In which my hair is mentioned in a national newspaper
OPEN EARS started last night. You should be sad if you’re not here with us, you really should. Buy a ticket to Kitchener-Waterloo now!
We started with an orchestral concert which began with a tribute to David Byrne and Stop Making Sense. I stood alone onstage for about 15 minutes while a powerpoint flashed over my head alternating words about classical music and the natural landscape. “Viola” “Cloud” “Crescendo” “Lake” etc. etc. The concert was about the Romantic Landscape in music and featured Mendelssohn’s HebridesOverture, Frank Bridge’s The Sea, and R. Murray Schafer’s The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveler, a violin concerto played by our amazing concertmaster, Stephen Sitarski. In the lobby before the show, students from Wilfrid Laurier University did a lively performance of In C. We also performed 4′33″ which I had never done before. It was amazing to hear people settle into the silence after a while, when their nervousness about the piece faded.
This festival is about sound and environment. Yes I mean THE environment (oceans, trees, and so on), but also the environments in which music can take place (concert hall, jazz club, lobby, forest, factory, bathtub). I think in the world of symphony orchestras, environment is key. We’re taking a good, fun look at this.
There’s still some YouTube symphony press floating around. Particularly amusing is MEASHA BRUEGGERGOSMAN’S ACCOUNT of preparing John Cage’s Aria, which was performed simultaneously with the same composer’s piece Renga. She also mentions my musical integrity and hair in the same sentence. Which is so Measha.