How can music influence the ways in which we remember and connect with history? How can music highlight similarities and differences across time, cultures, and points of view?

Soundstreams first Encounters of 2019 explores these in an evening of performance and discussion, featuring David Buchbinder and Lawrence Cherney with music from the JUNO award-winning Odessa/Havana.

Remembering the past can be painful; it can also be celebratory. Through the lens of two distinct musical projects, “Steve Reich’s Different Trains” and Odessa/Havana, Lawrence Cherney (Artistic Director, Soundstreams) and David Buchbinder (musician, composer, producer) present two contrasting perspectives on how music and memory intersect.

American composer Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” is a work (for string quartet and tape) he created to bear musical witness to the Holocaust. It is a meditation on Reich’s childhood train trips across the US in the 1940s, with the realization that as a Jew, had he grown up in Europe at that time, those train journeys would have had a very different outcome.

David Buchbinder’s Odessa/Havana, a collaboration with Cuban-born pianist, Hilario Durán, is a project that also bears witness through music and unites memories from miles apart. The cities of Odessa and Havana share cultural roots, and David’s ensemble reflects on these by exploring Jewish and Cuban music’s little-known common ancestry.

Encounters is a free performance and discussion series, held at The Gladstone Hotel. Discover and engage with Soundstreams music and artists in a relaxed, informal atmosphere.