20 ~WiflmtS~ will be holding auditions this August Unparalleled performance, development & exposure opportunity for the accomplished or high potential musicians Mary Willan Mason, Honourary Patron Ron Ka Ming Cheung, Artistic Director Select openings for choristers 18 to 35 For audition appointment, contact Ron Cheung at 416-519-0528 or email resume to healeywillansingers@yahoo.ca Tlamilton-Tlalton bac'1ed mixed choral sroup Auditioning for tenors & bass-baritones Repertoire: nroadway, pop, b\S band, jazz, contemporary. Must memorb.e music and ~rics. Some sic;ht read1ric; ability required Lo6 on our webgite for more information Lend your voice ........ . www.harlequinsiric;ecs.com NO RTH.+.J. 0 ,· ,,(,1 / rll f lht l, /r Auditions North 44° Ensemble is the fundraising body for the Street Haven Women's Choir . Members of the Street Haven Women's Choir are drawn from women who use the services of Street Haven at the Crossroads. North 44 ° performs at special engagements throughout the year to raise funds to keep the women of Street Haven singing. Director: Geoffrey Butler Accompanist: Jenny Crober For an audition, please call 905 764-5140 REHEARSAL ACCOMPANIST and SECTION LEAD REQUIRED Etobicoke Centennial Choir seeks a Rehearsal Accompanist and a baritone section lead for the upcoming concert season commencing in September. Rehearsals are Tuesday evenings from 7:30 p.m.-10:00 p.m. at Islington United Church. (TTC access from Islington subway) For further information or to arrange an audition, please call Mary Thornton at 416-239- l l 3 l , Ext. 49 Back to Ad Index tu r o rr tdartsbo u n er I An ar m 's lengthbody o!theC1tyofToronto WoRLD View by Karen Ages CanAsia to the fore I begin where I left off last month, with the seventh annual Muhtadi International Drumming Festival. The opening concert (and only ticketed event) takes place June 2 at Harbourfront' s Brigantine Room, and features drumming master Amara Kante from the Ivory Coast as well as "Royal Sweet Fingers" from Trinidad & Tobago. The rest of the festival, held outdoors at Queen's Park June 3 and 4, features a wide variety of drumming ensembles representing about twenty different cultural traditions, as well as food and crafts. Visit www .muhtadidrumfest.com. Sitar player Neeraj Prem, of Toronto and Hamilton's Raga Music School, celebrates the release of his new CD Colours of Meditation, with a concert June 3 at 297 Augusta Ave. in Kensington Market (see www. ragamusicschool. com); and for those interested in exploring the ancient Indian vocal form known as Dhrupad, the Malhar Group presents Pandit Falguni Mitra accompanied by Tapash K. Das on pakhawaj, in a free lecture-demonstration, June 4 at Mc Master University. Also on June 4, the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir holds its 80th (!) annual spring concert at the Leah Posluns Theatre. The oldest continuing Jewish choral group in Canada, they'll be joined by Beyond the Pale klezmer band in the premiere of In Amerike by Sid Robinovitch, and four vocal soloists in various other works including a medley featuring highlights from the choir's eight decades. This performance also marks the 30th anniversary of the choir's pianist Lina Zemelman. CanAsian Dance presents Transformations: Expressions of Gender Roles in Dance, June 8 to 10 at Harbourfront Centre. Curated by award-winning dancer/choreographer Peter Chin, this mixed program showcases the ancient tradition of cross-gender performance in Asian culture. Featured perfomers include Didik Nini Thowok (Indonesia) in Berdandan, which includes live music by Gamelan Toronto and vocal soloists; Elly (Indonesia) in Kiana Topeng, a masked dance in which she portrays a king in love; Master Song Chang-Rong (China) in The Drag- Yukio Waguri's Engagement on Flirts with the Phoenix, a sampling of Beijing opera; Yukio Waguri (Japan) in Engagement, a work in the 20th century art form Butoh; and Hari Krishnan (Canada) in excerpts from Varnam, from the tradition of Bharatanatyam dance. There will also be daytime public lecture-demonstrations and workshops June 3 ,4, IO & 11. Visit www. canasiandancefesti val. com. DanceWorks presents its final show of the season, June 15 to 17 , also at Harbourfront. Shimmer, from the aboriginal arts group Red Sky, is a collaboration between artists from Canada and Australia, with an all-male Aboriginal cast of seven dancers. The original music by John Gzowski will feature live drummers, dijeridoo and vocalists. Sister group to Gamelan Toronto, the community based Gamelan Gong Sabrang celebrates its fifth season with a free concert June 22 at the Indonesian consulate, featuring guest dancer Ita Dwi Lestari. And last but not least, Juno-nominated tabla player Ravi Naimpally and his band Tasa have a busy summer ahead of them. This South Asian world-fusion ensemble will travel from Victoria to Halifax and points in between, promoting their new CD Urban Turban, which features the talents of Naimpally and other band members John Gzowski, Chris Gartner, Ernie Tollar and Alan Heatherington, all stellar musicians in their own right. They'll be performing at the Toronto Jazz Festival on June 28, and the Montreal Jazz Festival on the 30th. WWW.THEWHOLENOTE.COM J UNE 1 · J U LY 7 2006
Back to Ad Index SoME THING New by Jason van Eyk soundaXis - a timely coming-of-age THIS MONTH'S BIG EXCITEMENT is the inaugural soundaXis festival of architecture, music and acoustics. And big is indeed the word for it! soundaXis is a tightly packed, ten-day affair which will feature 30 events ranging from concerts to exhibitions, conferences, screenings, installations and educational workshops. Altogether, soundaXis proposes to transform Toronto into a playground of sound and space exploration. Although this new festival is very fresh news for most Torontonians, in many ways it has been long in the making. For the new music community, soundaXis is a much-anticipated response to the five-year absence of a new music festival in Toronto. Back in 1996, the TSO launched the Made in Canada festival, with the goal of anchoring this city as a hub of Canadian contemporary music. By 1998, Made in Canada had evolved into the Massey Hall New Music Festival, which not only featured the TSO but several other prominent Toronto-based new music presenters. By 2001, slickly redubbed NuMuFest, the festival had grown in size and scope, with many more participating ensembles and larger audiences for new music overall. Over seven years, this festival evolved into a success story for the new music community, providing an much-needed environment for shared exposure and interaction. But then, faced with significant other challenges and difficult "market conditions", the TSO had to abandon its flagship role . On November 24th, 2001, after the final concert, NuMuFest fell silent. THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL before then. By September 2000, the new music community had already begun to meet collectively, in an attempt to tackle the same market conditions that closed down NuMuFest. By May 2001 the community officially formed the Toronto Coalition of New Music Presenters. By 2004, with increased confidence in its abilities, the coalition was beginning to give voice to a shared desire to create a new music festival with a thematic focus. The idea surfaced early on to focus on the work of recently deceased, internationally renowned composer Iannis Xenakis, whose work reached across music to architecture, mathematics and physics. The idea was widely received as a platform rich with potential, and came to be more broadly expressed as "music, architecture and acoustics", in an effort to include contributions from other disciplines. With a planned launch for June2006, the festival's inspiration was amazingly timely, given the hype surrounding Toronto's architectural "Cultural Renaissance" and the launch of the city's "TO Live with Culture" campaign. IN KEEPING WITH the Coalition's collective nature, the festival has been built up on a framework of collaboration. This structure has allowed for the collection of a huge range of events, all of which seek to take a fresh look at the relationship between sound, music, architecture and the city. In practical terms, Torontonians and international visitors alike should be prepared to unexpectedly encounter interesting musical events and installations in unpredictable places. These could include a crescendo of sound from the Stockholm Chamber Brass in the CBC's Barbara Frum Atrium, any number of spontaneous performances in high-traffic spaces by the irreverent Toca Loca ensemble, a series of human-triggered sound installations on Ward's Island, or the mobile prelude to Continuum's Touch Space concert, where four inventive performers will choose their individual paths and means of travel to converge on a final central performance space. ONCE THE FESTIVAL'S THEME has grabbed your interest, you can plan ahead for a host of other ticketed concerts. On June 2nd, local experimentalists Arraymusic will take over Hart House's Great Hall with spatially intriguing works incorporating interactive and interdisciplinary elements. Continuum's Touch Space concert on June 8th offers a spatially-conceived event for the University of Toronto's new Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, featuring works that share a fascination with space and architectural structure. The following evening, Earshot! Concerts take over the Fields Institute with a fully improvised creation rooted in Xenakis' war-inspired writings, illuminating the impact this world event had on the composer's work, Phoebe Tsang, pictured here at the soundaXis MaRS launch, also performs June 3" 1 with Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Orchestra at Maureen Forrester Recital Hall and June J8'h with Al icier Arts Chamber Music at St. Georges on-the-Hill. life and soul. On June 10th, CON TACT Contemporary Music teams up with New Adventures in Sound Art to bring a mixed acoustic I electronic concert that sonically references a variety of important architectural artifacts - from the walls of Jericho to ancient temple sites of Malta - all of which will meet within the walls of the controversial "stilted tissue box" known as the Ontario College of Art and Design. For the festival 's closing night, NUMUS brings together four talented string quartets at OCAD to execute its Quadraphonics concert, including works for displaced quartets, Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, and a new work by Canadian composer Jim Harley. If you're planning on attending more than one event, be sure to pick up a festival passport, which will entitle you to off regular ticket prices. ON THE OTHER HAND, if you're feeling a bit intimidated by the theme of soundaXis, there's no need to be. The festival collaborators have also compiled a series of panel discussions, conferences and exhibitions that will help open dialogue and understanding. These include an "Exploring New Places for New Music" panel discussion at the ROM on June 3rd, a Xenakis retrospective lecture on June 10th at the new MaRS Centre, and a full academic conference exploring all facets of music, architecture and acoustics at Ryerson University's Department of Architectural Science. A portion of the Ryerson conference will include an intriguing keynote speaker series featuring top level thinkers in the field, such as Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, Finnish architect Juhani Pallaasma, German sound artist Berhard Leitner, and acoustician Robert Essert (who is already known in Toronto for his work on Roy Thomson Hall and, most recently, the new Opera House.) ULTIMATELY, soundaXis is a timely and historic event for new music in Toronto. It has evolved into a unique opportunity to directly connect this living art form to the built fabric of the city, to other communities and disciplines, but also to the lives of Torontonians in unique and interesting ways. Full festival details are available online at www.soundaxis.ca, and in a special four page supplement at the centre of this issue of Wholenote. So venture out into unexplored spaces, find your place for some thing new. (Jason van Eyk can be reached at 416-961-6601 x. 207 or jvaneyk@musiccentre.ca.) Aut o u r de la Harpe autour harp'e" ~ MONTf;.b\l (HAM8Elt PLAYEStS Jennifer Swartz, principal harp of the DSM, and six of her DSM coll eagues perform as the Montreal Chamber Pl ayers in a program of French chamber works with harp. 1+1 =~ :::::.: Canada J UNE 1 - J UL Y 7 2006 WWW. THEWHOLENOTE.COM 21 w z z 0 > >- 0 Q 0::
