Beckwith turning 94, with some fanfare
When he reached the age of 90, the actor-comedian George Burns celebrated by doing a show in Las Vegas, at which time an interviewer asked how optimistic he felt about his future.
“I feel very optimistic,” Burns reportedly answered, “because very few people die after the age of 90.”
That was a joke, of course. But a week Sunday, Toronto composer John Beckwith will reach the age of 94 and that surely is no joke.
To celebrate he will likely be listening along with many of his admirers to the John Beckwith Songbook, a two-hour, free virtual concert honouring his 70-year career in music, the first of three such concerts available on YouTube at 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and thereafter for two weeks on the Confluence channel at confluenceconcerts.ca.
Confluence happens to be the name of one of Toronto’s most innovative music presenters, presided over by another Beckwith, the composer’s own musician-educator son Larry.
The concert was Larry’s idea, bringing together 36 singers, among them such well-known figures as soprano Barbara Hannigan, mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabo, tenor Benjamin Butterfield and baritone Russell Braun, performing from as far away as Paris.
Indeed, it is from her home in Paris that Hannigan will sing “Wearily a Wanderer Returns,” a song she premiered a generation ago while still a University of Toronto student.
“I missed the premiere,” its composer recalled the other day, “because it took place on a tour of the Maritimes with the very good pianist Robert Kortgaard.”
It is one of a number of songs his fellow listeners will be hearing for the first time.
“I have been going through the songs with Brad Christensen, a grad student at the university, who is working on my song repertoire (and will be singing one of its items himself in the concert) and I was surprised by how many I had forgotten.”
Like so many of his fellow composers, Beckwith has written more music than his public has yet heard. “I stopped composing a few years ago,” he admits. “I didn’t have the urge. And what’s the point? I have written a lot of pieces that haven’t had a second performance.” Many years ago it was this very problem that motivated his fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg to help found an organization in Vienna dedicated to presenting second performances of new music.
Beckwith’s own urge to compose appears to have developed naturally from a love of music during his student years. “I sang quite a bit before my voice changed, even some solo singing,” he says. “And in college I earned money as a studio (piano) accompanist. I was a good sight reader and learned the Schubert, Schumann and Brahms repertoire.”
His formal studies in composition included time spent with John Weinzweig at the University of Toronto and Nadia Boulanger in Paris, developing skills in instrumental as well as vocal composition. The list of his works tops 150.
Along the way he became an important teacher and writer, including even a few years as music critic of the Toronto Star in the early 1960s, but vocal music has remained a special interest, culminating in a series of operas produced in collaboration with the playwright James Reaney.
“Jamie lived in London and I lived in Toronto so our collaboration was almost exclusively through correspondence,” he recalls. The composer Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal carried on their famous collaboration much the same way. And like Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Beckwith and Reaney had their disagreements: “I wanted the leading character in our first opera to have a cat,” recalls Beckwith. Reaney replied tersely: “Cut the cat.”
Advice for potential opera composers? “You have to get a good book or you won’t have an opera. I’ve had students come up to me asking ‘What should I do for words?’ I tell them to get to know some writers.”
Beckwith himself has known some of Canada’s leading writers, including Margaret Atwood, Jay Macpherson, Dennis Lee and bpNichol, whom he regards as one of the most innovative of them all.
Not that he ignores the dead. His own unknowing collaborators from the distant past have ranged from the Tudor Englishman Ben Jonson to poets of China’s Tang Dynasty. And when students have come to him for advice in songwriting he has told them to “look at models. Look at Ravel.”
As productive as he has been in putting black dots on white paper, the sometime dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music and current dean of Canadian composers has been equally engaged as an advocate for Canada’s musical culture, serving as a director of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society and editor of two of its 25 volumes of pre-1950 Canadian music.
With disarming modesty he titled his memoirs, published in 2012 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, “Unheard Of.” In close to 400 consistently interesting pages, he reveals the title’s inaccuracy, concluding happily with the observation “Unheard Of? Maybe I exaggerate.”