{"id":148643,"date":"2010-12-12T17:51:36","date_gmt":"2010-12-12T17:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/celebrating-composer-teacher-and-writer-john-beckwith\/"},"modified":"2010-12-12T17:51:36","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T17:51:36","slug":"celebrating-composer-teacher-and-writer-john-beckwith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/celebrating-composer-teacher-and-writer-john-beckwith\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating composer, teacher and writer John Beckwith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing you see when you visit composer John<\/strong> Beckwith<\/strong>\u2019s home is his bicycle, standing in the hallway. At 83, he\u2019s an avid cyclist, and can be often seen on the streets of Toronto. He lives in the Annex, a neighbourhood of fine old houses, about a 10-minute pedal from the University of Toronto, where he taught for almost four decades. Fittingly, it was at the U of T\u2019s Walter Hall that a full program of his music was presented by Toronto\u2019s New Music Concerts in September.<\/p>\n

As a composition teacher, he gave instruction to over 100 students, up to his retirement in 1990. It\u2019s an impressive list, containing some of the country\u2019s leading figures in new music: Robert Aitken, Bruce Mather<\/strong>, Henry Kucharzyk<\/strong>, Peter Hatch<\/strong>, Kristi Allik<\/strong>, Alice Ping-Yee Ho<\/strong>, John Burge<\/strong>, Omar Daniel<\/strong>, Clark Ross<\/strong> and James Rolfe<\/strong>, among others.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also maintained a parallel career as a writer, penning reviews and essays on a variety of musical subjects as well as a series of books. In Search of Alberto Guerrero<\/em> (about his piano teacher) appeared in 2006, and a new book about composer John Weinzweig<\/strong> (co-edited by Beckwith and composer Brian Cherney <\/strong>and published by Wilfred Laurier University Press) will be launched this month, funded in part by the SOCAN Foundation.<\/p>\n

But most of all, Beckwith is a composer, with a substantial number of works in his catalogue. \u201cThe number is probably close to 150 nowadays,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd some of them are fairly big pieces. My opera Taptoo!<\/em> takes two and a half hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of his pieces have received numerous performances \u2014 and he has mixed feelings about a few. \u201cMy most performed pieces, Five Lyrics of the Tang Dynasty<\/em> (1947), are very slight. But they were published and they\u2019ve been done over and over. Since then, I\u2019ve written songs that are much more substantial.\u201d On the other hand, he quite likes his String Quartet<\/em> (1977), and is happy to see that his Sharon Fragments<\/em> (1966) have found a place in the choral repertoire. \u201cThey\u2019ve been done a great deal,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich surprises me, because they\u2019re rather difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he admits to a few personal favourites in his catalogue. \u201cI\u2019m very pleased with the flute concerto I did for Bob Aitken. He\u2019s played it with two different orchestras, but it\u2019s never been played in Toronto, even though it was commissioned by the Toronto Arts Council.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, when Beckwith was born, in Victoria, B.C., in 1927, there was virtually no such thing as an arts council or a commission for a composer. Throughout his career, he\u2019s seen the gradual professionalization of composition in Canada. Indeed, he\u2019s been actively involved in many of the institutions that have aided composers: the CBC, the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday there are about 700 associate composers of the Canadian Music Centre,\u201d he says with a pride that\u2019s tempered by a concern that this number might be too high. \u201cHow many of them are really serious composers, writing pieces of serious length and serious demand?\u201d he asks. \u201cTo become an associate of the CMC you don\u2019t have to do much. It sounds snobbish and elitist to say it, but you can\u2019t get into the College of Surgeons and Physicians without proving you know what you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

His considerable career<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}