McGill vying to be Canada’s premier school for music students

Schulich School putting music first, thanks to philanthropic and Quebec government support

MONTREAL— Canada’s finest music school?

First a confession. I happen to teach at one of the candidates, the Royal Conservatory of Music, home to Toronto’s beloved Koerner Hall and neighbour to another candidate, the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, home to the country’s pre-eminent music library.

Alas for Toronto, the talk these days seems to be of Montreal and McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, whose symphony orchestra is scheduled to perform a 10th-anniversary concert Nov. 17 at Koerner Hall under Alexis Hauser’s direction.

McGill has had a school of music since 1904, but it was Seymour Schulich’s $10-million gift a decade ago that led to its renaming in his honour and Elizabeth Wirth’s subsequent $7.5-million gift that led to the naming of the music building in her honour.

Contrary to rumour, these munificent gifts did not go into real estate. The Quebec government paid most of the cost of a handsome new music building. They are funding a drive for excellence beyond the reach of most sister institutions.

McGill’s new music research and production facilities include a four-storey, symphonic-size Music Multimedia Room with state-of-the-art recording facilities and a Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology that brings together internationally respected researchers from academia and industry with expertise in science and engineering as well as music.

Popularly referred to by an amphibian-inspired acronym, CIRMMT has been called “Canada’s premiere centre expressly dedicated to research in the science and technology of music.”

Not that music’s past is ignored. Associate dean Julie Cumming, herself a noted medievalist, likes to point out that at last year’s joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, the world’s largest conference of its kind, McGill participants outnumbered not only those from all other Canadian universities but those from Harvard, Yale and Princeton as well.

Dean Sean Ferguson goes even further, pointing out that there are basically three types of music schools: those that provide professional conservatory training, such as Juilliard and the Curtis Institute; those that are humanities-based, such as Harvard University; and those that focus on music technology, such as MIT and Stanford University.

“What makes us unique is that we are the first school in Canada to operate at this level in all three areas,” he says.

“It’s not the facilities that make a great school, it’s the teachers and students. If you are a Canadian and want to study music you should not have to leave Canada to attend a great school. We aim to be that school.”

Proud words? Obviously. But after spending a long weekend on the McGill campus during open house, prowling the corridors, talking with teachers and students and attending concerts and classes, they did not seem to me to smack of hyperbole.

“When I enter the building, I already feel young,” says Hauser, a Viennese maestro known in Ontario for his years conducting Orchestra London.

“And I never address the musicians as students. I expect professional results from them.”

Several years ago, television viewers could watch a remarkable performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by the McGill Symphony Orchestra under Timothy Vernon’s direction.

A subsequent recording of a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony under Hauser’s direction demonstrates that even with personnel changing every year, today’s best university orchestras are, as the maestro implies, professional in all but name.

The priority given music at McGill is not replicated at all universities across the country and it certainly is not to be found in our music-starved primary and secondary schools. As dean Ferguson bluntly asserts, McGill owes the high quality of its entry-level students to the work of private teachers, not to our public schools.

Maybe these schools should listen to the words of one of our leading philanthropists, the aforementioned Schulich, who on more than one occasion has asserted that “music is what makes us human.”