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29 Chapter 2 Toronto: The Social and Artistic Context robin elliott Introduction John Weinzweig was born on 11 March 1913 in a city that was poised on the brink of modernity. During his infant years, life in Toronto, as in much of the world, was dominated by the Great War, but even during that period—and with still greater urgency immediately thereafter—developments in the physical and cultural landscape of the city transformed Toronto beyond recognition. It seems reasonable to argue that Weinzweig was influenced by the burgeoning sense of the new that was much in evidence during his youth and adolescence in his native city. Toronto’s shift from gas to electric streetlights can be compared to Weinzweig’s resolution to abandon tonality for serialism: in each case, the world of the past gave way to modern developments. The thesis underlying this equation—that an increasingly modernist urban landscape conditioned Weinzweig to be amenable to the idea of adopting a modernist idiom as a composer—may be somewhat naive, but Weinzweig himself would have endorsed it. He felt strongly that the conditions of the contemporary urban environment differentiated his music from that of earlier generations.As he put it in a film documentary on his life and work in 1992,“Handel never watched TV, Mozart never rode in a Volkswagen, and Schubert never travelled in a jumbo jet.”1 It is common wisdom that artists are strongly affected and influenced by the cities in which they grow up. An artist’s fundamental outlook on life has been set in motion, if not in stone, by his early twenties, so an examination of the urban surroundings he experienced as a young man is crucial to understanding his mature aesthetic stance. One celebrated instance of this is the 30 biographical themes case of James Joyce, much of whose creative work is situated in and influenced by his native city, Dublin. Joyce left Dublin while in his early twenties for a life of voluntary exile; Weinzweig left Toronto at the same stage in his life to study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The two men enjoyed a contentious and argumentative relationship with their respective native cities. There were, of course, important differences in the two careers. Weinzweig returned to Toronto and lived there the rest of his life, struggling for recognition and fighting for his cause from within rather than reflecting upon his background from abroad, as Joyce did.And Joyce’s prodigious creativity was realized in words (notwithstanding his intense devotion to music), whereas Weinzweig’s artistic efforts were achieved in sound.2 It is much more difficult to trace the influence that a city has on musical sound than it is to consider its concrete representation in the visual arts or in literature.3 Nevertheless the general thesis—that the lived urban experience of the artist as a young man has a strong and defining influence on his later career— remains valid, and so this chapter will focus on the early, formative stages of Weinzweig’s development by looking at the artistic and cultural life of Toronto during his youth. Cityscapes and Demographics In 1913, the year of Weinzweig’s birth, no one then alive would have remembered the founding of the town of York by John Graves Simcoe in 1793. Some of the older citizens, though, may well have been able to recall when York was incorporated as a city and renamed Toronto in 1834. From today’s standpoint , we can see that Toronto in 1913 was poised between a bygone era and modern times. The city that Weinzweig would leave behind in 1937 when he travelled to Rochester for a year of graduate studies was a very different one from the city that he had been born into twenty-four years earlier. In 1900 Toronto’s sidewalks were wooden and illuminated at night by 900 gas lamps; by 1930 they were made of concrete and lit by 56,000 electric street lights.4 The last gaslights were extinguished in 1911, the same year hydroelectric power generated by Niagara Falls reached Toronto.5 The advent of cheap power, developed cooperatively by municipal and provincial levels of government, transformed daily life in Toronto. It made the city brighter and safer after sunset, disrupting natural circadian rhythms and enabling increased nighttime activities. Cheap electric power also stimulated the city’s industrial productivity, leading to significant economic growth. By 1911 manufacturing [3.144.151.106] Project MUSE...

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