richard reed parry

Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry stunning musical piece made from ocean wave patterns gets its North American debut

I just wanted to let people know what an extraordinary debut recording the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has made under its fearless artistic director, Edwin Outwater. (It’s hardly the orchestra’s first recording, just the first under the new guy’s baton.) I wrote about Outwater two years ago. He’s a Californian who rather effortlessly mixes the standard orchestral repertoire with some really wild new compositions and multimedia projects. This season he’ll lead the orchestra in… something… he’s cooked up with the physicists at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. That’s the sort of thing he does. K-W already had a very good orchestra and, bizarrely, one of the two or three best concert halls in Canada. Outwater takes the whole package to another level.

Faithful readers, if any, have perhaps been wondering since last autumn what on earth the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony sounded like when Edwin Outwater led it through a new piece by the Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry that required the musicians to listen to their own hearts through stethoscopes. Now, thanks to the CBC’s Concerts on Demand website, you can hear it, along with the rest of an entertaining program, here.

Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry has written a piece based on each musician’s heartbeat