Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

13. Choirs

13 Choirs S tanley Bulley, in whose choirs in Victoria I developed a love of classical choral literature, moved east in 1945 to work on a University of Toronto doctorate while holding a position as organist and choirmaster . At his invitation, for my first two undergraduate years I sang tenor (or baritone, as needed) in his choir at St Clement’s Anglican Church, often in exchange for a Sunday lunch at his home. I had a mediocre voice, but he appreciated that I was a secure sight-reader. For my part, I continued to enjoy participating in choral music rather than just listening to it. But in those years when I was starting to act on my composing ambitions , the idea of composing for chorus was not high on my priority list. In my time in Europe and during the busy teaching and writing years which followed, I certainly heard, studied, and taught a wide variety of choral pieces but felt no urge to explore the medium creatively. A striking new feature of Toronto’s musical life in the 1950s was the emergence of a professional chamber choir, the Festival Singers, under the direction of Elmer Iseler. They adopted this name following their inaugural concerts at the Stratford Festival, and were first called the Festival Singers of Toronto; after a number of successful seasons they changed this to Festival Singers of Canada (a possessive and grandiose Torontonian gesture that rubbed British Columbians like me the wrong way). Iseler had been a student in the Faculty of Music a few years after me. He showed remarkable charisma and drive in his early work as a choral leader and attracted an outstanding team of young professional singers. In 1963, Iseler asked if I would be interested in composing a work for the Singers. He had in mind an a-cappella piece of maybe ten minutes’ length. I found the opportunity touched a number of latent strands of 277 thought. Another bright young talent, the baritone James Milligan, had made several impressive solo appearances (he was an electrifying Mephistopheles in The Damnation of Faust with the Toronto Symphony and came across vividly in a number of Verdi roles with the Canadian Opera Company). Milligan said he would welcome some new songs by me, and I toyed with the idea of setting the lamentation of Jonah from the “belly of Sheol” (i.e., hell). The prospect was cut short when Milligan suddenly died of a heart attack while preparing for a major international debut as Wotan at Bayreuth—a tragic loss; he was in his mid-thirties. I was not bent on biblical or religious sources, and Iseler made no suggestions as to a theme, but the Jonah text coincided with some of my personal anxieties in those difficult years. I looked at the Book of Jonah more closely. One of the shortest books of the Old Testament, it consists of only four chapters. It now seemed to me a possible basis for a cantata for choir and soloists. Jay Macpherson kindly offered editorial suggestions on my adaptation of the biblical narrative. When I said I thought there should be some contemporary interpretive verses for the choir, she agreed to provide them. The result, instead of the modest a-cappella number Iseler had requested, turned out to be a work for soloists, choir, and chamber orchestra , whose six movements lasted more than half an hour. Unfazed, he programmed Jonah in one of his concerts, and the CBC gave it a broadcast. Alexander Gray sang the title part with an intensity reminiscent of Milligan , and Patricia Rideout delivered the substantial alto-voice narrator’s part beautifully. In a scheme of musical symbolism, in addition to strings I chose three solo instruments to represent key images of the story: the clarinet as the worm, the horn as the gourd, and the timpani as the “big fish.” Some members of the audience at the premiere interpreted the timpani’s outbursts as an early-sixties reference to The Bomb, an implication reinforced when the people of Nineveh cry on God for mercy—“that we perish not.” My approach to the text was more personal than either social or religious . It was, as I saw it, a parable about forgiveness. Its God was more like the Christian deity than the vengeful Jehovah of so many earlier Old Testament passages. The musical references were varied. The chorale of the opening and closing movements linked to the Bach cantatas and also...