more than 20 million times.

Using the hashtag, people all over the world began to share stories of their own experiences of abuse at the hands of people whose wealth and power had protected them from justice, and this public reckoning led to a major – and ongoing – cultural shift.

Now, two years after the publication of the reporting that launched #MeToo, two journalists who continue to advance and shape the public conversation around the issue in Canada are bringing their expertise into the classroom at the ��Ƶ.

Beginning Sept. 5, Jessica Johnson, executive editor and creative director of The Walrus magazine, and Anne Kingston, senior writer and columnist for Maclean’s, will be co-teaching “#MeToo and the Media,” a course at the University of St. Michael's College designed to help students develop an analytic understanding of the social movement as it continues to evolve.

Kingston and Johnson plan to contextualize #MeToo in a larger media ecosystem. “This will be a class that looks at the way #MeToo informed the media, and also, about the way the media coverage of the movement has fuelled broader conversation in society,” says Johnson.

“This is a new class – new at St. Michael’s College, but also, we aren’t aware of any other one exactly like it anywhere,” she says. “Some of the themes of the public conversation surrounding #MeToo – privilege, the nature of consent, the workplace, dating, contemporary constructions of gender – are matters of ongoing concern to U of T students, which creates an opportunity for a special kind of dialogue in the classroom.”

Over the course of the semester, lectures, readings, social media investigation, videos, and guest speakers will examine #MeToo’s far-reaching consequences (and controversies), including the cultural biases, systemic inequities and endemic violence that #MeToo coverage exposed.

Kingston, who covered the trials of Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby and has done extensive reporting on #MeToo, acknowledges that the ongoing, dynamic nature of #MeToo creates unique challenges for the course, but sees the Book and Media Studies program as an ideal framework.

“St. Michael’s well-received ‘Trump and the Media’ course led the way in showing how an academic institution can instruct while interacting with real-time news,” says Kingston. And as former New York Times editor Sam Tanenhaus did with his class on Trump last fall, Kingston and Johnson will regularly incorporate breaking news into their curriculum.

Kingston points to the upcoming trial of Hedley’s Jacob Hoggard as one possible example.

“Book and Media Studies is a program that allows students to engage with some of the most pressing and complex situations created by our intensely mediated moment, and place them in contexts beyond 140 characters,” St. Michael’s Principal and Vice-President Randy Boyagoda says.

“A course like #MeToo and the Media, taught by two distinguished visiting professors, each a leading figure in contemporary Canadian media, makes it possible for students to explore one of the most vexed, active, and important situations in contemporary media, politics, and culture.”

Media ethics in the fake news era: Conference at U of T builds on Marshall McLuhan’s legacy

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 16:23:50 +0000

Media ethics in the fake news era: Conference at U of T builds on Marshall McLuhan’s legacy

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 06/24/2019 - 12:23

Cutline

The University of St. Michael’s College in the ��Ƶ and U of T are co-hosting the Media Ecology Association's annual convention this week (photo by Makeda Marc-Ali)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Information

University of St. Michael's College

In a world of fake news, hyper-connectivity and rapidly advancing means of communication, the humanistic and critical perspective of famed media theorist – and ��Ƶ professor –Marshall McLuhan can feel almost prophetic. So it’s fitting that, this week, hundreds of scholars will converge on U of T’s downtown Toronto campus to address many of the most important and challenging questions about media and society today.

From June 27-30, the University of St. Michael’s College in the ��Ƶ and U of T will co-host the Media Ecology Association (MEA) for its 20th annual convention. This year’s theme is “Media Ethics: Human Ecology in a Connected World,” and the itinerary includes 80 sessions and events that feature 300 speakers from 30 countries.

The international conference is timely, with elections on the horizon in both Canada and the United States.

“Given St. Mike’s long tradition of teaching and research infused with a focus on ethics and values, it’s fitting that we, along with U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science, Faculty of Information, and the Centre for Ethics, have joined together with the MEA to inspire the next generation of media scholars,” said St. Michael’s President David Sylvester.

Paolo Granata, an assistant professor of book and media studies, is the chair of this year’s conference. He organized the event with an eye on a technological society developing so quickly that lawmakers and ethicists are struggling to keep pace. Granata explores these ideas in his research and teaching, including the McLuhan Seminar in Creativity and Technology, an SMC One program that features a learning experience in Silicon Valley for first-year students. A number of Granata’s students will also be on hand to participate in and support the proceedings while making connections with scholars in the field.

The proceedings will kick off on Wednesday with a pre-conference panel discussion on how the internet is affecting civil society featuring Mark Kingwell, a professor in U of T’s department of philosophy. Presented by the Toronto Reference Library and the McLuhan Salon Series, “The Social Cost of the Information Age” networking event is free and open to the public.

The formal opening of the convention is on June 27 and will include remarks from the Honourable Karina Gould, Canada's minister of democratic institutions.

“The Media Ethics conference provides an important space for Canadians to discuss how they use platforms, the information they are seeing on these platforms and the level of trust they have for these platforms,” says Gould.

“Democracy is rooted in the trust of the people in the process and in the legitimacy of the outcome.”

Honouring Frankenstein's 200th anniversary: U of T scholars hold week-long celebration

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 04:00:00 +0000

Honouring Frankenstein's 200th anniversary: U of T scholars hold week-long celebration

noreen.rasbach Tue, 10/23/2018 - 00:00

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The original manuscript of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was exhibited at the University of Oxford in 2010 (photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Topic

Jackman Humanities Institute

University of St. Michael's College

More than two centuries ago, inspired by a frightening daydream, Mary Shelley wrote a novel called Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, the story of a scientist who brings to life a monstrous patchwork humanoid would become a classic, and the book has never gone out of print. Two hundred years after Shelley published her novel, its questions about the meaning of human life and society are as freshly compelling in an age of artificial intelligence as they were in the Age of Steam.

On this bicentennial anniversary of Frankenstein’s publication, University of Toronto Assistant Professors Paolo Granata and Jean-Olivier Richard, both at University of St. Michael's College, and Terry F. Robinson, an assistant professor in the department of English, are making sure the book receives a worthy celebration. With the sponsorship and support of the Jackman Humanities Institute, the trio has spent months organizing a week-long interdisciplinary program Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next, which will run from Oct. 24 to 31. The itinerary includes film screenings, special exhibits, a day-long academic symposium and a marathon reading of the novel at the Toronto Reference Library.

“No Western novel past or present has had the same kind of popular, intercultural and interdisciplinary impact as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” says Robinson. On the most basic level, the book remains relevant because it “translates an ancient warning for a modern context – for a society no longer governed by myth but by technology.” That warning? “That unreflective hubris can produce dire consequences.”

Granata, who will chair a global conference on media ethics at St. Michael’s in June of 2019, also finds the book’s ethical dimension to be the key to its ongoing relevance, particularly when it comes to today’s rapid advances in technology. “It’s time to take ethics into account for a critical interpretation of the role of technology in today’s world and the future,” he says.

This call to action has been associated with Frankenstein since its publication. Richard refers to a paper in which philosopher Heather E. Douglas uses the Manhattan Project – the scientific collaboration that led to the creation of the first nuclear weapons – to illustrate the moral stakes of the book’s ancient warning. (Publishers Weekly quotes a reporter after Hiroshima as saying, “We have created Frankenstein.”)

Boris Karloff in the Bride of Frankenstein: Nearly 100 years before the film, Frankenstein was adapted for the London stage (photo via John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)

Perhaps little known to modern readers is the fact that Frankenstein’s earliest adaptations were for the stage, notes Robinson, and its malleable narrative entertained popular audiences in London “nearly 100 years before Universal Studios introduced Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.” The book also presents readers with “multiple generic styles [and] narratives” that “serve the deeper philosophical purpose of the novel by providing insight into multiple perspectives.” While the ethical questions have been clear and urgent from the book’s publication, its variable form has made it possible for each generation of readers to respond to the book in markedly different ways.

Frankenstein helped to establish the genre of science fiction. On Wednesday, a panel presentation at the Merril Collection’s special exhibit “200 Years of Mad Science” at the Lillian H. Smith Library will kick off the week-long program. The story by Shelley (pictured left) reflected Romantic-era anxieties about the progress of scientific reason; the moment Dr. Frankenstein’s creature comes to life demonstrates Shelley’s familiarity with “Galvanism,” says Richard – the study of so-called “animal electricity,” a hot scientific topic at the time. (“The specific reanimation of decapitated bodies” using electric currents became a spectacular galvanic fad at the beginning of the 19^th century, he says.) A century later, early-20^th-century film adaptations would reflect Progressive-Era beliefs about eugenics and biological determinism, with the doctor’s assistant Igor sealing the creature’s villainous fate by mistakenly stealing a “criminal” brain for it from an anatomy lab.

Frankenstein continues to spur engagements with contemporary issues. The Cinema Studies Institute’s professor Brian Jacobson will introduce the film Ex Machina (2014) before a screening on Thursday, at St. Michael’s; the movie updates Shelley’s mythology for an era of artificial intelligence. The story has also given expression to new questions about race, justice and society. Novelist Victor Lavalle’s graphic novel Destroyer (2018) continues Shelley’s story in an age of widespread concern over police violence in communities of racialized residents.

Richard notes that though Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a frightening ghost story, the novel has lost some of its fear factor. He will introduce a screening of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) on Monday in order to show a more lighthearted side of the book’s cultural reception. The Halloween marathon reading on Wednesday, Oct. 31 at the Toronto Reference library – with interlude music from film adaptations – will serve a similar purpose.

But even if Frankenstein doesn’t frighten modern readers, it provides an endless source of fascination to scholars and specialists, many of whom will participate in a daylong “academic campfire” symposium on the book at St. Michael’s on Friday. Presenters from across Canada and the U.S. will discuss topics as diverse as cybernetics, the history of the book’s interpretation, the prospect of “responsible” science and the way that theatrical stagings changed the reception of the book.

In celebrating the 200^th anniversary of Frankenstein, one question seems particularly apt: “Who are the Victor Frankenstein’s of today’s world?” In response to this question, Granata suggests looking into a recent television show – Black Mirror.

Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next begins Wednesday. All events will be free and open to the public.

St. Mike's Angel Lab hosts tech leaders Anthony Lacavera and Mark Palma at U of T

lanthierj — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 17:30:24 +0000

St. Mike's Angel Lab hosts tech leaders Anthony Lacavera and Mark Palma at U of T

lanthierj Tue, 01/10/2017 - 12:30

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From left to right, Canadian tech entrepreneur Mark Palma, students Enyi Anudu, Hao Chen, Andrew Dyck and Luke Kyne, and Palma's business partner Anthony Lacavera. The students are part of Angel Lab, St. Mike's initiative for social entrepreneurs

Martyn Wendell Jones

Author legacy

Martyn Wendell Jones

Topic

City & Culture

Startup

Alumni

St. Michael's College

Social Entrepreneurship

Dealing with “spectacular failures” and the politeness of Canadians – those were just some of the challenges faced by Canadian tech entrepreneurs and U of T alumni Anthony Lacavera and Mark Palma.

The alumni and business partners shared their experiences recently with students interested in developing social justice startups at U of T’s St. Michael’s College.

“I’ve had some spectacular failures,” Lacavera said, recalling that in the early 2000s, “I wanted to make payphones free, and sell ads…I would not let it go.”

It took three years and millions of dollars before he finally admitted defeat, he added.

The fireside chat was attended by St. Michael's College President and Vice-Chancellor David Mulroney and Principal and Vice President Randy Boyagoda.

It was organized and hosted by students from Angel Lab, an initiative St. Mike’s launched last year to help undergrads start enterprises with a social impact. The startup effort is just one of the many ways St. Mike’s has been helping students connect faith with academics – the college's recent initiatives have been featured in the Globe and Mail.

Read the Globe and Mail story

WIND Mobile founder Anthony Lacavera answering students' questions during the fireside chat

Lacavera, who founded WIND Mobile and Globalive, and Palma, who manages Globalive, have known each other since their days in St. Mike’s residence.

Though Toronto is now home to incubators, accelerators, and a tech-friendly venture capital network, the city and academic institutions were not always so hospitable to business projects, said Lacavera.

“It’s great to see senior leadership [at St. Michael’s] supporting startup initiatives,” Lacavera said. “The world was so much more difficult to navigate in the mid ‘90s, pre-Internet.”

Martyn Wendell Jones

Olivier Latry, organist at Notre Dame, to perform at St. Basil’s Church and give master class to U of T students

New U of T course to examine #MeToo and the media

Media ethics in the fake news era: Conference at U of T builds on Marshall McLuhan’s legacy

Honouring Frankenstein's 200th anniversary: U of T scholars hold week-long celebration

St. Mike's Angel Lab hosts tech leaders Anthony Lacavera and Mark Palma at U of T

Read the Globe and Mail story

Read more about Angel Lab