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Welcome!Founded in 1998, the biennial Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound is a celebration of listening, featuring activities from concerts, dance/interdisciplinary performances and to guided soundwalks, symposia and sound installations, all found throughout a variety of spaces within downtown Kitchener. It has featured instruments as diverse as the violin, electric guitar, taiko drums, the Theremin and the turntable; the audiences attracted to our events are equally diverse. Guest composers and performers have included international artists such as Brian Eno, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Diamanda Galas, Negativland, DJ Spooky, Ikue Mori, and Pauline Oliveros as well as Canadians R. Murray Schafer, Martin Tetrault, Gordon Monahan, Michael Snow, John Oswald, Tim Brady and Hildegarde Westerkamp. An important theme of the festival is its ties to the community: the festival has involved activity from professionals, amateurs and volunteers, university and public school students. Most of our events are within walking distance of one another and include a number of free events - sound installations (open during a ten day period), symposia, workshops and some concerts. The theme of our 2009 festival is "Environments" - a broad examination of the green, cultural and social environments we live in and the interections (or "ecology") between them. This year's festival features over forty events presented over ten days in over a dozen venues spread throughout downtown Kitchener and beyond. This year's festival could have you spending time listening to a concert of the music of legendary composer Lou Harrison by the Evergreen Club Gamelan (an Indonesian ensemble) following the world premiere of a feature film on his life, grooving to the energetic sounds of Nagata Shachu taiko drumming or the Flying Bulgar Klezmer band, attending a talk by renowned acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer followed by a "soundwalk" through the woods, attending the world premiere of new works for local legends Dancetheatre David Earle and the Penderecki String Quartet or observing new and recent sound sculptures by Janet Cardiff, Gordon Monahan, Giorgio Magnanensi and others. A project of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, this year the Open Ears Festival is actively partnering with NUMUS, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Da Capo Chamber Choir, Zero to One gallery, rare ecological reserve, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo Region Children's Museum, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Waterloo's School of Architecture and Kitchener City Hall. Pulling these various organizations behind a common vision and presenting that vision to as broad a public as possible is at the heart of the Open Ears festival: while the focus is on new art pertaining to sound and music, it is 'a festival for all.' |
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