Hello and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Carol Ratzlaff, founder of VIVA Singers Toronto.
Among the choirs that she and her team lead
is the Every Voice Matters chorus, EVM, a choir for teenagers and adults
with disabilities who require individualized support.
I attended one of their rehearsals on Monday, February 26, 2024.
This episode first opens with an excerpt
of the song "We rise again" that they were practicing.
You will then have a snapshot of their
warmup and rehearsals with their conductors Carol and Michael.
After that excerpt, we will hear Michael speak about
his experience with the choir, and Carol tell us more about VIVA singers.
Choir: ♫ We rise again In the faces of our children ♫
♫ We rise again in the voices of our song ♫
♫ We rise again In the waves out on the ocean ♫
♫ And then We rise again ♫
Carol: Breath and expend breathe, that stretch side here moving.
Nice full breaths.
Maybe breathe in through the straw
as you're doing it.
Choir: ♫ [Vocalizations on Z-Z-Z-Z-Z] ♫
Carol: Nice, now change to lip trills.
Choir: ♫ [Vocalizations on br-br-br-br-br] ♫
Carol: It's a fantastic vowel, the best vowel for an E, for sure.
It's not easy to do a balanced one. It's a closed vowel.
Choir: ♫ [Vocalizations on I-I-I-I-I] ♫
Carol to the pianist: We are doing it in E flat. Pianist to Carol: E flat, sorry.
Choir: ♫ [Vocalizations on I-I-I-I-I] ♫
Choir: ♫ Do Ti La Sol ♫
♫ Fa Mi Re Do ♫
Carol: Sight singing time.
Ready!
Choir: ♫ Do La Ti Sol ♫
♫ La Fa Sol Mi ♫
♫ Fa Re Mi ♫
Sorry, I mixed it!
Choir: ♫ Mi Do Re Ti Do ♫
That was so good!
Choir: ♫ Do ♫
Nice job! You sang in first and in fourth!
Fourth is so tough!
Great work. Awesome.
Sight singing in the air.
It's a beautiful structure that helps us when we perform
and for an entire performance, and it makes it easy for the audience.
Just pat near your heart so we all know that we're feeling the pulse
Because we all have very different rhythms.
If you take a look at the score there from top to bottom,
there is nobody that has the same rhythm.
Ready? Two.
Breathe. And.
Choir (women): ♫ Uuuu ♫
Choir (men): ♫ Uuuu ♫
Great! Great job!
Three, four.
Choir: ♫ Get busy living Get busy, get busy, get busy living ♫
♫ Get busy living, get busy living get busy, get busy ♫
♫ Get busy living, get busy Right now, get busy ♫
♫ Living right now get busy ♫
♫ Right now, get busy Living right now ♫
♫ Get busy ♫
That's it, right here, bar 98.
Does that makes sense? Great, okay.
We will review more of that next week.
We'll take five minutes so that we can run "We rise again."
Ready!
Choir: ♫ When the waves roll on ♫
♫ over the waters ♫
♫ And the ocean cries ♫
♫ We look to ♫
♫ our sons and daughters ♫
♫ to explain our lives ♫
♫ As if a child could tell us why ♫
♫ That as sure as the sunrise, ♫
♫ as sure as the sea, ♫
♫ as sure as the wind in the trees, ♫
♫ We rise again in the faces of our children ♫
♫ We rise again in the voices of our song ♫
♫ We rise again In the waves out on the ocean ♫
♫ And then We rise again ♫
Great job tonight!
It came so far, thank you.
Hi, Michael. Hi.
So you're Michael Denomme and I'm right now with VIVA.
What is your role in the organization?
So I'm the assistant conductor of the Every Voice Matters Chorus here at VIVA.
And how long have you been doing that?
I've been in this role for just two years now,
but I've been with the choir for, I think this is my fifth season.
So what does it consist of, this choir, exactly?
Yeah, so this choir is a great inclusive
group of singers for all disabilities and varying abilities depending
on physical needs, also different mental needs.
And yeah, it's just an all accessibility choir and we often collaborate
with a community choir, which is made up of different adults from the community.
It's a non auditioned choir,
so it's really a great way to get everyone in from the community and include
lots of different voices that aren't always included in other groups.
So can you tell me what it consists of, your role, exactly?
Yeah, exactly. So my role as the assistant conductor is
just making sure that everything goes smoothly.
I teach a lot of music and just making sure that everyone feels comfortable
in the space and helping anyone with sort of anything musically.
Okay. And so the format of the rehearsals, what do you do exactly during the rehearsals?
Yeah. So during the rehearsals, generally,
either Carol or I will start with a warm up.
Often I will play the piano if Carol is teaching
or if Brad [the pianist] is somewhere else, and that's something that I love doing.
Collaborating with Carol on a weekly basis is wonderful.
So we often will just take turns leading
things in the rehearsals, either being up there teaching,
or we often will split into smaller groups as well.
Just switch up the learning environment to make sure that everyone that learns
in different styles, whether it's group or in smaller groups, is taken care of.
Can you tell me a great memory that you
have in everything that you've done in the choir?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the one that always sticks out for me is the very first season I was with Viva.
It was 2019-2020, so it was right as we were sort of heading into the pandemic,
and I believe this was when we sang Beethoven Mass in C.
And at first when I came into the group,
I said, there's no way that we can sing this.
It's such a big work. It's so huge.
And just the way that we were able to break it down
for every single singer, no matter their music ability level,
it was just a wonderful way to present that work.
And with the assistance of the community choir
and different section leads, we were able to sing
through the whole Beethoven Mass in C, which is quite a substantial work,
and I still remember that musical memory to this day.
And I think I have most of that work
memorized at this point as well, which is just a great testament to how
well it was taught throughout the whole process.
So this is a special choir, and I've attended a rehearsal,
and I was really impressed by everything that was done.
But so it's all related to inclusivity and accessibility.
And what is it for you to be
in an organization that promotes accessibility in the arts?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's really important to me because I
I think that music should be available to everyone.
It's something that I enjoy every single day of my life, and I don't really know
what I would be doing without music in my life.
So just to be able to share the gift
of music with every singer, no matter their ability level or whatever
accessibility needs they need, is really important to me.
So we are often very flexible with the way that we teach things here at VIVA,
and I think that's a really important way for us to keep moving forward,
to be able to reach as many lives as possible through music.
Thank you so much.
So I am with Carol Ratzlaff today,
and I just attended a rehearsal of one of the VIVA choirs,
and I will let Carol present this organization and these choirs.
But before that, Carol,
can you present yourself?
Sure. I am a senior woman with long brown hair, and I am five foot two.
I'm wearing blue jeans and just a gray shirt and big glasses.
You are the founder of VIVA? Yes, I am.
And what is it exactly, VIVA?
I know there are seven different choirs.
There are a lot of different things that you do in terms of pedagogy,
in terms of rehearsals, in terms of music training, things like that.
And so can you tell me a little bit more about VIVA itself?
Sure. Yes.
Well, our evolution began in the year 2000, when there were severe government
cuts to school programs, especially downtown Toronto.
And so I was a teacher in the school system,
but I felt I had to do something outside the school system as well.
It wasn't just enough to be in the system,
but I had to do something in the private sector, as challenging as that is.
And so I founded a children's choir, VIVA Youth Singers, at the time.
And it grew fairly quickly.
And we got work with the National Ballet right away in our first year.
We've been singing with them ever since, 24 years.
And so we just grew quite quickly.
We had programming for children up to 18,
but our community evolved based on who stuck around, basically.
We were responsive to singers who were just with us.
And so as they got older and tenors
and basses emerged from the crowd and they didn't leave.
We created an SATB choir in about 2005.
But in the back of my mind, I was burdened by this -
I think you might say it's a calling
to create a choir for people with disabilities.
It just weighed heavily on me with each passing year.
I felt this is something that I had to do and when would I do it and how do I do it?
And so it wasn't until 2010 when I had
an opportunity to do that, that I added that component to the choir,
but it was weighing on me the whole time, for sure.
But it did start with very much just a youth focus
and with some anger at that government for not understanding that a broader
curriculum is what serves children, not a narrow one.
But you couldn't fight it, really, at the time,
except by doing your own thing within the system as well as you could,
and then just working outside of it at the same time.
So those are our roots, and then we have evolved based on who is around us, really.
And I guess you'd call it responsive pedagogy.
And so then our non audition community choir evolved
because there were some parents around and they wanted to sing.
And so we had a little program called the Six Week Singers.
And so we have these limited time kind of projects.
And then it just evolved that people wanted to sing longer than six weeks.
And so all of these things were just from our community.
But originally, you are a voice teacher or you are a teacher in.
I am both, yes, I mean, I'm a singer, you know, mainly a classical singer
and, you know, just done professional choral work locally.
And then I taught vocal music in the schools,
ended up at high school teaching choral music and so on.
I tried to keep singing as much as I could with my school teaching and then my VIVA work,
but tried to keep my hand in that as long as I could.
So how did it evolve from one choir, possibly like a community choir, was it?
Yeah, we started with two children's
choirs, and it got populated, I think, fairly readily.
It was small at the beginning,
but it seemed to grow quite well within two or three years.
Two or three years?
From 2000 to two or three years later.
Yeah, but, I mean, it was viable, it was growing, there was interest.
We just, you know, we were able to keep going.
Mind you, I mean, you know, a number of us worked very hard for about seven years to really launch it.
You know, we volunteered for the first few years just to get it going and assemble
the board and get charitable status and all those foundational things.
You never want to do that twice in your life.
Yeah, I can imagine that.
So you have a big team behind you? A big team.
We do have a big team.
We have 35 staff members, most part time,
and then, of course, the board of directors.
Okay, so now today you have seven choirs?
We have seven, yes.
So we've kept our youth choirs,
and then those adult choirs have emerged, and our EVM chorus is thriving.
And when you started your choir,
it was with children with disabilities or it was with everybody with disability?
There were no people with disabilities for the first ten years.
It was just a children's organization.
And then I had the opportunity to network with someone at Holland Bloorview [Kids Rehabilitation Hospital]
I knew a music therapist there, and I just, you know, I just really felt I wanted to do this work.
And it was a cold call, really.
And this person said - Andrea Lamont is her name, still a practicing music therapist, I'm sure.
She said, well, I have just been allotted a certain percentage of my schedule to do community
work somewhere, and I'm funded to go somewhere and help out.
And so I said, well, could that be with me?
And so for that year, she had a certain percentage of her time
where she helped us understand how to audition people with various conditions
and diagnoses and how to support them and how we might go about that work.
And so we just jumped in.
And for each rehearsal, I suppose you have staff members who help you with the attendees?
Yes, we have almost one on one teaching assistant
staffing for each person with a disability.
And then we have an inclusion coordinator that oversees all of it.
When we have a new singer come,
she will then spend time with the family and make sure
that we know what brings out the best in that singer.
And then she will acquaint the singer
and their needs to their teaching assistant and then, you know, just network through
the year to make sure that relationship is going well.
So there's a lot of work in the background that has to be done.
So in details, what does it mean for you to have this organization that provides
this accessibility needs that is not very well covered here, right?
We don't have a lot of organizations like you
that is that open, and it says, everybody's welcome.
You can come sing whatever your ability is.
What does it mean for you exactly?
It means that you are
creating...
You're taking beauty and sharing it more widely.
And for me, it's less political than it is esthetic.
And that's the thing that I find challenging currently in our world,
is that everything is stated from a political lens.
And very rarely when I read academic
sources of any kind do I encounter the power of music or the esthetics.
So we've lost that currently. It will come back.
We've just got a lopsided academy currently.
But because the human spirit wants creativity
and yearns for beauty, that will be restored at some point.
But that's how I think of it. I think of it as sharing
music that I love and of all sorts,
and, you know, removing barriers so that other people can share in it.
I guess that pretty much sums it up for me.
And there's something about that dynamic of working with people with disabilities
that tears away
the social mystique that there's a layer
sometimes in musical performance that is absolutely stripped away.
And to me, music making is so much better
without it, just the raw humanity of a person.
And for an example, we have a young person with...
Cystic... No, my.
Why do I always forget the name of what he is affected by?
But anyway, he's trapped in this body and he tries his best to -
And he sings with his heart and soul, but he rides
with joy in performance.
And, you know, that is pure and utter raw humanity.
That is just wanting to make art and be part of something beautiful.
And I've spoken at many conferences,
and how many times have people said: "I guess you just listen with different ears?"
And I find that unconscionable.
Of course I don't listen with different ears.
You know, I'm a musician. I love sound.
I love beautiful sound.
That's not it. That's not the point.
The point has been missed with that comment.
But I have great patience, though,
with people and their anger and their ableism.
I really do.
I have compassion for it because we are
locked into this world of ours, you know,
and people are just trying to make their way.
And so...
But I would like to share a little bit
of how you could think of things differently than that and just open up.
I think what it does is it just opens you up in a different way.
It's quite a gift.
And still, logistically, when you perform,
you have to make sure that all the performers are able to go on stage, right?
Yes. Where do you perform usually?
Well, we just rent space here at Jeanne Lamon Hall.
You know, it's accessible, and they're comfortable in the building.
We tend to retain the singers because, you know, so much is built on relationship.
You know, we have a young teaching assistant,
for instance, who's been a TA here since he was 15.
He's now finished his Master's,
and he's been supporting the same two young men all that time.
Those relationships are key.
And when he's away, they're not happy, right.
So they really benefit from routine and from familiarity.
So they're very happy here to do the concerts,
and it's a great place to perform.
And when you do camps or when you go outside
the place where you usually perform, do you struggle to find places that are
accessible for... Like to have an instrument, somewhere to rent,
and to make sure there is enough space for everybody to go around?
Yeah, I mean, we haven't had that much opportunity to do things outside.
For the EVM chorus in particular, we have taken some of them to camp
one year because we do have a children's performing arts camp every fall.
And I don't think they benefited that much from that experience.
We might try it again in a different way.
We did a musical just recently
at Theatre Passe Muraille, and that was a great experience.
And that was a young man with Down Syndrome who composed the musical.
And then it was professionally produced, and so we were the chorus for it.
So that was really our first gig, you know, where we
left home and went out, and got, you know, were engaged to perform.
And when is your next performance with the group?
May 25 is our year end concert, so all of our choirs will sing on that show.
And so, yeah, the music that you heard tonight is what will perform that night.
So it's called "Poetry in Motion,"
and we have some hip hop dancers who will dance to the Carmina Burana.
And so I think it's pretty creative.
Where can we find information about how to book the tickets?
Oh, well, we could just give your name to our manager.
She'd be happy to share the info.
I mean, not for me, but for people who want to... For anyone.
Or our website. Well, it'll be advertising it as well.
Okay, great.
I have a last question.
Is there any person in particular that you
would think [of] in term of inspiration of your work?
Well, a few years ago, before COVID,
I flew to Scotland by myself, and I went to the Drake [Music] School
and saw all the amazing things they were doing in Edinburgh there.
And I met James MacMillan, one of the world's great composers currently.
And I had just read that he had a granddaughter
with a disability who just unfortunately died.
And similar to me, who, I have a son with a disability.
He's alive and well, I'm happy to say.
But, so, I mean, I'm not...
I don't possess a disability and neither does James MacMillan.
But the common thing was that we had this close family member who had been affected,
but his work and what sprung from that for him was this amazing
project of compositions, including people with disabilities
there at the Drake School. And also school children with disabilities,
and, you know, bringing together some of the finest orchestral players
you know, in the UK, doing a major work with these people,
playing instruments, you know, that are modified or with the aid of technology and so on,
but creating beauty out of that, it was just amazing to watch.
So, you know, that's been a real inspiration for me, that there's this incredible artist,
and he is able to find ways to bring beauty and to include those people.
Well, thank you for your work, because I think it's very important.
People like you, they're
the force of this society, and we can actually show that there is
great power in art for people with disabilities, or for everybody, actually.
But with the creation of all these choirs
and all these ensembles and all these pedagogy techniques.
I was also very impressed by the diversity of pedagogy techniques that I saw tonight.
That's great.
And so I wanted to say thank you and thank you for receiving me today.
Yeah. Thank you for coming.
And all the best with all your projects.
Thank you so much. Thank you.