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The University of Alberta may be well over a century old, but its music department is much younger: 50 this year. It is celebrating that anniversary in style at the Winspear Centre this Sunday afternoon, with a concert featuring students, faculty and alumni.
There has, of course, been music at the university for much longer, but it wasn’t part of the founding mandate. Indeed, Convocation Hall, the university’s main concert venue, opened in 1915 as a ceremonial meeting hall rather than a place for music.
However, music soon started being performed at the university, and in 1920 the Women’s Musical Club of Edmonton urged the university to develop music courses, without success. Convocation Hall acquired an organ in 1925, in memory of the 80 university students killed in the First World War. A Glee Club was started, as well as a university orchestra, which became the radio orchestra of CKUA when that pioneer radio station started broadcasting in 1927.
Music classes were finally given when the department of fine arts was established in 1945, and the University of Alberta Mixed Chorus gave its first concerts in the same year. But it wasn’t until 1965 that an actual department of music was created, with the choral conductor Richard Eaton as chair. Faculty composers and teachers such as Malcolm Forsyth established a national reputation, while Violet Archer became known worldwide as a pioneering female classical composer.
Convocation Hall itself got a facelift and a new organ in 1977, after the department moved into the new Stage 1 of the Fine Arts Building in 1970. But the promised Stages 2 and 3 never materialized, and the lack of proper facilities and concert hall has been a major impediment for the department.
Department chair William Street is looking forward to the downtown Galleria project, which would house the music department if and when it gets built. “We’ll be moving to disparate spaces scattered in the Fine Arts Building to ones dedicated to music.”
Over those 50 years, the emphasis has gradually changed. In the early days, the model was that of the traditional British classical music academy. Now the department has embraced world music (housing the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology) and popular music. As David Gramit, a professor in the music department, points out, “The faculty have become much more specialized.”
There are thriving world music ensembles in addition to the more traditional student ensembles, orchestra and choirs. “It’s one of the major universities in Canada where students can gain excellent classical music training and instruction in world music and ethnomusicology,” says Gramit. The popular music courses have also attracted a lot of students. “Now we’re about society, about politics, about arts, through music,” explains Street.
The department’s Sunday Winspear concert, though, is largely traditional. The second half is a performance of two movements from one of the grandest of all classical pieces. The University of Alberta Orchestra, U of A Choir, Madrigal Singers, alumni, and members of the Richard Eaton Singers will join forces for the last two movements of Beethoven’s Symphony No.9. The soloists in the choral movement include one of Canada’s leading tenors, John Tessier, and the conductor is Petar Dundjerski.
The first half, if conventional in structure, is imaginative in content. For an overture, it opens with one of the most entertaining and witty of French piano pieces, Milhaud’s mercurial Scaramouche suite for two pianos. The soloists are two of Edmonton’s best-known pianists, Jacques Després and Patricia Tao, both of whom teach at the department.
The concerto is the Horn Concerto No. 1 by Richard Strauss, an astonishingly mature work for a composer who, at 18, had just become an undergraduate. This is a performance with a twist; it is in arrangement for horn and winds, by the University Symphonic Wind Ensemble, conducted by Angela Schroeder.
The solo horn player is former Canadian Brass member Jeff Nelson.
The final work in the first half enters new musical territories. Mothership by the American composer William Bates was first performed by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Sydney Opera House in 2011.
It’s a sound picture of a space mothership “that is ‘docked’ by several visiting soloists” and will be given in the composer’s own version for wind ensemble and electronics.
Various university ensembles will be playing music, from Bach to West African, in the foyer for an hour before the concert.