"SPACE IS THE PLACE" SYMPOSIUM

Saturday Oct. 25
Location: The Music Gallery, Fellowship Room
3pm • FREE

The Music Gallery presents a symposium of the X Avant festival theme of "Space is the Place," hosted by Ron Gaskin of Rough Idea.

Participants include:
Aiyun Huang (Toca Loca, performer of Stockhausen percussion works)
Arnd Jurgensen (Woodchoppers Association, U of T Political Science)
Winston Smith (Seneca College, formerly of CKLN FM's Expandable Language)
Alan Stanbridge (U of T Visual and Performing Arts, formerly of Glasgow International Jazz Festival)
Carl Wilson (Zoilus.com, Continuum 33-1/3 book Let's Talk About Love)

Plus: audio-visual show-and-tell, and astrological profiles of Sun Ra and Stockhausen by Julie Simmons!

Biographies

Aiyun Huang was winner of the First Prize as well as the Audience Award at the 2002 Geneva International Music Competition; the first prize in percussion has been awarded only three times in the competition’s history. She has performed throughout North America, Europe and Asia, and in 2004, she gave a solo European tour in the cities of Paris, Geneva, Lyon, Budapest, and Milano. In both 2007 and 2008, she was a featured percussionist at the international Cool Drummings festival in Toronto. She has performed as a soloist with National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, La Jolla Symphony and Brott Academy Orchestra. Between 1997 and 2006, she was a member of red fish blue fish under the direction of Steven Schick. She is founding member of Canadian trio Toca Loca with pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking.

Arnd Jurgensen, multi-instrumentalist, improviser and educator, was born in Detmold, West Germany, on our 1960's orbit around the sun in the Christian calendar. He moved to NYC at the age of 12 where he resided until settling in Canada in the mid-80's. As a musician, he has performed in Canada and around the world with the likes of Eugene Chadbourne, Rainer Wiens, and Michael Snow, among others. He performs regularly with a number of local groups including playing the saz with the Woodchopper's Association the first Sunday of every month at the Tranzac. As an educator, he has taught in a number of interdisciplinary programs as well as in political science, sociology and applied sciences and engineering, in several Canadian Universities. His main areas of interest are international political economy and the philosophy and history of science and technology. He is currently teaching courses on global politics in the department of political science at the University of Toronto.

Winston Smith hosted the jazz and Black Atlantic music program Expandable Language on CKLN Radio for ten years. He is especially interested in Sun Ra's Chicago progeny, the AACM, the "mixteries" of various African-diasporic expressive musical traditions, and has written and lectured widely on these. For a number of years, he has taught English and research skills at Seneca College.

Dr. Alan Stanbridge is an Assistant Professor in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed in graduate programs in Music and Museum Studies. Stanbridge is the recipient of a Faculty Teaching Award for his contribution to undergraduate teaching. Stanbridge’s current research focuses on the discursive construction of musical meaning and cultural value, and is supported by a grant from SSHRC. He has published numerous articles on popular music, jazz history, and cultural policy, and he is currently working on a book entitled Rhythm Changes: The Discourses of Jazz, to be published by Routledge. He is a contributor to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Cultural Policy and the Jazz Research Journal. In a previous life, Stanbridge pursued a 15-year career in professional arts management and music promotion in Britain, during which time he held the post of Director of the Glasgow International Jazz Festival, and promoted concerts and specially commissioned projects featuring Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, Stan Getz, Astor Piazzolla, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Philip Glass, and John Cage, among many others.

Carl Wilson is the author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, a book about aesthetic judgment, global culture and Celine Dion in the 33-1/3 Series from Continuum Books (New York). His writing also appears in the Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Slate, Blender and other publications as well as on his own website, Zoilus.com. He lives in Toronto, where he helps run the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series, formerly curated the Tin Tin Tin live genre-mashup series and dreams of other planes of Here.