Editorial

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To celebrate our 15^th anniversary, La Scene Musicale is embarking on several major projects this fall. This includes doubling our distribution to 50,000 copies, with a return to Ottawa-Gatineau and Quebec City with 5,000 copies in each region. At the same time, the magazine is becoming more accessible by publishing all articles in separate English and French editions. Our team has been hard at work refreshing the content to give LSM a more national and international flavour. This will not only cement LSM as Montreal-Quebec-Ottawa's most important classical music publication, it will also allow us to promote music and musicians to even more people through the Internet.

We will also champion creativity by launching The Next Great Art Song, a contest to find the best new art song (lieder, mélodie, etc). This will be a unique contest, as the promotion of the art song will be done the LSM way--articles will be published in every issue of the magazine for the next year, counting down the 10 greatest art songs of all time as determined by a world-wide survey of experts. The songs will then be performed by Canada's top singers at concerts in Toronto and Montreal in the fall of 2012, where the public will vote for the best new song. This year, the biennial contest will be open to Canadian composers of all ages; we plan to turn this into an international competition in the future. Next time, we plan to launch The Next Great Aria, a contest to find the next great operatic aria.

We are also bringing back and improving some of our best outreach ideas, starting with the relaunch of the Bring a Teen program which provides a teenager free entrance to a classical music concert when ­accompanied by an adult (parent, sibling or teacher). In partnership with the Federation of Quebec Music Educators and through our Facebook page, we plan to reach 72,000 music students across Quebec. Mentorship will also be featured in the magazine through the new LSM Ambassador Mentorship program, which will match a master musician or artist with a promising young student.

I feel Alain Lefèvre said it best at the recent Place des Arts Foundation Gala honouring Madame Jacqueline Desmarais: “It is not enough to nurture the stars of the future, it's crucial to create the next generation of music and art lovers as well.” La Scène Musicale has been doing both for the past 15 years, and our new direction will allow us to achieve this even better and more widely.

Look for our 15^th anniversary commemorative issue in October. Help support our mission to promote music, the arts and individual artists by making a donation or buying a space to voice your words of encouragement.

Help expand the magazine's reach by sponsoring the single language editions, promote creativity by sponsoring an award for best art song or give a teenager the chance to experience live music and the arts. Visit our website for a list of our sponsorship and donation programs.

In closing, I want to thank you for being a reader of La Scena Musicale and I hope you enjoy this all-English edition. The all-French edition is available at scena.org or by subscription (http://www.scena.org/fs_subscription.asp).

Have a great musical and artistic 2011-2012 season.