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David Jaeger: Chamber Works for Viola

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Particularly memorable, in the former category were my high school band teacher, my graduate school advisor, my trainer as a new recruit at CBC Radio in 1973, and Glenn Gould, whom I worked with often in the ensuing years.

Then, as my professional career developed, one detail of my personal history seems to have forecast how my own involvement in the role of mentor would evolve. In 1969, while still a university student, I had the good fortune to be named as a Fellow by what was then the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now The Institute for Citizens & Scholars). The panel of examiners for the Foundation was charged with the task of finding scholars entering graduate schools, whom they felt possessed the potential to become outstanding future teachers. I suppose, in retrospect, those perceptive examiners were on to something, although teaching “on the job” has always come naturally for me rather than as a formal profession.

It was during my 40 years as a music producer for CBC, that, with the passage of time, I began to find myself in the role of mentor rather than mentee. There were innumerable opportunities to share my knowledge, skills and experience with colleagues, especially those in the early stages of their own careers, as I had been when I arrived. I found myself delighting in introducing eager young colleagues to programming concepts and methods, and in enabling them to make productive and prudent choices. One of my broadcasting protégés, Stephanie Conn, describes the process as “being given the feeling that we were legitimate producers-in-training and part of the music community, and thus being enabled to grow into just that.”

One of the things I learned early on was that the process of broadcast content production is inherently teamwork, so the key to success is putting the best teams together. The ability of teams to focus effectively on the project’s agreed standards largely determines success in making meaningful content. This seems like common sense, but in reality, actually finding gifted team players and motivating them to join in the effort to make exceptional outcomes, is no small task. Among others, I think of someone like a young recording engineer named Dennis Patterson who was one of the people I had the chance to bring into my production teams, beginning in the mid-1990s. Patterson has worked steadily at his craft, and several of the recordings he engineered have won a variety of prestigious awards, including several JUNOs.

Fast forward, then, to 2020, when the plans of every single performing arts organization were brutally rendered void and radical adjustments to plans and well-established ways of thinking have become necessary just to survive. In this context the hierarchical relationship between mentor and mentee goes out of the window; mentorship becomes a team sport, with the ball being passed around as the situation demands.

I was given the exhilarating opportunity to work in one such team, when Michael Hidetoshi Mori, artistic director of Toronto’s Tapestry Opera (no stranger to mentoring himself) approached me to participate in one such radical readjustment to a well-set plan. Mori had already put a team in place for the remount of their successful production of the chamber opera, Rocking Horse Winner. Based on a story by D. H. Lawrence, libretto by Anna Chatterton with music by Gareth Williams, the opera was originally produced for the stage by Tapestry in May 2016. It had won five Dora Mavor Moore Awards and looked like an ideal remount candidate. Cast, chorus and instrumentalists had been booked for the spring and summer to rehearse and stage a fresh updated version of this proven work.

With rigid pandemic restrictions suddenly introduced last March, Mori faced the prospect of cancelling the entire production. As he describes it: “A combination of valuing the work of artists and making every dollar count are key to Tapestry’s ethos. Like everyone, we had to make some hard decisions. Our first step was to ask artists if they were okay with us honouring the full amount of their contracts, but being open to new ways of spending it.”

With that buy-in achieved, they began with a workshop of the piece, focusing on how online collaboration could happen. Music director Kamna Gupta prepared video and audio conducting tracks. Stéphane Mayer created piano tracks on Tapestry’s Bösendorfer Imperial Grand and, later on, a coaching track for difficult passages that included cues like breathing – something that would normally be followed in person. Mori, as director, was able to go into much greater detail than usual with table work, the time spent with actors focusing solely on character development and plot arc. And they collaborated with their orchestra to record tracks to Gupta’s conducting video.

At this point, as Mori says, the project took a decisive turn. “In doing all of this and stretching our creativity for collaboration, we discovered that deep and musical rehearsals were happening, giving us the confidence to say that we could record an audio album, and that layering as part of the recording process would afford us some creative possibilities in storytelling.”

As a result, in May 2020, Dennis Patterson and I were asked to work with Tapestry to produce a commercial recording of the opera at Tapestry’s Ernest Balmer Studio in Toronto’s Distillery District. We met via Zoom with Mori’s team and determined that we would be able to build the recording from the ground up, multi-tracking four performers at a time over a two-week period, following COVID safety protocols. Each layer of the recording would be complete and edited in time for the next layer, starting with the instruments and ending with the cast principals. In addition to Gupta’s video conducting tracks, live conducting was added when needed, in order to provide ongoing interpretive feedback. Gupta, who was in New York City, was channelled in live to the sessions via Source Connect Now software. Patterson took care at every stage of the recording to create a “real life” monitor mix for the performers, enabling them to deliver a true, believable performance, rather than a simple execution of the notes.

We were, in effect, reimagining the opera in a purely sonic world, learning from each other as we went. Post-production editing, mixing and effects took another month, but finally, by early fall, we had our performance.

Tapestry Opera’s recording of Rocking Horse Winner was released in time for it’s premiere network broadcast, December 26, 2020 on CBC Music’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, and is now available to the public on bandcamp at tapestryopera.bandcamp.com/releases.

“We needed to be brave and find solutions that would keep us working, learning how to succeed amid restrictions, Mori says. “The silver lining is that this worthy production would have seen a couple thousand audience members live, but its broadcast reached over 300,000 across Canada and the world!”

Quite a different mentoring challenge came my way when a student of mine, Ruby Turok-Squire, who sings with the English vocal octet, Aeterna Voices, based in Leamington Spa in the English Midlands, got in touch. I had composed a setting of the famous W. B. Yeats poem, He Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven, for the group early in 2020; she now wanted to let me know the group had decided to make their debut recording, to be titled The Cloths of Heaven, and to ask if I would guide the process from a distance.

Suddenly our conversations, previously largely centred on the topic of choral text-setting, shifted to recording techniques, microphone characteristics, and how to run a recording session. The recording was made last summer at the spectacular Gothic church, All Saints, in Leamington Spa, and will soon be released online.

My summer of 2020 was, in fact, filled with a seemingly endless series of projects, both large and small in scale, and covering a vast range of repertoire. All were by people pivoting to working in remote mode, most, if not all, performing their parts from home. All required coordination in innumerable different ways and for different reasons. All developed their own flow.

With the U.S.-Canada border closing, Canadian cellist Arlen Hlusko, a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, and a member of New York’s famed Bang on a Can All-Stars, returned to her home village of Lowville, Ontario. Hlusko’s creative solution to relative isolation was to act as a self mentor: producing and learning from regular webcasts of her own live solo cello performance.

I connected with her, impressed by her mastery of the cello, and offered to send her music. She hatched the idea of inviting composers from around the world to collaborate with her to create miniature compositions for solo cello, written for Instagram (hence the minute-or-less limit.) The 20 composers who responded came from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Kosovo and the United States; in each case, Hlusko and the composer corresponded, discovering common interests upon which the works were based. All of them had online premieres on Hlusko’s @celloarlen Instagram, as well as live performances on her webcasts in her regular Saturday afternoon series, Live from Lowville with Love. I ended up creating three miniature pieces, solo cello compositions based on works by Scottish poet, David Cameron, now based in Belfast, with whom I had collaborated in another project. An album release will follow.

Looking back at the overall legacy of the content I have been involved in producing, I find it immensely reassuring that those involved have by and large been populated with people with open minds, eager, as Robert Aitken described it, to continue to learn. That kind of reflexive mentoring has never been more important than now.

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A significant event in the history of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE) took place during the last week of February, 2020: the nearly 50-year-old ensemble was engaged by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) School of Music for a four-day residency at their Pittsburgh campus. It was one of the most ambitious and impactful tours in the long history of the CEE, a live-electronic music group that Jim Montgomery and I co-founded in 1971, together with David Grimes, who left in 1986, and the late Larry Lake (1943 – 2013) The current membership includes violinist, synthesist, composer Rose Bolton; pianist, synthesist, composer John Kameel Farah; synthesist and composer Paul Stillwell; synthesist and composer David Sutherland, as well as Jim and me. The significance of the residency, which felt at the time like it was opening up new audiences, soon revealed itself as having prepared the CEE members for a creative path through a pandemic. 

The residency was organized by CMU assistant professor of Musicology, Alexa Woloshyn, who is Canadian. She created a plan that had CEE members working closely with CMU students in masterclasses, lecture demonstrations, composition workshops, and of course, live performance. “Pittsburgh and CMU have vibrant electronic music communities,” said Woloshyn. “I thought it would be great to learn from the CEE’s almost 50 years of experience in electronic sound-making and collective improvisation. The week was energizing for the students. I witnessed new and renewed interest in improvisation, modular synthesis, electronic composition and collaboration.” 

 

Woloshyn partnered with several of her CMU colleagues, including composer Jesse Stiles, professor of Sound Media, who directs an innovative student performance group known as the Exploded Ensemble that also works in the live-electronic music medium. The two ensembles rehearsed together and it became clear from the outset that both groups operated with similar and compatible procedures and musical languages. Stiles and Woloshyn had the idea to invite the extraordinary violinist and composer Pauline Kim Harris to join in the sessions. 

Stiles wrote, “CEE visited Exploded Ensemble rehearsals several times to share their methodologies for electronic sound-making as well as their approach to improvised performance. They would set up their various mountains of rigs beside those of Exploded Ensemble and very quickly a vast neural network of audio and control cables sprawled across our rehearsal space. With roughly 20 musicians blasting out electronic sound it would be easy for matters to devolve into sonic chaos – but the Canadians were able to guide the students that comprise Exploded Ensemble through a thoughtful approach to performance that balanced listening and responding. This yielded performances with exhilarating dynamics that swept between quiet fields of spatialized chirps and squeaks to tremendous waves of drone and thrilling thunderous noise. A few days later, when the students walked onstage with CEE and Pauline, they did so with confidence and eager excitement.  That concert was one of the finest performances in which Exploded Ensemble had ever participated.”

At that final concert, the two ensembles played together, and the CEE performed two of its own works, including a homage to Larry Lake, in which the CEE improvised variations on a signature Lake gesture. Lake’s Psalm for solo oboe and electronic tracks was performed by oboist Hanna Senft, a gifted graduate student. And the impressive undergraduate violist Sara Frankel delivered a brilliant performance of my Sarabande for viola and live electronics. We departed Pittsburgh on February 28 feeling gratified that we had left a positive impression with the students and buoyed with the connection our music had made. Paul Stillwell said, “The success of our recent trip to Carnegie Mellon University shows that we are relevant to both longtime fans of electronic music and younger students of the craft.”

Just a few days after our return to Toronto, we learned that the CEE was the last foreign group to be allowed to visit the CMU campus, as international borders began to harden, and then to close. But the feeling of such a fabulous visit lingered with us, and with it, a sort of creative momentum. Jim Montgomery wrote in his blog on the CEE website, “As the reality of social isolation and physical distancing set in, we decided to try doing some music while maintaining our isolation. The result: the Pass the Track (PtT) project.” 

Building on the buzz – “Pass the Track

John Kameel Farah, who has had a thriving international solo career, describes what happened: “I felt unable to make solo music because of the stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, which left me feeling very little creative inspiration. I thought maybe the answer would be instead to be creative in a collaboration, so I asked Paul Stillwell to send me some electronic sounds to work with. He sent me a beautiful synth drone and I added piano over it. Then we passed it to other members of the CEE and each added another layer. After that was done, we had enjoyed it so much that we thought to do more tracks, but with each starting with a different person, each adding in a different sequence. Each got the chance to be first, last and in the middle. The biggest challenge, if you were a ‘starter’ was to try to leave enough musical space so that three or four musicians could make a meaningful contribution without feeling the space had already been taken up, or without the whole thing becoming an overflowing cacophony.”

Rose Bolton further pointed out that, in the collaborative method we used, “The process of layering on tracks revealed that the person who puts down the first track in the piece, often sets the tone, shape and sound of each movement. So how each movement sounds, is greatly affected by the musical sensibility and choices that the first person has done.”

As accustomed as the CEE members were to collective composition, this was a fresh approach to collaboration, born out of the COVID lockdown, and the results were highly satisfying. It seemed that those few days on the CMU campus, steeped in intensive interaction with both students and faculty, had energized the CEE and had the members constantly engaged in demonstrating, analyzing and explaining how their music works. And it had helped to refresh the CEE’s own processes with a clarity among the members of the group, enabling us to immediately jump into the creative opportunity that the pandemic presented. No click tracks were needed as the PtT pieces came together – just the free flow of layer after layer of freshly minted electronic music that blended smoothly and naturally.

David Sutherland wrote, “When the CEE was founded, electronic music was pretty much confined to electronic music studios in universities. In 1978 Brian Eno released Music for Airports and called the music ambient. Today there are thousands of people around the world who make ambient electronic music and they have no connection to universities. This expansion of interest in electronic music has both created a much larger audience than existed in the 1970s and in some ways made our music less exceptional. 

“What surprises and delights me is how well the recordings of the past stand up in today’s music, and how well we can still play together. In some of the later tracks, there is some really outstanding playing that would stand on its own compared to much of the music produced today. Then you have everyone else adding to the whole and, where I thought there wasn’t any more room, someone has found just the right thing. I find that quite remarkable and inspiring.”

There are now six episodes of PtT, pieces that range widely in terms of style, temperament and duration. Two of the pieces are accompanied with digital animation, the skillful work of Paul Stillwell, who also did the audio mixing. The full set of six pieces is due for fall release on the CEE’s Bandcamp page: thecee.bandcamp.com. People can have a preview right now, however, on YouTube at http://youtu.be/asGiXXoyC1o (PtT 1) and youtu.be/0D7QPeUcVJ4 (PtT 5). 

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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Now in its 49th season,Toronto’s New Music Concerts (NMC) remains one of the main presenters of contemporary concert music in Toronto, with a long and diverse legacy of bringing first performances of significant new works to Toronto audiences, covering compositions from a wide range of styles, written by living composers from around the world, including Canada.

NMC was founded in 1971 by composer-flutist Robert Aitken and composer Norma Beecroft. In her unpublished NMC Memoirs, Beecroft wrote, “Norma and Bob founded a baby. This was not your usual conception, but a brainchild which would revolutionize the city of Toronto’s musical public – we hoped. In fact, it was not our brainchild, but seeds that were planted by the Canada Council, which found fertile ground in the thoughts and dreams of both of us.”

Aitken and Beecroft had previously collaborated, in the 1960s, with a larger group of composers and performers in a series called Ten Centuries Concerts. As its name suggested, this had been a series with an extremely broad range of potential repertoire. But for the newly created NMC, the main objects were both clear and ambitious:

• To promote interest in the art of music and contemporary musical ideas;
• To advance knowledge and appreciation of musical culture, with special emphasis on contemporary music;
• To perform, preserve, publish, record and broadcast all forms of contemporary music;
• To establish and maintain a series of concerts to compare, contrast and illuminate, by imaginative and experimental programming, music of the modern age; and so on.”

The decades that followed: these objectives defined precisely what NMC did, ambitiously and with remarkable rigour. Aitken and Beecroft insisted that the composers on NMC concerts should come to Toronto and be present for the preparation of their works, to assure the authenticity of the performances. Aitken also insisted on a full schedule of rehearsals, so that all the music, regardless of its difficulty, was fully ready to be performed. This policy was costly, but it set an incredibly high standard for performance. Accordingly, dozens of the leading composers from around the world were invited to Toronto for definitive performances of their most recent and most challenging works, and the list of those who were drawn to Toronto for the NMC series reads like a who’s who of contemporary composition: John Adams, Lucian Berio, Pierre Boulez, Henry Brant, John Cage, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Peter Maxwell Davies, Vinko Globokar, Helmut Lachenmann, Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Toru Takemitsu, Iannis Xenakis and many more. And the list of Canadian composers is every bit as comprehensive, including Aitken and Beecroft themselves, and also John Beckwith, Walter Buczynski, Brian Cherney, Harry Freedman, Serge Garant, Chris Paul Harman, Alexina Louie, Bruce Mather, Barbara Pentland, Murray Schafer, Harry Somers, Ann Southam, Gilles Tremblay, Claude Vivier, John Weinzweig and on and on…yet another who’s who list!

On the record: an equally impressive third list can be found on the NMC website, newmusicconcerts.com: a detailing of the 16 recordings featuring Aitken and the NMC Ensemble. Perhaps the most striking of these are the collections of chamber works by Elliott Carter (on the occasion of his 100th year), George Crumb and Toru Takemitsu, all on Naxos records. Also on Naxos is a historically important release, Lutoslawski’s Last Concert, made from the broadcast on CBC’s Two New Hours, of the live performance we recorded on October 24, 1993 at Jane Mallett Theatre. Lutoslowski conducted the NMC Ensemble with violin soloist Fujiko Imajishi and soprano Valdine Anderson. It was Lutoslawski’s final appearance as a conductor of his own works. O Bali: Colin McPhee and His Legacy, on CBC Records, is another highlight, a recording which features Aitken both as flute soloist, and as conductor of the NMC Ensemble. Murray Schafer’s opera, Loving/Toi, is another unique release, on Centrediscs.

In fact, the history of NMC is reflected in recordings predating the items on this list, which are all CD releases. Before the advent of the CD, the NMC Ensemble appeared on an LP, in a recording (which I produced) of John Cage’s Sixteen Dances, for a boutique record label, CP2 (Composers Performance Squared) in 1981. The American violin virtuoso Paul Zukofsky conducted and Cage himself was present at the sessions – part of an ambitious NMC John Cage Weekend, filled with concerts of Cage’s music, including the first-ever concert performance of Cage’s epic work, Roaratorio.

Another very important aspect of how NMC applied their operating philosophy was in the commissioning of original new works by the composers featured in their concerts – commissions that were offered to the international and the Canadian composers. NMC’s record of significant artistic achievements in the creation of important new works is an impressive one, forming another long list. Among the international set are Elliott Carter’s Scrivo in vento, George Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten and Toru Takemitsu’s Bryce, this latter title having been borrowed from Bryce Engleman, the son of percussionist Robin Engleman, with whom Takemitsu formed a bond while visiting in Toronto. Among the major Canadian works NMC has commissioned are Amerika by Chris Paul Harman and Zwei Lieder nach Rilke by Omar Daniel, both of which subsequently won the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music, as well as Princess of the Stars by Murray Schafer, Sanctuary by Alexina Louie, El Dorado by Marjan Mozetich, Triojubilus by Gilles Tremblay, Zipangu by Claude Vivier, and Chura-Churum by Harry Somers, to name only a few.

Pieces for Bob: it is this aspect of the NMC legacy that will be celebrated in “Pieces for Bob”, a concert scheduled for Saturday, April 4 at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre at 8pm. As the title indicates, the program is made up exclusively of works composed for Robert Aitken. The two aforementioned pieces by Carter and Crumb are in the lineup, as well as Cage’s Ryoanji, Henry Brant’s Ghosts and Gargoyles, the world premiere of Epigrams for Robert Aitken by Daniel Foley, and Tierra…tierra by Ecuadorian composer Diego Luzuriaga. The work on the program that gives the concert its title is one that I was personally involved in – Norma Beecroft’s Piece for Bob, dating from 1975. In it, the flute soloist is called upon to execute advanced performance techniques, such as multiphonics, vocal modulations, and brilliant technical writing, while simultaneously synchronizing with both analogue electronic tracks and digital audio effects, all created with the latest technology of the time. Beecroft had decided to create her electronic sounds with a digital sound synthesis system I had helped to install at the University of Toronto while I was a music graduate student there in the early 1970s. (My role was to guide Beecroft through the still new territory of synthesizing sounds with a mainframe computer.) Piece for Bob became one of Beecroft’s most performed works, and has been fittingly chosen to provide the theme for this concert in celebration of Aitken and NMC.

Beecroft left NMC in 1989 to pursue her many other creative interests, but those 17 years with the organization remain an important chapter in her own story, as well as the story of NMC. Hopefully, her unpublished memoirs will soon be revealed.

Committed to continuing: more changes are now in the works, as the distinguished NMC organization, with its long legacy of creation and innovation, approaches its 50th anniversary next year. Aitken will retire after 50 years as artistic director and will be succeeded by the renowned composer and conductor, Brian Current, now serving as NMC’s co-artistic director during the period of transition. “We are committed to continuing Robert Aitken’s legacy of excellence in programming and performance,” Current says, “and part of our exciting transition is to celebrate his 50 years of groundbreaking leadership with concerts featuring pieces written just for him.” Next year’s series will include works by Aitken as well.

Meanwhile, the immediately upcoming NMC concert, February 13 at Harbourfront Centre Theatre at 8pm, will give us a glimpse of what’s next for NMC – Current’s first chance to design a program in its entirety for NMC. The concert, titled “Serious Smile”, includes recent compositions by three emerging young Canadian composers: Brandon Chow, Keiko Devaux and Corie Rose Soumah, and Toronto audiences will meet the extraordinary young German multimedia wizard, Alexander Schubert for the first time. And as a gesture to the earliest days of NMC, György Ligeti’s famous Chamber Concerto will be remounted for the first time since 1973.

“Our job as artistic directors is to scour the globe for the greatest music out there,” Current told me, “and to bring it to our audiences through performances by the best musicians, in the context of our magnificent 21st-century Toronto.”

The mandate continues.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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On Sunday evening, December 8 at 8:30, pianist, impresario and all-around creative spark plug, Cheryl Duvall, is doing something at the Tranzac Club she’s never done before: launching her first full-length recording as a piano soloist. It’s not that she hasn’t been in the recording studio numerous times, but this time it’s a special project for her, one in which she’s invested her creativity on many levels. (It’s also been a special project for me.)

The title of the CD, Harbour, is taken from a major new work by Victoria-based composer Anna Höstman, commissioned by Duvall expressly for this project. Duvall told me that when she first encountered Höstman’s music in 2012, “I was immediately drawn to her poetic use of harmony, texture and time, as well as her unexpected melodic turns. I found myself inspired to create pianistic colours that would help evoke the different atmospheres in her music.” Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk, had co-founded the Thin Edge New Music Collective in 2011, and they had commissioned Höstman to create a chamber work for their series. Duvall said, “I loved puzzling my way through her fascinating uses of rhythms and counterpoint, which often went from static and sparse to jumbled and tangled within moments. Since then I have performed at least 15 of her works in different contexts, and premiered at least seven or eight. She is very inventive in how she approaches the piano and I feel I am witness to her ever-evolving relationship with the instrument.”

The broader story of Duvall’s incessant commissioning activity lies in her experience with the Thin Edge New Music Collective (TENMC). In its first nine years of operating, TENMC has commissioned 70 new works, a remarkable number for such a small, young organization. Some of these can be heard on a recording I produced in 2017, one which Duvall co-organized and co-supervised, Raging Against the Machine, which features TENMC, alongside the Montreal group, Ensemble Paramirabo. That recording includes music by American composer Steve Reich, Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, Canadians Patrick Giguère, Brian Harman, and, not surprisingly, Anna Höstman. That recording is available on the Red Shift label at redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com.

This latest recording, Harbour (for which I was, again, happy to serve as producer) is also available on the Red Shift label, and is a complete collection of the works for solo piano by Höstman. Harbour, the title work, is also the longest composition on the recording, a sprawling, 26-minute work that weaves its way through a varied musicscape of textures, themes, counterpoints and dynamic shadings that leaves the listener filled with a multiplicity of experiences. The scale and complexity of Harbour is thrust starkly into relief by the much simpler, perhaps gentler qualities of the works that surround it. Harbour is available as both a CD and digital download at: redshiftrecords.org.

The very first commissions for TENMC, Duvall freely acknowledges, were born out of necessity, to fill repertoire gaps for the available instrumentation, but they have become a major part of her activities as co-artistic director of TENMC, as well as in her solo endeavours. “They were an exciting step,” she says. “Being the very first person to hear a piece of music is a fascinating experience and a huge artistic risk in many ways. You never know what you are going to get and what challenges you’ll face in the process – but this keeps me motivated, the constant element of surprise and the always evolving directions and concepts that different composers are exploring.”

Duvall’s partner in TENMC, Ilana Waniuk tells their story in somewhat more practical terms. “Cheryl and I decided that we wanted not only to create a means of exploring/performing contemporary chamber music on our own terms, but to actively take part in the commissioning and development of new works,” Waniuk says. “Starting an ambitious project with limited funds and minimal prior administrative experience is an amazing litmus test for the strength of a collaborator. Cheryl’s passion, tenacity, creative vision and willingness to take artistic risks was apparent from the outset and has carried us through nine seasons and counting. Together, we have tackled scores which have required us to decipher highly complex/individualistic notation, interpret light sculptures, operate on musical instruments wearing hospital scrubs and explore virtual sonic worlds through interactive video game technology … Perhaps even more importantly, as a collaborator, she makes it a conscious priority to ensure that her fellow artists have a safe and welcoming space within which they can create and rehearse. ”

Anna Höstman echoes Waniuk’s observations about Duvall’s strengths as a collaborator. “On the one hand, Cheryl has an amazing ability to crystallize fragments of tumbling when they occur in my music, allowing direction and impulse to shift with swift fluidity,” she says. “On the other hand, one sinks into the warm timbre and depth of feeling she achieves in more shadowed, tender passages. Cheryl is a remarkably inclusive performer, programmer and thinker – with energy like a rushing river. She has transformed our Canadian artistic landscape with her devotion to new music creation.”

Innermost Songs

The concluding track on Harbour is Höstman’s 2019 composition, Adagio, originally commissioned by Duvall for another of her initiatives, an upcoming solo piano performance she calls Innermost Songs. “A year and a half ago,” Duvall explains, “I approached seven Canadian composers to write new works for me, while I created a documentary exploring the composer/performer relationship. I chose composers with completely different aesthetics, processes, sound worlds and approaches, in order to give my research diversity and scope. Composers Daniel Brandes, Patrick Giguère, Anna Höstman, Emilie LeBel, James O’Callaghan, Monica Pearce and Kotoka Suzuki are featured in this event. There are two pieces with electronics, one with a harmonica, and another with video, as well as purely acoustic pieces that explore different aspects of pianism, making an eclectic mix of piano music.”

As wide-ranging as these commissions are, they all refer back specifically to Duvall, the artist for whom they’re being written. One example – Monica Pearce describes her work, Silks, as follows: “This work was written for and dedicated to Cheryl Duvall, a pianist who has an avid interest in aerial silks. Duvall choreographed, performed and filmed an aerial silks routine, and for the process of composing, I mapped each movement of the routine to music. The held poses are mapped to a series of chords, which were handpicked from my absolute favourite chords from Romantic/20th-century piano literature (Brahms, Messiaen, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin). Pearce has worked with Duvall on many projects over the years. “I’ve written for her ensemble, Thin Edge; she has played in my operas; and so on – but this was the first time to write something for her as a soloist. Knowing her as a good friend as well as a musical collaborator, I wanted to write something that felt very ‘her.’ She is someone who is always searching and striving towards musical beauty and transcendence.”

Innermost Songs will take place at the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph St. in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at 8pm.

Waniuk gets the last word: “Cheryl is incredibly inventive and has the ability to examine all facets of an idea, often coming up with surprising and innovative solutions to complex problems. Whether insisting we climb Mount Fuji eight hours after arriving in Japan for a concert tour, or taking aerial silks classes to gain a better understanding of our ongoing circus/contemporary music project Balancing on the Edge, she has an adventurous spirit and great sense of humour – two qualities which I consider essential ingredients in our musical/artistic partnership. It has been so exciting to watch her branch out in new directions through her various solo projects. I can’t wait to see what adventures, artistic and otherwise, await!”

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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On a particularly sunny and warm May day in Belfast – one might even have called it summery – my thoughts turned to the coming season, and to the phenomenon of music performed in the great outdoors, or even deep in the wilderness, if the friends and followers of Murray Schafer are to be emulated. My reverie gradually took me back to a much earlier time when such thinking was a fresh idea.

I recalled that in the summer of 1979 my CBC Radio colleague, John Reeves, approached me with an unusual proposal for a broadcast. He asked if I would consider funding an episode he wanted to produce for my recently established contemporary music series, Two New Hours (1978–2007) on what was then known as the CBC FM Network. The notable aspect of his proposal was that it would feature a composition by Murray Schafer, to be recorded on a wilderness lake. The title of the episode was simply, Music for Wilderness Lake. The performance of the work would be by an ensemble of 12 trombonists, ringing the lake, and the recording would be made from the perspective of microphones positioned in a canoe in the middle of the lake.

I thought about Reeves’ proposal, reflecting on other Schafer compositions I had already broadcast on the series, such as his now iconic Third String Quartet, which I had commissioned. The quartet had been a highly unconventional piece, one which begins with only the cellist on stage and in which the other three string players gradually join after slowly progressing, one by one, from the back of the hall to centre stage. In the middle movement, the string players perform all manner of un-string-like sounds. They shout, growl, stomp their feet, and generally carry on in an unhinged and bellicose manner. Needless to say, this kind of innovative writing worked beautifully both on stage and on the radio! The idea, therefore, of a new Schafer composition to be recorded from a canoe in the centre of a wilderness lake was only momentarily surprising. I responded by authorizing the necessary budget to Reeves to produce the segment.

I subsequently discovered that the audio recording was only part of the project. A film crew would accompany Reeves and his recording engineer into the wilderness. The filmmakers eventually contracted for the rights to synchronize and mix our CBC recording as a part of the soundtrack of their film were Barbara Willis Sweete, Niv Fichman and Larry Weinstein; it was released as the first ever film by their new company, Fichman-Sweete Productions, which later evolved into Rhombus Media.

Schafer mentioned in his 2012 autobiography, My Life on Earth & Elsewhere, that Music for Wilderness Lake was his first environmental piece. “I had been canoeing around one of the many unpeopled lakes in the Madawaska area and had noticed how the sounds changed throughout the day and evening. I decided to write a work for the lake and take advantage of those changes,” he wrote. “Just at this time I was approached by a group of 12 trombone players who wanted me to write a piece for them. I suggested my idea and they liked it.” The book, published by The Porcupine’s Quill in Erin, Ontario, is not the focus of this article, but bears mentioning; it is a remarkable read, divided into two parts. Part one is subtitled Student, Sailor, Wanderer and part two is The Music of the Environment. It’s furthermore am increasingly valuable document, since Schafer has become afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, and unable to further share his remarkable story.

Brooke Dufton, a soprano and scholar who has devoted much of her career to studying and performing the works of Schafer told me: “Given the many obstacles to presenting this music publicly – gathering a dozen adventurous trombonists at once, to play at dawn, and getting performers and audience to that location, and at those times – it is remarkable how frequently Music for Wilderness Lake is professionally performed. In the last three years alone, almost 40 years after its creation, it has been featured in at least seven events. These are ones I know about: Stratford Summer Music, Stratford ON; Make Music New York, New York Central Park Lake; Nuit Blanche, Huntsville ON; The contemporary Austin Sound Series, Austin, Texas; Kalvfestivalen, Gothenburg, Sweden; and Living with Lakes, in Sudbury ON.” Dufton herself is often included in such performances, positioned in the front of a distant canoe, singing Ariadne’s Aria by Schafer.

Music for Wilderness Lake proved to be pivotal for Schafer’s subsequent works for performance in the natural environment. Schafer wrote: “Following the success of Music for Wilderness Lake, I began to think of a larger, more theatrical work in which the action would take place on a lake with the musicians situated around the shores.” The resulting piece, Princess of the Stars, composed in 1981 is an environmental opera, which also serves as the prologue for the 12-part Patria Cycle, which revolves around the journeys of three central characters: the Princess of the Stars, the Wolf and the Minotaur.

In 1997 our Two New Hours production team was able to record and broadcast a production of Princess of the Stars, staged on and around Wildcat Lake in the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve by Patria Music/Theatre Projects. This was a large- scale undertaking, requiring advance research of the lake itself in order to determine ideal locations for microphone placement. Once the locations were set, our team constructed simple floats, which were anchored at those precise locations with microphone mounts. For each performance, we paddled out to these positions with the mics themselves, installed them, together with the portable recording devices, and then ditched our canoes behind large boulders on the nearest shore, becoming invisible. This was all accomplished before the pre-dawn glow and the arrival of the audience. After the performances, we collected the recording gear and headed to the mixing station. Listeners to Two New Hours across the nation were thus transported to the lake to experience the opera.

Prior to that, in 1995, as a sort of warm-up to the Princess of the Stars opera broadcast, Schafer prepared several pieces from the final movement of Patria, the Epilogue, titled, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon. Several musicians travelled with us to Wildcat Lake, where recordings were made using those same methods that we would subsequently employ for the later production of Princess of the Stars. The resulting broadcast, titled Wolf Music, was heard on Two New Hours in 1996 and subsequently leased to Centrediscs, the record label of the Canadian Music Centre. This recording is still available through the CMC and Centrediscs. Wolf Music was also entered by CBC Radio as a submission to the 1996 Prix Italia, an international competition for public broadcasters, where it earned a special mention from the jury.

Two New Hours was also involved in the commissioning, recording and broadcasts of two more parts of the Patria Cycle: Patria 5 – The Crown of Ariadne and Patria 8 – The Palace of the Cinabar Phoenix.

And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon lives on, continues each summer in the Haliburton forest as a cohort of up to 64 participants who spend a week and a day in the forest, organized in packs, to live in the wild creating music and performing together. Poet and essayist Rae Crossman describes it as, “an annual pageant involving musicians, actors, dancers, artists and storytellers who create musical drama in the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve, on the edge of Ontario’s Algonquin Park.” Crossman explains: “This is music theatre like no other: the stage is a moose meadow, a rock-strewn gorge patterned with moss, a raft assembled from rugged cedar driftwood, or a quiet forest pool, fringed with cardinal flowers. The lighting: dawn through filigree of pine, intense noonday sun on a burnished lake, flickering campfire flames, or a million stars. Flute music accompanies birdsong. A trombone echoes across the bay. Is that wind in the tamarack or an ethereal voice singing sibilant notes of sorrow? “

Double bassist Neal Evans says: “One of my chief impressions from participating in several Murray Schafer works is that everything he does creates community.” Evans, together with his wife Peg and their two sons, have been long-term participants in The Wolf Project, as it’s also known. They told me that over the space of eight days it “creates a community of people who feel a close bond, much closer that would be achieved by a regular week-long camping experience.” The reason, they explain, is because participants’ days together are purposeful. “There is the immediate need to create short ‘pieces’ (Encounters) to perform for the rest of the group, and the overarching need to create the large-scale composed piece (Great Wheel Day) for the final day. What makes this experience so different, is that at the end of our ‘creative’ work periods, we continue working together to prepare meals, set up a campfire, dig a latrine, hang a tarp or paddle in some supplies. There is no audience, only members of the group, which means that our guards do not/cannot effectively go up on the final day. There is a heightened sense of ‘performance,’ of course, tempered by the awareness and understanding of our shared humanity.”

Given the current fragile state of his health, Schafer no longer participates in this ongoing Epilogue to the Patria Cycle. But his story continues to be told. There are two large-scale projects in process that aim to put his life and career into perspective. One of these is a documentary by filmmaker Neil Dallhoff with the working title, R. Murray Schafer: Into the Mouth of the Wolf. Dallhoff told me he has spent countless hours with Schafer and his wife, mezzo-soprano and doctor of divinity, Eleanor James, talking, planning and filming at their rural home in Indian River. Dallhoff says: “The film is going to strongly represent Murray’s outdoor works, mostly through archival drawings, participant accounts and Murray’s writings. As we continue filming, the theme of the Patria Cycle is emerging in parallel with the story of his life and work.”

And filmmaker Barbara Willis Sweete, our cinematic partner in crime for the CBC Wilderness Lake recording, 40 years ago, is creating Schafer’s Labyrinth for the 2020 edition of Luminato. It will be a multimedia work in which, according to the project proposal, the Molinari String Quartet will perform live on stage in front of a giant movie screen showing motion picture images that include choreographed dance, shots of nature, archival and present-day images from Schafer’s life, visual effects, graphics and animation. “More than 50 years ago,” the proposal goes on to point out, “Schafer envisioned a Theatre of Confluence that would combine elements of opera, theatre, dance, music and projected images – and which would immerse its audience in a totally unified multi-sensory and multi-disciplinary experience.”

Schafer’s Labyrinth will include all 13 of Schafer’s string quartets, performed over two consecutive days in four distinct programs, each lasting between 60 and 85 minutes. “Schafer’s quartets embody his entire philosophy and symbology and are filled with visual allusions and extra-musical references,” the proposal continues. “Images invoked in his quartets include the behaviour of water (Quartet No.2), the sounds of birds and the howling of wolves (Quartet No.10) and the movements of Tai Chi (Quartet No.6). The quartets also reflect Murray’s preoccupation with mythology. Traces of the Greek myth of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur are threaded through all his quartets, taking the form of musical leitmotifs that interact with each other in fascinating ways. The archetypes within this myth form the primary thematic underpinning of Schafer’s Labyrinth.”

As I open my autographed copy of his book, My Life on Earth and Elsewhere, which I acquired on the occasion of Schafer’s 80th birthday, I see his inscription: “For David: New sounds every day of your life! Listen!”

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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A film titled Affairs of the Heart: The Music and Life of Marjan Mozetich, produced and directed by Jamie Day Fleck, and in which I make an appearance, was given its premiere showing March 1 at the most recent edition of the Kingston Canadian Film Festival. The title of the film borrows from what is arguably Mozetich’s (b.1948) most successful composition, the violin concerto Affairs of the Heart, composed in 1997/8 for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and violin soloist Juliette Kang, with the support of a commission from CBC Radio Music. Filmmaker Fleck told me her story of hearing a broadcast of the concerto on CBC Radio Two while driving, and her need to remain in her car after reaching her destination in order to learn the identity of this stunning work.

Mozetich says that Fleck’s story is similar to those of scores of CBC Radio listeners he’s heard from. The so-called “driveway experience” is even mentioned in the CD’s liner notes.

Early in the film, Mozetich remarks, “The music I write has this kind of spatial quality to it: distance and landscape.” On his website, he also applies the term postmodern Romanticism to his style. These are characteristics that have helped to make his music immediately appealing, so much so that he has become the most frequently broadcast Canadian classical composer. But it had not always been the case.

Prior to 1980, Mozetich had been struggling to conform with the aggressively modernist approach embraced by his young composer colleagues. In fact, in 1978, the year I created the CBC FM Radio network contemporary music series, Two New Hours, I chose an emphatically modernist Mozetich work, his Disturbances for solo viola – a piece we had recorded for broadcast on Two New Hours – as one of the CBC Radio submissions to the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in Paris. The IRC is a contemporary music meet-up sponsored by public broadcasters from some 35 countries, and organized by the International Music Council. It has been running with the participation of public broadcasters since 1954. Mozetich’s dramatically dissonant Disturbances was broadcast in several counties as a result of its presentation by our CBC delegation in 1978. He might have used this opportunity to advance his reputation as one of the emerging new voices in advanced contemporary composition. But he didn’t.

At a crucial point in Fleck’s film, I recount how a work I commissioned in 1979 for CBC Radio supported Mozetich’s decision to change his artistic direction. On the heels of his presentation at the IRC, Mozetich and I began a series of frank discussions in which he questioned the modernist approach. He complained that he was fed up with musical modernism and declared his intention to do something about it. We offered him a commission for Two New Hours to prove his point. The work he created, a delightfully tonal and exuberant composition titled Dance of the Blind, did more than offer a new approach. It was, for Mozetich, a watershed composition that strikingly displayed his new Romantic, accessible style, redefining his artistic voice. Accordionist Joseph Petric was the featured soloist in the work. “He had a lot of courage to do that,” Petric remarks in the film, “because it wasn’t a very popular style. And yet he’s become, in time, the most performed composer in the country.”

Dance of the Blind was recorded and broadcast on Two New Hours in 1980. “After the national network broadcast,” Mozetich said, “there was no turning back.” It didn’t take long before many more commissions were offered. In 1981, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE), the live electronic music group I co-founded in 1971, commissioned him to compose a work called In the Garden. In the process of our working together on the composition with Mozetich, he shared some rather candid thoughts about his working process. He confessed that, as his bedtime reading material, he would bring the great Romantic orchestral scores. He read Dvořák, Mahler, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky avidly. “You can learn a lot from those guys,” he remarked. He responded to our commission with a virtuosic display for electronic keyboards. The CEE members decided to digitally sequence the entire score, for both ease and accuracy of performance. The work became a core composition in the CEE’s repertoire, and was performed frequently on tour.

In 1984 the Music Gallery in Toronto invited Mozetich to prepare a retrospective concert of his music. It was a mixture of music from the early 1970s, and three works in his new postmodern Romantic style. We recorded the concert for broadcast on Two New Hours. Listeners to the broadcast were struck by the individuality of the music. It was another significant watershed moment, one that many people noticed. A 15-year-old Chris Paul Harman, a loyal Two New Hours listener even as a teenager, and now one of our leading contemporary composers, and a professor of composition at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, listened and was impressed. Harman remembered the program: “The first sounds I heard consisted of abrasive scratch tones played by a string quintet; these eventually gave way to vigorously bowed passages outlining clustered pitch collections, in turn leading to a plaintive modal chant and finally, an austere dissonant chorale. When finished, the work was identified as Serenata del nostro tempo (1973) by Marjan Mozetich. There followed an interview in which Marjan explained how he had eschewed such sensibilities to embrace a lighter and more whimsical style in works such as Fantasia…sul un linguaggio perduto (1981). I was absolutely intrigued. How does one reinvent one’s self in such a manner? Is one such ‘self’ more authentic than another ‘self?’”

In the course of producing that concert recording and broadcast, I had mentioned to Mozetich that his quartet, Fantasia…sul un linguaggio perduto (…on a lost language), might work well in an adaptation for string orchestra. He subsequently did just that, and his string orchestra adaptation has become one of his most performed works. Not too many years later, in 1989, CBC Records accepted my proposal to make a CD of Mozetich’s music on their Musica Viva sub-label. The CD, titled Procession, included the Amadeus Ensemble, a string ensemble led by Moshe Hammer, joined by guest soloists Joseph Petric, accordion, and harpist Erica Goodman. The recording included several important pieces in Mozetich’s developing style, such as Dance of the Blind, the string orchestra version of Fantasia… sul un linguaggio perduto, and his 1981 work for harp and strings, El Dorado.

It was this latter work which revealed the special feeling that Mozetich had for the harp. As Mozetich told me: “It all started with El Dorado and my friendship with harpist Erica Goodman. It was with this work that it all gelled with me and the harp. Over the years Erica commissioned three other works with harp which have all been recorded. I think it is the unique resonance and visual allure of the harp that attracted me to it. Subsequently I wrote four quintessential harp pieces, Songs of Nymphs, that are performed by numerous harpists around the world. To date I’ve written seven works with significant harp parts.” One of those harp pieces, The Passion of Angels, actually includes two harps: Mozetich wrote the work in 1995 on a commission from CBC Radio Music, for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and harp soloists Nora Bumanis and Julia Shaw.

Mozetich moved to the Kingston, Ontario area in 1990, initially to find the solitude he needed to compose. The move was just what he needed, and many of his most successful scores come from the post-1990 period. In 1992, he wrote the imposed Canadian work for the Banff International String Quartet Composition, supported again by a commission from CBC Radio Music. The quartet, Lament in the Trampled Garden helped the St. Lawrence String Quartet win not only the Banff competition overall, but also the award for the best performance of the imposed work that year. In Fleck’s film, Barry Shiffman, one of the founding members of the St. Lawrence says: “After winning the competition we went on to share that piece that he wrote in concerts all over the world.”

 

All the repertoire on the CD, Affairs of the Heart, was composed during this period. Besides the violin concerto that gives the CD its title, there is the double harp concerto, The Passion of Angels, and a set of short pieces for string orchestra, Postcards from the Sky, composed in 1996. Vancouver producer Karen Wilson, who was managing the CBC Radio Orchestra at the time, had met Mozetich while serving on an arts council jury. They hit it off, became friends, and when that fateful broadcast of Affairs of the Heart created scores of “driveway experiences” and CBC switchboards lit up all over the country, she knew she would have to quickly get a proposal together for the CBC Records selection committee. The recording with the radio orchestra under Mario Bernardi, and soloists Juliette Kang, Nora Burmanis and Julia Shaw, went flawlessly, and by the summer of 2000, the CDs were being scooped up by the truckload by thousands of consumers who couldn’t get enough Mozetich into their listening lives. Randy Barnard, who was the managing director of CBC Records at the time, said: “A Canadian composition outpacing core repertoire was a rarity, never mind becoming a bestseller in the catalogue.” The original CBC Records CD has been out of stock for years, but it’s now available as Centrediscs catalogue number CD-CMCCD 21815. For ordering information, see: cmccanada.org/shop/CD-CMCCD-21815.

Mozetich has made an impact in the Kingston community since settling there almost 20 years ago. In the film, Glen Fast, conductor emeritus of the Kingston Symphony notes: “I think Kingston knows they’re lucky to have him here, in this position as a composer, as a real music maker, as a substantial composer with his own voice.” Mozetich also taught as an adjunct professor of composition at Queens University most of those years. He retired from that position last June. John Burge, who, along with his teaching at Queens, is also in charge of the Queens Faculty Artists Series, commented in the film: “I know that if I can find a way to integrate Mozetich’s music into the concerts that we put on in Kingston it’ll make everyone happy. And I can tell you, that if we present a concert that has Marjan’s music programmed, there will be people that will come because they just want to hear Marjan’s music. They just want to see him walk up onstage and talk about his music.”

As for hearing live performances of Mozetich’s music this month, the Niagara Symphony Orchestra and music director Bradley Thachuck will perform his Postcards from the Sky on Saturday, April 27 at 7:30pm and Sunday, April 28 at 2:30pm in the recital hall in the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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Canadian composer Norma Beecroft (b. 1934) recently released her book, Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music, containing an insightful and revealing collection of interviews that explore the history of electronic music around the world. The book, originally published as an e-book, contains transcriptions of her interviews with many of the principal innovators who shaped electronic music from its earliest days. Beecroft, of course, is herself one of the pioneers of electronic music.

Her creative life closely mirrors the appearance and development of what was, in the mid-20th century, the newest musical medium. Given that she was also a prolific broadcaster and a maker of radio documentaries about contemporary composers of her day, it should be no surprise that she decided, in 1977, to embark on this landmark series of interviews with her fellow electronic music pioneers.

The list of the composers included in Beecroft’s book is comprehensive, reading like a who’s who of early electronic music. Among the 23 interviews, prominent names such as Luciano Berio, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis jump out of the group. Max Matthews, the so-called “father of computer music” is there. And there are important Canadian innovators as well, such as Bill Buxton, Gustav Ciamaga, James Montgomery and Barry Truax. Each interview is framed with a carefully drawn profile of her subject, intricately and accurately placing each into historical context.

The 400-plus-page book also contains an extensive preface, in which Beecroft introduces the overall subject of the relationship between music and technology, which is broadly relevant to her topic. She also details highlights of her own career, creating historical markers in the process, that show her creative work in parallel with her interview subjects. She describes herself as, “the second of five offspring of a father who was an inventor, Julian Beecroft (1907–2007) and one of his main interests was acoustics and sound, which he began investigating when he was very young.” She touches on her early composition lessons with John Weinzweig (1913–2006), interspersed with her other career activities, including her work with CBC Television in the 1950s, a time when TV was the newest of the broadcast media. It was also a period of her life when she travelled extensively, to both the United States and to Europe, meeting numerous composers, conductors and performers in the process. These acquaintances helped her in the development of the many phases of her career: composer, broadcaster and arts administrator (this latter role as co-director – with Robert Aitken –  of Toronto’s New Music Concerts, from 1971 to 1989). And a great many of these colleagues found their way into her collection of interviews.

Beecroft writes: “It was inevitable that I would join those questioning the present and future value of this new technology to music, this fascinating interaction between the fields of science and the humanities. And so, in 1977, I began my investigations into exploring music’s relationship to technology through the voices of some of the world’s foremost creative musical minds.” She concludes her preface with the notion: “It is generally agreed that the field of electronic music began in Paris, France, in the studios of the French Radio, then experiments in this new domain were being conducted at Columbia University in New York, and at the West German Radio in Cologne. Accordingly, I have ordered my collection of interviews in the same manner, beginning in France, and then moving to the United States and Germany, then followed with important work by Luciano Berio (1925–2003) and Bruno Maderna (1920–1973) at the Italian Radio in Milan, and concluding this volume with the interviews in Canada.” At the same time, she notes: “All these activities were mushrooming around the same period of time, in the years immediately following World War II, so the order is essentially inconsequential.”

Beecroft began organizing her enterprise in 1977, in a series of letters to her intended subjects in Europe. She told me she was confident in positive responses from the composers since she was known to them, and that they trusted her knowledge of the subject. She was by this time acknowledged not only as a composer, but as a highly skilled broadcaster, and she had easy access to all her subjects. She told me that Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), for example, said: “One thing I like about you is your determination.” Her travels took her first to Cologne, Berlin, Köthen, then Paris, London, and Utrecht. Additional interviews were scheduled in the United States, and back home in her Toronto studio, when possible.

The results of all these interviews were highly rewarding, and revealed great amounts of both historical and personal details. Beecroft’s subjects opened up to her highly focused line of questioning, delving into the recent past, to a time when they were all drawn to the artistic and technical challenges of this new musical medium. In the very first interview, for example, with Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), inventor of the concept of musique concrète using recorded sounds, and who founded Le Club d’Essai in 1942 and the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in 1958 in Paris, it’s immediately clear that Schaeffer’s focus is primarily on research and engineering. He refers to clashes in methodology with Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) and Iannis Xenakis, and confesses: “I hate dodecaphonic music, and I often say that the Austrians shot music with 12 bullets, they killed it for a long time.” This was a somewhat surprising revelation for me, but is typical of the sort of candid views Beecroft’s colleagues were willing to share with her.

In the Stockhausen interview, by contrast, we find the other side of the argument. “In Paris I became involved in the musique concrète that was at that time just beginning to develop. Boulez made me listen to a very few, very short studies, and immediately I was interested in trying myself to synthesize sound, and to get away from the treatment of recorded sound.” Stockhausen went on to mention his collaboration with Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had suggested a technique of combining pure sine waves to synthesize timbres: “I have to say that the friendship with this Belgian composer, and the exchange of letters with him, was a very important reason why I made these first experiments, because we were both thinking that it would be a marvellous thing if we could synthesize timbres. The general idea of timbre composition was in the air from texts of Schoenberg.”

Goeyvaerts recalled in his interview: “I never thought that pure sine waves could be heard. And suddenly I found that they existed with an electronic generator, so I wrote to Stockhausen and said, now we can go ahead.” He added: “When Stockhausen made the Study No. 1 and when I made my piece in 1953, I must say we considered at last we could come to a pure structure.” It was also in this year that the term “electronic music” was coined by Dr. Herbert Eimert (1897–1972) at the studio of the Cologne Radio.

Historical turning points such as these appear often throughout Beecroft’s Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music. But as important as such details are, the personal notes of the composers are possibly the more interesting aspect. An example is in the interview with American composer Otto Luening (1900–1996), who studied with composer and virtuoso pianist, Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), and was friends with composer Edgard Varèse (1883–1965). Luening said, of Busoni: “The essence of music, the inner core of music was to him still a mystery and he was like Schopenhauer in that, who I believe said somewhere if we knew the mystery and relationships of music, we would know the mystery and relationships of the whole universe.” And of Varèse, Luening said: “We immediately hit it off. Not only did I have great affection for him, and liked him very much personally, but we had this Busoni tie.” He mentioned the various stylistic groups of American composers current and pointed out: “Varèse and I were on this other line, we were really free wheelers, you know, and while we had a very strong aesthetic, it was not organized, there was no movement or anything, and we never wanted one. We used to talk together and so gradually we fell into a group of friends, that were very interesting and all kind of iconoclasts.”

These personal snapshots were entirely a part of Beecroft’s focus and plan for her project. In a letter to Stockhausen after the first edits were finished, she told him: “The publication is not intended to be a scholarly document on technical matters but an insight into the internal world of the composer and sociological forces that helped shape the person.” She projected to him that, “I am sure this modest document will help fill a void when it comes to musical matters in the latter half of this century.” The book is available through the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, and can also be ordered online. The details can be found here: musiccentre.ca/node/155113.

Norma Beecroft continues to compose. Montreal composer-pianist Bruce Mather invited her to create a work for his Carrillo piano, an instrument with 96 notes to the octave, which is to say, it’s tuned in 16ths of tones. Beecroft’s new composition will have its world premiere on March 11 at 7:30 at the Salle de concert of the Conservatoire de musique de Montreal, 4750 avenue Henri-Julien. It’s a work for solo Carrillo piano with digital soundtracks. Beecroft wrote: “Written for my friend and colleague Bruce Mather, this piece posed challenges that I could not resist. Having worked in analogue studios for most of my career, I determined to try my hand at composing using digital software only. The Carrillo piano was another challenge, as the entire piano keyboard consists of only one octave of sound. Training my ears to hear the microtones was a new problem, as was a system of notation for the performer. Herewith – my modest attempt at combining the two elements!” She explains further that the work’s design, “finds its analogy in nature, with the opening and closing of a flower. The one octave is divided in half and opens up slowly to create ever-widening intervals. And the flower slowly ends its fragile existence in a retrograde movement.”

Also in Montreal in March, a special dramatic concert presentation titled “Between Composers: Correspondence of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers, 1955–1960” will take place at the Tanna Schulich Hall of McGill University on March 22 at 7:30pm. Composer and McGill music professor Brian Cherney conceived the presentation, and he describes the idea:

“From 1955 until early in 1960, Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers were involved in a romantic relationship. In the fall of 1959, Norma went to Rome to study composition with Goffredo Petrassi. While there, she also studied flute with Severino Gazzelloni, the renowned flutist for whom many composers such as Berio wrote important new works for flute. During the last months of 1959 and early 1960, Somers and Beecroft exchanged nearly 200 letters, providing considerable information about their evolving relationship, what music they were writing, various compositional concerns, and the people they were meeting (in Toronto and in Rome). As well, Norma Beecroft’s letters describe her struggle to gain the confidence to study composition but also to finally reject a permanent ‘domestic’ relationship with Harry Somers, in other words, to devote herself entirely to composition. Thus the letters give us a fairly detailed portrait of that period in Canadian composition (of concert music): their compositional concerns, problems of financial support, thoughts about the state of the arts in Canada, and so on.

“In the concert being presented at McGill University on March 22, I have chosen significant excerpts from these letters and these will be read by two people, interspersed with music by each of the composers, chiefly, the String Quartet No.3 (1959) by Somers, dedicated to Norma Beecroft, and the film Saguenay, for which Somers wrote the music in early 1960 (and described in detail in the letters) and the Amplified String Quartet with Tape by Beecroft, written in the 1990s.”

Norma Beecroft will take part in both these Montreal events.

Returning briefly to the topic of the history of electronic music, I’m happy to announce that on March 8, a 1977 vintage recording by the Canadian Electronic Ensemble (CEE) will be released on the Artoffact record label. The CEE is a performing ensemble that I helped to establish in the early 1970s, and which continues to function even now, nearly 50 years later. This vintage re-release is a remastered version of the debut album by the CEE, originally released on an LP on the Music Gallery Editions label. By coincidence, the music contained on the album was all composed and performed at roughly the same period of time as Beecroft was travelling the world recording her interviews. The CEE’s founding quartet of David Grimes, the late Larry Lake, David Jaeger (aka me) and James Montgomery are the performers, together with a guest appearance by the late pianist Karen Kieser. The album is available as both a CD and in digital formats on Bandcamp: thecee.bandcamp.com.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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