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7 Writing A s I returned from Europe in the fall of 1952, what were my prospects? Colin Sabiston had written that Leo Smith was seriously ill (Smith died that spring) and suggested I should apply for the position of music critic on The Globe and Mail.1 I contacted the editors but received no reply; later, I learned that they looked unfavourably on my letter, which was not so much an application as a statement of terms. I had a good deal to learn about how to present myself. Another possible avenue was teaching. An appointment in music was advertised at the University of Saskatchewan, and I applied, hoping my studies with Nadia Boulanger would be taken as equivalent to a graduate degree.2 In Toronto, Richard Johnston said he found it shocking that some job didn’t immediately open up for me. I was neither shocked nor surprised. I hadn’t imagined a place in the music community would simply be handed to me on a platter. From September 1952 until March 1953, I was a freelancer in Toronto. I taught a weekly one-hour class in “musical form” for the Faculty of Music. On a Conservatory contract, I gave private lessons in music theory to a few teenagers. I accompanied opera rehearsals. I wrote concert reviews for The Globe and Mail at $7.50 per assignment. (Under Leo Smith’s regime the paper had published several reports I sent from France, but when I proposed an advance article for the Schoenberg concert by Glenn Gould the editors were not interested.) I even undertook concert management, for a couple of Conservatory staff members who recalled my work for the publicity bureau. A friend from student days, Robert Weaver, was a talks producer for CBC Radio, and through his contacts Pamela and I presented a series of short radio talks about our European adventures— three titled “Apartment in Paris” and another three titled “Roadshow in 119 Germany.”3 I played a Sunday afternoon recital at the Art Gallery and repeated the repertoire, in part, on my former CBC radio spot, Sunday Morning Recital. Practicalities intruded: the Globe work sometimes entailed travel to and from a suburban venue, and eventually the cost in time and transit fares made the fee not worth the trouble; the solo recital work demanded hours of practice, for which again the skimpy remuneration scarcely repaid the effort. In February 1953 my monthly earnings reached a low point. Another friend at the CBC, Fraser Macdonald, mentioned that there was an opening in his department, not imagining that I would be interested. I decided to apply, got the job, and held it until the fall of 1955. The department was called Radio Continuity. Macdonald and four others were assigned to write scripts for live and recorded music programs on the two CBC stations, sometimes for local series or special occasions and sometimes for the networks. We shared a large office in the Jarvis Street headquarters building. Ostensibly we put in nine-to-five working days and were expected, like all staff members, to sign in and out. But the work was not heavy. Producers would send us program sheets for coming broadcasts, with indications of timing so that we could calculate how long to make the announcer’s script. There was a small reference library elsewhere in the building, and on the office shelves were the major music dictionaries, a selection of the standard program-note compilations , a few critical collections, and (curiously) back issues of periodicals such as Modern Music, Music and Letters, and the Musical Quarterly. When literary research sources were scarce, we could look up scores in the music library or crib from record jackets in the record library. Scripts for daytime recorded-music programs were rather routine (“here is …, that was …”), but live solo and chamber-music recitals and the weekly broadcasts of the CBC Symphony Orchestra presented a greater challenge. The pay was low, but it was regular. A few weeks after I started with the department, Ira Dilworth, one of the top network executives,4 called the producer of the Symphony concerts, Terence Gibbs. He said he had understood the Corporation didn’t contract with freelance writers for program notes, so what was this credit to Beckwith he heard on a recent broadcast? Gibbs had to explain that I was now on the staff. Dilworth’s office was in the posh annex, often called the Kremlin, a parking lot and several...

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