Starting from Porcupine by William Aide (review)

334 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Teclmology, exammes the role which Safdie's Israeli projects have played in the formulation of the architect's mature style. At a timewhencollecting institutions areincreasingly reluctant to accept architectural collections and funds to support publication are increasingly difficult to obtain, this volume is testament to the important work being done by the CAC. By virtue of its publication, the sheer range of Safdie's creative output is broughtbefore the public eye - an output stimulated by the Canadian experience of modernism and now happily claimed by three countries. It is no criticism to say that Irena Murray and her team have stimulated an appetite for more, more about Safdie and more about his buildings which have collectively become our own. (KELLY CROSSMAN) William Aide. Startingfrom Porcupine Oberon Press. x, 122. $14.95 Porcupine is an area in northern Ontario which encompasses the town of Timmins and other - mostly-mining - towns. Canadian pianist William Aide begins this book playfully proclaiming himself Ithe greatest pianist ever produced by the Porcupine.' The author, who is head ofpiano at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, has been a lifelong student of literature. In fact, reading and writing (he has published a volume of poetry) seem to have occupied a place in his life as central as does music. It is therefore not surprising that this volume is not a straightforward chronological reminiscence: it tells many interwoven stories. To begin with, there is his personal and musical development. I wonder if anyone has given us more vividly the flavour of private music training in small-town Canada, with its reliance on conservative English models for instrumental and vocal training, the proliferation of part-time teachers armed with nineteenth-century pedagogy and pre-Wagnerian tastes, and - not least- its festivals. For any child studying music in Canada, festivals are an inevitable rite of passage; the rows ofself-conscious participants, the anxious family members, the long silences between performances violated only by the noisy scribbling of the adjudicator's pencil, the handbell signalling the next contestant, the.endless performances of Bach's Prelude in C minor or of Mousie in the Coal Bin by a series of earnest eight-year-olds. Such memories do not easily fade. But for young William Aide they were an exciting event: JPerhaps I was the only Timmins child ever to have been transfixed by Festival magic.' It was an opportunity to hear a great deal of music for the first time. But it was also an opportunity to compete and to win - which he often did. Perhaps it was this early experience of the joys of competition that has flavoured his professional life. Indeed his discussions about repertoire as well as his pedagogical concerns seem to have HUMANITIES 335 been conditioned by the combative language and outlook of competition and of competitions. In these pages, Aide comes across as a generous colleague, writing admiringly about such fellow Canadian artists as Greta Kraus, Jane Coop, and Anton Kuerti. He knew Glenn Gould and clearly admired, even idolized , him. Both of them studied with the same teacher, Alberto Guerrero. In his heartfelt memoir of his teacher, Aide takes spirited issue with Gould and his biographers who have been content to assign a very minor role in Gould's artistic development to Guerrero. The idea that Gould was ·self- .taught is an attractive myth: Aide shows how basic aspects of Gould's 'technique and repertoire are clearly the result of his study with Guerrero. Perhaps the most moving sections in this memoir involve the more personal relationships. There is, first of all, the accoW1t of his painful and sometimes explosive attempts to come to terms with the taciturn personality of his father, a survivor of Dieppe. His relationship to the poet Margaret Avison, who first inspiredhim to write poetry, leads to a rumination about the sometimes conflicting demands of art and religion. It is this section which makes one wish for a little more expansion. His references to organized religion are often troubled, and his feelings undergo a severe strain when, during the funeral of a student who has died of AIDS, and whom he had helped care for...