Cornies: Aeolian champion eyes new approach to poverty

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Twenty years ago, when concert pianist Clark Bryan and I met for lunch on the patio at Mykonos restaurant, he was brimming with hope, tinged with a bit of trepidation.

He had just purchased Aeolian Hall, the storied municipal building-turned-arts institution acquired by lawyer, organist and conductor Gordon D. Jeffery in 1947 and managed by a trust after his death in 1968.

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Bryan’s fervent ambition was to further improve and update the building, create one of the city’s premier performance spaces, turn Aeolian into a magnet for artists of all types, and operate an after-school music program for disadvantaged children.

There were good reasons for his entrepreneurial gambit to succeed, he thought. City hall seemed intent on restoring east London to its historic vitality. The Old East Village community association was humming with similar aspirations. Council was just weeks away from launching the Creative Cities Task Force, aimed at rediscovering the latent cultural and economic power of the city’s creative sector.

In addition to the $230,000 purchase price, Bryan footed the bills for renovations that just didn’t seem to end. He, husband Bryan Gloyd and a coterie of volunteers put in endless hours of sweat equity, hammering, sawing, insulating, repairing, drywalling and painting their way toward completion of practice rooms for the music school Bryan envisioned.

In retrospect, he’d been overly confident and a bit naive, he said last week in his Aeolian Hall office.

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Naive about whether the initial enthusiasm sparked by the Creative Cities Task Force would last. Naive about the true cost of his entrepreneurial investment. Naive about how much of the city’s ballyhooed support for the arts and culture sector really makes its way to the city’s creatives.

In 2009, five years into his project, Bryan shifted its governance to the Aeolian Hall Musical Arts Association, a registered charity/non-profit. Two years later, he transferred ownership of the building as well.

Since then, more lessons have been learned.

The city of London’s culture and music offices do “things to attract attention. In many instances, what trickles down to those of us who are creatives here is minimal. A lot of times we’re excluded,” Bryan says.

“The current council, in particular, undervalues the arts community and non-profits as a whole. And they’re pulling the wool over people’s eyes with that tax stuff,” he adds, referring to big tax increases purportedly intended to keep Londoners safe.

Bryan says Aeolian Hall’s location is still perceived by too many potential clients and patrons as dangerous – a misplaced apprehension shaped partly by myth, partly by the higher prevalence of marginalized individuals and households in east London, and “the current environment of xenophobia – the idea that immigrants are the problem.”

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Those ideas, he says, too often go unchecked: “Where’s our leadership? Where is the language we need to be using to call this out?”

The Old East Village community association? It dissolved last year, replaced by the Boyle activity council, focused mostly on recreation.

Despite those disillusionments, Bryan remains committed to – and inspired by – the students and teachers in Aeolian’s El Sistema program, which offers children and youth six to 19 a free, intensive, after-school music program including lessons on various instruments, meals, movement and leadership classes, and concerts.

Those efforts to enhance creativity and community, Bryan believes, teach children about their potential and impart a sense of belonging. Unless we begin to focus on individuals, “we’re setting ourselves up for (more hardship and poverty),” he says. All the splashy offices and events run and sponsored by various levels of government won’t address the central issues.

The Aeolian board continues to shore up funding; a few corporate sponsors (Canada Life and SPM Financial, among them) are key. So are individual donors. Canada Revenue Agency filings show the organization ran its first small deficit – about $82,000 – in 2023 after a long string of surpluses. It’s the story of many Canadian arts institutions, as they continue to recover from COVID-19.

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Bryan, meanwhile, is visiting Finland this summer. He’s determined to further study the country’s education system, the role it plays in making it one of the world’s happiest countries and how it might correlate to Finland’s poverty rate of 0.1 per cent. (In Canada, it’s 7.4 per cent; in the U.S., it’s 11.5 per cent, according to census figures.)

He’s wiser, and more chastened than he was during that lunch two decades ago, with strong opinions about the city and how it treats its creative class. And he just might be on to a transformational approach to poverty and community that would outperform bigger tax hikes and other top-down strategies.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist.

cornies@gmail.com

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