Tag Archives: Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal

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Galaxy Brain

Grand Concert Anniversaire UdeM x SMCQ, Salle Claude-Champagne, 15 November 2025

Artist Véronique Girard and the composer Maxime Daigneault. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Time of Useful Consciousness

In advance of the publication of my first book, Mad Skills, my publisher Repeater Books and I devised a promotional campaign of publicity, ads, and memes to be deployed across social media. To that end, we designed a take on the popular “Galaxy Brain” meme, in which text captions accompany four image panels depicting increasingly illuminated human craniums.

The first caption read, “Discussing People;” the second one, “Discussing Events;” the third, “Discussing Ideas;” and the final galaxy-brain panel declared, “Discussing MIDI.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 19 November 2025

Ben Palmer conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in performance of the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 19 November 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

According to film historians Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, an earlier and much more explicitly absurd treatment for Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove set the movie’s beginning in outer space, recounting the story from the perspective of an alien species that discovers Planet Earth shortly after a nuclear holocaust has exterminated all human life. Had this version of the picture been made, the first title card to scroll onscreen would have read: “Nardac Blefescu Presents … A MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Kubrick had originally titled the film The Delicate Balance of Terror, pilfered, apparently, from a paper of the same name that the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in 1958 for the RAND Corporation. Kolker and Abrams note that Kubrick, regarded widely as a genius, had doodled a number of alternate titles for the film before registering Dr. Strangelove with Paramount Pictures — foremost among them, The Secret Uses of Uranus. Kubrick would incorporate these Sci-Fi Easter eggs into not only 2001, but also the ending of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a story which Kubrick gifted to his friend and protégé Steven Spielberg.

Pulse Mag Issue #2 Launch, Cardinal Tea Room, 20 November 2025

NicheMTL publisher Ryan Diduck and Pulse Mag co-editor-in-chief Eva Rizk reading each other’s magazines. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The zombie apocalypse is not to be taken literally, as if the world should end up like a scene from some George A. Romero film, with the resurrected roaming the earth eating brains and defying death. Rather, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for capitalism, in which a non-living entity — capital — feeds on the planet’s life force, growing ever more powerful with the lives that it devours. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer to this as a “post-mortem despotism,” where an entity that has long-since died continues to exert authoritarian force over the living.

However, capital is not so much undead as it is never-having-lived and therefor can never be killed. Capital, like one of the all-time great cyber-zombie movie villains, on the order of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the HAL-9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, has to be unplugged from its networks of command and control, neutralized. To execute capital, humanity will have to invent and implement radical economies of alternate value and exchange and slowly replace capital as our global operating system. Furthermore, we need to do this without capital reading our lips.

Impedance of the hyper-capitalist economy requires relentless activity in absence of a product, not destruction but non-production.

Hannah Claus, tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 19 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

Hannah Claus, Watersong (2025). Photographed for NicheMTL.

Outsmarting A.I. is a fruitless strategy because we created Artificial Intelligence to mimic the human mind. The fact that there is an inherent competition between us and our progeny is indicative of the fundamental conflict present in the human dramatic narrative.

We are born to fathers and mothers whom we will replace, and neither side is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. We self-organize in the form of states and immediately rebel against authority. The authoritarian ruler is not free either, because he is condemned to subdue his subjects. Though capital is not alive in any biological sense, neither is it free. It is, in effect, a slave to its own slaves.

To prevail in the conflict against an artificially intelligent adversary requires becoming-beast, a return to an unsentimental, irrational, and savage, operative mode. The antidote to Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence, but rather, animal instinct.

M For Mothland with Brainwasher, Boutique Feelings, Mulch, Yoo Doo Right, and Annie-Claude Deschênes, 21 November 2025, La Sala Rossa

Boutique Feelings performs as part of M for Mothland at La Sala Rossa, 21 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

There is a brief scene early on in Kubrick’s 2001, a seemingly throwaway shot in which a cougar attacks one of the apes. The simian is unsuspectingly drinking at a shallow pond when, out of the blue, the wildcat jumps from an elevated cliff and assaults the hominid, provoking it into mortal combat. Kubrick cuts the scene before the audience sees an outcome to this battle. But it must be assumed that the ape loses.

Ostensibly, this might be Kubrick’s way of reminding the film’s viewers that humans were not always, and may not be again, at the top of the food chain, without natural predators, safe in our domination over the animal kingdom. On a deeper level, it may signify the order of chaos and possibility that the monolithic object directly opposes in its geometric and determinate perfection. The monolith for Kubrick is undoubtedly no less violent than the wildcat, cast down from above onto its innocent victims.

The monolith of 2001 is not a screen. It is not an antenna. It is not a tablet. It is not a commandment. It is not a repository. It is not an archive. It is not a mirror. It is not a machine. It is not a product.

The monolith is pure machine, pure repository, pure product. It represents order over chaos, the ultimate, the infinite, the real structure of violence. That is why it fascinates and terrifies the apes.

It is not the work of an alien. It is a symbol of alienation, alienness.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Dead Cities

Poolgirl with Shunk, G String, and Niivi, Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025

Poolgirl performs at Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In December 2006, Ben’s De Luxe Delicatessen, a landmark restaurant serving Smoked Meat sandwiches and French Fries in an historic Art Deco building at the corner of Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve, permanently closed its doors.

Ben’s had been a Montreal staple for 98 years. Scenes from the classic 1965 National Film Board documentary Ladies Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen were filmed there. Celebrities like Liberace and Bette Midler had been welcomed as guests. Pierre Trudeau was a regular, as was Jacques Parizeau. It was a place where federalism and separatism fell away, where the two solitudes could put aside their differences and come together over a Cherry Coke.

The staff at Ben’s, many of whom had worked at the deli for over 50 years, joined the CSN union federation in 1995, and went on strike for what would be the last time in the summer of 2006, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The strike drew on through autumn, and as winter fell, the restaurant’s owner and manager, Jean Kravitz, took the decision to sell the building to SIDEV Realty Corporation.

Following a number of efforts to declare it an historic edifice, Ben’s was demolished in November 2008, and the developer constructed a 16-storey hotel on the site. The restaurant in Le St-Martin Hotel Particulier has been closed for more than a decade.

A Musical Journey with Tawadros and Beethoven, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 5 November 2025

Joseph Tawadros performs with the OSM, 5 November 2025. Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Strikes are effective only when they affect everyone equally. If nurses strike, access to healthcare is restricted for all. If teachers strike, education across the board is denied.

When public transportation employees strike, however, it is only those reliant upon public transportation who suffer. Moreover, those who take public transportation are not in any position to deliver on striking workers’ demands. Rather, through direct and indirect means, Opus cards and taxes, we are the ones who pay the costs for public transportation — costs that have been steadily increasing for services that are in rapid decline.

Metros are constantly delayed or go out of service altogether. Refuse and graffiti litter stations. And at most of them, security seems nonexistent. Violent crime in the Montreal metro system increased 80 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Three men this week were charged in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old victim at Place St. Henri. And a woman was allegedly assaulted inside a metro car in October.

STM Board Chairman Éric Alan Caldwell earlier this year lamented the lack of provincial funding for Montreal’s public transit authority, sentiments echoed by then-mayor Valérie Plante. The STM received $258 million less than expected in the CAQ’s most recent budget.

However, Quebec Transport Minister, Geneviève Guilbault, doesn’t rely upon — and consequently isn’t required to care about — Montreal’s public transportation system. If anything, Quebec City politicians privately rejoice when Montreal’s bus and metro-riding population is distressed.

Quebec conceives of Montreal as its economic engine. Perhaps that’s why the province is more intent upon building highways out of it than maintaining trains within it.

If the unions representing bus drivers and maintenance workers want their job actions to be effective, they should interfere with policymakers’ ability to do theirs.

Quatuor Molinari, Musique à voir, Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025

Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is one silver lining to the transit strike — or of an event like the wave of flight reductions at U.S. airports — it is that it necessarily enforces a slower pace upon modern life.

Traffic is the impeding power to the futurist ideal of speed, the unrestrained id. Cities are regulated by a circulatory rhythm that accelerates, slows down, and fluctuates at various intervals, depending upon the flows of traffic — on foot, in cars, in transit, in flight.

The transfer of one form of traffic into another upsets the metropolitan temporal equilibrium and imposes a different timetable upon urban space. Time thickens when we are forced to throttle our maximum velocity.

Angela Grauerholz, La femme 100 têtes, Blouin|Division, 8 November 2025

Patrons gather for the launch of La Femme 100 têtes by Angela Grauerholz, 8 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Labour unions so far have failed to anticipate or reorient themselves towards the real threat to workers: automation. It cannot be long before city bus and metro drivers will become entirely unnecessary, as driverless alternatives exceed human beings in efficiency and reliability.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company that Google developed, has doubled in size in the past year, and delivered more than 200,000 paid rides per week in 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Autonomous taxis have other advantages. You don’t have to tip or make small talk with the driver. They are not prone to road rage and will never harass a passenger. And robots don’t go on strike. The degeneration of human behaviour is the biggest argument for the embrace of artificial intelligence.

David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM, 6 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Gallery view of David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It is possible that human beings, in our arrogance, will drastically reduce our own usefulness, if not strike ourselves out of existence. We have operated, for the past century at least, under the assumption that the future, benefited by the acceleration of technological advancement, would be indisputably better, and have been disappointed and despondent when it hasn’t. The question, however, is, for whom should the future improve?

If it is for human beings, then me might do well to recalibrate our expectations and ameliorate some of our manners, towards ourselves and one another. This could mean resisting the capitalist impulse to maximize exploitation; to accept less-than-peak profit and speed; to reallocate and share rather than colonize and contest our limited spaces.

The seemingly likelier and more deserving beneficiary of a better future, though, is non-human. Flora and fauna warrant superior living conditions far more than unionized workers of any occupation. Organic matter merits the right to prosperity in excess of the new class of corporate tech bros.

We will be judged by our treatment of wilder things.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Joseph Tawadros photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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Gratitude

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 September – 1 November 2025

Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Wise words from the departing
Eat your greens, especially broccoli
Wear sensible shoes
And always say “thank you”
Especially for the things
You never had
—Coil, “Broccoli”

We often conceive of gifts as those things we receive in a state of gratitude, like presents we are given or give to others on special occasions, or special qualities or skills acquired through practice or bestowed upon us by some benevolent force. The words ‘talented’ and ‘gifted’ are used interchangeably to denote an abundance of capability, as in a talented artist or a gifted musician. Universally, we think of gifts as desirable.

But the truly valuable gifts are the ones we received and never asked for, or asked for and never received, or received and never desired. The experiences in life that teach us the most are those we would have never chosen for ourselves.

Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, Centre PHI, 9 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Josèfa Ntjam at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m not a beggar… I’m just a man passing through.”
—The Way of the Pilgrim

Some things we do over and over again in life and seldom have any memory of the individual events. Try to remember what you had for lunch two Sundays ago and it will likely be difficult because you have lunch every day.

Other things, we do only once and remember forever. Traumatic events, for instance, tend to stick with us, to mark us deeply, embedded in memory. Some things we spend a lifetime trying but failing to ever forget.

And some traumas, like bondage or genocide, live on in ancestral recollection, persisting across continents and generations. One lifetime isn’t long enough to heal these wounds.

Marlon Kroll, Travailler ensemble, Galerie Eli Kerr, 13 September – 25 October 2025

Marlon Kroll, Hard Drive, 2025. Pine, manilla paper, rabbit skin glue, nylon, motor, electronics, hardware. 80″ x 74″ x 330″ Photographed for NicheMTL.

And the Lorg God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
—Genesis 3:18

“I’ll be what I am
A solitary man”
—Neil Diamond, “Solitary Man”

In 2007, Sean Penn attended the Telluride Film Festival with his directorial feature, Into the Wild, a rather silly picture based upon the 1996 true story of the same name by Jon Krakauer.

In it, main character Chris McCandless, also known as Alexander Supertramp, abandons his family and relinquishes his worldly possessions to travel to Alaska to live an ascetic life. Because he is woefully ill-equipped, Supertramp promptly dies from starvation, but not before arriving at the profound realization that happiness in life is only meaningful when it is shared with others.

The joke amongst the staff that year was that Into the Wild and Soylent Green had the same moral: it’s people.

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, La damnation de Faust, Maison Symphonique, 17 September 2025

Rafael Payare conducts Andrew Staples, left, and Sir Willard White, right, at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

What’s gonna’ set you free
Look inside and you’ll see
When you’ve got so much to say
It’s called gratitude, and that’s right
—Beastie Boys, “Gratitude”

Everybody spread love (gimme some more)
If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more)
—Busta Rhymes, “Gimme Some More”

Goodness is usually measured by two criteria.

The first is the ability to achieve another desirable outcome. For instance, it is good to work hard because you will in turn make money and in turn be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle, which is good. The goodness of the first action is determined by the functional goodness of the result. We might describe this as pragmatic goodness.

The second type of goodness is goodness for its own sake, goodness for no discernible purpose other than to be good. This type of goodness is often defined in absence of an action — not necessarily doing something good but rather not doing something that might not be good.

When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, you have the capability and maybe even the right to honk your horn and give the other driver the middle finger. But there is an inherent goodness to not doing those things, a goodness that does not achieve the desirable outcome, such as retribution or revenge, a goodness in absentia, goodness for goodness’ sake. We might describe this as gracious goodness.

As the omnipotent force in the universe, God, or whatever you want to call the law of nature, has the power to strike us down at any moment. But it is good that it usually doesn’t. We might cultivate and practice gracious goodness in our own lives, beginning with ourselves and moving outward into the world at large, doing good by simply not doing.

Elisabeth Perrault & Marion Wagschal, Constantly Shedding, Perpetually Becoming, Pangée, 18 September – 1 November 2025

Marion Wagschal, Colossus, 2016, Oil on canvas, 81″ x 65″ Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

O Give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.
—Psalm 107:1

What is natural might also be described as what is familiar.

Mark Fisher devoted a book-length study to differentiating the weird from the eerie. Neither of these phenomena seem natural to us, and thus they appear unfamiliar. The uncanny, however, is that which is either weird or eerie but also familiar and therefore comparatively natural.

We fill our time with attempts to perceive and interpret space and the things that occupy it, and ourselves in relation to these variables. We judge ourselves and each other upon arbitrary standards that are constructed socially and culturally and are subject to historical change.

One is known by the company one keeps, an age-old adage espouses. So, too, one is identified by their surroundings, the space that they occupy, the things that share that space, and the activities that transpire therein.

This is why gratitude and grace are of utmost importance. Whom or whatever is our company is that which reflects and shapes and constitutes us, that by which we recognize ourselves. And there is no greater gift than self-knowledge.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Suzy Lake, Distilling Resistance, Gallery View, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Forever Young: in conversation with Marianne Perron

I am sitting in an otherwise unremarkable office, except for the majestic Heintzman & Company grand piano, a Canadian-made symbol of the melodious nature of operations herein and a testament to our symphony’s commitment to preserving local heritage.

Today, I have been granted rare backstage access at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal to learn about the forthcoming season with Artistic Director Marianne Perron, who for more than a quarter century — spanning the careers of three conductors — has helped helm the programming priorities of Montreal’s oldest and most venerable orchestra. And while Rafael Payare is the Symphony’s newest public face, it is really Perron who pulls the strings.

Ironically, a broken violin sits on her desk.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she laughs, “and maybe one day I’ll get it fixed. But I never considered a career as a professional musician,” Perron tells me as she recalls her early life as a violinist. “I started lessons at age six. My mother conceived of it as just another part of getting an education. But I stopped at around 20. I love music, but it was not what I wanted to do. Honestly, I hate playing in front of an audience.”

Perron appropriately prefers to remain behind the scenes. Nonetheless, she is one of Montreal’s most inspiring women leaders, securing a coveted spot on the Women We Admire list, among other well-deserved honours.

Perron started with the OSM in 1999 as head of Education and Contemporary Music and continued climbing to her current role as Senior Director of the Symphony’s artistic sector, overseeing programming, community education, operations, production, and musician personnel. “Now, I am the head of all five of these departments,” she says with a smile. “So, voilà.”

The trick to success is making one’s job look easy — which it never is. And clearly, Perron is no stranger to hard work. She attended the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, studying and advocating for contemporary music from Quebec and Canada, and later obtained a master’s degree in Musicology from the Université de Montréal, plus an MBA from the HEC with a specialization in cultural enterprises. So, her chops are impeccable from both the musical and management angles.

“There are many things I understand about balancing dynamics,” she explains. “It is always a question of balance.”

From left: Marianne Perron, Rafael Payare, and Philippe-Audrey Larrue-St-Jacques. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Music, too, is about balance, and patterns, and cycles, and Perron inherently understands that the OSM is faced with balancing tradition and progress, the Classical repertoire and more contemporary works, and Montreal’s cultural specificity with that of the wider global stage.

“True, the OSM is not primarily a contemporary music orchestra,” says Perron. “But all the same, it is an orchestra that programs the works of new composers. Not all conductors believe that contemporary music is important. But for our new conductor, Rafael Payare, it is extremely important. It is really at the heart of his practice. At the Virée Classique and the outdoor concert at the Olympic Stadium, we have contemporary Canadian music. We are now programming more Latin American works as a tribute to our new conductor. And we also have an orchestra that is capable of playing Bach regularly. We are an orchestra that really plays 400 years’ worth of music.”

That historical range is integral to the life of the OSM. For Perron, it is perennially a challenge to program a season with an ear toward both history and the future.

“There are lots of things to consider,” Perron tells me. “We think about how to develop the sound of the orchestra. There are so many great things about Rafael Payare — his artistic sensibility, his talent. But also, his ambition for the orchestra. Rafael Payare has a sonic vision which is in sync with the OSM. We are not going to totally transform but just search for those existing elements to develop. Rafael has a particular interest in Post-Romantic Germanic works. So, we think of those things, as well as the elements we want to develop with the orchestra. We have lots of conversations. I think it’s wonderful that Rafael wants to perform, for example, Bruckner. And then someone says, ‘wait a minute, before we play Bruckner, we should play this and this.’ And that will take Bruckner to another level.”

Perron grew up in a Montreal household where Classical music was regularly part of the sonic backdrop.

“We went to a lot of concerts when I was a kid,” Perron recalls. “They had a series at the Piano Nobile at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier which was called Musique & Brioche. They were short concerts aimed at families, and they had muffins and croissants. I loved those. My family subscribed to the OSM. I was seven when my father took me to the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. And that became my favourite piece when I was seven or eight years old. And ten years later, my father returned to Place des arts to hear the very same piece. But this time, I was in the Orchestre de Conservatoire as a musician. That was a great milestone.”

To reach out to younger audiences, the OSM is experimenting nowadays with the form of symphonic performance, coupling the orchestra with cinema, for instance, as they did previously with Jaws and The Red Violin, and will be doing again this season with Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The role of the music in that movie is so special,” Perron says. “It’s interesting because there are lots of moments where there is no sound, there is no music. The orchestra wants to play all the time, but silence is really where the ‘wow’ moments are in that film.”

“There is a suppleness that I think represents us here.” Marianne Perron and Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And yet, hardly a silent moment passes in our conversation. There is plenty to look forward to in the OSM’s 2025-’26 season, and Perron is excited about all of it: the return of Barbara Hannigan; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; A German Requiem by Brahms with Kent Nagano; The Rite of Spring with pianist Bruce Liu; Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony paired with Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the OSM’s Composer-in-Residence, to celebrate Black History Month.

The OSM has chosen to launch its season with The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a bold and symbolic choice that gestures toward the spiritual bargains of our age, and their potential perils.

“We always try to draw a link between the pieces we are programming or commissioning and current events,” Perron reveals. “Is there an exchange? Is there an echo?”

In an era of increasing divisiveness, Montreal is arguably North America’s most progressive metropolis, and a municipal model for achieving linguistic and cultural harmony.

“It’s really about the richness of the whole community together,” Perron notes. “Montreal is very fluid. It’s a very safe place. There is a lot of pride here, but it’s not pretentious. There’s a lot of curiosity and creativity, too. I feel like it’s a city that is open to the world. And I think that reflects in the Orchestra. There is a suppleness that I think represents us here. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal is a mirror image of that.”◼︎

The OSM’s 2025-’26 season opens with The Damnation of Faust, 17 September 2025 at Maison Symphonique.

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Joy & Pain

Alicia Clara, Daydream, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“…dreams are the commonest and universally accessible source for the investigation of man’s symbolizing faculty…”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

The year was 2003. I had enrolled for a second time as an undergraduate in university, believing that returning to school and obtaining a liberal education would be the ticket to my success. It was an honest mistake.

I had signed up for a semester-full of introductory courses: Sociology, Latin, Cinema Studies, Symbolic Logic, and Psychology. And it was during one of our first Psych lectures that the young female instructor presented a history of dream interpretation to the class. Our dreams, she said, were viewed differently by various philosophers and psychoanalysts throughout history.

Sigmund Freud, for example, believed that dreams were a combination of repression and wish fulfillment. Carl Jung thought that they served a highly symbolic function, which could only be deciphered through a complex series of relational and interpretational associations.

Or possibly, a cigar was just a cigar, and dreams could simply be the random cataloguing of the day’s conscious events as a librarian might reshelve a stack of unrelated books. One thing was certain, though: dreams undeniably possessed some causal link to current occurrences in everyday life.

Attempting to engage a more-or-less disinterested lecture hall of juvenile scholars, our instructor petitioned us by suggesting things that we might have recently been dreaming about. For instance, a conversation with a friend, or a dispute with a family member. But no one raised their hand.

She then tried to conceive of something more universal that maybe a majority of the class had encountered in our nocturnal reveries. As the United States under its worst president to date had just then invaded Iraq, she suggested that a number of us must have been dreaming lately about war in the Middle East. But again, not a glimmer of sympathy from her audience.

“Come on!” she said incredulously. “You mean to tell me that nobody in this room has been dreaming about Bush?”

Slowly, the class began to erupt in laughter as many of us silently thought, “well, actually…” Indeed, equally as many in attendance might have also been dreaming about Bush’s second in command, Dick.

The Voice of Nature with Beth Taylor, 5ème Salle, 17 August 2025

The mezzo soprano Beth Taylor performs at 5ème Salle with the OSM’s Virée Classique, 17 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The soul of man is like water. First, it comes down from heaven, then it ascends into heaven; and again it must go down to earth in eternal change.”
—Hans Schwarz, On the Way to the Future.

The tension of history is that between a dialectical or upward-and-forward progression and a cyclical or sinusoidal up-and-down succession.

We know from observation and experience that nature passes through seasons in a circular momentum — summer becomes fall, fall winter, winter spring, and eventually summer returns.

But we also hope that the next season, the next year, the next century, will be markedly better in measurable ways — that progress will improve our lives, that technological advances will benefit humanity and unburden us from such antiquated incumbrances as labour and conflict, inequality and injustice.

Or, we look with nostalgia to precedent seasons, years, centuries to lament how much worse life has become, how we appear to have deteriorated and descended from some idealized age.

The disproportionate obsession with either the future or the past always seems to be strongest when the state of the present is at its weakest.

Karma Glider with Shunk and Poolgirl, Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025

Guitarist Peter Baylis and vocalist Gabrielle Domingue of Shunk perform at Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As summer turns into autumn, the tendency is to revert to melancholy retrospection, re-examining the previous season’s satisfying times. There is an equal measure of pleasure and pain to this exercise, one in gratitude for agreeable experiences, the other with a sense of loss and longing for things passed.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures,” writes the theologian C.S. Lewis, “speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

~Ondes~, Frotae with Ivy Boxall, White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025

Frotae perform at White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only constant is change. This is the paradox that confronts us continuously. The steady hum of electricity is merely an artificial distraction from life’s natural chaotic state. The desire to fix events in time — through recording or photography or cinematography or the written word — neglects the obvious and unavoidable truth that we ourselves are different every time we consult these texts. Not only do we never step in the same river twice; each time, the river fails to recognize our feet.

Organ Intermezzi with David Simon, The Church of St. Andrew & St. Paul, 28 August 2025

Organist David Simon performs at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 28 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Images of war saturate our media to such an extent as to desensitize the observer.

We are regularly bombarded with depictions of starving children clamouring to fill a dented metal receptacle with a ladleful of mushy gruel as if viewing this scene one more time will be enough to finally shock those of us fortunate enough not to be on camera into singlehandedly stopping these atrocities.

Of course, none of us want this — independently nor collectively — and none of us enjoy these images or condone them, and none of us can stop them alone. We are condemned, then, to watch them over and over with an increasing feeling of indignant vulnerability and survivor’s guilt. And yet, in order to survive and carry on with our lives we must, to a certain extent, ignore escalating atrocities and implicitly, in doing so, overlook them.

The American critic Susan Sontag in her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others quotes Leonardo da Vinci at length, offering formulaic instructions for painting battle scenes:

Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.

These could just as easily be directives given to war photographers from brazen if-it-bleeds-it-leads news producers in 2025.

It is relatively easy to portray physical pain. Representing the misery of helplessly witnessing it on an apparently endless loop, not so much.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Big Shiny Tunes

Sloan with Econoline Crush, Peachfest, Penticton BC, 9 August 2025

Sloan perform in Okanagan Lake Park, Penticton, BC, 9 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

I spent some time in English Canada this summer and in doing so had the opportunity to see a band I’d never seen, Sloan, the celebrated Canadian alternative outfit that dominated MuchMusic throughout the bulk of the 1990s.

I was surprised, despite having never owned a Sloan recording, that I was able to identify hit after remarkable hit. Apparently, these earworms had made an indelible impression upon my memory merely from hearing them over and over. In a time before the internet, before streaming became the dominant way of consuming cultural products, repetition worked.

The archive of the internet in many ways erases or at best flattens memory. Just because every record ever made is available to access at any given second does not mean that we do. And if and when we do, we seldom remember them in the same ways we did during the physical media age.

There exists a theory, Freudian in origin, that archiving is the subconscious reaction to a morbid fear of death. But what to make of the impulse to archive without the intention of ever accessing the archive? Imagine the sheer volume of music that nobody ever listens to filed away on the web. In the record-store days, we called it dead stock. On the internet, let’s call it zombie inventory.

What good is preservation without repetition?

Orchestre Metropolitain at the foot of Mount Royal, 30 July 2025

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the OM at Parc du Mont-Royal, 30 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Gustav Holst, The Planets, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 15 August 2025

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 15 August 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

“In the beginning was the word,” the Apostle John writes in the opening to his Biblical Gospel. Notably, it wasn’t nature’s noise that heralded all of Creation. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or an explosion. It was a human sound.

But neither was it a grunt or a cry. It was a word. And it wasn’t just any old word; it was the word. Word itself.

Words imply meaning. And thus, according to John, the beginning of the universe was also the beginning of language, frequency, harmony.

Christian Richer with Lowebrau, La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 2 August 2025

Christian Richer’s musical equipment setup at La Chapelle, 2 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If we are to read any era by its music, then surely conflict and chaos must characterize the present one. There is no dominant set of aesthetic criteria to describe contemporary music as there has been in nearly every preceding generation.

We can listen back to almost any historical time and say with relative confidence that this style or that theme characterized its day’s music. Romantic, baroque; pop, punk, &c. Even during the so-called postmodern period, postmodernity exhibited some consistent defining characteristics: assemblage, palimpsest, irony.

We are living in an age when everything and nothing is true — facts are contested; falsehoods are simply data — and therefore everything and nothing characterizes our post-postmodern music. Music today is ambient in the truest sense — it is omnipresent, a constant hum that emerges to the fore only when it is observed, like a fridge that seems to start buzzing when you notice it.

In addition, today’s music is ambivalent, of multiple traditions, hybrid, non-binary. However, cultural production that advances in simultaneous directions does not imply a lack of direction. And the speed with which music manifests ex nihilo, almost spontaneously, indicates more about the present era than any aesthetic measures.

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

VISIO & Orchestroll with Cecilia and Samuel Gougoux, Société des arts technologiques, 14 August 2025

Cecilia performs at the SAT, 14 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care
—Roger Waters, “Your Possible Pasts”

There’s a common assumption, generally unchallenged, that the past is behind us and cannot be altered, whereas the future is in front of us and can. This might not be correct. I’m not just making some clever semantic argument here, either. I am, rather, talking about fundamental ways in which the past can be materially reformed, and the future is a foregone conclusion.

When you dwell on the past, it constitutes your future. Every morning is greeted with history. The past becomes the medium in which life is lived — like water for fish or air for us humans. If there is nothing that we can change about the past, then it is pointless to ruminate over it. And yet, the contemplative impulse exists. Why?

I claim that it’s because the past can be changed, has been changed, is changing constantly.

The further objects are away in space, the more slowly they appear to move. It’s called parallax — the apparent position of an object in relation to its line of sight. This also holds for objects in time. Our memories of things morph and mutate with each passing day, sometimes appearing clearer, sometimes disappearing completely.

The future, on the other hand, is something that the forces of capital would prefer to set in stone. “Futures” in financial terms, for instance, are standardized contracts that can be bought and sold.

Markets function on predictability. One way to reliably produce predictability is to induce instability. Therefore, anything that ensues following a period of disorder looks comparatively stable, in part because of the parallax effect. In this way, the past is broken, and the future is fixed.

If we repair the past, perhaps the future will again become unknowable.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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