Open Ears has begun! I think I got an earlier start than everyone else, as I spent all morning on Friday putting up posters for the festival, and all afternoon setting up for a performance of Satie’s “Vexations” (which happened Saturday).  I got to hang out with some fairly excellent people while doing it, though! Jason White was the project manager for Vexations–a former Peter student, like many of the others participating. I also met Windsor Viney, a musician and scholar active in the community, who also happens to be a (robed) Tibetan monk.

The festival *officially* kicked off yesterday with a performance of “In C” by us, the beautiful WLU Contemporary Music Ensemble. It sounded pretty good! We opened for the KWS, who decided to mix things up by having Edwin go out onstage before the concertmaster, and the concertmaster before most of the orchestra. It was cute. The concert was…intriguing. They played Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” and Bridges’ “The Sea” and Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” (that latter of which was my favourite of the three), but to be honest, none of those pieces compared to R. Murray Schafer’s violin concerto, “The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveller” which was sooooo beautiful and complex. It was a weird concert. I mean, none of those pieces are big crowd-drawers. A fresh change, though, I’d say.

SO THEN I went home and slept for a scant few hours before getting up at 5 AM to see the start of “Vexations” which SOMEONE told me started at 5:30, but did not actually start until 6. My housemate (and bassoon friend), Nate, obligingly accompanied me. We got roped into doing some work–carrying things and setting things up and folding programs–but it was all right. We got free coffee, and after a couple of hours, we (me ‘n Nate) took off to Benny’s for breakfast (mmm, chocolate chip pancakes).
Though much of the point of “Vexations” is to explore boredom, the venue was decorated with dozens of umbrellas (Satie died in a tiny apartment with 100 umbrellas), a T’ai-chi group came and did T’ai-chi every hour, a group of people did Thunderclaps (100 syllable made-up words),

there were performances from John Cage’s “Songbooks”, a trio of singers did a vocal version of “Vexations,” cleverly entitled “Voxations,” a projector was set up displaying images about Satie, and out in the lobby there was a set of speakers playing some of Satie’s weird performance instructions (”Be careful, the monkey is watching”).

There were also a couple of sound installation pieces set up there–really neat ones, too. One was a big black box with a subwoofer inside and a dish of water set on top; it also had two dials you could turn to adjust the vibration, and make the water ripple in different patterns. The other piece was called “N-tet,” and it was a set of plastic pipes with some sort of radio frequency and proximity sensor, so that if you were close to one end of a pipe, a pitch would sound. We had a lot of fun making chords and melodies on it (even though it struggled a little). The two installations were made by students from the University of Waterloo; apparently they have an “Art and Technology” class, which art students and engineering students can both take. In this class, teams are formed of some art students and some engineering students, and they make an installation piece. I find this to be Very Awesome.

The Vexations pianists had a laptop set up to display the number of times they had left (and they had to hit the spacebar after every repetition).  I was at the church for the start of the performance and the end, where Peter started playing it with Jason, but on a second, verrrrry out-of-tune piano, which sounded *awesome*.

I was ushering for the Flying Bulgars concert that evening, and they were great! The lead singer and trumpet player were super friendly and funny. I love it when bands don’t take themselves too seriously. The music was great, too: Yiddish folksongs, screaming clarinet, a string bass that had a timbral quality like a bari sax, really strong vocals, and fantastic trumpet.  I mean, some of these guys had Mad Skillz.

SO FAR SO GOOD.

Stay tuned: the next blog will be on Tuesday night, after TransSpectra.

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