Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements This written-down story of my life started in the late 1990s with memories and researches about my parents and with an attempt to recall my initial composing adventures—the eventual chapters 1, 2, and 5. Sketches and results of further archival digging were added now and then over the following years. Planning, shaping, and writing were a main occupation during my stay in Paris in the first half of 2009, and the draft manuscript was completed in Toronto that fall. The sequence of chapters is unconventional but seemed to grow as I wrote: family background, childhood, and youth; a short reminiscence of my beginnings in composition; European studies; then, in succession, accounts of my activities as a writer, critic, and researcher, as a teacher and scholar, and as an administrator and musicopolitical activist; then, chapters outlining my musical output chronologically genre by genre (instrumental music, opera, choral music, music for solo voice); and finally, some notes on my personal and family life. A few facsimile pages will give a visual impression of various composing ventures. Dan Foley has copied the music examples. Family members , the Faculty of Music Library, the Canadian Music Centre, Rick MacMillan of SOCAN, and others have helped me locate appropriate illustration materials. With the written text, I have had assistance and advice from many quarters—family, friends, and friends of friends. Musical friends— William Aide, Robin Elliott, Vivienne Spiteri—as well as my daughter Robin and my sisters Sheila Gould and Jean Vantreight have all read portions and offered criticisms and corrections. Judith Williams, a professional editor, and two professional writers, Jay Macpherson and David Helwig, have kindly read the complete manuscript and supplied 371 me with helpful suggestions, as has my son Larry. My life partner Kathleen McMorrow has endured my out-loud readings of several chapters in early versions, read the whole with an especially critical eye, and volunteered her expertise as an indexer. The publisher’s two anonymous peer reviewers gave encouraging assessments and many detailed suggestions. It has been a pleasure to work once again with Lisa Quinn, Rob Kohlmeier, and the other resourceful and devoted staffers of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Finally, the publication would not have been possible without generous grants from the SOCAN Foundation and from the University of Toronto’s Institute for Canadian Music. I am enormously grateful to them all. If the book still contains wrong facts and doubtful opinions, the fault is mine, not theirs. —J.B., Toronto, 2011 372 • acknowledgements ...