"Tributes to mark composer John Weinzweig’s 100th birthday" William Littler: Weinzweig led the struggle in Canada for the recognition of composition as a profession.
Had he lived a few years beyond a remarkable 93, Toronto composer John Weinzweig would have celebrated his 100th birthday March 11.
In his absence, the party is going on anyway, highlighted by a March 8 centenary concert at the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall, curated by Soundstreams artistic director Lawrence Cherney, and a March 9 day of lectures and lecture recitals, introduced by the composer’s son Daniel, at the university’s Edward Johnnson Building. On March 11, a lunchtime performance by the Cecilia Quartet, again at Walter Hall, will be followed by the unveiling of a commemorative plaque for the former Weinzweig family home on College Street, as part of the City of Toronto’s Legacy Project.
All events are free, a fact which surely would have pleased the composer’s left-leaning, Polish-Jewish immigrant father, whose social conscience and stubborn willpower his son clearly inherited.
Like Linda Loman, Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, John Weinzweig never tired of insisting that “attention must be paid” and in his case it meant attention to the creators of our musical culture.
There were certainly Canadian composers before him, but he led the struggle in Canada for the recognition of composition as a profession. As one of his University of Toronto students, flutist-composer Robert Aitken, argues, he was our first major teacher of composition, with a list of pupils that reads like a who’s who of notesmiths, including R. Murray Schafer, Harry Somers, Harry Freedman, Phil Nimmons and John Beckwith.
Did he try to make them mini-Weinzweigs? Not at all, insists one of them, recently retired CBC radio music producer David Jaeger: “He wanted to help us on a technical level. When I was working on an orchestral piece for my master’s thesis he told me ‘we are here to talk about how you write, not about esthetics.’”
Weinzweig the professor nevertheless did steer his students away from traditional tonality toward Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone method of composition, which he is generally credited with having introduced to Canada.
Not that all his music sounds like a footnote to Schoenberg. An early opus such as the ballet Red Ear of Corn sounds more like Aaron Copland and some of his late scores have a terse, aphoristic quality all their own.
Like almost all his contemporaries in composition he has suffered posthumous neglect. It has taken this year’s centennial celebrations to bring his music back to the stands of the Toronto and Montreal Symphony Orchestras (for more information on the national celebrations check the website johnweinzweig.com).
Will his music stand the test of time? Robert Aitken doesn’t hesitate to nominate the Divertimento No. 1 for flute and string orchestra as a candidate for ongoing repertoire status and Esprit Orchestra founder-conductor Alex Pauk seconds the nomination. That score even won a silver medal for chamber music at the 1948 Olympics.
Some of the vocal music also continues to attract performers, particularly Private Collection, which has been characterized as the most studied Canadian vocal work.
The future will, of course, take care of itself. But as John Beckwith, co-editor with Brian Cherney of a splendid recent volume (Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music) has so often argued, our musical culture does not thrive on neglect.
In a sense, music only exists when it is performed and if our major composers are to be recognized alongside our major writers and filmmakers, the public needs exposure to what they have to say.
Weinzweig fought for this exposure through his work with the Canadian League of Composers, the Canadian Music Centre and CAPAC, the performing rights society. He was also a tireless critic of Canadian orchestras, concert presenters and the CBC for their inadequate support of Canadian music. To paraphrase the title of a Gerald Green novel, he was Canadian music’s “last angry man.”
“We in Canada are still not in the habit of recognizing our creators for what they are worth,” declares Lawrence Cherney, “except perhaps in Quebec.” Cherney credits Weinzweig with nothing less than taking us musically into the 20th century.
He did so through words as well as music and in devising the March 8 centenary concert Cherney decided that the only words spoken should be recorded passages by the composer himself.
There will, however, be sung words by someone else. To help climax the concert Andrew Staniland, a winner of the John Weinzweig graduate scholarship at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, has been commissioned to write a song for soprano and harp. Choosing his own text, he titled it, more than appropriately, “Dear John”.