Open Ears Festival Program

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Two hours and two blocks can span the corners of the globe and the moodiest of moodswings.

OPEn EaRS http://dangermuffy.blogspot.com

festival of music & sound celebrating the art of listening

April 27 to May 1, 2011

Kitchener, Ontario Canada

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OPEn EaRS

April 27 to May 1, 2011

Kitchener, Ontario Canada

5 Welcome Concerts Wednesday April 25 13 KWS: Popular Standards 19 Spinvolver / People Like Us

Thursday April 28 24 Morning Music 24 M aryem Tollar: La Mer Méditérranée 27 P rinceton Laptop Orchestra: Sideband / Andrew Stewart 30 P enderecki String Quartet with DJ P-Love

Friday April 29 39 E lectroacoustics in the Rotunda 42 T anya Tagaq 43 Tony Conrad

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Saturday April 30 N oreum Machi Eve Egoyan T he Rent Toca Loca B lue Dot

Sunday April 29 52 Soundwalk 53 V alody’s Book of Disquiet 54 D aCapo Chamber Choir: A World of Colour

Ongoing Events 7 Sound Installations

23 Marc Couroux

29 Disscosia

Symposium

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Thanks

Our Sponsors

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Map

Artists, front cover (l to r): Princeton Laptop Orchestra; Tanya Tagaq; Noreum Machi; Eve Egoyan; Valody.

David Jensenius rich and complex sonic environments realized using computers and simple sounds Presented in conjunction with Open Ears

Tuesday, April 25 · 7 pm Queen’s Square, 1 North Square, Cambridge www.cambridgegalleries.com

s E ARC H ING FOR

THEMUSEUM.ca

IMAGES Top:Thomson at Lake Scugog,

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PRESENTED BY

D OW N TOW N K I T C H E N E R

Ring in the 2011 Open Ears Festival with a

Join us on the roof of the parking garage at Duke and Ontario streets to hear all of Kitchener’s bells ring together.

Wednesday, April 27 • 7 pm • free 4

OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Welcome to our festival!

It’s time to energize, rekindle creative thoughts and spirits, and hang out with like-minded souls Open Ears is back! It is time to book the days off in your calendar, be prepared to turn off your television, computer, Blackberry, iPhone, etc. Dozens and even hundreds of professionals, amateurs and volunteers have been working long and hard to bring you five action-packed days of activity that will engage, entertain and possibly change your life.

This year we bring artists from as far afield as London, New York, Seoul (Korea) and Cambridge Bay (Nunavat).

We’ll hear sounds brought to us by recent technologies, from an orchestra of Peter Hatch laptops (PLOrk) to the turntable as instrument (DJ P-Love), to the recently invented “t-stick” (performed by Andrew Stewart), which responds to gestural movement—the ultimate conductor’s baton. At the same time, new-to-us sounds come from ancient traditions and the oldest of musical instruments, the human voice, ranging from Noreum Machi’s renditions of Korean “pansori” to the Arabic-trained voice of Maryem Tollar, and from the unearthly sounds of Tanya Tagaq (trained in Inuit throat singing) to the overtone singing by Da Capo Chamber Choir in a new work by Gerard Yun. Our composer-in-residence this year is Montreal’s Nicole Lizée, whose works appear three times over the weekend, including the world premiere of a piece written for Greg Oh for keyboard and ensemble. Nicky’s work is fascinating for the way it embraces and straddles both “pop” and “serious” musical traditions, synthesizing many diverse musical influences.

You can find us online at:

www.openears.ca celebrating the art of listening

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A number of artists in this year’s festival investigate popular culture in a variety of ways.

It is interesting to note the strong sense of nostalgia that characterizes the work of artists like John Oswald and Vicki Bennett, two artists who appropriate images from popular culture in ways that are highly investigative, critical and entertaining. John is famous for his groundbreaking work in “plunderphonics”, which predated the sampling phenomenon underlying hip-hop. Vicki Bennett’s (People Like Us) multimedia works juxtapose popular images (like similar “mashup” activity) in ways that are both hilarious and bitingly critical.

Similar sensibilities are found in the video work of installation artists Marc Couroux and Matt Rogalsky. Rogalsky’s new installation Discipline will see twelve electric guitars respond sympathetically to a local classic rock station. The performance of the “Halo Ballet” on Toca Loca’s concert examines our relationship to popular culture in a very unique way—we watch as three expert “gamers” play the classic “Halo” with the goal of perfecting ballet-like synchronized movements—less than a handful of shots are fired by the machine-gun wielding thugs while they dance their way through the piece.

Lots to do…

You’ll need to book off days because an action-packed schedule of concertizing, socializing, and occasional opportunities for food and sleep, await. It is a time to energize, rekindle creative thoughts and spirits and hang out with like-minded souls. I look forward to seeing you there!

Peter Hatch, Artistic Director

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an ongoing event

Sound Installations At various locations in downtown Kitchener free Wednesday to Friday, 4 pm to 6 pm • Saturday & Sunday, 1 pm to 6 pm unless otherwise noted

Playful, meditative and thoughtful: audio artworks to gather around, watch, interact with and listen to.

Althea Thauburger In collaboration with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery KWAG Eastman Gallery 101 Queen St North Althea Thauberger is an artist based in Vancouver. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration with a group or community that results in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves — groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls — that are both coercive and voluntary. Her work provides constraints for her subjects to work within which may echo the ones they live within.

These may be structural imperatives or conventions of particular film or photographic media, allegory, seriality, or other containers. Thauberger’s performances have involved diverse groups including young Canadian female singer/songwriters, U.S. military wives, Canadian tree planters, Vancouver-based reserve soldiers, and male youth in the German civil service.

KWAG will feature an installation of some of Thauberger’s past video work. This installation can only be seen during gallery hours: Wed 9:30 am to 5 pm; Thurs celebrating the art of listening

9:30 am to 9 pm; Fri 9:30 am to 5 pm; Sat 10 am to 5 pm; Sun 1 pm to 5 pm.

Bill Viola: The Darker Side of Dawn (2005) In collaboration with CAFKA City Hall Cube 200 King St West The Darker Side of Dawn is a study of an old California oak tree on a hillside in the mountains north of Los Angeles from the first light of dawn to full sunlight and beyond. A fixed camera registered the subtle shifts of color and luminosity of the changing natural light from daylight to complete darkness over several days. The recordings were edited to create a condensed time-lapse document of the continuous passage of time at dawn, moving slowly into night, with the goal that there be no apparent movement of light or shadow visible. The changing illumination and subtle shifts of color in the image are felt rather than seen, and it is only the occasional gust of wind through the branches that visibly animates the tree.

The work continuously cycles from night to dawn to night, and in between each cycle the extremes of light and dark are attained. From 8 pm to 11 pm daily.

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Bill Viola, The Darker Side of Dawn

City Hall Rotunda Installations City Hall Rotunda 200 King St West Curated by Jachsa Narveson A tradition of the Open Ears festival since its inception, this event features an octaphonic sound system in the beautiful acoustics of the City Hall Rotunda. Each year the Open Ears festival chooses a different person to curate a series of electroacoustic works for this installation followed by a free concert in the Rotunda on Sunday afternoon.

Betsey Biggs: TON YAM I (FOR BRIAN WILSON) Ton Yam I (For Brian Wilson) is a live improvisation deconstructing and reshaping fragments of the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows into a sea of floating harmonies, feedback, and glitch: destruction and reconstruction manifest. The original stereo version was premiered at the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planeterium in 2008. A 15-channel overhead version commissioned for ISSUE Project Room’s Floating Points Festival in 2009. This 8-channel version was created for Open Ears in 2011.

Betsey Biggs is a Brooklyn- and Providence-based composer and artist whose practice in music, sound, video and 8

installation aims to explore the resonance between sound and image, to actively engage the audience, and to explore the relationships among sound, memory, and geography. Her work has been described by the New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” She has collaborated with musicians and artists including Margaret Lancaster, Evidence, The Now Ensemble, The BSC, So Percussion, Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble and filmmakers Jennie Livingston and Amy Harrison. Her work has been seen and heard at venues as disparate as ISSUE Project Room, Abrons Arts Center, the Conflux Festival, MASSMoCA, Sundance Film Festival, and on the streets of Oakland, Red Hook, Williamsburg and the Gowanus.

Biggs holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University.

Jascha Narveson: Sine of the

Times (2011)

This installation takes a surround-sound recording of Times Square and slowly moves the recording in and out of a parallel sound-world by decomposing it in to sine waves. This is done using a quirky, homegrown technique I first hit upon while writing a piece for flute and interactive electronics in early 2010, and OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

I loved the effect (and affect) of hearing a complex sound morph into these basic, elemental wave forms. For Jascha Narveson‘s biography see page 41.

shredding and ubiquitous all-too-familiar riffs, Robert Fripp’s “guitar craft” approach to mastering the instrument (Discipline is also the title of a King Crimson album and song), and the apostle-like devotion which is often accorded the electric guitar and Matt Rogalsky: the canon of classic rock.

Discipline for suspended Matt Rogalsky’s activity as a performelectric guitars (2011) ing and exhibiting composer and media Kitchener City Hall storefront artist often focuses on exploration of 200 King St West abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored Discipline focuses on electric guitar as streams of information. Recent work inthe iconic instrument of the 20th century cludes ANT/LIFE/ART/WORK, an instaland an object of obsession. The model of lation listening in to the sound world of guitar used in the installation—twelve of thatching ants, and Memory Like Water, a them, no brand name needing to be men- series of installations and concert pieces tioned—was designed in 1954 and remains exploring the flow and malleability of unchanged as a staple of rock and pop memory. Additionally, Rogalsky promusicians worldwide. In this installation, duces recordings for bands in a variety each guitar is tuned to a single pitch class, of genres. The most recent is the 2010 so the twelve together represent the album Meet Me at the Muster Station, by 12 tone equal tempered scale. The guitars indie rock band PS I Love You (Paper are invisibly played by wiring their pickups Bag Records) which found its way onto in reverse, with the driving signal being a many year-end best-of lists. The National live classic rock radio station. Each guitar Post said: “This album may destroy your responds only to the presence of its pitch stereo,” and Eye Weekly described it as class in the radio signal, so the twelve to- “a 30-minute dream of fast backbeats gether create a shifting resonance which and soaring distortion that will quicken shadows the songs being played live on your heartbeat and have you singing in air. The radio station is not heard directly— nonsense tongues you don’t understand.” only via the guitars.

Rogalsky lives in Kingston Ontario and The piece has several reference points, teaches in the School of Music at Queen’s including the “boy culture” of guitar-store University. celebrating the art of listening

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Paul Walde: Snow Drift

(2011)

Artery Gallery 156 King St West With the end of broadcast television approaching, the snow or electronic noise on now otherwise useless vintage television consoles is warped and folded using high powered magnetic fields to drift the “snow” into shapes resembling landscapes and snowfall patterns. This effect is accentuated through installing the sets to suggest a large three dimensional landscape.

Additionally, the magnets also alter the sound waves emanating from the consoles- en masse these shifts in pitch , when combined resemble the sound of wind drifting snow across a frozen landscape.

Paul Walde is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and curator. Walde’s eclectic body of work suggests unexpected interconnections between landscape, identity, and technology and includes painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, installation and audio. Most recently, his work was seen at Electric Eclectics 5, a

paul walde, Snow Drift

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festival of experimental music and sound art in Meaford, Ontario, and at Malaspina Printmakers Gallery in conjunction with VIVO’s Signal + Noise festival in Vancouver (2010). He lives and works in London, Ontario where he teaches studio art at the University of Western Ontario, and is the artist in residence at the Biotron, Canada’s experimental climate change research centre. Walde is a founding member of Audio Lodge, a London-based experimental sound art collective.

Veronika Krausas:

The Player Piano Project (2008) Walper Terrace Hotel Art Gallery 2nd Floor 1 King St West Veronika Krausas, curator James Harley, coordinator Several years ago composer Veronika Krausas was given a player piano and that’s how The Player Piano Project was born. She asked a number of composers to write new works or arrange old works for her new old piano. What resulted was an eclectic collection of 23 pieces by 22 composers from 6 different countries including James Tenney, Thomas Adès, Chris Dench and Veronika Krausas. The works were premiered at the Alfred Newman Concert Hall at the University of Southern California in conjunction with a CD release.

At the Open Ears Festival we are presenting this series of a work as an installation, inviting gallery goers to “perform” the works by pumping the player piano.

Veronika Krausas was born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Canada. She has received commissions from ERGO Projects, OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Sara Graef: Building 58 Julian Revie: Jam To-Morrow and Jam YESterday John Williams (arr. Ceiri Torjussen): Raiders March

veronika krausas, The Player Piano Project

the Penderecki String Quartet, San Francisco Choral Artists and the Alexander String Quartet, Continuum Music, Toca Loca, and several Interdisciplinary Grants from the University of Southern California Arts where she is an Assistant Professor in the Composition Department at the Thornton School of Music.

Compositions on Player Piano Rolls: James Tenney: Spectral Canon For Conlon Nancarrow Larry Polansky: III interloods Thomas Adès: Sursum Osvaldo Budón: Melodias para el in de Pietro Crespi Shaun Naidoo: B-sharp Wallah Jeffrey Holmes: Oro Supplex Marc Sabat: Wake for Jim Lou Bunk: Player Piano Chris Dench: Pas Seul I Joseph Bishara: Spectral Manifestation Veronika Krausas: White & Orange W.C. Handy (arr. Veronika Krausas): Blue Clarence Barlow: Kuri Suti Bekar Gordon Monahan: Just Another Turkey Track Horizon Brian Current: Banjo/Continuum James Harley: pLayer8 Tamar Diesendruck: Loom Study I For Player Piano Sean Heim: Elegant Cycles Daniel Corral: Eraser Gayle Young: Forest celebrating the art of listening

Thank you to Joanne Maguire and the Hayter family for the donation of the instrument.

John Oswald:

Stillnessence (2005)

Zero to One Gallery 107 King St West, upper floor This endless cinematic spectacle features hundreds of Torontonians participating in a literally skin-deep portrayal of a ghostly crowd which goes nowhere and does nothing but is nonetheless always gradually becoming constantly different. Standstill is the third of a series of chronophotic moving stills (Janéad O’Jakriel/Jacko Lantern, the Arc of Apparitions) in which Oswald perfectly blurs the properties and aesthetics of photography, movies, and televisualisation in a counter-Koyaanisqatsi universe.

For John Oswald‘s biography, see page 19.

john oswald, Stillness

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A JOINT PRODUCTION OF CAFKA & MUSAGETES BIK VAN DER POL GUELPH YOUTH MUSIC CENTRE 75 CARDIGAN ST, GUELPH WEDNESDAY JUNE 22, 2011 7:30 PM

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

wednesday April 27 Popular Standards Members of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Daniel Warren, conductor with guests Greg Oh and Anne-Marie Donovan 8 pm • Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts In collaboration with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Performers Thomas Kay, flute James Mason, oboe Ross Edwards, clarinet Cedric Coleman, bassoon Catherine Robertson, horn Larry Larson, trumpet Joseph Costello, trombone Jane Maness, tuba Ron Brown, percussion Lori West, percussion Elaine Lau, piano

Mauricio Kagel

John Adams

Mauricio Kagel

Nicole Lizee

Mauricio Kagel

Philip Glass

Mauricio Kagel

David Lang

Program Ten Marches to Miss the Victory—Marches 1–2 American Standard I. March II. Christian Zeal and Activity III. Sentimentals

Ten Marches to Miss the Victory—Marches 3–5 Simulakra (World Premiere) featuring Greg Oh, keyboard, voice Ten Marches to Miss the Victory—Marches 6–8 Changing Opinion, from Songs from Liquid Days featuring Anne-Marie Donovan, mezzo-soprano Ten Marches to Miss the Victory—Marches 9–10 Born to be Wild (After Steppenwolf) featuring Greg Oh, narrator

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Program notes

Mauricio Kagel: Ten Marches to Miss the Victory (1979) These marches developed as a counterpart to the text of the radio play The Tribune. This play is about a political speaker, who during the rehearsal for a public appearance plays a tape with loud applause for himself over a background of omnipresent music from a military band. I have written marches to accompany this monologue, although I cannot say that I was able to enjoy composing them (can one enjoy a genre whose effect is so questionable?). In this context it becomes clear why I chose such an unequivocal title for the composition. I did not want marches that might help to lead to a victory. Since the Geneva Convention, musicians and medical staff in uniform have not been allowed to carry weapons. The fact that the acoustical tools of musicians can incite violence is deliberately concealed, because their effect seems harmless. The opposite is true: music can effectively embed itself in the heads of those men who are in control of warhead.

The result is universally known. — Mauricio Kagel Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008) is among the most distinctive composers of contemporary music. From the very beginning his name has been associated above all with music theatre, the genre in which he has perhaps exerted the greatest impact. Besides his radical innovations in this area, however, he has also developed a highly personal aesthetic in his absolute music. Kagel’s creative output has been enormous. It encompasses not only stage, orchestral and chamber music in an extremely wide range of instrumental settings, but also film scores, radio plays and essays. Throughout its broad spectrum, his music reveals a breach with any and all forms of academicism as well as close ties to tradition, especially to the German tradition. Imagination, originality and humour are the hallmarks of this multimedia artist. With inexhaustible powers of invention, Kagel makes use of a very wide array of expressive devices that, although often caustic and provocative, are always placed in the service of musical discourse.

John Adams: American Standard (1973) (realization by Jascha Narveson) An early work of John Adams, American Standard is a triptych: a march, a hymn, and a jazz standard. Extra materials may be used in performance in various forms whether film, tape, video, speech, mime, dance etc. In this performance, the ‘extra material’ in Christian Zeal and Activity is a recording of Bernie Madoff giving advice to a client on how to handle a pending SEC investigation. The full conversation can be found at <http://www. cnbc.com/id/32767249/Madoff_Caught_on_Tape_Reveals_Ways_to_Dodge_SEC>.

Each of the three parts is separately performable and separately titled: 1. John Philip Sousa The use of a steady, insistent pulse makes the title’s derivation quite clear; the pulse is given by a bass drum and other instruments have constant pitches that are departed from and returned to. As with all three pieces, the dynamics are restrained and undramatic, with the exception of the “extra material”: a crisp

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snare-drum roll that both sets the tone and gives a dramatic touch that is not present anywhere else.

2. Christian Zeal and Activity The main body of the music consists of a series of long held notes, very consonant, in four parts that are occasionally synchronised to give unified chords. The instruments are divided into four groups according to their pitch ranges, with at least one sustaining instrument in a group, each group having a leader who cues movement from one note to the next. During this piece, the “ extra material” consists of a tape recording of a radio talk show.

3. Sentimentals This is the most melodic piece of the three and the one that involves the greatest range of variation, quoting extensively from Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. The gentle swing of the trap set, that is added during the piece, is again not included in the score, and its presence gives the sound a distinctively Californian feel, close to that of the Beach Boys or Hollywood studio bands. The curious ending is an ironic affirmation of the maudlin chromaticism of the Ellington piece that generates the music.

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker, John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, have played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a different language some consider to be expressive of his New World surroundings. Apart from receiving myriad awards and honours, commissions and premieres, recordings and performances by every major symphony orchestra on the continent and beyond, Adams writes prolifically and provocatively in print and on his appropriately-titled blog, Hell Mouth.

Nicole Lizée: Simulakra (World Premiere) Since the term was coined in the late 1950s to describe the use of psychedelic drugs within the practice of psychotherapy, psychedelia has come to encompass myriad forms of expression; expanding beyond the laboratory into the realms of visual art, film, literature, design and other aspects of a burgeoning pop culture, psychedelia has become synonymous with the notion of creativity under the influence of mind-expanding drugs.

Simulakra is a song cycle influenced by specific traits of 1960s psychedelia. The work is my distorted interpretation of the genre in homage to iconic psychedelic sound art of the 1960s such as the Bee Gees’ Odessa, Love’s Forever Changes and the Zombies’ Odissey & Oracle.

This song cycle was commissioned by Greg Oh with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and is dedicated to him—a fine example of an altered mind if there ever was one.

Nicole Lizée is a composer, sound artist and keyboardist based in Montreal, Quebec.

Her compositions range from works for large ensemble and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox

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instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichord, stylophone, Simon and Merlin hand held games, and karaoke tapes.

Nicole has received commissions from several artists and ensembles including l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, Kronos Quartet, CBC, So Percussion, Standing Wave, ECM+, Arraymusic and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. In 2010 Nicole was awarded a fellowship from the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation based in New York City and Italy. She has twice been named a finalist for the Jules-Léger Prize, most recently in 2007 for the work This Will Not Be Televised, scored for chamber ensemble and turntables. This work was selected as a top ten recommended work at the 2008 International Rostrum of Composers. In 2002, she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize, and in 2004 she was nominated for an Opus Prize.

Changing Opinion (from Songs from Liquid Days) (1985) Songs from Liquid Days is Philip Glass’ most popular and successful recording in which the composer collaborated with Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne, who all wrote lyrics in a cycle of themes. The opener, a ten-minute opus called Changing Opinion, possesses unusually oblique lyrics courtesy of Paul Simon; it condenses the strange excitement of a minimalist opera into a single creative burst of melody, rhythm and momentum.

Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg or Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera, concert, dance, film and popular music worlds simultaneously.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.”

Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds and develops. There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output; Glass continues to be a prolific performer and composer (both in range and sheer quantity).

David Lang: Born to be Wild (After Steppenwolf) (1968) (realization by Esther Wheaton) Born to Be Wild has been described as the first heavy metal song, and the second verse lyric “heavy metal thunder,” marks the first use of the term in rock music. First recorded in 1967 and released the following year, Born to Be Wild has been heard on soundtracks for films from Wild America to Mr. Bean’s Holiday, covered by bands from Slade to the Hampton String Quartet to Ozzy Osbourne and Miss Piggy on an episode of The Muppets.

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Originally written by Oshawa, Ontario, native Dennis Edmonton (a.k.a. Mars Bonfire) for Canadian-American rock band Steppenwolf (who made it famous), and arranged by Pulitzer-prizewinning composer and Bang on a Can founder David Lang twice (once for percussion ensemble, once for the Bang on a Can All-Stars), it found its way to the current arrangement via Esther Wheaton, a young Canadian composer with a slightly unhealthy fascination with tone colour.

David Lang is the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier. One of America’s most performed and honored composers, many of Lang’s pieces resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music—even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. His recent works include writing on water for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, staged by Ridge Theater, and featuring the Norwegian vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval. The commercial recording of the little match girl passion was released in 2009 on Harmonia Mundi, and received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. His music is published by Red Poppy (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc. Performer Biographies Anne-Marie Donovan is the founding artistic director of Inter Arts Matrix, former artistic director of NUMUS (1994–2000) and a founding member of the Blue Rider Ensemble (1991–). As a performer, director and producer, Anne-Marie’s primary interest is the development of new work. She has directed a wide range of performance events from performance installations and guerilla events to theatre and new opera. As a classical singer, Anne-Marie has acted as a vehicle for many composers, having premiered, recorded or commissioned over 50 works.

In the last few years Anne-Marie has ventured into her own creative work. Her Sounding Rituals, a series of ‘creative disturbances’, premiered at the 2007 Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound. She

anne-marie donovan

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is also involved in the collaborative development of several interdisciplinary works: The Last 15 Seconds with MT Space, and Frankenstein’s Ghosts with the Blue Rider Ensemble.

Canadian pianist and conductor Gregory Oh has premiered works by many of Canada’s most important composers as well as composers Frederic Rzewski, Simon Bainbridge and Phillip Glass. As a board member and the music committee co-chair of the Toronto Arts Council, he is committed to supporting the arts through civic action and engagement. He teaches at the University of Toronto, has spent the past three summers on faculty at the greg oh National Youth Orchestra of Canada and is the contemporary music curator at Toronto’s Music Gallery.

He spends his spare time trying to fix his bike and watching bad television.

He has served as music director of the San Diego Opera Ensemble, and has also worked with Florida State Opera, the University of Michigan Opera Program, Michigan Opera Works, Tapestry New Opera, Autumn Leaf and Lyric Opera San Diego. As the conductor of Native Earth Performing Arts’ Giiwedin, Greg was nominated for a Dora Award for outstanding musical direction. Oh is the conductor of Continuum Contemporary Music and has also conducted CONTACT, the McGill Percussion Ensemble, the CBC Kieser Gala and Companion Star in Sweden. He has performed in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aberdeen Sound Festival, the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Berlin’s C3 Festival at Berghain, Festival of the Sound, Sound Symposium, the Colours of Music Festival, Festival Internationale de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville, soundaXis, the Wordless Music Series at the Lincoln Center, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Festival, the Guelph Jazz Festival, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Luminato Festival, the Images Festival and with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Brave New Works, Esprit Orchestra, Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne, Arraymusic, Ergo and the Soulpepper Theatre Company.

Gregory Oh is the artistic director of the highly acclaimed new music group Toca Loca, also appearing at this year’s Festival on Saturday evening.

Daniel Warren is currently Artistic Advisor and conductor for Orchestra London Canada and Resident Conductor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. He is in frequent demand as a guest conductor and has appeared with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Orchestra London Canada, the Windsor Symphony, Symphony New Brunswick, The ERGO and Continuum ensembles and the Canadian Chamber Ensemble. He is heard conducting regularly on the CBC. For the past eight years he has been conducting at the Westben Arts Festival Theatre in Campbellford, Ontario, performing repertoire with orchestra and full chorus with soloists both operatic and instrumental, all in a wide variety of orchestral and operatic programs. This past summer (2010) Dan conducted a run of fully staged performances of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflote at Westben. He is 18

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very busy as an arranger, his latest being played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, England. Other arrangements include several works for full Symphony including classical, jazz and rock that have been performed by orchestras in Canada, the USA and Asia. He resides in his owner-built home in a rural setting with his wife and two children.

With a goal of reinventing the orchestral experience, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, led by Music Director Edwin Outwater, has taken the nation by storm. Frequent collaborations with rock musicians, electronic artists, composers, authors, scientists, authors and others push the envelope musically and turn audience expectations inside out.

Formed in 1945, the KWS is the cultural centrepiece of the Waterloo Region. The orchestra comprises 52 professional musicians and plays more than 100 performances of music from early Baroque composer Monteverdi through commissioned music by Arcade Fire bassist and Canadian composer Richard Reed Parry. The orchestra is nationally praised for its world-class performances, has an education program unparalleled for an organization of its size.

Spinvolver / People Like Us with John Oswald & Susanna Hood / Vicki Bennett 10 pm • The Registry Theatre John Oswald: extracts from Spinvolver a solo dance opera lecture performed by Susanna Hood, with John Oswald (offstage) Spinvolver is part opera, part dance jockey set, part cinema for the ears. It brings to the stage various aspects of the recorded medium of plunderphonics through a lone performer, who is partly real and partly memorexed.

john oswald

celebrating the art of listening

John Oswald has created an art—and vocabulary—of his own in his exceptional and innovative work as a sound artist, image alchemist, composer and media artist... Oswald’s art, while often playful, is a serious examination of basic elements. According to the jury statement for the Governor General’s Award in Media Arts, “His influence on an entire generation of artists and his international reputation attest to his free-ranging spirit of innovation and exploration.”

Oswald’s first chronophotics to be exhibited in North America, Jacko Lantern, was on display in the window of Pages Books as part of both the Images Moving Pictures and the Contact Festival of Photography. Stills, his first solo show of images, 19

was held over at Toronto Harbourfront’s Premiere Dance Theatre for eight months, and he was the cover boy for the British music magazine The Wire.

His recorded works have been used in productions for radio, stage, concert, television, film, Hollywood movies, computer media and video.

Susanna Hood’s first selfproduced show, The Ides of May at Myth Production in May 1997, demonstrated a commitment to explore and present work that merged disciplines.

Premiered in this show was her first substantial solo, Four ways of approaching susanna hood in spinvolver a door (described by NOW Magazine as “a kinetic, multi-layered, voice-driven solo”), combined her talents as a choreographer, composer and performer, and marked the beginning of her development of a language of physical sound.

In 2000, Susanna founded hum to house her dance-based interdisciplinary vision of performance. Under the umbrella of hum, she produced her first full evening production, still, (of which the Globe & Mail said “a must see event—as precious, as rare, as that proverbial pot of gold.” Still premiered at Artword Theatre in Toronto in November 2000 to outstanding critical acclaim.

People Like Us: Genre Collage By combining compositing techniques, audio/music collage, and animation, People Like Us (in collaboration with Tim Maloney) examines the concept of “genre.” By manipulating patterns, syntax, moods, narrative elements, recurring icons, characters and film stars held within selected movie genres/ sub-genres (i.e. action, adventure, comedy, crime/gangster, drama, epics/historical, horror, musicals, science fiction, war and westerns), we are creating a humorous, surrealistic, yet informative take on the content

Vicky Bennett / people like us

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

held within. The sound is partially taken from the films and partly from music holding corresponding messages, mood and lyrical content. The moving parts are cut around and collaged into each scene, complete with the source’s accompanying audio and added contextual musical collage.

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio.

People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks.

In 2006 Bennett was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘Do or DIY’ on WFMU has had over three quarters of a million hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

River Run Centre 519.763.3000 877.520.2408 riverrun.ca info GCDF 519.780.2220 guelphdance.ca tickets

celebrating the art of listening

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an ongoing event

Marc Couroux Lobby, Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts free Wednesday to Saturday, 7:30 pm to 8 pm

In a Senditmental Mood (2010) In a Senditmental Mood is a work of “musique d’ameublement”—in the tradition of Erik Satie and Musak that is, not meant to be listened to attentively, but to be overheard occasionally, tuned into once in a while, but mostly coating the room in which you are in like so much wallpaper. It was made in a strange way. I recorded each layer without listening to the previous—it’s a “deaf” recording in other words—any fortuitous harmonic/melodic encounter is purely coincidental. I also thought of this work as a set of fractal instances of a same general idea, a set of non-repetitive repetitions—you are always hearing the same contours, instruments and general affects, but the melodies and harmonies are different each time.… a slow downwards trawl to a sedimented listening…

Strange Homecoming, A Structural Comedy (2010) Happening upon a long forgotten TV movie called Strange Homecoming, dwelling on a central scene where the character (Robert Culp) returns to his hometown after 18 years of degenerate behavior.

Rewinding and fast-forwarding the DVD

celebrating the art of listening

to re-listen to the strangely elusive theme music, trying to learn its modus operandi.

Stupidly leaving the DVD at home when travelling to the country. One week of attempting through various mental procedures to recover the theme song, to surface it, to no avail. On returning, maniacally scrubbing over the same music, again and again. An earworm made possible by recording technology, subsequently impossible to dislodge. Except through systematically applying centrifugal force to the content, and centripetal force to the structure, producing multiple variations neither exactly the same, nor legibly different. Resituating the original as only one of a potentially infinite set of fractal variations. A process of structural listening overheats into fractal listening, while the image degradation, immediately palpable, continues on its merry way. The viewer’s eye remains glued to the image, even while it is being scrubbed back and forth, while the music drops out, only to return after every landing subtly altered: same form, different melodies and harmonies. Listening to the recursive rhythms of the möbius strip, a sedimented state where it is no longer possible to tell when the flip to the other side occurred.

An abstracted illustration of a desperate process of re-covery, addiction and provisional therapy.

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thursday April 28 Morning Music 8 am • Pyrus Café free Performers Scott Thomson, trombone John Oswald, sax Germaine Lui, percussion Music for people who are up early with open ears.

A couple of years ago Scott Thomson and John Oswald introduced the lovely convention of a concert at the beginning of the day, presented weekly at Scott’s experimental music venue, Somewhere There, in Toronto, usually in a trio with percussionist Germaine Lui (who also created fresh baked goods for the occasions), and featuring a variety of guest musicians.

La Mer Méditérranée Maryem Tollar & Friends noon • Zion United Church free A musical crossroads where music from Arabic, Jewish and French cultures converge, presented by Maryem Tollar and Aviva Chernick. This project was conceived by Dominique Denis and premiered on April 16, 2011 at Alliance Française in Toronto.

Performers Maryem Tollar, vocals Aviva Chernick, vocals Eric St. Laurent, guitar Ernie Tollar, flutes, sax, clarinet Rakesh Tewari, percussion

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Georges Moustaki Enrico Macias Traditional Ladino Lo’Jo Lo’Jo

Program En Méditerranée La Vie Populaire Las Tiyas En La Taberna Del Domingo La Danseuse OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Souad Massi Traditional Ladino Maryem Tollar Dalida El Salam

Raoui La Serena Marrakesh Salma Ya Salama Zaman

The program is subject to change.

Performer biographies Maryem Tollar is an extraordinary singer, composer and songwriter. She is EgyptianCanadian and lives in Toronto. Since the mid-nineties, she has been an integral part of Canadian music. She helped forge the acceptance of music from diverse cultures in groups like Maza Meze and Doula. She has become the favourite singer of composer Christos Hatzis, lending her voice to such highly received works as Constantinople and Sepulcher of Life, and toured with rumba flamenco guitarist Jesse Cook. She has lent her voice to the cause of peace in the Middle East and has composed and sung for theatre, dance, film and television. She has recorded three of her own CDs and was featured with Patricia O’Callahan and the Gryphon Trio on the JUNO award-winning recording of Constantinople. From concert hall to club to festival site Maryem has won rave reviews for her performances in an encyclopedic array of contexts. What Maryem likes to do most is combine all the music she loves best and sing it with her own ensemble. With a repertoire that runs from traditional Arabic songs, hundreds of years old, to settings of the work of EgyptianCanadian poet Ehab Lotayef, to her own and husband Ernie Tollar’s creations, Maryem Tollar maryem tollar opens up a world of wonderful music.

Aviva Chernick is a passionate singer whose riveting voice and inviting presence have compelled listeners across the continent. Her music moves between traditional, acoustic world mixes in Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew and English and plugged in, danceable global roots. Aviva’s recordings include the Juno-nominated debut album Sun Place by the global fusion band Jaffa Road and Under the Canopy, released by the Canadian Folk Music Awards nominated ensemble, The Huppah Project.

Eric St. Laurent is a performing guitarist, a composer and an emerging chef (at home only). He has been featured on over 30 recordings, has produced albums, written scores celebrating the art of listening

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for short films, theatre, and toured in Europe and Canada. He has won the SOCAN award for best original composition at the Montréal Jazz Festival, the Best Band Award at the Vienne (France) Jazz Festival, was sent to represent Canada at the International Jazz Guitar Summit in Nice (MIDEM).

Ernie Tollar was born and raised in Toronto. Over the years, Ernie has extended his musical reach from jazz through studies with Indian and Arab music teachers in North America, India, and Egypt. He plays saxes, and flutes such as bansuri (India) flute and the nay (Middle East). Performing from Cairo to Kapuskasing, Ernie finds connections in world music cultures.

Rakesh Tewari was born in the Maritimes and is now based in Toronto. He has performed with many world music artists including the Toronto Tabla Ensemble, Roam, Rhea’s Obsession, Ian De Souza and Lal. He has toured across Canada and internationally.

two-day event

symposium The Registry Theatre free Thursday & Friday, 2 pm to 3:30 pm Thursday Symposium

Friday Symposium

Appropriation 2.0: The Pop-Politic Does the recontextualization of iconic pop images and audio within the experimental genre distract or enhance experimental expression?

Garage Band versus MAX: Popular Technology, Experimental Practices Where does experimental practice find its voice within ubiquitous popular sound technologies?

Panelists Paul Walde (chair) Vicki Bennett Marc Couroux John Oswald Nicole Lizée 26

Panelists Richard Simas (chair) Jonny Dovercourt Paolo DJ P-Love Matt Rogalsky Neil Weirnik OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Princeton Laptop Orchestra: Sideband / Andrew Stewart

Andrew Stewart The digital musical instrument called the “tstick” “grew out of a collaborative project undertaken by Joseph Malloch and composer D. Andrew Stewart at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill University, and also in cooperation with performers as part of the interdisciplinary McGill Digital Orchestra project. The first prototype was completed in 2006.

The t-sticks form a family of tubular digital musical instruments, ranging in length from 0.6 metres (soprano) to 1.2 metres (tenor). The tsticks have been designed and constructed to allow a large variety of unique interaction techniques such as: touching, gripping, brushing, tapandrew stewart with tenor t-stick ping, shaking, squeezing, jabbing, swinging, tilting, rolling, and twisting. As a result, a significant emphasis is placed on the gestural vocabulary required to manipulate and manoeuvre the instrument. The musical experience for both the performer and audience is intensified by a unique engagement between performer body and instrument.

Additionally, the t-sticks are designed for the use of expert users. To this end, more emphasis is put on extending any “ceiling on virtuosity” rather than on lowering the “entryfee.” New users should be able to produce sound from the t-sticks, but not necessarily musically pleasing sound. The instrument design of the system aims at keeping the performer’s focus on the sound and its relation to the entire instrument, rather than individual sensors. Technological concerns are subsumed under performance or musical concerns.

The sound of the t-sticks are entirely synthesized in real-time without any type of automation, live score following or computer-assisted composition. —Joseph Malloch.

Andrew Stewart’s compositional activities centre on contemporary art music and composing instrumental music, musique concrète, acousmatique musique, and music with live electronics and for innovative digital musical instruments. Andrew’s compositional projects of the last fifteen years attest to his interest in blending acoustic instrument and electronic music composition. His current research centres on the application of new technology both in the context of the classroom and the concert hall. celebrating the art of listening

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vanessa yaremchuk

8 pm • Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts In collaboration with NUMUS

princeton laptop orchestra

Princeton Laptop Orchestra: Sideband Performers (for this incarnation) Cameron Britt Michael Early Lainie Fefferman Konrad Kaczmareck Michelle Nagai Jascha Narveson Sideband’s parent ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), was formed in 2005 by Dan Trueman (composer, Norwegian fiddler, and computer music hacker) and Perry Cook (computer scientist, electrical engineer, and music hacker) to be a test-lab for a new way of thinking about electronic and ensemble music. Using specially designed and custom made hemispherical speakers and a fleet of laptops, PLOrk was able to turn each member of the orchestra in to an island of sound, returning a sense of acoustics and space to the normally flat world of electronic music. PLOrk has performed widely (in Princeton, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC), has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, and has worked in collaboration with Zakir Hussain, the American Composers Orchestra, Matmos & So Percussion, and others.

Sideband was conceived out of a desire to explore the PLOrk model of music making in a more sustained fashion, outside the annually changing context of academic classes.

Formed in 2010, Sideband is currently made up of a group of longer-term members whose skills range from orchestral percussion to installation art, research in machinelearning algorithms, traditional Norwegian folk music, solo performance, electroacoustic music, software design, and scored composition. Being a new ensemble, Sideband is starting from a basis of pre-existing PLOrk repertoire—written by Sideband members— and is continually in the process of creating new pieces.

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an ongoing event

Dissocia 29 King St East (formerly Millsy’s Billiard Hall) In collaboration with UW Drama Wednesday to Sunday, 5 pm Written by Adam Cowart Directed by Andy Houston Music and sound by Nancy Tam Film and video design by Mark Walton Scenography and design by Scott Spidell

DISSOCIA examines the role that addiction plays in the ‘performance’ of everyday consumerism. The title refers to dissociative states of being and what happens when a person compartmentalizes his or her life into various activities so that addictive, abusive or other unethical activity is effectively concealed from the person’s sense of self in the other compartments.

This is what happens when people become addicted to gambling, shopping, sex, exercise, drugs, alcohol, work, and other activities—that become diversions from self-awareness.

The show focuses on digital gambling addiction, but it approaches this issue through the idea that gambling as an exploitative business is not unlike other businesses that claim to provide entertainment—for a price.

Through the use of a soundscape and digital imagery, the play becomes part re-

celebrating the art of listening

ality, part reality TV and part mythology.

We see the stories of a casino owner and his son, two daughters of a gambler, and a woman who commits suicide in the washroom of the casino while a staff member tries to ‘help.’ There is a pronounced focus here on the root cause of addictive behaviour, mostly in the absence of loved ones or other traumatic rupture, such as the loss of a family member.

One of the most traumatic betrayals, based in part on a true story, is that of a father whose gambling addiction leads him to exploit his youngest daughter in order to serve his addiction.

This play examines how our society is slowly becoming addicted to immediate gratification, delivered digitally to us in so many forms. This is DISSOCIA. DISSOCIA has emerged from the research undertaken by a group of dramaturgy students at the University of Waterloo.

The creators of DISSOCIA wish to acknowledge the generous support and guidance of Dr. Kevin Harrigan and the Problem Gambling Research Team at the University of Waterloo.

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Penderecki String Quartet with DJ P-Love 10 pm • The Wax Presented by Open Ears Festival, New Adventures in Sound Art, and PSQ Projects Performers Penderecki String Quartet Jeremy Bell, violin Jerzy Kaplanek, violin Christine Vlajk, viola Jacob Braun, cello Greg Samek, percussion Rick Sacks, percussion Brian Baty, double bass Greg Oh, conductor Darren Copeland and Hector Centeno, sound spatialization Featuring DJ P-Love

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Kotoka Suzuki Steve Reich

Nicole Lizée DJ P-Love

Program Vestigia for string quartet and live electronics Different Trains for string quartet and tape 1. America—Before the war 2. Europe—During the war 3. After the war This Will Not Be Televised for 7 players and turntablist solo sets OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Program Notes Kotoka Suzuki: Vestigia for string quartet and live electronics (2009, 2011 revised) Quantum physics continuously raises fascinating questions about what reality really is.

Inspired by the many phenomena of quantum physics, the work metaphorically explores these questions for reality, mainly of time and of the uncertainty principle: the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other property can be known.

In this work (originally written for dancers, string quartet, video, and live-electronics), uncertainty between reality and illusion is constantly at play. References to different points of time (traces of the past and hint of what is to come) are manifested at various sections of the work. The work is held quietly together by an electronic sound derived from a pulse used to calculate the data of the NMR machine at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. The wave data of this pulse was transformed digitally into sound, and is heard continuously in the background throughout the work.

This work was commissioned by the Penderecki String Quartet with funds from the Canada Council for the Arts. The work was realized in collaboration with Osama Moussa and Raymond Laflamme, a leading quantum computing physicist, a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.

Kotoka Suzuki is a composer of instrumental and electro-acoustical music, large multi-media production works, and music for dance and film. She has produced several collaborative audio-visual works with artists in Germany, Canada, and the U.S. Many of her works explore the spatial relationships between sound and architecture, as well as visual images. Her works have been performed at numerous international festivals and venues such as Inventionen, The Stone, MATA, Ultraschall, ISCM World Music Days, Klangwerktage Hamburg, and ICMC, by performers such as Arditti String Quartet, Continuum, Pacifica Quartet, Earplay Ensemble, and Nouvel Ensemble Modern (Montréal). Her awards include George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Künsterporgramm, Bourges International Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art Competition Prize in multimedia category, and Robert Fleming Prize from Canada Council for the Arts.

Steve Reich: Different Trains for string quartet and tape (1988) Different Trains for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments. The idea for the piece form my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride celebrating the art of listening

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very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation. In order to prepare the tape I did the following: 1. Record my governess Virginia, then in her seventies, reminiscing about our train trips together.

2. Record a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, then in his eighties, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life.

3. Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul and Rachel—all about my age and then living in America—speaking of their experiences.

4. Collect recorded American and European train sounds of the ’30s and ’40s.

In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them as accurately as possible in musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape and the final live quartet part is added in performance. —Steve Reich Steve Reich was recently called “... the most original musical thinker of our time” (the New Yorker) and “... among the great composers of the century” (the New York Times).

His instantly recognizable musical language combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instrumental colour. Many choreographers have used his scores, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jiri Kylian and Jerome Robbin. Exclusive recording contract with Nonesuch, on which label Different Trains appears, earned him one Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition and Music for 18 Musicians a second. His “documentary video opera” works The Cave and Three Tales (in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot) have expanded the boundaries of the operatic medium.

Nicole Lizée: This Will Not Be Televised for 7 players and turntablist (2005–2007) Written during the CBC strike of 2005, This Will Not Be Televised is an exploration into the world of turntablism and its integration into a concert music setting. This work picks up where my two previous works for turntables (1999’s RPM and 2004’s King Kong and Fay Wray) left off. Pitch based manipulation techniques are one of the foremost techniques centered on in the piece. A sine wave record tuned to A=440 (originally intended to test stereo systems in the 1960s) and a nun’s chorus (from the soundtrack to The Sound of Music) are used to create melodies and themes that are accompanied and embellished by the live ensemble. These turntable melodies are created using a combination of pitch bends on the turntable’s pitch adjustment control and alternating the r.p.m. speed between 33 1/3 and 45. Many of the records were selected for their vocal based material.

Very short excerpts of unique vocal harmonies—“ooohs”, “whoas” and “yeahs”—from some of the most distinctive vocalists of the 60s, 70s and 80s are used. Many come from 1980s hard rock/heavy metal records. David Lee Roth, vocalist for the band Van Halen, has a tendency to create shrill overtones when he sings, which make for some 32

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intriguing sampling sonorities. The concept of record juggling, used to some extent in my two earlier DJ works, is extended and expanded both in scope and virtuosity. The records are tuned to individual pitches and tempos and, at one point in the work, two slightly different excerpts from the same record are juggled to create a new sample.

The ensemble acoustically enhances and emulates the juggling effects performed on the turntables, changing tempo and meter in sync with the DJ. The piece concludes with the turntables and ensemble joining forces to create a driving, relentless outburst using an 80s synthesizer sample, heavy metal guitar solo and various scratch techniques intertwined with a rigorous loop performed by the ensemble. The two build until a peak is finally reached using a well-known idiomatic heavy metal cadence performed by the DJ. Commissioned by the CBC. Premiered February 13, 2007; the Winnipeg New Music Festival: Manitoba Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg.

Biographical information for Nicole Lizée can be found on page 15.

Performer biographies Brian Baty attended the University of Toronto where he studied the Double Bass with Joel Quarrington. He is currently principal double bassist of the Niagara Symphony Orchestra and also works as a freelance musician throughout Ontario where he regularly performs with orchestras in Windsor, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, Hamilton and Kingston among others.

DJ P-Love (Paolo Kapunan) moved to Montreal in 1995 to study trumpet at McGill University. Somewhere between ear training classes and choir practice, the trumpet took a back seat to the turntables, the alter-ego “P-Love” was born; immediately after his last exam in 2000, he was whisked away by his friend Kid Koala on a series of tours throughout North America and Europe as the extra pair of hands. Since then, Paolo has recorded and toured with acts such as Steinski, Medeski Martin & Wood, and Amon Tobin. In 2004, he was part of Sixtoo’s touring ensemble, where he played everything from turntables to keyboards and trumpet and various handheld electronic devices. In 2005, Paolo performed Nicole Lizée’s RPM with the Canadian Chamber Ensemble as part of the Open Ears festival in Kitchener. In 2007, he played trumpet in a performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis for a Cage memorial concert in New York. Paolo’s debut full-length instrumental album All Up in Your Mind was released in 2005 on Montreal-based Bully Records and distributed worldwide through British/Canadian label Ninja Tune. He currently lives in New York, and is involved in Kid Koala’s turntable-rock outfit The Slew, which features Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, formerly of the Grammy winning rock group Wolfmother.

New Adventures in Sound Art is a non-profit organization based at the Artscape Wychwood Barns in Toronto that produces performances and installations spanning the entire spectrum of electroacoustic and experimental sound art. Through workshops, lectures, and demonstrations that teach a new perception of sound, New Adventures celebrating the art of listening

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in Sound Art offers the opportunity to educate artists and audiences both locally and abroad. New Adventures in Sound Art now offers four festivals/events through the year that each focus on a different genre of sound art. This May is Deep Wireless (radio and transmission art), this summer is Sound Travels (outdoor installations and electroacoustic music) and in the fall is SOUNDplay (sound art and new media). All of NAISA’s performances feature real-time control of sound spatialization using a customized Max/MSP patch and a Polhemus Patriot sensor worn on the hand of the performer. The spatialization for tonight’s performances are being done by NAISA’s artistic director Darren Copeland and technical director Hector Centeno.

Biographical information for Gregory Oh can be found on page 18.

Rick Sacks performs as a percussionist with many groups including Arraymusic, New Music Concerts, Aventa, The Glass Orchestra, and the Evergreen Club. With TONO he toured to the 2009 Cultural Olympiad (Beijing), the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the May 2010 World Expo (Shanghai). Rick is currently composing for shadow puppets and Indonesian Gamelan and is the artistic director of the contemporary chamber ensemble Arraymusic.

Greg Samek is an alumnus of the Detroit Civic Orchestra, the Band of the Ceremonial Guard and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. He has performed with Beverly Johnston, Liam Teague, NEXUS, PAS International Convention, Evelyn Glennie, Vancouver 2010 Olympic Closing Ceremonies and toured across the globe.

Celebrating their 25th anniversary season, the Penderecki String Quartet has become one of the most celebrated chamber ensembles of their generation. Formed in Poland in 1986, the four Penderecki musicians (now originating from Poland, Canada, and USA) bring their varied yet collective experience to create performances that demonstrate their “remarkable range of technical excellence and emotional sweep” (Toronto, Globe and Mail). Recent concert appearances include New York City’s Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles’ REDCAT at Disney Hall, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. Their 25th anniversary season is a highly active one with appearances at festivals in Brazil, USA, Spain, Germany, Poland, China, and guest teaching at the Hong Kong Academy, Indiana

Join us for our exciting and informative cooking classes! Save $5 by visiting www.kitchenermarket.ca/openears

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

University at Bloomington, and their partner university in Osnabrück, Germany. Described

by Fanfare Magazine as “an ensemble of formidable power and keen musical sensitivity”, the Penderecki Quartet’s large discography includes over three dozen recordings including the chamber music repertoire of Johannes Brahms on both the Marquis and Eclectra labels, as well as the first all-Canadian release of the six Béla Bartók quartets under the auspices of Chamber Music in Napa Valley. Their disc of Marjan Mozetich’s Lament in the Trampled Garden won the 2010 JUNO Award for Best Composition.

The Penderecki String Quartet wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for its support through the Presenter/Producer Project Grant Fund; Canada Council for the Arts for its support through the Concert Production Chamber Classical Grant.

The Penderecki String Quartet is Quartet-In-Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario and performs under exclusive representation of Richard Paul Concert Artists.

Thursday begins and ends at Pyrus Cafe, 14 Charles Street West.

Join us after tonight’s last performance for beverages & conversation.

waterloo dance project and The Registry theatre present

What we do in the future depends on what we do in the present.

Let us help you build the future of your organization today with strategic planning and workshops in marketing, audience outreach, event planning, risk assessment, board governance.

T 519.579.8564 Toll-Free 1.888.363.3591 E cheryl@cherylaewing.ca www.cherylaewing.ca

celebrating the art of listening

inDance

Deeply rooted in Bharatanatyam dance, Hari Krishnan’s choreography is contemporary, urban — and difficult to adequately describe. www.indance.ca

May 28 8 pm The Registry Theatre 122 Frederick Street Kitchener pay as you leave for the enjoyment received

[ general seating — determine your own ticket price after the performance ]

To reserve your tickets call 519-745-6565 or email info@registrytheatre.com 35

ANDR-CIT-A-AD-OPENEARS-MAR16-1.indd 1

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

3/16/11 4:09:26 PM

$189,990 LiveAtCityCentre.ca

Prices and specifications are subject to change without notice. E. & O. E.

GRAND OPENING OF 2 DECORATED MODEL SUITES

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Call: 519-744-2170

Destined to be a landmark address, City Centre offers a contemporary urban lifestyle perfectly suited to its surroundings at the corner of Duke and Young Streets.

Condominiums in Downtown Kitchener from just

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April:

Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound April 27th to May 1st

Earth Day April 22

Cu Expo May 12th

Cinco de Mayo May 7th,

Mudpuppy Chase May 1st,

May:

Multicultural Festival June 25th - 26th

National Aboriginal Day 26th and 27th

Kite Festival June 12th

Tri Pride Day June 4th

Our World Music Festival June 3rd â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4th

June:

August:

Phone: 519.744.4921

August Link Picnic August 27th

August Hot Summer Pupusas Festival August 13th

KidSpark August 14th

Kitchener Blues Festival August 5th - 7th

www.kitchenerdowntown.com

Rib and Craft Beer Show July 15th-17th,

Cruising on King Street July 8th,

Toonie Tuesday July 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th,

July:

Upcoming Events

Canadian New Music Network Ontario Regional Meeting Friday April 29 The Registry Theatre

122 Frederick Street, Kitchener Part I 10:00am–11:30 am

The Canadian New Music Network is hosting seven regional meetings open to everyone across Canada (Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia). These meetings will allow people within each region to get to know each other better, talk about what they value and need, share knowledge, stories, challenges and solutions, and organize thoughts in an effort to build a stronger, more united and effective voice for all members of the new music community —both regionally and nationally. Veteran arts administrator Jane Marsland will facilitate meetings in English Canada.

Part II 4:00 pm–5:30pm

This is a continuation of the discussions started in the morning session of the Canadian New Music Network.

The CNMN regional meetings are made possible in part by the generous support of the SOCAN Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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friday April 29 Electro-acoustic Concert noon • City Hall Rotunda free

Freida Abtan Mark Applebaum Natasha Barrett Jascha Narveson Scott Smallwood

Program Untitled Pre-Composition Kernel Expansion Doors Casimo’s Stars

Program notes Freida Abtan: Untitled Freida Abtan is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and composer. Her music falls somewhere in between musique concrete and more modern noise and experimental audio and both genres are influential to her sound. Her work has been compared to bands such as Coil and Zoviet France, because of her use of spectral manipulation and collage.

Freida primarily works with samples of both musical and non-musical objects that she records herself and then manipulates, often beyond recognition, through techniques derived from musique concrète and through successive layers of digital signal processing. She uses structures reminiscent of popular music and more abstract compositional variants to sequence these sounds into melodic songs before incorporating her own treated voice.

As well as having created visual shows for and performed with the internationally renowned group Nurse with Wound, Freida has presented her own sound and visual work at festivals across North America and Europe. Her first album subtle movements is available on United Dairies / Jnana Records. Her upcoming release the hands of the dancer will be available on finite state and through Jnana Records.

Mark Applebaum: Pre-Composition (2002) Pre-Composition is a piece for 8-channel tape. The sound source is merely my voice … or voices.

My music emerges as the result of conversations in my head. In all honesty, the voices I hear are not my own. They are the cultivated wisdom of my many colleagues, mentors, critics, friends, and relatives. Some of these people are still alive and near to me, others have died or are distant. They are both musicians and non-musicians, real and imagined. They include hypothetical collaborators who implore me to do certain things, and conjured audiences whom I try to satisfy or challenge.

Usually I feel like a chameleon. I guess that any originality—or at least uniqueness—in my music would derive from the manner in which I carefully and consciously celebrating the art of listening

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cultivate this “council of elders,” as composer Matthew Shlomowitz appropriately calls it. I have developed a kind of deliberate switching mechanism, inviting certain council members to the party when I need to invoke them, and then dispatching them. There are moments in the compositional process in which I need Roger Reynolds to mentally kick my ass as if I am in a lesson with him; other times I want to know what my mom thinks. It is perverse and probably has unsavory mental health implications for me, but that’s how I compose.

This idea, coupled with my experience of a lot of well-intentioned but misguided, bland, tedious, cliché, or just dumb music at electronic music festivals (some of it my own), provoked the eight characters of Pre-Composition. Although the basic mechanism of the mental conversation is germane, this piece is clearly facetious, ironic, a bit sarcastic, self-deprecating, and satiric. These are not really members of my council of elders. If they were, I would labor to keep most of them out of the conversation. But for Pre-Composition they compose an ideal cast.

Clearly, as the boundary between piece and meta-piece is problematized and eroded, it calls attention to the frame of the medium. But there are other odd or downright ludicrous aspects of the piece. The sounds are simply unprocessed vocal sounds, moving from meta-musical narration to absolute musical expression. The title is ridiculous because I don’t distinguish between the act of pre-composition and composition. And I rarely through-compose a piece in the way the characters do here. So while this piece provides legitimate insight into my compositional mind, it is perhaps equally misleading. I like that. Pre-Composition was commissioned by Electronic Music Midwest 2002.

Mark Applebaum is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions. He has received commissions from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Fromm Foundation, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Vienna Modern Festival, Antwerp’s Champ D’Action, Festival ADEvantgarde in Munich, Zeitgeist, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Jerome Foundation, and the American Composers Forum, among others. His music can be heard on recordings on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, and SEAMUS labels. Additional information is available at <www.markapplebaum.com>.

Natasha Barrett: Kernel Expansion (2009) Kernel Expansion contains three interconnected sections and addresses the essence of sound in its rich multiplicity, ambiguity, schizophrenia and passion, exposing the ‘kernel’ or heart of some specific sound sources; from outdoors, from inside, from realities, dreams and imaginations. Kernel Expansion was commission by, and realised in the studios of ZKM, with additional support from the Norwegian Cultural Council.

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The following technical notes may be of interested to some listeners. Kernel Expansion is composed spatially in a hybrid ambisonics format. Some source materials were recorded with a ‘b-format’ microphone. Other materials were synthesised in higher-order ambisonics (third-order). The work was to be premiered over ZKM’s 43-loudspeaker Klangdome concert system and I needed to find a practical approach for decoding the ambisonics. After thorough testing I found vertical information unstable. This was not surprising considering the limitations of our current decoding methods. So instead of a ‘purist’ horizontal-vertical decoding, I worked with vertically displaced horizontal decodings of both b-format and higher-order material (decoding the b-format with a non-standard decoder such that it functioned over large numbers of loudspeakers). A final layer containing standard octophonic panning techniques was added, positioned in the Klangdome with Vbap embedded in the Zirconium software. The spatial ‘flatness’ of this panning layer highlighted the three-dimensionality of the ambisonics picture. Apart from the 43-speaker decoding, Kernel Expansion exists in ‘ready to play’ decoded stereo, quadraphonic and octophonic formats, as well as the encoded original. In this concert, you are listening to one of the 8-channel decodings.

Natasha Barrett is a freelance composer working with music, research, and creative uses of sound. Her output spans instrumental and electronic concert composition through to sound-art, sound-architectural installations, interactive techniques and collaboration with experimental designers and scientists, and has been performed and commissioned throughout the world. An awareness of auditory perception and sound’s spatio-musical potential features strongly in her work, over the past 10 years involving research and practical application of ambisonics, acoustics and 3D sound. Recent projects include the use of scientific data and geological processes in sound-art, spatial composition for hemispherical loudspeaker arrays, exotic amplification and electronics techniques in composition for acoustic instruments and her third installation project with the architectdesign group ‘Ocean’. Barrett studied in England for masters and doctoral degrees in composition. Both degrees were funded by the humanities section of the British Academy. Since 1999, she has lived and worked in Norway.

Jascha Narveson: Doors (2007) Doors is made entirely out of recordings of doors I made around the house I was living in the fall of 2007, and the houses and buildings that I frequented at that time. Special mention must go to the spring-loaded attic ceiling trap door at the Fefferman family residence, and the chrome-plated metal foot-pedal garbage can that was in my kitchen.

Jascha Narveson absorbed the language of the classical music cannon from an early age, being surrounded by live chamber music recitals in his family home in Waterloo, Ontario. He went on to play in industrial bands and improvised noise-music ensembles, study North Indian tabla, computer programming, South Indian rhythm, Batá drumming, Georgian choral music, and many other things besides. His disparate influences seem, over time, to be less and less disparate to him. He’s had a bunch of work commissioned, celebrating the art of listening

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premiered, and presented by a bunch of different people in a bunch of different countries, some of whom have even committed bits of it to CD. For more info and sounds, visit: <www.jaschanarveson.com>.

Scott Smallwood: Casimo’s Stars (2011) Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and sound performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation. He also designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios. He performs as one-half of the laptop/electronic duo Evidence (with Stephan Moore), and currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he teaches Composition, Improvisation, and Electroacoustic music at the University of Alberta.

Tanya Tagaq 8 pm • Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts When Tanya Tagaq’s music fills your ears, she is genuinely one of those rare artists whose sounds and styles are truly groundbreaking. ‘Inuit throat singer’ is one part of her sonic quotient. So are descriptions like ‘orchestral’ ‘hip-hop-infused’ and ‘primal’… but these words are not usually used collectively. In the case of Tagaq, however, they are.

The Nunavut-born singer has not just attracted the attention of some of the tanya tagaq world’s most groundbreaking artists. They have invited her to participate on their own musical projects, not just singularly, but repeatedly. Tanya has recently recorded once again with Björk (specifically on the soundtrack for the Matthew Barney film Drawing Restraint 9) having already appeared on Björk’s Medúlla in 2004 and accompanied her on the Vespertine tour. In 2005, another monumental collaborative project came to fruition when the Kronos Quartet invited Tanya to participate on a project aptly titled Nunavut, which has been performed at select venues across North America, from its January 2006 debut at the Chan Centre in Vancouver, BC, through to New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Acclaim and respect has followed Tagaq on her solo ventures as well: both Sinaa and Auk / Blood were nominated for a Juno Award (Best Aboriginal Recording) and (Best Instrumental Recording). Both recordings won in several categories at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist.

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Tanya’s most recent project is the stunning video Tungijuq on which she collaborated with Jesse Zubot and Montreal filmmakers Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. In 2009 Tanya also narrated and provided music for the National Film Board documentary This Land.

In his last appearance at Open Ears, award winning musician and producer Jean Martin (Toronto, Ontario) gave an unforgettable performance as part of Barnyard Drama. Martin is well on his way to becoming a Canadian jazz legend. Along with recording over ten albums with artists such as, Juno award winner DD Jackson and Chelsea Bridge, the drummer has put in his time on the road picking up awards along the way (Freddy Stone Award for leadership and excellence, National Jazz Awards Best Drummer nomination).

Jesse Zubot (Vancouver BC) is a founding member of the acoustic-roots ensemble Zubot & Dawson. Zubot is also a member of the Great Uncles of the Revolution which includes well-known Toronto bassist Andrew Downing and trumpeter Kevin Turcotte. Both of these recording acts are Juno Award winners. Recently, Jesse has delved heavily into the world of creative & improvised music, In 2005, Jesse launched a new label, DRIP AUDIO.

Tony Conrad 10 pm • THEMUSEUM Tony Conrad’s artistic creativity cannot be subsumed by any one category. He is certainly best known as a musician and film-maker, yet he is also a painter, a video- and performance artist, and at the same time a mediator of his knowledge by means of quantities of writings and teaching activities. In 1966, Conrad made Flicker, one of the key works of structural film. The alternation between dark and light images with varying frequencies is often the medium of such experimental films. As a violinist, he was a member—with artists such as John Cale, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela—of the Theater of Eternal Music, whose work in the 1960s helped define what was become known as “minimalism.” Conrad’s recording Outside the Dream Syndicate with the rock band Faust in 1973 was a defining moment tony conrad in the creation of “drone” music. Conrad’s concerts continue to explore the rich territory of long, sustained textures, evolving timbres and ear-bending tunings in a completely riveting and even hypnotic way. celebrating the art of listening

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Don’t miss these 2011 Festivals Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound April 27 to May 1 www.openears.ca Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area Sept 16 to Oct 2 www.cafka.org IMPACT International Theatre Festival Sept 22 to Oct 1 www.mtspace.ca/impact11/impact11.html 44

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Saturday April 30 Noreum Machi noon • Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts free Noreum Machi is a captivating new group from Korea that performs the virtuosic percussion music known as samulnori. First introduced to the West in the late 1970s by the legendary ensemble Samul-Nori, this exciting music had a huge effect in galvanizing the student movement in Korea and reengaging Koreans with their traditions. Samulnori is a modernized staged adaptation of p’ungmul nori, a ritualistic celebratory event with origins in shamanism and animism performed by rice farmers and professional musicians at harvest festivals. Noreum Machi’s colorful program includes spectacular percussion dialogues, shamanic chants, and acrobatic dances.

P’ungmul nori represents the soul of Korea. Whereas court music died out for the most part with the end of dynastic rule in the early 20th century, p’ungmul nori, a folk medium, was maintained in the villages and rural areas. After the 1961 military coup and throughout the latter half of the 20th century, students throughout Korea employed p’ungmul nori as a medium to empower the masses and demonstrate against the authoritarian government.

Until Samul-Nori’s first U.S. tour in 1983, Korean music was performed only to diehard aficionados; it was considered far too esoteric for Western ears. Even in Korea, traditional music was fast fading in the wake of the onslaught of Western music—both pop and classical. Samul-Nori, with its emphasis on percussion, dramatically changed the way that Korean music had been perceived both in the West and by young Koreans; here was a music that was easily accessible and seemed to speak a far more universal language.

Noreum Machi essentially continues and expands the journey that Samul Nori began.

The group was founded in 1994 by Kim Juhong, a graduate of the Korean Traditional University who studied singing, shaman rhythms, and pansori (traditional storytelling/ vocal music) with masters of these various genres, including Kim Duk Soo, one of the original members of Samul-Nori. While steeped in the tradition of p’ungmul nori and its derivative samulnori, Noreum Machi has reached out to embrace outside elements and improvisation is a key element of their performance.

Noreum Machi consists of young musicians specializing in a genre of Korean traditional music that originated from the local farming culture and shamanistic ritual background. Kim Juhong and Noreummachi pursues the depth of tradition, yet reinterprets it from their point of view on stage. With its consistent interaction with local Korean and musicians abroad, Kim Juhong and Noreummachi, is a professional performing arts company that continues to bring shows for those from various backgrounds to enjoy.

Since its foundation in 1993, Noreum Machi has been trying to re-discover its traditional music that suits our time by communicating with various artists around the world. The name “Noreum Machi” comes from the jargon of Korean minstrels, a combination of skill and timing attained only by the best players. In competition amongst minstrels, Noreum celebrating the art of listening

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noreum machi

Machi would refer to the player so skilled that no one would dare follow. In other words the best! Noreum Machi, which is known for its artistic performances and creative activities, invites you to the original soulful rhythm and sounds on the lively stage.

Kim Ju-hong Lee Ho-won Oh Hyun-ju Kim Jong Myung Lee Jae Hyup

performers Janggu, Kkwaenggwari, Jing, vocal Janggu, Kkwaenggwari, Jing, chorus Janggu, Kkwaenggwari, Jing, chorus Janggu, Kkwaenggwari, Jing, chorus Piri, Taepyongso, chorus

THE INSTRUMENTS The core instruments used are the janggo, an hourglass-shaped double headed drum that could be considered the national instrument of Korea since it is used in all forms of Korean music; the buk, a double-headed barrel drum; the kkwaenggwari, a small gong originally used in the royal ancestral shrine music; and the jing, a large gong. Other instruments used selectively are the piri, a small eight holed high-pitched oboe; the taepyongso, a conical oboe; and the bara, brass cymbals used in Buddhist and shaman ritual music.

Eve Egoyan 3 pm • St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church program Ann Southam: Simple Lines of Enquiry An eloquent and quietly emotional work, Simple Lines of Enquiry relies on its slow unraveling to evoke a magically suspended, weightless sound world. Its stillness and intimacy invite listeners into an environment of deep listening and contemplation. “Simple 46

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Lines of Enquiry is an enquiry into the emotional possibilities of a twelve-tone row. It is also an attempt to rationalize the irrational for which the twelve-tone row serves as a metaphor,” says Ann Southam.

This event is supported in part by the Canadian Music Centre’s New Music in New Places program, funded by SOCAN Foundation and the Government of Canada through the Canada Music Fund.

One of Canada’s first prominent women composers, whose music is performed all over the world, Ann Southam was on the front lines of a generation that profoundly and positively changed the landscape of contemporary Canadian music. Ann Southam experimented with electro-acoustic and serial music, but she is perhaps best remembered for creating music of ever-repeating motifs that, over time and small changes, turn questions into answers. “There is a close connection between composing for or playing the piano and other forms of work done by hand, such as weaving, that reflect the nature of traditional women’s work,” she said in an interview with Eve Egoyan in MusicWorks magazine, “repetitive, life-sustaining, requiring time and patience. But through it all runs a thread of questioning.” She died this past autumn. sam barnes

Born in Victoria, BC, in 1964, pianist Eve Egoyan has been interpreting new works since 1994. Eve’s intense focus, command of the instrument, insightful interpretations, and unique programmes welcome audiences into unknown territory, bridging the gap between them and contemporary composers.

Eve has performed the world première and North American premières of many works by Canadian and international composers includeve egoyan ing Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, Alvin Curran, Maria de Alvear, José Evangelista, Michael Finnissy, Rudolf Komorous, Jo Kondo, Michael Longton, Juliet Palmer, Stephen Parkinson, James Rolfe, Linda C. Smith, Ann Southam, Karen Tanaka, James Tenney, Judith Weir and Gayle Young. Many of these works were commissioned through the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Laidlaw Foundation, CBC, Japan-Canada Fund and the British Council.

She has appeared as a solo recitalist in Canada, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Japan, and the U.S. including performances at in the Huddersfield Contemporary Festival, (Huddersfield, U.K.), the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Kobe International Modern Music Festival (Kobe, Japan), and the Sound Symposium (St. Johns). In 2001 she made her debut with the Toronto Symphony celebrating the art of listening

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Orchestra, playing the world première of Figures by Ann Southam for the Massey Hall New Music Festival.

Eve has released seven critically acclaimed solo discs, six of works by living composers and one disc of works by Erik Satie. She has acted as soloist and executive producer on all these discs. Her first solo CD, thethingsinbetween, was included in the Globe and Mail’s 1999 Top Ten list. Her most recent disc, Simple Lines of Enquiry, a one-hour long piano solo by Ann Southam written for Eve, was selected as one of the New Yorker’s ten top of 2009 discs by Alex Ross, music critic and author of the critically acclaimed The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

Eve has had the pleasure premiering many of Ann’s works. Their shared love for the piano and its expressive capacity uniquely links both composer and performer. For both of them, the piano is the primary medium through which they express their creative voices.

The Rent 5 pm • The Registry Theatre performers Kyle Brenders, soprano saxophone Nick Fraser, drums Robert Clutton, double bass Scott Thomson, trombone Susanna Hood, vocals The Rent is a Toronto-based repertory band dedicated to the music of American composer and saxophonist, Steve Lacy.

Starting in the late 1950s, Lacy used his intensive research into the then-neglected compositional œuvre of Thelonious Monk as a foundation on which to base a lifetime of thoroughly original music-making.

The Rent approaches Lacy’s compositional legacy with the same spirit.

Lacy’s songs are based on texts by the rent wonderful poets from various places and eras, and have a special place in the group’s repertoire as sung by Susanna Hood. Susanna is also an acclaimed dancer who solos on the tunes along with the rest of The Rent. The band’s debut recording, Musique de Steve Lacy, is recently released on Ambiances Magnétiques.

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Toca Loca 8 pm • Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts performers Greg Oh Aiyun Huang Simon Docking With guests Greg Samek, Rob MacDonald, Callan Burgess, Lucas Marchand, Erik Ross, David Schotzko Program

Javier Alvarez Temazcal Aiyun Huang, maracas

Matthew Hindson AK-47 Simon Docking, piano

Sean Griffin Pattycake

Aiyun Huang and Gregory Oh, percussion

Nicole Lizée Promises, Promises

Andrew Staniland Adventuremusic

Simon Docking, piano Aiyun Huang, percussion Gregory Oh, keyboard Aaron Gervais/Julia Aplin Halo Ballet

Simon Docking, piano Greg Samek, percussion Rob MacDonald, guitar Gregory Oh, keyboard Callan Burgess, Lucas Marchand, Erik Ross, and David Schotzko, Halorinas Javier Alvarez: Temazcal Javier Alvarez’s piece Temazcal for maracas and tape was composed in 1984 for Luis Julio Toro. The word “Temazcal” comes from the Nahautl (ancient Aztec) word literally meaning “water that burns.” A highly structured improvisation, Temazcal combines traditional maraca rhythms of Central America with a contemporary taped accompaniment. The sound sources on the tape include a harp, folk guitar, and bass pizzicati for the attacks, the transformation of bamboo rods being struck together for the rhythmic passages, and rattling sounds from the maracas themselves for other gestures.

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Matthew Hindson: AK-47 Written by Aussie Matthew Hindson for Aussie Simon Docking, AK-47 is many things: a monument to disco days gone by, a humourous look at common structural elements in popular music and an homage to a remarkable human invention that is still regularly killing people despite being over 65 years old. “More AK-type rifles have been produced than all other assault rifles combined.”

Sean Griffin: Pattycake Sean Griffin has taken a popular children’s game and transformed it into the amped-up, aurally-driven virtuosic display of Pattycake. With memorization required, it really is as difficult as it seems. This piece appeals to our love of dexterous display, but also to our craving for nostalgia and paperback enlightenment.

Nicole Lizée: Promises, Promises From the mid 1970s to mid 1980s many music genres and subgenres came into existence as a reactionary response. Punk music began as a reaction to the polished, overproduced arena rock of the 1970s. Post-Punk was a reaction to the nihilism and questionable musicianship of Punk. Synth-Punk attempted to fuse the attitude and energy of PostPunk with New Wave. New Wave was created primarily using synthesizers and drum machines; its production was polished and its image was squeaky clean. Synth-Punk used a similar instrumentation to create dark, gritty, lo-fi, aggressive music that maintained a melodious quality. From these genres came: No Wave. A reaction to New Wave, its title reflects a disassociation with any one genre. It has been described as experimental, deconstructionist, atonal and abstract, where mood and texture are favoured and conventional harmony and melody (associated with New Wave and Synth-Punk) are tossed out. Promises, Promises is an interpretation of the 3 genres. It’s a love song.

This piece was commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council.

Andrew Staniland: ADVENTUREMUSIC: love her madly *I Driven II Free, rubato—Humourously mechanical—Meditative III Like an industrial machine* * *Adventure:* /an exciting or very unusual experience. /*Music:* /an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color: /*Love:* /strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything: /*Her:* /anything considered, as by personification, to be feminine: *Madly:* In a wild manner; frantically./ This piece was commissioned with the assistance of the Toronto Arts Council.

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Aaron Gervais/Julia Aplin: Halo Ballet Created specifically for the Music Gallery’s X-Avant Festival, Halo Ballet explores the differences between virtual and real, installation and live performance. Conceived by a confessed video game addict, and drawing inspiration from late night SNES NHL 94 leagues and machinima, Halo Ballet combines the “real-time” actions of four networked Halo players choreographed by Julia Aplin to a live performance of Aaron Gervais’ music.

Nothing is pre-recorded, and the action is projected live onto a video screen. Halo Ballet begs the question, “is it a bunch of people watching a video game, or is it live dance, or is it something completely different?”

Despite multiple attempts, this piece was commissioned without the assistance of the Canada Council.

Since their inception in 2001, Toca Loca has been furiously branding the cattle of the new music world, and has long been held up as the best argument against intelligent design.

Sworn enemies of actuaries and slow-growth fund managers the world over, Toca Loca is committed to reinvigorating the artistic community by encouraging the creation of new Canadian work, introducing work from the international community to Canada and by thoughtfully challenging popular conceptions of how things should be done and what they should sound like.

Toca Loca was founded by Aiyun Huang, Simon Docking and Gregory Oh. They have been Provost Distinguished Visitors at the University of Southern California and Ensemble-in-Residence at the Music Gallery. Past performances include the Wordless Music Series at the Lincoln Centre, C3 at Berghain in Berlin and soundaXis in Toronto as well as the Ottawa Chamberfest, Montreal’s Musicmars, Wavelength, X-Avant toca loca Festival, and Vancouver’s Western Front.

During the soundaXis festival, they were offered twenty dollars by a merchant’s personal assistant to stop playing on the trendy corner of Queen and John in Toronto. They accepted.

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blue dot

Blue Dot 10 pm to sunrise • 123 Breithaupt Street A much anticipated, highly-charged late night event; both art experience and celebration in a beautifully articulated space. Aesthetically original Blue Dot uses spatial design and art to cultivate a friendly and equalising experience that lingers afterwards.

Featuring many local but influential producers and DJs tightly connected to Canada’s widely reputed underground dance scene. Friendly and equalising, Blue Dot aims to linger afterwards. Participants include filmaker Peter Mettler (Petropolis, Manufactured Landscapes), Mutek curator Patti Schmidt and, because you will love it, an uptempo set by klezmer band Valody.

Sunday, May 1 Soundwalk 11:00 am to noon • Roos Island Gazebo, Victoria Park free Join Artistic Director Peter Hatch in an ear-opening opportunity to listen to the sounds that surround us, to walk silently in the company of others and enjoy the murmurs and signals of the environment. The simple act of walking in silence while listening intently can provide for a fresh perception of our surrounding environment. We will walk together with open ears, then take a few moments to talk together of what we hear.

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valody

Valody’s Book of Disquiet 1 pm • The Wax Performers Nadia Delisle, accordion Diane Labrosse, accordion Jean-Sébastien Clément, double bass Benoît Converset, double bass Richard Simas, clarinet Milan Simas, clarinet Alain Morrier, guitar Pierre Tanguay, percussion and artistic direction Benoît Garneau, violin Artistic direction of Valody’s Book of Disquiet Diane Labrosse, Richard Simas, Pierre Tanguay Valody’s Book of Disquiet is a music-text project inspired from the Book of Disquiet (O livro do desassossego) written by the 20th century Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa. Presented as excerpts in our performance, the texts in English, French, and Portuguese are recited and sung as sound/poetic fragments, resembling bits of dream, sound, thought, and scenery from Pessoa’s 1920’s intimate chronicle of observation. The music performed by Valody, a 9-member street-band, is dialogue, accompaniment, and transposition of those brief narratives.

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… It starts as a noise that sets off another noise in the dark pit of things. Then it becomes a vague howling joined in turn by the rasp of swaying shop signs in the street. Then the clear voice of space falls suddenly silent. Everything trembles then stops and there is quietness amidst all this fear…(from The Book of Disquiet)

iane Labrosse, concept D

Fats Waller

Richard Simas

Richard Simas Traditional (Bulgaria)

Pierre Tanguay Robert Marcel Lepage

Traditional (Azores)

Valody

Program Babel

Black and Blue Desassossego

Fernando’s Valse

Gunkino Hora

Jeu de l’intranquilité Le Pelleteur de Nuages Os Bravos

Improvisations

Valody is an eclectic group of Québec musicians exploring a diverse repertory of original and established festive music and poetic possibilities. With the wandering, Bohemian Valody as its poetic emblem, the group plays in a street-band tradition for a variety of events: festivals, public markets, parties, etc.

Valody is the vagabond of our imagination, a wanderer with extraordinary stories, and a chanting soul…

A World of Colour

Exploring and exploding the colour palette DaCapo Chamber Choir Leonard Enns, conductor Guest artist: Catherine Robertson, piano 3:00 pm • St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church

Jeffrey Ryan

Gyorgy Ligeti

Ivo Antognini

Gerard Yun

Bruce Sled

Jonathan Dove

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Program Paint the Light Lux aeterna My Song The Silence (DaCapo commission; premiere) Shimmering Waterloo Ice Reflections The Passing of the Year featuring Catherine Robertson, pianist OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

dacapo chamber choir

program notes by director Leonard Enns (except where indicated) Our program today takes inspiration from the synesthetic possibilities implied by the ways we speak about music—how does music paint a canvas for our ears? Ryan’s program note is as good an introduction as any, both to his piece, and to the concert itself.

Jeffrey Ryan: Paint the Light (b. 1962, Canada) (program note by Jeffrey Ryan) Paint the Light was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director) with the assistance of the Laidlaw Foundation. It received its world premiere on November 5, 2000, by the combined choirs of the University of Alberta, the University of Manitoba, McGill University and Memorial University of Newfoundland, conducted

by Robert Sund, as part of University Voices 2000 at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada.

When talking about music, we often borrow words from visual art to describe sounds.

We speak of orchestral “colours,” of “brightness” or “darkness,” and so on. I often think of orchestrators as “colourists” and one of the things that interests me as a composer is to focus on the transformation of colours within a piece of music.

In searching for a subject for this short choral work, I found myself turning to my fascination with colours. I find it so intriguing that, just as each of us hears a piece of music uniquely, we similarly have no way of knowing whether we all see exactly the same thing when we look at a particular colour. In this sense, the piece celebrates the experience of both the individual and the collective, as it celebrates the gathering of individuals into a collective musical unit.

And so, Paint the Light is inspired by colour, particularly the continuum between black and white, and the idea that black is created by the complete absorption of light while white is created by the complete reflection of light. The initial state of blackness celebrating the art of listening

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is not a void, but rather a storehouse for the many colours of light, or perhaps it can be thought of as “potential light.” In the course of the piece, a panoply of different colours is added to the black until, full to bursting, it explodes into white light.

Paint the Light also evokes the image of the artist’s palette, covered in daubs of colour, which are swirled and mixed together—colours that come alive in a constant state of motion. The text is essentially a series of different colour names and other colour-related words—each word chosen more for its rhythm and sound quality than for a logical progression of dark to light, or to create groupings of like colours. The initial slow section gradually accelerates into the main dancing tempo, which explores different registers and vocal combinations as the music methodically rises higher and higher.

Gyorgy Ligeti: Lux aeterna

(1923-2006, b. Hungary) For choral musicians, Ligeti’s Lux aeterna is a landmark composition in terms of technical and conceptual demands. Neither melody nor rhythm is perceivably in the forefront, and the expressive impact of the music lies in texture, tessitura and sound blocks. Yet, the music is carefully constructed in terms of tight melodic canons and careful rhythmic organization. This is a sound-painting using large brush strokes. A possible “listening posture” is to relinquish intellectual analytical efforts, and simply enter the sound world created here.

While the music has a kind of pop status because of its use in Kubricks’ 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is instructive to be called back to the actual text from the mass Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es.

May eternal light shine on them, O Lord with Thy saints for ever, because Thou art merciful.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Grant the dead eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.

for the dead that Ligeti is “reading”:

Ivo Antognini: My Song (b. 1963, Switzerland) Ivo Antognini is a composer, jazz pianist and educator; while his compositional output includes many choral works, he also has numerous television and film scores to his credit.

My Song was premiered in Gorizia, Italy in July 2010.

This song of mine will wind its music around you, my child, like the fond arms of love.

The song of mine will touch your forehead like a kiss of blessing.

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

When you are alone it will sit by your side and whisper in your ear, when you are in the crowd it will fence you about with aloofness.

My song will be like a pair of wings to your dreams, it will transport your heart to the verge of the unknown.

It will be like the faithful star overhead when dark night is over your road.

My song will sit in the pupils of your eyes, and will carry your sight into the heart of things.

And when my voice is silent in death, my song will speak in your living heart.

—text by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Gerard Yun: The Silence (World Premiere) (b. 1961, USA) Gerard Yun has been a gift to the choral community since his arrival here some years ago.

For more than a decade he has worked to educate choral singers in extended techniques including various forms of Asian overtone singing. Since Western choirs have rarely developed the techniques to explore overtone singing in a way that is both technically interesting and aesthetically compelling, there are few choral works that feature overtone singing, and often those that do are not able to present it as much more than a novelty.

We hope to move in a corrective direction with the premiere of Yun’s The Silence.

As love was immense… …silence… as the armor was to struggle …ethereal silence… as knowing was profound …caressed in silence… better listen

to the song of birds the howling wind and the images of fantasy and dreams talking silently as immense love… …silence…

—text by Dina Grutzendler

Bruce Sled: Shimmering Water / Ice / Reflections (b. 1975, Canada) Bruce Sled graduated from the UBC music program in 1998 where he studied music composition with Stephen Chatman. His music has been performed across Canada, the United States and in Europe. Choirs that have performed his works include The UBC Singers, musica intima, Vancouver Cantata Singers and Chor Leoni. He received second place in the SOCAN choral composition competition in 1996 and 1997. His opera The Nightingale and the Rose was performed by the UBC Opera Ensemble in 1998 in the Chan Center for the Performing Arts. Bruce continues to compose while teaching music in North Vancouver.

The phonemes have no semantic role; the titles give us clues. celebrating the art of listening

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Jonathan Dove: The Passing of the Year (b. 1959, England) The music of British composer Jonathan Dove is often imbued with a strong pulse and dancing rhythms. Here, in The Passing of the Year, Dove uses his typical technique of overlapping repeating patterns (in both piano and choir), creating points of breathless energy and excitement, and also sublime moments of calm and reflection. The work opens and ends with bell-like sonorities—typical that bells should both mourn a passing and celebrate a new beginning.

Dove’s selection of poetry for the work is masterful, flowing from the celebrative and playful opening poems by Blake and Dickinson (the Dickinson Answer July fairly bursting with breathless excitement and urgency) to the more introspective fourth and fifth movements (with texts by Peele and Blake). This is followed by the wonderfully poignant penitential movement which Dove creates by marrying the Nashe text, Adieu!

Farewell earth’s bliss!, with the refrain, “Lord, have mercy.” The cycle returns to the first music at its end, but now the bell sonority newly-focused and defined: “Ring in a thousand years of peace.”

1. Invocation O Earth, O Earth, return!

—text by William Blake 2. The narrow bud opens her beauties to the sun The narrow bud opens her beauties to The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins; Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve, Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing, And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.

The spirits of the air live in the smells Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.

—text by William Blake

Sumer is icumen in Lhude sing cuccu 3. Answer July Answer July— Where is the Bee— Where is the Blush— Where is the Hay? Ah, said July— Where is the Seed— Where is the Bud— Where is the May— Answer Thee—Me— Nay—said the May— Show me the Snow— Show me the Bells— Show me the Jay! Quibbled the Jay— Where be the Maize— Where be the Haze— Where be the Bur? Here—said the Year— —text by Emily Dickenson

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4. Hot sun, cool fire Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair; Shine sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me; Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me: Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, Make not my glad cause, cause of [my] mourning.

Let not my beauty’s fire Inflame unstaid desire, Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lightly.

—text by George Peele 5. Ah, Sun-flower!

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveler’s journey is done; Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

—text by William Blake 6. Adieu! Farewell earth’s bliss!

Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss, This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys, Death proves them all but toys, None from his darts can fly: I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

celebrating the art of listening

Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade; All things to end are made; The plague full swift goes by: I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen’s eye: I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

—text by Thomas Nashe 7. Ring out, wild bells Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

—text by Alfred Lord Tennyson

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The DaCapo Chamber Choir was founded in 1998 under the direction of Leonard Enns.

The mission of the choir is to identify, study, rehearse and present in public performance and recordings, the outstanding choral chamber works of the past 100 years and to champion music of Canadian and local composers.

Our performance season consists of three annual concerts in Kitchener-Waterloo: once in the fall around Remembrance Day, a mid-winter and a spring concert. In addition, the choir performs on an ad hoc basis at other events.

The choir has released two CDs, the award-winning ShadowLand (winner of the 2010 Association of Canadian Choral Communities National Choral Recording of the Year award, including the Juno-nominated Nocturne by Leonard Enns) and STILL (2004). The choir has also appeared on several other recordings, including notes towards; DaCapo’s performance on that CD helped garner a Juno nomination for the title work, Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written, by Timothy Corlis. The choir can be found online at <www.dacapochamberchoir.ca>.

DaCapo’s founding director, Leonard Enns, holds a PhD in Music Theory from Northwestern University, Chicago (with a dissertation on the choral music of Harry Somers), a Master of Music in choral conducting (supervised by the late Margaret Hillis), and undergraduate degrees from Wilfrid Laurier University and Canadian Mennonite University.

Enns is on the faculty of the University of Waterloo Music Department at Conrad Grebel University College, and is active as a composer, conductor and adjudicator. He is the director of the UW Chamber Choir and former (founding) director of the Conrad Grebel Chapel Choir. In addition to his work as conductor, he maintains an active composition schedule: his 25 minute cantata, Ten Thousand Rivers of Oil, commissioned by the University of Guelph, was premiered in November 2010; in March 2011 the Wilfrid Laurier University Choirs premiered With Light Unfailing, commissioned for the centennial of WLU; this spring Mel Braun and Laura Loewen of University of Manitoba will premiere the commissioned song cycle, Behind the Seen.

Catherine Robertson is active as a pianist, chamber musician, singer, coach and teacher.

She is in demand as a piano and choral adjudicator at music festivals across the country.

Catherine earned her B. Mus. Piano Performance (Queen’s University), Piano Licentiate LRAM, (Royal Academy of Music, London, U.K.) and her M. Mus. Piano Performance (UWO). She taught piano at Redeemer University College and presently is on the staff of the music department at the University of Waterloo. Catherine is the music director of TACTUS Vocal Ensemble, a professional group specializing in early music.

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OPEn EaRS 2011 thanks our volunteers, whose contributions have made this year’s event possible.

OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Thanks Board of Directors Don Bourgeois, Chair Anne-Marie Donovan, Vice-Chair James Harley, Treasurer

Adam Thornton, Secretary Andrew O’Connor Micheline Roi

Festival Staff Peter Hatch, Artistic Director Cheryl Ewing, General Manager Allan Hoch, Production Manager Don Chapman, Volunteer Coordinator Roger Pstuka, Sound Engineer

Micheline Roi, Coordinator Andrew O’Connor, Coordinator Ron Hewson, Photographer Kathe Gray, Graphic Design

Technical Staff Trevor Gould Earl McCluskie

Laura McGuire Daniel MacPherson

Volunteers Meghan Bunce Jared Davison Jennifer Lynn Del Duca Anne-Marie Donovan David Hight Narim Kim Melodie Laton Amanda Lowry

Lawrence McNaught Margaret Rovers Glen Soulis Helen Soulis Esther Wheaton Tammy Whetham Caitlin Yearwood

Open Ears would like to express its appreciation to Cherie Fawcett Andy Gann Robin McDonald Joanne McQuire Ian Newton

Marcel O’Gorman Pam Patel Randy Raine-Reusch Margaret Toye Jason White

And the staff of Downtown Kitchener Business Area The Registry Theatre Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts

celebrating the art of listening

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Sponsors

Donald J Bourgeois, Barrister & Solicitor

artery gallery

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OPEn EaRS festival of music & sound

Venue locations 1

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Artery 156 King Street W

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Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts 36 King Street West

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Kitchener City Hall 200 King Street West

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Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery 101 Queen Street N

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Pyrus Cafe 14 Charles Street W

12 Walper Terrace Hotel

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THE MUSEUM 10 King Street W

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The Registry Theatre 122 Frederick Street

10 St. Andrews

Preysbeterian Church 54 Queen Street N

St. John the Evangelist Church 23 Water Street N

Gallery 1 King Street W

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The Wax 125 King Street W

14 Zero to One Gallery 107 King Street W

15 Zion United Church 32 Weber Street W

For tickets call our box office: 519.579.8564 celebrating the art of listening

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Festival-at-a-glance Events are free, unless otherwise noted.

Friday April 29 noon 8 pm

10 pm

Wednesday April 27 7 pm 8 pm

10 pm

lang!

K Duke Street Parking Garage Popular Standards Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO Spinvolver / People Like Us The Registry Theatre $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO

lectroacoustics in the Rotunda E Kitchener City Hall Rotunda Tanya Tagaq Trio Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO Tony Conrad THE MUSEUM $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO

Saturday April 30 noon 3 pm

5 pm

Noreum Machi Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts Eve Egoyan performs Ann Southam St. Andrews Perysbeterian Church $15 adults / $10 students/eyeGO The Rent The Registry Theatre $15 adults / $10 students/eyeGO Toca Loca Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO Blue Dot 123 Breithaupt Street $20 general

Thursday April 28

8 pm

10 pm

8 am noon 8 pm

Sunday May 1

10 pm

Morning Music Pyrus Cafe Maryem Tollar Zion United Church Princeton Laptop Orchestra with Andrew Stewart Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts $24 adults / $12 students/eyeGO Penderecki String Quartet with DJ P-Love The Wax $24 adults / $12 students

11 am 1 pm

3 pm

Soundwalk Roos Island Gazebo Valody The Wax $20 adults / $10 students/eyeGO DaCapo Chamber Choir St. John the Evangelist $20 adults / $10 students/eyeGO

Ongoing events April 27 to May 1 Sound Installations Various locations, see page 7 for details.

Wednesday to Friday 4 to 6 pm • Saturday & Sunday 1 to 6 pm April 27 to 30 Marc Couroux: Installations Lobby of the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts.

See page 23 for details. Wednesday to Saturday 7:30 to 8 pm April 27 to May 1 Dissocia 29 King St East •

5 pm daily

Symposium April 28 to 29 The Registry Theatre • 2 pm • See page 26 for details.

Canadian New Music Network Meeting April 29 The Registry Theatre • 10 am • See page 38 for details.