8. Toronto Music Garden - 479 Queens Quay West
1 sound
Toronto’s waterfront is a formerly industrial place created from reclaimed land that extended the shoreline into the harbour with landfill. Since the 1970s it has slowly been transformed into the string of parks, residences and cultural attractions we know today. The Toronto Music Garden, a linear park, was designed in the mid-1990s by landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy along with famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The design was inspired by German-born Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and interprets the six dance movements: the Prelude evokes an undulating riverscape, the Sarabande becomes an arced conifer grove and so on. The Allemande segment is named after a German dance originating in the renaissance era and is interpreted here as a Birch forest with pathways that swirl inward to a high point with views of the harbour.
