Montreal's diverse Ensemble Obiora is changing the faces of classical music
The classical music world is pretty white. But rather than simply accept the imbalance and hope things change eventually, Allison Migeon and her partner Brandyn Lewis decided to do something about it.
Article content
'It started in 2021,' Migeon said. 'Brandyn and I were asking ourselves a lot of questions, like many people, about what we wanted to do and things we wanted to change professionally. Also, with everything that happened around (the death of) George Floyd, we took time to think — how could it be that in the milieu we had evolved in for so many years, there was so little representation of people of different origins? It was always the same types of people on stage, and the same types of repertoire being played.'
Article content
Article content
And so Migeon and Lewis founded Ensemble Obiora, Canada's first orchestra comprised primarily of professional musicians from culturally diverse backgrounds. Migeon, who has experience in cultural administration, is the group's director. Lewis, a double bassist who is the first Black musician to perform regularly with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, is Ensemble Obiora's artistic director.
Article content
Article content
They began reaching out to racialized musicians they knew, and as word spread, people began contacting them.
Article content
'There was a lot of interest,' Migeon said. 'It's something new that had never been done in Canada. We're used to seeing this type of orchestra in the U.S., and there's Chineke! Orchestra in London, but in Canada, there's nothing like this in classical music.'
Article content
Ensemble Obiora is made up of approximately 50 musicians primarily from Quebec and Ontario, who come together in various combinations depending on the repertoire of a given concert. They are of African, South Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous heritage, with a few white players thrown in for good measure.
Article content
Article content
'Our goal is to reflect the society we live in,' Migeon said. 'We don't want to discriminate. It's important to have allies.'
Article content
Article content
The orchestra is in its fourth year of participation in the OSM's Virée classique concert series, being held Aug. 13 to 17. As the ensemble in residence of the music department of Université du Québec à Montréal for the past three years, it engages in activities with students and performs regularly at UQAM's Salle Pierre-Mercure.
Article content
This weekend, Ensemble Obiora steps outside, performing for free Saturday at 7 p.m. in N.D.G. Park and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Ahuntsic Park as part of the Campbell Concerts series. For the occasion, the group will play music by composers of African descent.
Article content
The program features three works. Tzigane, for wind quintet, by Grammy-nominated American flautist and composer Valerie Coleman, 'a piece inspired by Eastern European music and the Roma,' Migeon said; Nonet In F Minor, by 19th-century British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; and Danzas de Panama, by 20th-century American composer William Grant Still, whom Migeon describes as 'the don of African-American composers, and the first Black man to conduct an American orchestra.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Global News
3 minutes ago
- Global News
‘The ends are hot right now': Scarborough's ‘Shook' captures life on Toronto's edges
There's a scene in 'Shook' in which the drama's lead tells a Toronto hipster that he lives in Scarborough. Her response — 'Oooh, Scarborough' — comes off as if he just name-dropped a war zone. 'That literally happened to me,' says director and co-writer Amar Wala, who grew up in the multicultural east-Toronto suburb. 'I didn't know that Scarborough had this dangerous reputation growing up. To me, it was just Scarborough. It was fine.' The moment stuck with him. 'I told myself, 'I'm going to put this in a movie one day.' It took a while, but here it is.' 'Shook' stars Saamer Usmani as Ash, a South Asian twentysomething trying to make it as a novelist while navigating his family's unravelling, a romantic entanglement and the quiet class divisions of the Greater Toronto Area. Story continues below advertisement The film, out Friday, draws from a turbulent stretch in Wala's mid-20s, when he was chasing his filmmaking dreams amid his parents' divorce and his father's subsequent Parkinson's diagnosis. 'It was a lot of things all hitting at once, when you're supposed to figure out what it means to be an adult,' Wala says in a virtual call from Toronto. 'At the time, I was doing what I think a lot of us do when we're writers: travel downtown, sit in coffee shops, write — or pretend to write most of the time — and figure out what it actually means to be a working artist.' Despite his proximity to the city's cultural core, Wala says breaking into the arts community felt like trying to push through an invisible wall. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy Wala says he wanted to make a Toronto film that captured the subtle, everyday obstacles that come with being 'a brown kid from the suburbs.' One recurring gag sees South Asian characters give baristas a 'fake white name' that's easy to write on coffee cups. 'It's stuff I felt was relatable to a lot of people who live just on the outside of major cities, where you might as well be from another state,' he says. 'That distance may be short in terms of kilometres — you can see the skyline — but you're not that connected to the arts community or to the power structures or the money of the city, and so that distance feels gigantic.' Story continues below advertisement When Wala started out more than a decade ago, he had no industry connections and no clear path in. While he aspired to make narrative features, documentaries offered a more accessible entry point. His debut doc, 2014's 'The Secret Trial 5,' examines Canada's post-9/11 use of security certificates to imprison Muslim men without charge. 'Shook,' Wala's debut scripted feature, co-written with Adnan Khan, isn't overtly political. Instead, it centres on Ash's personal coming-of-age as he explores a budding romance with barista Claire, played by Amy Forsyth, while trying to deal with the emotional debris left by his parents, played by Bernard White and Pamela Mala Sinha. Still, the film captures the invisible systems that shape who gets to feel at home in a city like Toronto. When Ash and his friends miss the last subway train home, they must weather the chaos of the night bus — known colloquially as 'the vomit comet.' 'It just seems silly that last call is at 2 a.m. but the subway shuts down at 1:30. That tells you who they're actually thinking about when they build these systems,' Wala says. 'Shook' joins a growing wave of Canadian films set in Scarborough — including 2021's 'Scarborough,' 2022's 'Brother' and this year's 'Morningside' — and does so with a self-aware nod to its cinematic company. Story continues below advertisement 'The ends are hot right now,' a publisher tells Ash as he pitches a novel set in the east-end suburb. Wala suspects Scarborough artists are feeling more pride after years of being 'on the outside looking in.' But he's wary of how quickly the industry can turn authenticity into formula. 'As soon as they realize, 'Oh, there's an audience for this stuff,' they only want to give you the same version of that thing over and over again,' he says. 'They don't understand it's a diversity of perspectives from these places that the audience is craving.' Wala hopes 'Shook' challenges the narrow, often dreary portrayals of the area by presenting Scarborough as he remembers it: vibrant, lived-in, lush. 'People say to me, like, 'Scarborough looks so good in the movie. You shot it so beautifully.' And I'm like, I didn't do anything to it,' he says. 'We just used some nice lenses and colour corrected it. It looks gorgeous because that's what it looks like. A lot of those bleak depictions of it — you have to go out of your way to make it look like that.'
Winnipeg Free Press
4 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
‘The ends are hot right now': Scarborough's ‘Shook' captures life on Toronto's edges
TORONTO – There's a scene in 'Shook' in which the drama's lead tells a Toronto hipster that he lives in Scarborough. Her response — 'Oooh, Scarborough' — comes off as if he just name-dropped a war zone. 'That literally happened to me,' says director and co-writer Amar Wala, who grew up in the multicultural east-Toronto suburb. 'I didn't know that Scarborough had this dangerous reputation growing up. To me, it was just Scarborough. It was fine.' The moment stuck with him. 'I told myself, 'I'm going to put this in a movie one day.' It took a while, but here it is.' 'Shook' stars Saamer Usmani as Ash, a South Asian twentysomething trying to make it as a novelist while navigating his family's unravelling, a romantic entanglement and the quiet class divisions of the Greater Toronto Area. The film, out Friday, draws from a turbulent stretch in Wala's mid-20s, when he was chasing his filmmaking dreams amid his parents' divorce and his father's subsequent Parkinson's diagnosis. 'It was a lot of things all hitting at once, when you're supposed to figure out what it means to be an adult,' Wala says in a virtual call from Toronto. 'At the time, I was doing what I think a lot of us do when we're writers: travel downtown, sit in coffee shops, write — or pretend to write most of the time — and figure out what it actually means to be a working artist.' Despite his proximity to the city's cultural core, Wala says breaking into the arts community felt like trying to push through an invisible wall. Wala says he wanted to make a Toronto film that captured the subtle, everyday obstacles that come with being 'a brown kid from the suburbs.' One recurring gag sees South Asian characters give baristas a 'fake white name' that's easy to write on coffee cups. 'It's stuff I felt was relatable to a lot of people who live just on the outside of major cities, where you might as well be from another state,' he says. 'That distance may be short in terms of kilometres — you can see the skyline — but you're not that connected to the arts community or to the power structures or the money of the city, and so that distance feels gigantic.' When Wala started out more than a decade ago, he had no industry connections and no clear path in. While he aspired to make narrative features, documentaries offered a more accessible entry point. His debut doc, 2014's 'The Secret Trial 5,' examines Canada's post-9/11 use of security certificates to imprison Muslim men without charge. 'Shook,' Wala's debut scripted feature, co-written with Adnan Khan, isn't overtly political. Instead, it centres on Ash's personal coming-of-age as he explores a budding romance with barista Claire, played by Amy Forsyth, while trying to deal with the emotional debris left by his parents, played by Bernard White and Pamela Mala Sinha. Still, the film captures the invisible systems that shape who gets to feel at home in a city like Toronto. When Ash and his friends miss the last subway train home, they must weather the chaos of the night bus — known colloquially as 'the vomit comet.' 'It just seems silly that last call is at 2 a.m. but the subway shuts down at 1:30. That tells you who they're actually thinking about when they build these systems,' Wala says. 'Shook' joins a growing wave of Canadian films set in Scarborough — including 2021's 'Scarborough,' 2022's 'Brother' and this year's 'Morningside' — and does so with a self-aware nod to its cinematic company. 'The ends are hot right now,' a publisher tells Ash as he pitches a novel set in the east-end suburb. Wala suspects Scarborough artists are feeling more pride after years of being 'on the outside looking in.' But he's wary of how quickly the industry can turn authenticity into formula. 'As soon as they realize, 'Oh, there's an audience for this stuff,' they only want to give you the same version of that thing over and over again,' he says. 'They don't understand it's a diversity of perspectives from these places that the audience is craving.' Wala hopes 'Shook' challenges the narrow, often dreary portrayals of the area by presenting Scarborough as he remembers it: vibrant, lived-in, lush. 'People say to me, like, 'Scarborough looks so good in the movie. You shot it so beautifully.' And I'm like, I didn't do anything to it,' he says. 'We just used some nice lenses and colour corrected it. It looks gorgeous because that's what it looks like. A lot of those bleak depictions of it — you have to go out of your way to make it look like that.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 7, 2025.
CTV News
13 hours ago
- CTV News
Edmonton Symphony Orchestra to put on free concerts in 4 Edmonton-area communities this month
Hand-out photo of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra performing outside. (Supplied: Edmonton Symphony Orchestra) Edmonton Symphony Orchestra's free concert series is returning to the metropolitan region in August. The orchestra will perform four times between Aug. 14 and 24 in Devon, Fort Saskatchewan, Beaumont and Stony Plain. Each concert will consist of a variety of types of music, from classics by Mozart to pieces from films like The Phantom of the Opera and Finding Nemo. Robert Bernhardt will conduct all of the shows. 'It's wonderful to provide this opportunity for communities to come together once again. These concerts foster connections and celebrate the joy of live music in the great outdoors,' said orchestra and Winspear Centre president and CEO Annemarie Leenhouts-Petrov. The orchestra began putting on free concerts in the summer of 2021 as a way for communities to gather during pandemic restrictions. Re/Max now sponsors the event. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own seating. More details are available online.
