Institute for Music in Canada

The musicologist Carl Morey died on December 3, 2018 in Toronto at the age of 84. He served as the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music and the Director of the Institute for Canadian Music from 1991 until his retirement in 2000. Obituaries are available online from the Faculty of Music website here, and from the U of T News website here.

On Thursday, 11 April 2019 in the lobby of the Edward Johnson Building from 4 to 6 pm, the Faculty of Music held a Tribute to Carl Morey to honour his memory, with speeches by friends and former colleagues, and musical performances. The program for the event is available here: PROG-Carl-Morey-tribute_Apr11.

Here are the opening remarks by Robin Elliott on that occasion:

My name is Robin Elliott and I have the honour of serving as the Jean A. Chalmers Chair of Canadian Music here at the University of Toronto. I inherited this chaired professorship from Carl Morey, who held it from 1991 until his retirement in 2000. There was talk at the time of Carl’s retirement about letting the Chalmers Chair lapse. Carl fought hard and prevented that from happening; Canadian music studies, and I personally, owe him a big debt of gratitude for that.

Carl supervised my PhD thesis The String Quartet in Canada, and I also took several courses with him during my graduate studies in musicology at the University of Toronto in the 1980s. These ranged widely, from medieval music notation, to Music in Paris at the turn of the 20th century – the latter course reflecting his deep and abiding love for the city of Paris, his home away from home. It may seem strange in retrospect that with three medievalists on staff at the Faculty of Music back then, it was Carl who taught the medieval music notation course. He was technically a Baroque specialist, having completed his PhD thesis at Indiana University in 1965 on the late operas of Alessandro Scarlatti – which reminds me, I also took a course on the Scarlatti operas with him. However, his musicological training was both broad and deep. He studied medieval music at Indiana University with Willi Apel, whose book The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 was the bible of early music notation in those days. Carl’s studies with Apel readily equipped him to explain the mysteries of ligatures, neumes, and mensural notation to graduate students.

When Carl was himself a graduate student in musicology in the 1960s, the field pretty much ended with Beethoven, chronologically speaking; more recent music was left to performers, music theorists, and sundry other musical enthusiasts, but was not thought to be a topic worthy of serious investigation by true scholars of music. And so Carl chose a Baroque topic for his research, but that is not where his true musical interests lay. He did love Baroque music, but his real passion was for the canonic operatic repertoire from Mozart to Richard Strauss. Eventually musicology caught up with Carl’s interests, and late in his career he was very pleased to be able to offer the Faculty’s first ever course on the Operas of Puccini, when Puccini had finally become a respectable topic for serious musical study.

Carl’s main contribution as a scholar was in the field of Canadian music studies – a field that is thousands of miles and hundreds of years distant from his own doctoral studies, but one that nevertheless became his abiding research interest. Late in his career that Carl really came into his own as a publishing scholar. In the last four years of his tenure at U of T, he published numerous articles, several editions of music by Glenn Gould, and no less than four books on Canadian music, including Opera Viva, the handsomely produced history of the Canadian Opera Company that he co-wrote with Ezra Schabas, combining his love of opera and music in Canada. The article on Carl in the first edition of Encyclopedia of Music in Canada states that he was at work on a history of music in Toronto. On numerous occasions, I heard him disavow that assertion; indeed, I am sure that more than once he said there was not a grain of truth in it. I was somewhat surprised then, to say the least, when not long before his death Carl turned over to me an extensive article – more like a short book really – that is a draft of his history of the beginnings of concert life in muddy York and Toronto. It is carefully researched, beautifully written, and meticulously detailed. On that same visit, I spoke to Carl about a beautiful manuscript that I had just been examining – it is a professional copyist’s full score of Ernest MacMillan’s choral/orchestral work England: An Ode. Carl knew the score well, of course, having been responsible for the revival of England in 1993, on the centennial of MacMillan’s birth. However, his own personal favorite musical manuscript was the holograph of the final scene from Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier. He showed me his copy of the beautiful facsimile reproduction of that manuscript, published in 1964 on the centennial of Strauss’s birth, and he spoke at length and with intimate knowledge about Strauss’s beautiful penmanship and the clinical precision with which this transcendently beautiful music is laid out on the page. I was deeply touched when Carl’s daughter Rachel presented me with that very publication after Carl’s death, as a bequest from Carl. When I opened the covers of it, I discovered that tucked inside was another gem, a reproduction of Strauss’s autograph manuscript of the song “Morgen,” which Strauss had presented as a wedding gift to his bride, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, in 1894. This is why our first musical performance for this tribute to Carl was Strauss’s heart-stoppingly beautiful song “Morgen,” performed for us by Monica Whicher and Steve Philcox.

Jane Cooper.The Canadian Nightingale: Bertha Crawford and the Dream of the Prima Donna. Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2017. 334 pp., ill.

ISBN 978-1-5255-1740-2 (hardcover, $26.49) / 978-1-5255-1741-9 (paperback, $15.49) / 978-1-5255-1742-6 (eBook, $9.99). All prices are quoted from the Friesen Press website as of 14 November 2018. The book is also available from Indigo and Amazon. The author’s website about the book, including a video trailer for it, is here, and there is an article about Cooper and the book on Ottawa’s artsfile website here.

Jane Cooper was intrigued by a passing reference in a letter written by her great-aunt in 1924 about Berta Crawford, an English opera singer in Warsaw. She googled the singer’s name and learned that she was actually Canadian, not English. Her curiosity piqued, Cooper embarked upon what turned out to be a six-year research project that has resulted in this meticulously detailed and gracefully written biography. Undaunted by a lack of interest in her book from traditional publishers, Cooper launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money and then had the biography produced by Friesen Press, a self-publishing outfit based in Victoria, BC. The resulting book meets the very highest editorial and production standards and is a worthy addition to the not terribly extensive library of books about Canadian opera singers.

Bertha May Crawford was born in Elmvale, Ontario (ca. 135 km north of Toronto) in 1886, and died in Toronto in 1937 at the age of fifty. The limited horizons those bare facts suggest – a life lived within the confines of a small area of southern Ontario – could not be further from the truth. After lessons with Edward Schuch in Toronto, Crawford was trained in London and Milan. Her career as a professional singer began in Italy but blossomed in Poland, and subsequent travels took her across the Russian empire, from Finland to Vladivostok. In Italy she had changed her name to Berta de Giovanni as a secret nod to her father, whose name was John (Giovanni in Italian). But after leaving Italy for Eastern Europe she dropped the “de Giovanni” while keeping the Italianate spelling of her first name, so she was “Berta Crawford” in Europe but reverted to “Bertha Crawford” for concerts in North America. For most of her career she was based in Warsaw, where she was highly regarded for her appearances as a coloratura soprano in opera, in concert, and later on the radio. Her signature roles were Gilda in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, and Violetta in La traviata.

Crawford enjoyed a lengthy professional and personal relationship with Zofia Alexandra de Słubicka (née Kosińska), a wealthy and widowed Polish aristocrat whom she met in London. The two were inseparable friends by the end of 1912, and remained so for the next eighteen years. They lived together in Warsaw – perhaps, Cooper speculates, in a Boston marriage – and experienced the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the creation of an independent Poland together, only to have a bitter falling out for unknown reasons in the early 1930s. After the break with her patroness and friend, Crawford returned to Toronto but died just three years later. Despite repeated attempts throughout her career, Crawford was unable to translate her successes in Poland and Russia into an international opera career. Aside from one appearance in a semi-professional production of Rigoletto in Washington, DC, she never sang in an opera production in North America. She did sing with orchestras and in solo recitals in Canada, and to a limited extent in the USA, but the “dream of the prima donna” eluded her on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The  Great Depression, followed by the break with Zofia, left Crawford all but destitute. At the time of her sudden death from pneumonia in Toronto her career was effectively over and she was living on the edge of poverty. Her life was memorialized in numerous obituaries, but after her death Crawford quickly faded from memory. There were no recordings to preserve her voice for posterity, and no pupils to keep the memory of her career alive. The entry on Crawford in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada reduced her life story to a mere four sentences. If Cooper’s curiosity had not been aroused, Crawford would remain all but unknown, the details of her life forgotten. But now Cooper has done a remarkable job of constructing a detailed narrative of Crawford’s life and career from countless bits and pieces of information that she unearthed in Canada, Poland, Russia, and online. In addition to this excellent biography, she has also contributed a fine Wikipedia entry on the singer.

Cooper presents two biographies within the covers of this one book. A factual biography unfolds chronologically in the course of the book’s fifteen chapters. There is a certain amount of conjecture, but it is always presented as such – the evidence of what happened is given first, followed by a number of possible interpretations, often presented as questions. Each chapter is followed by what Cooper labels an “entr’acte,” and these taken together comprise a second biography – or rather, a charming biographical novel. The entr’acte chapters consist of vignettes that illustrate important events in Crawford’s life. Each one was inspired by an actual historical artifact – a newspaper clipping, a photograph, and so on – but Cooper uses these concrete objects as springboards for her invention, presenting imagined conversations and richly detailed descriptions to provide a more rounded, if somewhat speculative, character portrait. In the wrong hands, this approach could have fallen flat, but happily Cooper is just as adept at historical fiction as she is at biography. The entr’acte chapters are entirely engaging and, to this ear at least, strike just the right tone. They capture the manners, customs, and conversational idioms of a bygone era without being at all contrived or awkward.

The extensive research that Cooper undertook is detailed in the acknowledgements, notes, archival sources, and bibliographical materials listed at the end of the book. She got in touch with Crawford’s living relatives, including a nephew, since deceased, who recalled having met Bertha, and others who had photos and clippings to share. Research trips to Poland and Russia resulted in many helpful contacts and unearthed further archival sources, and the Ancestry website proved useful in detailing not only Crawford’s family lineage but also her transatlantic crossings, thanks to that source’s extensive passenger records. Each phase of Crawford’s life and career, from her church choir positions in Toronto to her Polish radio performances, is presented in compelling and impressive detail. After a twenty-five year career as a policy analyst in Ottawa, Cooper has found a new calling as a Canadian music researcher. I look forward with keen anticipation to her next project, whatever it may be.

I have not read anything by Zadie Smith. Not White Teeth, not On Beauty, not even Swing Time. Those are all on my wish list, but I have such a backlog of great books on my wish list that I may not get around to Zadie Smith for quite a while. But when I noticed that her most recent book, an essay collection titled Feel Free (released on 29 Jan. 2018), includes an essay on Justin Bieber … well, that couldn’t wait. I’m not a Belieber – at least, I don’t think I am – but I have taught a class on Bieber in years past as part of a unit on celebrity culture in my Music in North America course. So, curious to see what the British celebrity author had to say about the Canadian celebrity musician, I put a hold on Feel Free via the Toronto Public Library online catalogue. However I was number 36 on the waitlist and I couldn’t wait for my number to come up – it might be weeks from now, by which time this would all be such old news. I had to read the essay on Justin Bieber now. So I parted with $18.07 and bought the eBook. Was it worth it? Was that one essay worth $18.07?

On the whole I would say that yes, the essay – titled “Meet Justin Bieber!” – was worth the price of admission to the book. To start with, it is a new essay that has not been published elsewhere, unlike most of the other essays in the book. So this is not recycled Zadie Smith, it is original material. More to the point, it is an entertaining yet also thought provoking article. It dates from around 2013 (Smith is a bit vague on that point) which makes it ancient history as far as Bieber’s life story is concerned, but there are timeless elements to it that render its date of origin a moot point. I think the essay was likely written sometime after January 2014, when Bieber was charged with DUI in Florida, a fact that is alluded to obliquely in the essay. A very brief postscript was added more recently, perhaps in 2016.

Smith begins by ruminating on what it must be like to be Justin Bieber: “What does it feel like? Does it still feel like being a person? If you met Justin Bieber, would he be able to tell you?” Side note: I have not met Justin Bieber, but one of the students in my class a couple of years ago went to high school with Bieber in Stratford, and did not have nice things to say about him. But high school was a long time ago in Bieber years. I’m sure that Bieber is a very different person nowadays. Maybe, as Smith intimates, he no longer even feels like he is a person. To anticipate the philosophical thrust of Smith’s essay, it is possible that Bieber has transcended the Heideggerian Dasein to become a hyperreal Baudrilliardian simulacrum, leaving behind the mundane day-to-day reality that the rest of us inhabit. Or maybe he is just bummed out by being stalked by freaks on the sidewalk and is hiding out in his basement.

In an attempt to answer her provocative questions, Smith engages in a little thought experiment: she imagines a meeting between Justin Bieber and Martin Buber. It is an exercise in the “random input” technique of lateral thinking that Edward de Bono developed in 1968: you are stuck for an idea, so you pick two words that have nothing in common, try to figure out how to relate them to one another, and watch the creative sparks fly. But this is not quite a textbook example of that process, as the names were not chosen entirely at random: Smith observes in a footnote that Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German name. [That name, incidentally, means “beaver,” a singularly appropriate moniker for a Canadian celebrity musician.] This similarity of names has not gone unnoticed on Twitter, where an account that goes by the handle of “Justin Buber” offers tweets that combine “the pop stylings of Justin Bieber with the existential wisdom of philosopher Martin Buber”; it features an avatar that photoshops Buber’s bushy beard onto Bieber’s boyish face.

One point of contact that Smith discovers between Buber and Bieber is relationships: Bieber sings about them, Buber ruminates about them. Bieber’s relationships revolve around adolescent heteronormative mating rituals; Buber’s revolve around God. Smith observes that personal relationships range from the casual contact of a fan meet-and-greet (“I just touched Justin Bieber!”) to a life-changing experience in which one’s deepest essence is altered by another, e.g. holding your newborn child and watching her open her eyes for the first time.

Smith riffs for a while on Buber’s I and Thou and the two types of relationship that it explores: I-It and I-Thou. The former Smith likens to the meet-and-greet, in which the celebrity (Bieber) is an object to be approached, touched, and narrated about (on social media, inevitably); as Smith observes, it is “As if he [Bieber] were not a person at all, but a mountain range they had just climbed.” The characteristic communication mode of an I-It relationship is monologic; Smith cites Bieber’s 2012 single “Boyfriend” (700 million views on YouTube to date) by way of example. In this song, Bieber (who was only 18 years old at the time) is not looking for Buber’s ideal “living mutual relation” with the anonymous girlfriend; he is talking at her rather than with her. An I-Thou relationship, on the other hand, is dialogic, and Socrates is the model: the subject is continually in communication with others, “Recognizing the reality of other people – and having them recognize the reality of you.” If only Bieber could be more like Socrates… But this type of deep, meaningful connection is difficult to maintain – rather like Bieber’s on-again, off-again relationship with Selena Gomez, Smith wryly observes. Fans of Bieber will be happy to see that in the brief postscript Smith finds evidence in the album Purpose (2015) that the singer is moving from the superficial I-It mode to the deeper and more intimate I-Thou. He may yet transcend his Dasein to reach a new level of existence. Ever better, if current reports are to be believed, he might get back together with Selena Gomez.

We hope you enjoy our conversation with Métis poet, Gregory Scofield, about his book of poems, Louis: The Heretic Poems, and about the ways the historical figure of Riel has continued to be used in national narratives.

This week we sat down with three female leads of the Canadian Opera Company production of Louis Riel. Joanna Burt, Allyson McHardy, and Simone Osborne were kind enough to share their thoughts on the opera and the rehearsals so far! We hope you enjoy their reflections and thoughts on this work as much as we enjoyed our conversation with them!

Follow us on Twitter @RielOperaTalk and if you have any comments or questions, we would love to hear from you at LouisRielPodcast@gmail.com.

Check out other University of Toronto C150 events and projects at canada150.utoronto.ca/

This week’s episode features conversations with some of the cast for the upcoming Canadian Opera Company’s production of Louis Riel. We spoke with Russell Braun, Michael Colvin, and James Westman about their earlier encounters with Riel, the rehearsal process so far, and what they are looking forward to with the premiere just one week away! We hope you enjoy listening to this lively conversation!

Follow us on Twitter @RielOperaTalk and if you have any comments or questions, we would love to hear from you at LouisRielPodcast@gmail.com.

Check out other University of Toronto C150 events and projects at canada150.utoronto.ca/

The ICM is a proud co-sponsor of the symposium “Hearing Riel,” forthcoming on 21 April at Innis College Town Hall. Attendance is free, and is already oversold! However, the event will be viewable onscreen in the Innis lobby, and will also be webcast live, so you can listen to the conversation even without a ticket.

For all student and scholar attendees of the interdisciplinary “Hearing Riel pre-seminar” on Thursday, 20 April: let’s meet in the Trinity College Combination Room, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. Our guest scholars include Jean Teillet, Sherrill Grace, Colleen Renihan and Linda Hutcheon; we’re excited to involve Law, English, Music and Drama in a discussion about the many issues that arise in our present Canadian context surrounding the artistic representation and dramatic re-narration of legal histories and Indigenous peoples. SO, here are some optional readings by each author that attendees may peruse if they’d like to prepare for this exchange of ideas:

• Sherrill Grace, On the Art of Being Canadian (UBC Press 2009), Ch.3 “Inventing Iconic Figures,” 106-23 (excerpt)
• Linda and Michael Hutcheon, “Identity Crisis,” Opera Canada 57/4 (2017), Special Issue “Louis Riel at 50,” 18-24
• Colleen Renihan, “The Politics of Genre: Exposing Historical Tensions in Harry Somers’ Louis Riel,” in Opera Indigene, ed. Karantonis and Robinson (Ashgate 2011/Routledge 2016), 259-76
• Jean Teillet, “Exoneration for Louis Riel: Mercy, Justice, or Political Expediency?” Saskatchewan Law Review 67 (2004): 359-92

–bonus entries:
• Beverley McLachlin, “Louis Riel: Patriot Rebel,” Manitoba Law Journal 35/1 (2011), 1-13
• Janique DuBois’ 2005 Toronto Star article “Trudeau Can Make Louis Riel’s Dream A Reality“

This week’s episode features three Canadian musicologists – Profs. Colette Simonot of Brandon University, Colleen Renihan of Queen’s University and Sherry Lee of the University of Toronto- who offer their insights to Louis Riel the opera, in its past and present iterations. Our conversations touched on the 2005 McGill production, as well as the 2010 University of British Columbia production of Louis Riel, in addition to reflecting on what we hope to see in this year’s Canadian Opera Company revival of the opera.

Part one of the podcast features our conversations with Profs. Colette Simonot and Colleen Renihan, and part two is our conversation with Prof. Sherry Lee.

Tune in next week to hear our conversation with Peter Hinton, the director of the COC’s production of Louis Riel.

Follow us on Twitter @RielOperaTalk and if you have any comments or questions, we would love to hear from you at LouisRielPodcast@gmail.com.

This week’s episode features three Canadian musicologists – Profs. Colette Simonot of Brandon University, Colleen Renihan of Queen’s University and Sherry Lee of the University of Toronto- who offer their insights to Louis Riel the opera, in its past and present iterations. Our conversations touched on the 2005 McGill production, as well as the 2010 University of British Columbia production of Louis Riel, in addition to reflecting on what we hope to see in this year’s Canadian Opera Company revival of the opera.

Part one of the podcast features our conversations with Profs. Colette Simonot and Colleen Renihan, and part two is our conversation with Prof. Sherry Lee.

Tune in next week to hear our conversation with Peter Hinton, the director of the COC’s production of Louis Riel.

Follow us on Twitter @RielOperaTalk and if you have any comments or questions, we would love to hear from you at LouisRielPodcast@gmail.com.

Check out other University of Toronto C150 events and projects at canada150.utoronto.ca/

Correction: Prof. Simonot has since informed me that she misremembered when discussing the McGill production of Louis Riel and wishes to clarify that Mavor Moore was not in attendance then.