Sound Symposium

Imagine a neo-proto-pre-crypto hominid, standing over a kill or a brood.  It grunts or howls or whistles or bangs together two rocks or thumps the ground with a cudgel–the more advanced form of pissing on the boundaries of its territory. It might be a lonely sound. What does it mean? “Touch me and I’ll break your face.” “Come on now, touch me, babe. Can’t you see that I am not afraid.” How do others react to it? Verbal communication and nuance follow, slowly but surely.

There, Don installed his Chinese gongs and Turkish cymbals, bass drums, snare drums, and brake drums; tom toms and tam tams; his vibraphones, xylophones, and waterphones; his Tibetan singing bowls and Woolworth mixing bowls; children’s toys and garbage cans; his bangers, bongos, congas, and shakers; tars, djembes, and doumbeks; talking drums, walking drums, cowbells, and curicos; his maracas, marimbas, mbiras, and timbales; whistles, flutes, and ocarinas; buckets of BBs, shot, and ball bearings; bags of nails, brads, and railway spikes; his sticks, brushes, rubbers, grinders, and graters, violin bows and hammers and anything else that would excite vibration from a sympathetic object. He created an environment of sound; the room became the instrument. The world changed. Or at least Tors Cove did.

From the moment he arrived, Don involved himself with as many artists as he could. Classical, jazz, rock, and pop musicians. Dancers. Visual artists. Poets. Playwrights. Filmmakers. Anyone who responded to sound. He threw himself into the arts scene, holding the chair of principal percussionist with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, serving as pit band drummer in stage shows, co-founding the Eastern Edge Gallery, a teacher, fulminator, instrument maker, and disseminator of artistic seeds.

 What a sturdy man was Don Wherry. Strong and sure, purposeful and direct. What hands he possessed. Big mitts. Mitts made for making. And soft. Shaking hands with Don, your hand disappeared into his—a giant pillow. The hands of a percussionist: someone who apprehends life through their hands. Don needed those big sensitive hands so he could play his instruments with love and beauty. So he could express, with grace and power, what he saw and heard in us.

Some instruments Don owned were beautiful gourds, or drums with zebra skins, or contraptions from Africa, South America, Asia, or Europe. Don once saw a South American performer whose playing on some obscure instrument—a metal tube about eighteen inches long with a section removed from the center, through which a coiled spring could be seen and played—impressed him mightily. The musician had shaken, rattled, scraped, and pounded the thing in many different ways during the show. Following the concert, Don spoke with the chap through an interpreter and asked where he could buy one. The player laughed. He had made the instrument himself. He’d removed the tailpipe from a trashed automobile in the jungle near his home, scraped off the really rusty bit, and put inside a spring from the back seat of the car. He’d made other instruments from door panels, wires, and bits of frame, recycling as much of the car into percussion instruments as he could. Thereafter, Don created some of his instruments himself so that he could make them say exactly what he wanted them to say. Children’s toys took on new resonance when Don played with them, the big kid. But the largest, most complex and expressive instrument Don ever created was Sound Symposium, for it was made of people. And could Don ever play the shit out of that instrument.

Don trained as a classical percussionist, so he knew all the rules. He could follow the rules. But he could also bend them, twist them, break them, or ignore them entirely (rules exist for that reason, it seems), and it was heartening to see and hear someone with his great experience do so with such humour and inquisitiveness. There are no bad notes, only lack of intention. Okay, there are bad notes, but you catch the drift. Don expressed this in one of his mantras: “If you’re going to make a mistake, make a loud one.” Do everything with conviction.

His search for new sounds, new expression, and new ideas took Don to all the corners of experimentation he could find. He attended performances in the legendary New York City loft of minimalist composer Phill Niblock (who has hosted over 1,000 such concerts since he began the series in 1973). Don also attended New Music America festivals, a string of shows that began in New York in 1979 and then moved from city to city until its final incarnation in Montreal in 1990. These fêtes featured concerts and performances of experimental music presented by some of the leading thinkers and performers in the burgeoning field of New Music—musique concrète, electro-acoustic, free jazz, contemporary classical, ambient, noise, minimalist, atonal. Sound. Finally, Don visited Le Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, a small festival in Quebec that began in 1983 and featured experimental rock, pop, and jazz performances. He appeared at the 3^rd FIMAV with Paul Bendsza. Through all these filters, Don sifted and sieved until he formed a concept that would be Sound Symposium.

Along with psycho-acoustician/synthesizer player Mike Zagorski, architect/bassist Robert Mellin, saxophonist Paul Bendsza, and violinist Peter Gardner, Don created Fusion in 1976, a group intended to investigate New Music composition and improvisation. Artist Frank Lapointe and arts activist and bureaucrat Edith Goodridge were also involved in the founding of the group. Support from Goodridge during her reign with the Memorial University Art Gallery proved key to the future of both Fusion and Sound Symposium. The Art Gallery sponsored the original Sound Symposium in 1983. The stated goal of that first event was to bring together musicians, filmmakers, actors, dancers, and visual, multi-media and environmental artists—local and international, “new” and traditional—in “a celebration of sound.” Our acoustic environment; our acoustic ecology.

For the first Sound Symposium, the poster was the program. Seven days over a long weekend in July, 1983. Don invited two of New Music’s heavyweight contributors, R. Murray Shafer and Michael Snow, to Sound Symposium, and lo and behold, they both accepted. Along with Terrill Maguire, one of Canada’s premiere modern dancers, they formed a formidable troika. They are all multi-disciplinarians, and this fed the loop of Sound Symposium. Shafer is perhaps Canada’s most widely known and respected  society. His acceptance of the invitation need not be too baffling: he served as artist-in-residence at Memorial University from 1963-65 Michael Snow is not only a world class filmmaker, but also a jazz pianist, a  sculptor, a sound poet,  a painter and an installation artist. Terrill Maguire creates award-winning choreography, teaches dance, and works in community development, utilizing art as a tool for empowerment. The involvement of such world-class talents gave instant credibility to Sound Symposium. Performances and workshops took place in Art Galleries large and small; in scientific research facilities; on ponds and in parks; on the Arts and Culture Centre stage, the LSPU Hall stage and fish stages; on the streets, in backyards and railyards; on oil supply vessels and in dories; in carpenter shops and commercial buildings; in living rooms and dining rooms. Eyes and ears were opened.

Nineteen-eighty-four proved a watershed year, in at least one respect. The onus of creating a week-long symposium weighed too heavily on the director and his accomplices. Following Sound Symposium II, the decision was made to offer the event bi-annually. We approach the fifteenth Sound Symposium in July, 2010.