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A
bit of background information . . . . I
was born and raised in the Sault, and started piano lessons with Monica
McNally as a child. She had been a student of Kurt Kunzel, a German piano
teacher in the old style, who will still be remembered by many in the area
for his personal qualities and high standards; Kurt was the epicentre of
piano study in the Sault for many years. Monica in turn has devoted over
four decades to teaching piano locally, and many of her students have gone
on to bright careers in music or the arts. When I began taking piano in the
1960s it was still a very common thing to do, and for those of us who found
ourselves especially captivated by a love of music, the yearly Kiwanis Music
Festival was an enormous part of our lives. I'm no longer so sure that the
competitive aspect and the awarding of marks and prizes was such a good
thing, but nonetheless the festival did instill in everyone a sense of the
value and importance of music as something worth devoting those endless
hours of practice time to. I myself was especially fortunate during my high
school years in being awarded a scholarship for out-of-town study, which I
used for summer music lessons with Margaret Parsons-Poole of the Royal
Conservatory in Toronto. I then continued with her until the end of high
school, flying down to Toronto once a month on Saturday mornings.
Later
I had the privilege of studying with Douglas Voice at the University of
Ottawa, where I also studied piano pedagogy with Cynthia Floyd. The music
department there was a vibrant and exciting place for performance students,
with many top-notch international musicians. I didn't follow a full
performance program, but I did enjoy many fine opportunities for playing
with singers and instrumentalists, and in my third year I played the Bach
Goldberg Variations for a recital credit. I also played them again later in
London Ontario at the University of Western Ontario, but not for credit. In
fact at Western I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in musicology, and my
dissertation topic had nothing to do with piano--it was on the
twelfth-century poetry and music of the Provençal troubadours. I recently
converted it to html and placed it online here,
in case anyone might find something useful in it. The troubadour topic
allowed me to combine musicological research with another interest,
literature, and the opportunity to learn some of the Occitan language and
poetry was an added bonus of the project. I also managed to combine the two
arts in one of the graduate courses that I taught, which was titled
"The Golden Thread: Interrelations of Literature and Music in the
Modernist Era."
I'm still fascinated by the modernist period in art, yet I have to acknowledge that I haven't made that much room for twentieth-century music in my piano repertoire, I'm still working away at the traditional masters--Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms for the most part. I also love playing with other instrumentalists and singers, and I'd relish more opportunities to play the art song repertoire of Schumann, Brahms and Wolf. Most recently, the Hemiola Harbour Trio, consisting of Brenda Arrowsmith (clarinet), Teimour Sadykhov (cello), and myself, performed an all-Brahms recital of chamber music both in the Sault and in Sudbury. We did both the clarinet sonatas, the E minor cello sonata, and the heavenly A minor clarinet trio--such beautiful music! My most recent solo recital took place at 8 pm, November 26, 2005, in the Algoma University College auditorium, and it featured a selection of the Chopin nocturnes along with variation sets of Brahms, including the big Handel variations. Thanks to everyone who came, it's wonderful to have a full house and such a receptive audience. Since 2006 I've been somewhat held back by illness, but I'm planning to experiment with some house concerts using my Yamaha C7. My condition also makes it difficult to work in the darkroom pursuing another one of my interests, photography, but the convenience of the digital darkroom has helped with that, and I have a small gallery of black and white photos online here.
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