Ron Brown’s latest book, Top 170 Unusual Things to See in Ontario, was newly released and expanded in 2022. Using the book as a starting point, this illustrated lecture will explore some of Ontario’s most unusual features and landscapes including such phenomena as The Screaming Heads, Guelph’s “Notre Dame”, Toronto’s Graffiti Alleys, and its “Luminous Veil” on the Bloor Street Viaduct as well as the light show in Brockville’s railway tunnel.

Over five centuries in Europe a remarkable concert instrument evolved: the carillon, consisting of tuned bronze bells expressively played from a keyboard. Before the outbreak of the Great War there were more than 140 “singing towers” in the Low Countries, providing melodic soundscapes to their communities. Wars wreaked destruction on the European carillons, but the fame of their voices also inspired a carillon renaissance to build new towers across the world serving as musical memorials. In 1922 Toronto’s Metropolitan Methodist Church (now Metropolitan United Church) installed the first modern tuned carillon in North America. In the century since, ten more carillons were built in Canada and more than 170 installed across the continent. In this illustrated lecture Andrea McCrady will celebrate North America’s newest carillon to serenade Toronto at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church.