The Open Ears Festival returns
April 24 to 29, 2007
The Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound programme magazine is now available at Encore Records, Second Look Books, Walper Terrace Hotel lobby, Twelfth Night Music Shoppe, The Princess Cinema, the Rum Runner Pub, King Street Theatre Centre, Cobblestone Gallery, KW Art Gallery, and Casablanca.
Latest News
- There have been some changes in the installations: Michael Waterman's piece has been moved, and we've added a piece by Sarah Peebles - please see the sound installations page for more details
- SAFA has been moved to the Registry Theatre
- Frederic Rzewski will gladly bring copies of his scores if you contact info@openears.ca by Wednesday, April 25th and request a particular work.
- And just to clarify: Festival Passes are not transferable, and will only guarantee you a seat until 10 minutes before the performance, so arrive before then!
The highlights
Highlights of this year's festival include an appearance by legendary composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski in a programme of piano performance mixed with spoken word which includes his Die Profundis, the composer's dramatization of Oscar Wilde's years in prison for homosexuality and his more recent Stop the War, written “immediately after Bush dropped his bombs on Baghdad”. British artist Scanner will be “reinventing” Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 classic black and white modernist sci-fi noir film Alphaville by selecting a series of key scenes from the film accompanied by audio culled from the movie, offering up a space for contemplation and reflection as the soundtrack weaves an imaginary narrative in counterpoint to the visual images of the original. San Francisco's Pamela Z's Wunderkabinet is a multi-media opera score for voice, cello and electronics in collaboration with Matt Brubeck and media artist Christina McPhee. It blurs the boundary between reality and imagination as Wunderkabinet's central character "Alice May Williams" makes her strange and magical journey in search of the scientists of the Mount Wilson Observatory, only to find herself in a strange cabinet of curiosities.
The music
The music featured at Open Ears will again feature a very broad aesthetic— ranging from the mastery of the “classical” ensembles Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and Penderecki String Quartet to the improvisations of legends Fred Frith and Malcolm Goldstein, from Vancouver's François Houle and Toronto's musique actuelle cabaret band Barnyard Drama to post-rock band I Have Eaten the City and emerging “no-wave, post-jazz, brutal-chamber, brutal-prog, post minimalist” band Zs from New York. Also present at this year's festival will be the sounds of rarely heard traditional Persian and Japanese musical instruments, featured as part of a free lunch-time series, and Finger, local “folktronica heroes, acclaimed for their post-Cardew aesthetic.”
InnerEars
This year's InnerEars sound installation series will again be found throughout downtown Kitchener. Media and sound artist Steve Heimbecker will create Songs of Place: Kitchener, the sixth in a series of audio/visual portraits, which follows his recent portrait of Vienna. Morton Feldman's four-hour long "For Philip Guston" (1984) will see the King Street Theatre transformed into a meditative performance/installation space, allowing listeners to fully envelope themselves in the sounds of flute, piano, percussion and silence. The site-specific play Legion of Memory, directed by Kitchener's Andy Houston with music by Nick Storring, takes place in Kitchener's former Legion Hall, which is used as a "found object." Anne-Marie Donovan's Sounding Rituals are vocal “liberations” presented as a series of creative disturbances which gently interrupt and disrupt social convention with a view to expanding its borders.
The symposium
Contemporary music's interaction with society and its potential for activism is the subject of this year's symposium, entitled "Listening Out"—it features Rzewski as keynote speaker in a lecture/performance titled Nonsequitors.
Open Ears 2007 Sponsors
