Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

8. Academia

8 Academia A s teachers, Alberto Guerrero and John Weinzweig both strongly influenced my musical formation. Guerrero’s only piano teacher, as far as anyone knows, was his mother. Weinzweig’s only composition instructor, for a limited time, was Bernard Rogers in Rochester; his other teachers, in Toronto, left him feeling bitter and frustrated. How did they become such outstandingly successful teachers? Similar questions arose constantly in the 1950s as I found myself taking up responsibilities as a teacher: for example, What is teaching? and How do you become a good teacher? Northrop Frye’s definition of education was “repeating something over and over until you know it by heart.”1 I used to wonder how I could tell whether my teaching had any effect.The one sure evidence I could produce was that I taught my son Symon how to drive a car and he passed his driver’s test on the first try. Music has both scientific, right-or-wrong qualities and elusive, unmeasurable ones: the difference between an eighth note and a quarter note, or between C and C<, may be exactly quantified, but the differences between allegro and allegretto, staccato and semi-staccato , or forte and fortissimo are matters of judgment, taste, and feeling. Teaching music isn’t a simple matter of dispensing information and testing whether it gets across. For Guerrero, teaching was a mysterious process. You knew, he said, when you got across to your student, but you didn’t really know how or why. Moreover, what worked for one student didn’t always work for another. Compatability between teacher and student seems to be essential for effective communication and influence. Student reactions about a teacher can vary widely. As noted earlier,2 Nadia Boulanger achieved great 147 renown as a teacher, but not all her pupils emerged from her classes with the same views of her or the same musical attitudes and habits; the same might be said of both Guerrero and Weinzweig. My first teaching assignments were university classes and private lessons in musical theory and the history of music. Apart from knowledge of my subject, there were no qualifications; I had taken no courses in educational methodology, had undergone no criticism from experienced teachers , endured no sessions of “practice teaching.” I read Gilbert Highet’s The Art of Teaching3 but little of the more fundamental educational literature . I skimmed the music education journals occasionally, but found their contents were mainly how-to articles aimed at school-music teachers . I plunged in, trying to be guided by what I had observed of my own teachers and feeling lucky to have had so many fine ones. I used the piano and, less often, the phonograph to illustrate, and I distributed paper copies of music-notation examples or else drew them on the blackboard, because I knew that developing an inside knowledge of music required you to be constantly in touch with the sound and the look of it, not just with descriptive words about it. From observing the best musicians I had encountered, I told my students that knowing music from the inside meant being able to hear what you read, and sing (or play) and write down in notes what you hear. In common with most novice teachers, I had to work hard to keep ahead of the students. This was especially true when, in the middle of my second season of teaching, I assumed an almost-full courseload on the sudden departure of a colleague, George Loughlin, who took up an appointment in Australia. Inheriting his class in medieval and Renaissance music, I sat up late every night reading Gustave Reese and searching out music examples in the Apel-Davison anthology.4 My own spotty undergraduate preparations had not included these wonderful areas. My part-time engagement to the Faculty of Music in the fall of 1952 coincided with full-time appointments to Kenins, Morawetz, and Weinzweig. The Faculty director, Arnold Walter, could be seen as bolstering the institution’s strength in composition studies, although we were hired to teach theory subjects to all music undergraduates, not just budding composers. Bolstering of music history studies came a few seasons later, with further appointments—Harvey Olnick, Myron Schaeffer— Canada’s first professional musicologists. My teaching responsibilities grew, and in 1955 I was accorded permanent (full-time) status. As a junior member of the staff, I was expected to be versatile. The load included craft courses and study courses—that is, courses like traditional harmony and even fugue,5 but also courses in history and analysis. Most of 148 • career my students were music majors but some were enrolled in either honours or general programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science. My first assignment had been a course in contemporary-music analysis. Then I was handed an undergraduate course in counterpoint and fugue and another in basic musicianship (meaning traditional harmony and analysis with concurrent sight singing and dictation).6 The latter program, for first- and second-year performance majors, is one which I enjoyed and continued to teach for more than thirty years. I also taught (when asked) a variety of undergraduate history-of-music courses as well as graduate courses in special topics. After the first few years of keeping a week or so ahead of history classes and responding to the varying demands of this period or that period designed now for music majors and now for general arts enrollees, I used to boast that I could serve up a survey of Western music history in a half-course or a full course, in one, two, or three hours a week. In the full course, Beethoven got three lectures, in the one-hour-aweek arts option, twenty minutes. I was a sort of musicological custom tailor. I called myself a composer and was fairly steadily productive, but it wasn’t until my sixteenth year of teaching that I faced my first composition class. In terms of my value to the university, then, I was a generalist , not a specialist.7 I was scarcely older than my students and had to work to earn their respect. University procedures were more formal in the 1950s than in later decades. In our Faculty we didn’t insist on wearing gowns, as was the custom in some colleges, but I had to ask members of my class to please refrain from calling me “sir.” There were other ways to acknowledge authority. Once I referred to some feature in a score by Bach and a student interrupted; he knew the score well, he said, and he questioned my point about it. Feeling on the spot, I returned the challenge: Would he please stay for a few minutes after class so we could look at the score together? It turned out I was right, but I had not wanted to waste class time having to prove this. I soon learned that awareness of time was a vital part of classroom technique. I prepared notes but in the lecture style of the day found my natural gift of the gab sometimes resulted in a scramble to complete the class before the actual or imaginary bell. My assignments intrigued me, and the constant association with bright and committed colleagues and students was stimulating. Without spelling it out, I was aware of a developing loyalty to the institution. For Frye (an outstanding teacher), the university undergraduate program was “the engine room of society.”8 In my experience the music faculty was no ivory tower, sheltered from “the real world.” I attended council and committee academia • 149 meetings and appreciated playing a part in decisions. I spent spare hours with the head librarian, Jean Lavender, perusing the monthly Schwann catalogues and developing lists of long-playing records to be ordered (Olnick had instituted a push for vast improvements to the library’s collection ). Conscious of my limited paper credentials, when the Faculty announced a new Master of Music degree program in 1955, I signed up. Weinzweig was my main adviser, and I took courses as well from both Olnick and Schaeffer. Language study was obligatory, so I enrolled in introductory Italian. Spreading the degree work over two years, I still found it impossible to finish the composition thesis while juggling full-time teaching and family responsibilities; my graduation didn’t take place until 1961. At the final oral exam, Dr Walter as chair posed a single question: What were my views on modern-music aesthetics? Though tense, I must have held my own in the ensuing lengthy debate. There was little reference to my thesis, a three-movement work for piano and orchestra. Surveying the Faculty’s founding and early history in two talks in the 1990s,9 I made a study of examination questions as a way of observing the changes in course demands over the years. The essentials of an advanced music education program in the 1970s and ’80s, I found, were not the same as those of the 1920s. The exam papers confronting candidates in the spring of 1953 reflected the new composer appointments in the first references to works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Stravinsky. Where in later periods students would study assigned music by listening to cassettes or CDs, in the 1950s they equipped themselves with scores: in the first course I taught, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Suite, op. 25, were required. I formed the habit of copying score excerpts on stencils and running off copies of them (on a purple-ink spirit duplicator) for class discussion. Cheap photocopying (not to mention websites) were as-yet-unknown teaching tools. I savoured the sound of music in class and found satisfaction when the freshman harmony studies were sufficiently advanced that we could spend a whole hour analyzing a Beethoven sonata movement, Bach prelude, or Schubert song. Using Schubert’s “The Erl King” in one such session, I was delighted when, with six minutes to go before dismissal, a singer in the class volunteered to sing it to my (largely faked) accompaniment. It brought the dissection to life. Now and then I was bold enough to invite an older member of the performing staff to a class to join me in a live illustration of some work we were studying. Kathleen Parlow played a Mozart sonata and talked about it, and Ernesto Vinci sang the entire Winterreise after I had devoted a couple of lectures to it. Analyzing Ives’s From the Steeples, I contrived a classroom reading, 150 • career with glockenspiels in each of the four corners and brass soloists in the middle. The administrative separation of the Royal Conservatory and the Faculty was many years in the future, and they continued as “sister institutions ” within the university. Principal Mazzoleni set up a series of musicianship classes for Conservatory scholarship students (gifted teenagers who looked likely to pursue a musical future), and he asked Tali Kenins and me to teach them. The late-afternoon sessions for groups of half a dozen students turned out to be animated encounters with keenly motivated youngsters, most of whom entered the Faculty and went on to prominent careers—I recall Brian Cherney, Patricia Perrin (later Krueger), Terence Helmer, Anahid Alexanian, and others. My first sabbatical, in 1965–66, was only the second granted in the Faculty of Music. Dr Walter took pains to impress on me how lucky I was; in his career he had never had a whole year to spend on his own musical pursuits. We later learned to call it “study leave,” since “sabbatical” sounded too much like holiday goofing off. My partial salary for the period, supplemented by a Canada Council study grant, proved not quite adequate support for the twelve months, so in the spring of ’66 I took on a number of CBC assignments—both talks and piano performances. Robert Aitken, at that time first flute of the TSO, recommended me to Maestro Ozawa, and I was one of the keyboard players in his performance of Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony (23–24 March 1966). In its New York premiere the previous year this sprawling score had required three conductors, Stokowski and two assistants. But Ozawa chose daringly to do the one-conductor version, as devised by Gunther Schuller. The score calls for solo piano, piano four-hands, and organ; Pat Krueger played the solo piano and the organ, while Carol Pack and I were the duettists. In the second and fourth movements, the parts were atonal, dense, and tough to play. The textures were unusually involved, so that in rehearsal the players found it at times impossible to hear themselves. In some passages, a dozen different rhythmic or harmonic motives occur simultaneously (psychologists dealing with musical perception put the limit for human ears at three, or four maximum). I asked Seiji Ozawa how he managed to keep it all together, and he said he found the trick was to concentrate on one part of the orchestra at a time, more or less tuning the others out. In analyzing this extraordinary piece with students later, I referred to this pragmatic approach as a possible way of listening to such passages: it’s possible to visit aurally the various strands in the wonderful thicket of notes one or two at a time, acknowledging them in turn as if walking around a academia • 151 monumental and complex piece of sculpture. Participating in that performance was a thrilling experience. The Faculty had occupied its new building, named after Edward Johnson , in 1962.The following few years brought curricular changes, new content to be absorbed, and a new, more informal way of communicating with students. Stockhausen, Berio, Cage were new personalities to be reckoned with; the Faculty appointed its first ethnomusicologist, Mieczyslaw Kolinski; the three-year undergraduate degree expanded to four years; and, belatedly, a new sub-discipline, performance (sometimes referred to by the US term “applied music”), became recognized with its own degree stream. The old fugue course disappeared as a requirement—one professor , Godfrey Ridout, voiced a fervent but unsuccessful plea to retain it on the grounds that it made the students “better citizens.” Classes became rap sessions rather than lectures. Male staffers started appearing without their jackets and ties (one professor, the Austrian-born Gerhard Wuensch , even sported Lederhosen). The basic survey in the history and literature of Western music metamorphosed into a consideration of music’s nature and social purpose, a context incorporating current popular musics and non-Western musics. It was a novelty for the Faculty Council to discuss a proposed course offering which defined its topic geographically rather than by genre or era—not a course in lieder, or baroque music, but a course tentatively called “Music of North America.” Dr Walter asked whether such a course would deal with—he could hardly bring himself to say the word—jazz. In the Council debate, I argued in favour of the proposal , without anticipating that I would be asked to teach the course. Starting in the 1966–67 academic year, it became my specialty for the next twenty years or more.10 In designing the course, I found it was possible to develop useful comparisons between the settler cultures in New Spain, New England, and New France in musical terms and project them into succeeding eras. The consideration of Aboriginal musical cultures I mainly left to a later point in the chronology, roughly when investigators began studying and documenting them and (especially) when field workers began recording them; within a decade or two, discussion and illustration from a broader historical perspective would become feasible. I benefited from then-new writings on music in Latin America by Robert Stevenson, and on US musical history by H. Wiley Hitchcock, Richard Crawford, Eileen Southern, and others; for Canada there was Kallmann. In the accounts of early psalmody, I found stimulus for investigations of my own, which eventually led to publications . At the start, though, I didn’t try to hide the fact that I had more 152 • career enthusiasm than expertise. With the students, I covered much of the continent ’s repertoire (both the “cultivated” and the “vernacular,” to use the terms Hitchcock had introduced); digging out scores and recordings required sometimes a good deal of ingenuity and instinct, especially for early musical Canadiana. The listening I had done for my radio series had made me familiar with at least some of the relevant pieces, and happily a few good anthologies, both published and recorded, were just emerging. Reading about Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, I learned that the Toronto jazz musician Ron Collier actually possessed a copy of the out-of-print vocal score. He loaned it to me so that I could discuss it with the class; there was at the time no recording. My self-accompanied renditions of Henry Russell’s song “The Old Arm Chair” and numbers from the latenineteenth -century Canadian operetta Leo, the Royal Cadet proved more memorable to the students than some of the more profound topics. (Leo, immensely popular in its own era, has lately been successfully revived.) In class discussions, we developed comparisons between prominent musical figures in the US and Canada—for example, Stephen Foster and Calixa Lavallée. academia • 153 In this photo of 1980, I am apparently meeting with my “Music of North America” class (photo courtesy of Rick MacMillan). In 1970 Toronto played host to annual meetings of two professional societies—the American Musicological Society and the Music Library Association—providing a valuable glimpse of enthusiasms and standards from elsewhere, particularly the US universities. During the AMS gathering , there was a special meeting about the future of Canadian-music studies , chaired by David Sale, who had done an excellent master’s thesis on concert life in early Toronto; the keynote speaker was Helmut Kallmann. With this inspiration, I assigned my “Music of North America” students research in facets of local musical history—church choirs, military bands, dance halls, publishing and instrument-making ventures—and interviews with senior musicians. The course attracted an enrolment varying each season from eight to twenty or more. In the first year it was offered, the class included Eric Chafe, John Kruspe, Doug Riley, and Timothy Maloney. Beverley Diamond remembers that almost all students in the course the year she took it emphasized the music of Canada in their later careers as researchers, theorists, or composers.11 Members of that group included, besides Diamond, Jay Rahn, Clifford Ford, Dorith Cooper, Ruth Pincoe, and John Fodi. Indeed, among the participants over the years, a surprisingly large number have gone on to do original research in Canadian music, which is perhaps the most gratifying result of my efforts as a teacher. Historically I believe “Music in North America” marks the beginning of incorporation of local repertoires and local historical accounts in university music studies in Canada, alongside courses first offered in the mid1960s at the University of Alberta and the Université de Montréal. It was part of a trend: there were soon to be similar courses at almost every university music department in the country. Working with student composers was a new responsibility starting around 1967. The increased popularity of the composition major (we were in the creative sixties), together with the enlarged graduate program, necessarily involved more staff composers in the undergraduate offerings. Weinzweig, Kenins, Morawetz, and later Lothar Klein, Derek Holman, John Hawkins, and Walter Buczynski all participated.We each had our own methods and approaches, but met every few weeks for tryout sessions with student performers (the communication with performers was less than perfect, with the result that, as often as not, the student composers were their own performers). After my first year in this new role, I inaugurated a series of open noon-hour workshop readings devoted not primarily to student works but rather to works from the broad modern repertoire, with which students appeared to lack close acquaintance. The series became popular and continued for several seasons. Alex Pauk, 154 • career conductor of the Esprit Orchestra, once told me those readings were a main stimulus for his passion for new music. The composition classes were different from other teaching situations, their emphasis being on creativity and individual experience. There is a widely held opinion among composers that composition can’t be taught. Certainly creativity is an urge or an instinct, but it can be stimulated, nurtured , by a teacher’s practical tips and criticisms. I asked Reaney about his experience teaching creative writing. “I start by asking them their world view,” he said. When interviewing music students for the composition concentration, we would get them to submit whatever pieces they had already composed. If an applicant demonstrated ambition but hadn’t yet attempted to produce any music, it seemed a bad augury. No matter how elementary or faulty, the early tries were evidence of a musical “world view” ready to be developed. The classes were often more like therapy than formal instruction. Students felt free to criticize each other, with the teacher as referee. Some students composed reams; others would sweat several weeks to produce a couple of phrases. I liked to refer to models—Copland , Webern, Ravel, Berio—often assigning for class discussion particular scores relating to whatever creative projects were in progress. While it was obviously important to encourage a knowledge of recent music, I found it distanced the discussion of a technical problem if I illustrated it from a Handel sonata or a Mozart string quartet, where articulation of phrasing or curve of melody could be divorced from “style.” (Here perhaps is evidence of Boulanger’s influence.) “Style” was like “world view,” the hoped-for personal stamp of the creative artist. Occasionally I used an example from my own music, something I was working on or had recently finished. Dealing with a student work-in-progress, I liked to sight-read it at the piano, or get the student to. A favourite assignment was an ensemble piece for the students’ own instruments, which they could then read together. I tried always to include assignments for solo voice or choir; they not only raised special problems (text choice, prosody) but also provided music which the group could try singing at sight. If it was a period of increasing demand for the composition program, it was also a time when new trends appeared to challenge the radical modernism of the mid-century. The teacher’s role, it seemed to me, was to encourage originality in whatever musical avenue the student chose to explore. In the early 1970s a vogue for classical tonal reference arose, mainly after the success of George Rochberg’s Third Quartet, a work deliberately modelled after the late quartets of Beethoven.When someone asked Elliott Carter, around this time, for his opinion of younger composers, he academia • 155 observed that they all wanted to sound like Brahms but didn’t know how. My students attempted to make their pieces “tonal” by introducing rootposition major and minor chords, bypassing the larger implications of tonal relationships as illustrated in Beethoven or Brahms. To demonstrate this point, I once took the time to play for the class the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sonata, op. 106, perhaps his longest; in it, multiple ideas are masterfully exposed, varied, and repeated, along a broad arc of related tonalities. Stravinsky compared this kind of composing to the construction of a suspension bridge. I wanted to show that it wasn’t easy. Quoting T.S. Eliot, that new poems are made from old ones, I admitted there was nothing really new in music, but at the same time always hoped for original solutions to creative tasks, fresh ideas, avoidance of well-worn lines or idioms. As with the “Music of North America” classes, over the years the undergraduate (and later graduate) composition seminars attracted some talented young composers, many of whom went on to active and productive careers. Clifford Ford as a dedicated teenager had studied privately with me before entering the Faculty. He was one of an outstanding group in my very first composition classes, along with John Fodi, Gary Hayes, Bob Bauer, and David Nichols. (In previous years several students from my other classes went on to careers as composers, notably Robert Aitken, Bruce Mather, and William Douglas.) In the early 1970s, a group of graduates and senior undergraduates—Ford, Hayes, Marjan Mozetich, and others—formed a new-music performance organization to which they gave the name Array. Most had been my students, and I helped sponsor some of their first events. The programs featured mainly their own works; audiences were small at first, and the level of success varied, but eventually the annual series became an established and recognized feature of the Toronto musical landscape, later under the name Arraymusic . With similar motives of making a showcase for their own music, in the 1980s a younger group initiated a series with the name Continuum, again mainly from my classes and to a certain extent with my help (as an advisory board member in this case). The group included Omar Daniel, Clark Ross, James Rolfe, Timothy Knight, Alastair Boyd, and the flutist Jennifer Waring. Both Arraymusic and Continuum were still mounting new-music events in 2011. Ross, Rolfe, and Daniel all became productive figures in later decades, as did other former students such as Kristi Allik, David Passmore, Elma Miller, Tom Dusatko, Henry Kucharcyk , Peter Hatch, Chan Wing-Wah, John Burge, Ronald Bruce Smith, and Alice Ping-Yee Ho. 156 • career Just as the old formality of dress and of class-time communication gave way, university programs in the late 1960s started to offer students more choice, more electives. While there was, some thought, a danger of weakening the basics, there was now more opportunity for staff to present courses in their areas of specialization and research. Many were given once only, but in a few cases popularity led to repeated offerings. I designed a graduate course in the history of hymnody, with an emphasis on its North American phase. Among my other undergraduate and graduate electives were courses on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, on opera in the twentieth century, on the music of Ives, the music of Debussy, and music between the two world wars. With one group in the 1980s I examined the twentieth-century status of “two musics,” popular and classical—a tentative consideration of what later became a contentious issue. It was a common complaint that graduate students had aptitude and talent but often lacked “background”—that is, an awareness of the scope of classical repertoire. The curriculum contained a course in “music literature,” seemingly in answer to this perceived need. It became my course, and soon one of my favourites. I would cover each year a different set of five or six general topics (dance genres, the violin sonata, microtonalism) and illustrate each with appropriate historical and contemporary examples. We might spend several seminars examining a question like “What is tonality ?” in the light of selected passages from early and modern scores. A colleague, Carl Morey, had observed the students’ lack of experience in handling orchestral full scores, so one of my topic units always touched on the symphonic repertoire—two or three weeks with the big Schubert Symphony in C, Brahms’s Fourth, Mahler’s Fifth, or Beethoven’s Sixth, bar by bar. The traditional lecture format and the trendier rap session are two different ways of imparting or developing knowledge, both (ideally) using the Socratic method: that is, interrogation. My gift of the gab led me at times to forget to draw my hearers out with questions. Once a student detained me after a history class and, referring to her notebook, asked, “What was your third point about Corelli?”I gulped; I hadn’t recalled saying Corelli was important for two points let alone a third. Evidently I had droned on without checking class attention in question-and-answer fashion and (an important consideration) without even maintaining eye contact with the students. Such educationally poor examples were, I hope, rare, but I remember one graduate seminar when I gave out a long, flowing discourse (on what topic I forget) and suddenly stopped with a realization I had been asleep on my feet—for how long I couldn’t say. What the academia • 157 students wrote in their notebooks on that occasion I can’t imagine. Well, I was tired. I loved the work but, often on the same school day, found I had to leap from a Rameau keyboard suite to Lulu, or from the rules for the augmented-sixth chord to criticism of a student brass-ensemble piece. The exertion, the mental effort, was fatiguing. The Canadian Association of University Schools of Music (CAUSM) began operation in 1965. Although I was not among the several faculty members from the U of T who helped set up the organization, I attended its annual meetings regularly for many years and sometimes presented papers on subjects that interested me. In 1974 I served on the program committee . The meeting that year was in Toronto, and we succeeded in making “Canadian music” the central topic for papers, discussions, and performances.12 In 1981 the name was changed to Canadian University Music Society (CUMS). Its journal, the Canadian University Music Review (after 2005, Intersections), is an exceptionally durable survivor among serious music periodicals in Canada. Academics were increasingly encouraged to engage in research and to produce articles and conference papers: the organization provided an outlet. For a composer, composition projects are the equivalent of original research, but I, like many other composerteachers , felt drawn also to writings in scholarly areas such as history, criticism, or analysis. The annual contact with colleagues from other 158 • career With John and Helen Weinzweig at a reception, 1974. campuses was a valuable bonus. In 1987 I joined the Sonneck Society (later the Society for American Music, SAM) and attended its annual conference in Pittsburgh—the first of a dozen or more. I was successful in proposing Toronto as the site for the 1990 meeting and in turning it into a joint gathering with yet another newly founded scholarly body, the Association pour l’avancement de la recherche en musique du Québec (ARMuQ; later the Société québécoise de recherche en musique). The journals (American Music, Les Cahiers de la SQRM) and the annual conferences were always stimulating, and again I valued the contacts—and sometimes real friendships—that developed. At the start of my career, academics were known as teachers or perhaps professors. The designations “educator” and “scholar” were just coming into common use. In Victoria, Ruth Humphrey, I remember, considered the term “scholar” hifalutin, an affectation of her male colleagues; she put a lot of energy into her teaching but published little. Though vastly knowledgeable in her field, she was no pedant such as those Yeats ridiculed in his poem “The Scholars,” which she had us study (“They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end” is a line I recall). I delved into special topics and issues for articles and talks, but was not moved to call the process “scholarship .” Partly this was because I had no secure sense of method aside from what I had gathered from Olnick’s teaching and from collaborating with Kallmann. Canadian music became by the early 1980s a significant field of study, as articles and dissertations began to appear with greater frequency and more and more departments instituted courses. Two Faculty colleagues, Carl Morey and Timothy McGee, approached the philanthropist Floyd Chalmers, remembering the major financial backing he had provided for the Encyclopedia in the 1970s. They asked if he would consider endowing a centre for CanMus studies at the U of T. The suggested price tag was a million dollars. Chalmers agreed, and the university accepted an endowment for a new study and research program to be called the Institute for Canadian Music, and for a Chair, whose holder would be the Jean A. Chalmers Professor of Canadian Music (after his late wife). Dean Morey asked me if I would accept the position of director of the Institute and the inaugural Chalmers Professorship. He was surprised when I asked for time to think it over. In fact, I was surprised by the invitation. I had known of the proposal, but assumed the appointment would go to someone from musicology, rather than a composer—someone like McGee or Morey himself, both of whom had published major works in the field. Unknown to me, they had assumed I was the person for the task, and had academia • 159 even mentioned my name to Chalmers. There would be a slight reduction in my teaching obligations, and I would have a free hand to spend the Chalmers money on whatever projects I fancied. I decided to accept, figuring it was a challenge, and possibly an appropriate final contribution I could make to the Faculty before retiring. (I was then fifty-eight. A journalist reporting the appointment wrote sixty-eight, leading my friend Margaret Gayfer to remark that she could understand why I needed a Chair.) The Institute was a part-time venture with no office and no secretary. Within a short period, however, it managed to create an identity, through invited guest lecturers, annual conferences on special topics, and a publication series. I worked with a few colleagues and three or four graduate research assistants.When not managing conferences or editing publications, we developed team research projects, notably one on Canadian college songbooks. I was a complete novice in computer technology, but several of the students brought skills in the then state of the art, limited though it was in comparison to what emerged a few years later. Our guests included Richard Crawford, Nicholas Temperley, Robert Stevenson, and Vivian Perlis, all of whose works I had read, read about, and admired, and all of whom I had encountered at the Sonneck gatherings. Our conference subjects were hymn tunes in Canada, the dissemination of Canadian composers ’ works abroad, Canadian ethnomusicological studies (a joint enterprise with the music department of York University—a case of“hands across the 401,” as a York colleague, Bob Witmer, called it),13 and the relationship of classical and popular idioms in new music (with the music faculty of Wilfrid Laurier University). We gave the publication series the name “CanMus Documents,” at the suggestion of a colleague, the ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice. CanMus was a term I liked to use, analogous to the well-established CanLit, and Rice thought “documents” would allow for the possible inclusion of other forms such as films. Volumes were devoted to proceedings of the conferences and to a selection of reports on researches the Institute had sponsored—including Rebecca Green’s on the songbook repertoire, and others by Gaynor Jones and Colin Eatock.14 A proposed volume on Canadian orchestral composition in the 1980s was to have consisted of invited talks by five composers. The talks were delivered, but the publication encountered various snags and delays and has never appeared. Funding for the Institute’s programs came from Chalmers’s pledged annual grant of $50,000. In 1989 he decided to hand over the entire endowment, as one of ten gifts of a million dollars each to ten Canadian 160 • career arts organizations. The gift consisted of stock rather than cash, and the returns, less than anticipated, were not available immediately, so as I prepared for my early retirement I found the Institute’s future uncertain. It soon recovered its stability and has survived under the resourceful and enlightened management of, first, Carl Morey, and then Robin Elliott. Starting in 1975, when Françoys Bernier asked me to teach part of a summer course devoted to Canadian music at the University of Ottawa, I have had a number of guest-professor or composer-in-residence invitations from other universities—notably Memorial in 1988, Mount Allison in 1992, the University of Alberta in 1997, and Brock in 2000. The opportunities to hear students perform my music, listen to theirs, and generally discuss my work, have always proved rewarding. My researches and writings on the history of tunebooks and hymnals began around 1973 and have occupied much of my energy and interest at various times since, including my post-retirement years. Istvan Anhalt once asked me, “Why hymns?” It seemed to him, and has often seemed to me, a curious choice of specialization. The hymns themselves—that is, the texts—were not my concern, and religious factors were no part of my motivation. Working with Reaney, I sensed how in former generations people retained familiar hymn-tune melodies, alongside pop songs, hardly distinguishing between the two. In many of our collaborative projects, hymn singing has been an important element, again not primarily for religious reasons. Through teaching and reading, I felt the strong significance of psalmody and later hymn singing in the lives of early North Americans . The Bay Psalm Book in the seventeenth century, Urania in the eighteenth , Southern Harmony in the nineteenth, and other historic publications, had many offshoots, including in what is now Canada, from which my ancestors, among others, learned the fundamentals of music and a repertoire of tunes. I liked to point out that the tunebooks were produced not only for use in public worship, but also—perhaps mainly— for social and family use. I once posed the rhetorical question, “If hymn tunes and chorales are not‘people’s music,’ what is?”15 Analyzing with students the earliest imported and indigenous tunes, I found both melodic and rhythmic traits that endured. The rhythms in particular behaved quite differently from the classical vocabulary of Europe: where the verses had a symmetrical formation in twos and fours, the tunes often proceeded in fives, sixes, or sevens. In a southern US field recording of the tune “New Britain” (to John Newton’s words,“Amazing Grace”), the singing moves in seven-bar units. All this was intriguing. No one, as far as I could find out, had made a thorough investigation of the repertoire and the history academia • 161 of publications from a Canadian standpoint. My first attempts were haphazard , and possibly patronizing. The task of editing an anthology for The Canadian Musical Heritage demanded a more rigorous and more detached method. I made lists, scoured library collections, played and sang many tunes, compared early and late versions. An exercise I gave to my graduate seminar in the topic (a survey from St Ambrose to The Hymn Book—Anglican/United Church, 1971) was: compose a hymn tune in one of the standard metres. It wasn’t easy. Several Canadian churches were in the process of revising their hymnals in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and I hoped my anthology might inspire revivals of some of the early tunes I admired. My mother, when I told her I was editing this volume, thought it was wonderful: every church in the country would buy it and I would become rich. However, while musicological circles seemed to take my efforts seriously, the churches remained uninterested, and the repertoires I had researched went unvisited by the denominational hymnal committees. (Anhalt’s question “Why hymns?” related not just to my researches but to the hymn-like formations that kept cropping up in my compositions. I became an observer of the many instances of chorale textures that arose, sometimes when least expected, in works by others. The variations on a Bach chorale in the finale of Berg’s Violin Concerto offer a striking example , and I noted comparable passages, either derivative or freely invented, in Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, Bartók, Copland, Lutoslawski, even a Chopin nocturne. The music of Ives was full of examples. What did they signify? solemnity? reflection? communion with the infinite? or perhaps simple nostalgia? Looking at my own list of pieces, it surprised me to find prominent chorale evocations in at least a dozen scores, including two of the operas and several large works for chorus. In an opera they could be associated with the spiritual mindset of a character; elsewhere I could only interpret their “meaning” in general and vague terms, although I recognized they often resulted from musical features that had fascinated me in my historical digging.)16 I had several reasons for taking early retirement from the Faculty of Music. Completing the opera Crazy to Kill had required a half-year’s leave without pay, and I realized further major composing projects (and I had a few in mind) might again conflict with Faculty obligations. University appointments were becoming scarcer, and many bright young musicians were appearing on the horizon: maybe it was time for me to step aside and make room for one of them. Colleagues gave me a fine send-off—not a gold watch but a reception centring on a first-class program of my music, 162 • career tendered by performers I had known and worked with. Organized mainly by Tim McGee and Bill Aide,17 it was a truly heart-warming occasion. I had requested “no speeches,” but in the end there were two—a short one by Joan Chalmers and an even shorter one by me, thanking her and everyone else. For three or four years after my official retirement, I continued to take on teaching tasks, when asked—replacing an associate on leave, or developing a score-study program for student conductors. For the season 1990–91, I remained as director of the Institute until Morey returned from sabbatical ready to assume the post. As well, I served on the occasional graduate degree committee. By the later 1990s there were virtually no formal demands, but I felt comfortable with my round of frequent if irregular visits (working or browsing or attending concerts and talks) to the Faculty building, full as it is of memories and echoes. As dean of the Faculty in the 1970s, when welcoming new undergrads, I told them they would find the practice rooms in the lower basement and the library on the top floor (it has since relocated in a separate wing). They should expect, I said, to spend time in both areas every day, and in between they would likely pass in the hallways a performer just back from a tour of Russia , a music educator preparing to give a workshop in Mexico, a musicologist whose book had just appeared from a distinguished scholarly publisher, or a composer whose concerto had just received a notable premiere . I wanted them to appreciate all this musical quality and vigour— as I always did. Discussion of the deanship episode belongs in another chapter. academia • 163 This page intentionally left blank ...