Mapping Canada’s Music: Selected Writings of Helmut Kallmann by Helmut Kallmann (review)

Helmut Kallmann (1922–2012) was an animating force in the recognition and understanding of Canadian music from its earliest, veiled beginnings to that produced during his lifetime. His passion and curiosity drove a sustained effort to connect musicians, musicologists, composers, audiences, and the international community to his dream of making the full range of Canadian music visible and accessible. The institutions he created remain vital to music scholarship and dissemination, even in these times of uncertain support and technological change.

For Mapping Canada’s Music, John Beckwith and Robin Elliott chose seventeen writings from Kallmann’s vast output. Five appear for the first time in this book. The choice was made to excellent effect, showing Kallmann’s life and work unflinchingly and with great care. The writings range from the somewhat brash earliest piece on university study, through forays into revivals of an early Canadian operetta and frustration at the inaccuracies and indifference to Canada in musical scholarship of the day, and into Kallmann’s maturity as a central figure promoting cultural memory nationwide. His fascination with individuals is evident in chapters on Canada’s first graduate of a university music program, one about John Newmark’s performances in internment camps during the Second World War, and a historical survey of Franz Schubert in Canada. There is equally an attention to detail of a level that seems almost exaggerated at times. If he struggled at all with the “big picture” beyond the individuals and the details that fascinated him, Canada itself may have inspired the desire to place them in a broader context. Arriving as a minor, transported out of Berlin in 1939 through England and finally to Canada, Kallmann had his horizons forcibly expanded. The gradual disintegration of his home life in Berlin is described in the final chapter of the book. Written in 1992, this brief memoir, filled with Kallmann’s characteristic details, carefully connects the child to the man. The loss of his home, his country, and his family and friends did not result in the loss of his curiosity and generous nature but certainly planted them in new soil. His love of maps, trains, and books grew into the ability to place individuals and small details in a broader geographical and historical context, which pervades every essay and was the central passion of his life.

The editors provide more than just a judicious selection of writing that opens up Kallmann’s life and work to a broad audience. The notes that accompany every chapter help the reader get inside of Kallmann’s world at the time of writing or the time of the events described. These notes are never excessive, occasionally entertaining, and always worth the page turning needed to access them, whether they are Kallmann’s or the editors’. The introduction and short biography reveal the large amount of both published and unpublished material available to the editors. The success of this collection as an overview and tribute to its subject lies in the ability of the editors to layer the materials: each important aspect of Kallmann’s work is illustrated by one or more chapters, and each is connected to a generous network of information. The introductions and notes clearly demonstrate that the editors worked as hard as the subject of the book would have to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. For example, in the chapter on the making of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, possibly Kallmann’s most ambitious project, one of the notes provides not simply the names but a sympathetic account of the duties of the support-staff members. In the chapter on Schubert in Canada, an editors’ note informs us that Kallmann was skeptical about Maynard Solomon’s argument that Schubert was homosexual, and that Kallmann much preferred to study Schubert’s musical legacy than speculate about his sex life. In the final chapter, notes provide details on the books Kallmann was reading, the fates...