Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music

By Brian Cherney

1

A Self-Made Composer      

John Beckwith and Brian Cherney   

An outline of his life story is followed by an assessment of his achievement and a brief personality sketch.  Original research, some of it based on the extensive collection of Weinzweig’s papers in Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, provides a rounded portrait of the composer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780889209220

Brian Cherney

Since 1972, Brian Cherney has been on the staff of the Faculty of Music (now the Schulich School of Music) at McGill University, where he teaches composition at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. His extensive compositional output includes orchestral, choral, and instrumental music. His monograph on the Canadian composer Harry Somers was published in 1975.

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Preface and Acknowledgements

In the spring of 2006, the editors each visited John and Helen Weinzweig at the seniors’ home in Toronto where they were then living. In the course of several conversations after these visits, we came to the conclusion that it was time for a new study of Weinzweig and his music. It had been over a decade since the appearance of the only monograph devoted to him, and during much of that time Weinzweig had remained active and productive. The Weinzweig Fonds at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa had meanwhile acquired new deposits but had so far been little explored. Since neither of us felt that we could undertake such a large project on our own, we struck on the idea of inviting others to join us in developing a volume devoted to his life and music, which we would co-edit.

Our letter to possible collaborators met with a heartening response, and Brian Henderson of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press said he thought the book would be a worthy addition to his growing list of publications on music, so we were encouraged to proceed. The fifteen contributors represent a mix of Canadian composers, theorists, musicologists, and performers. Six (John Rea, Elaine Keillor, Robert Aitken, David Jaeger, and both co-editors) studied under Weinzweig; four (Robin Elliott, Alan Gillmor, Kathleen McMorrow, and David Olds) had collegial and social contacts with him; five (Catherine Nolan, Clark Ross, James Wright, Drew Stephen, Eleanor Stubley) belong to a younger generation for whom he is a pioneer figure.

A Weinzweig Collection is a serious study of various facets of John Weinzweig’s life and work, without such technical complexity as would deter a general musical readership. While not exhaustive, the scope of topics is broad, in keeping with Weinzweig’s extensive compositional career and his long and varied involvements in the Canadian musical scene. We have framed the essays with a biographical portrait and a brief personal memoir, both incorporating newly researched material.

We would like to express our gratitude to the many organizations and individuals who have helped bring this project into being. The Canadian Music Centre has been an invaluable resource of scores, recordings, and documentation. John Gray, audio archivist, a close associate of Weinzweig’s in his last years, helped gather interview material and assemble photographs, many from his own collection. Elisabeth Bihl and Richard Truhlar provided useful advice.

For research assistance, we thank the music library staffs at McGill (Cynthia Leive), Carleton, the University of Toronto, and the Royal Conservatory (Cheryl Martin), and the staff of Library and Archives Canada (Ilene McKenna and especially Rachelle Chiasson-Taylor, who obtained many of the photographs).

Daniel Foley copied the music examples for several of the essays. Erin Bustin transcribed recorded interviews. André Leduc and Larry Weinstein helped us locate illustrations, as did Brenda Carroll of the CBC Archives. David Jaeger, in consultation with the editors, prepared the compact disc of Weinzweig’s music, illustrating a remarkable span of close to sixty years. In compiling it, we also received helpful advice from Allan Morris of the CBC Archives, and from Mark Tetreault and Ed Marshall. Bill Skolnik of the Toronto Musicians’ Association (Local 149, A.F. of M.) kindly gave permission for reproduction of various previously recorded works. To all of them, our warmest thanks.

Paul and Daniel Weinzweig, John and Helen’s sons, have been enthusiastic supporters of the publication from the start, and Daniel Weinzweig has given us access to family documents not yet acquired by the Fonds. Their support is greatly appreciated.

The co-editors express their thanks to the SOCAN Foundation for assisting this publication with a research grant. Finally, we have greatly appreciated the expertise and friendly collaboration of our editor, Rob Kohlmeier, and his Wilfrid Laurier University Press associates in all phases of this project.

Weinzweig was an unforgettable personality, and his music has a central place in the Canadian repertoire of his time. We believe that all of those who contributed to the book found their work—whether it consisted of new discoveries or the consolidation of earlier explorations—worthwhile and rewarding. For all readers, whether performers, scholars, composers, or listeners, our book aims to provide valuable insights into John Weinzweig’s accomplishments and the pivotal role he played in the evolution of composition in Canada, insights which we hope will inspire them to renew and enlarge upon their acquaintance with his music in the years to come.

—J.B., B.C.

Manuscript page from Gertrude V. Anderson, John Weinzweig: Life Story in Progress (1939). Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

Chapter 1

A Self-Made Composer

JOHN BECKWITH

BRIAN CHERNEY

As a child, I recall that I had some nightmares. And now in my senior category I have another nightmare. I thought I was through with nightmares—at my age I shouldn’t be having any nightmares. But I still have a nightmare that some nosey person is going to discover a piano concerto composed by Mozart at the age of two. Now, when the CBC gets hold of this darn thing, they’re going to push it and they’re going to sell it; it’s going to be the most national exposure ever, and we can forget about Canadian music for a while. Now that’s my nightmare.

Now it’s been obvious to me for some years that Mozart is in the category of most programs but first, a divertimento by Mozart. That’s a sugar pill apparently and I’ve never made that particular category, despite the fact that I’ve written more divertimenti than Mozart. Actually, I’ve written twelve of them but I never quite made that sugar pill category, and I’m a little bit jealous, because Mozart certainly has become a Canadian citizen, and he’s become the number one Canadian composer. All you have to do is look at the catalogue of recordings.

And that brings me to a recording that was made by the CBC Vancouver Orchestra as a birthday present for me about four years ago. It was a recording of four of my divertimenti: Nos. 1, 4, 3, and 7. It was supposed to be a birthday gift for me, which is very nice, except that it was never released, and I got a bill for $11,500, if I want that released. That’s the only time in my life that I got a birthday present with a bill.

—John Weinzweig, speaking at a round-table discussion of CBC music producers, members of the CLC, and a panel of arts administrators, Toronto, 2002

These remarks, delivered spontaneously to a gathering of members of the arts community in Toronto towards the end of his long life, give a vivid sense of what mattered most in John Weinzweig’s professional life: the status of the composer in Canada. His drive to establish and maintain a prominent place for Canadian composers and their music stretched over a period of some sixty years. His remarks reveal much else about the man: his dry, acerbic humour (springing in no small measure from a sense of outrage), his characterization of European music (especially Mozart, for whom he seemed to have a special animosity) as sugar (presumably used to mollify and sweeten up recalcitrant radio listeners), and his firm sense of the importance of his own unique contribution as a composer to the musical life of the country.

In the early years—especially in the 1940s and 50s—he was considered a radical figure, advocating the use of modernist techniques, which constituted a fundamental departure from the prevailing romanticism, largely a British import. In an interview with the journalist Frank Rasky in 1981, Weinzweig characterized himself as a radical romantic: I’m a radical romantic. Some of my colleagues think I’m mellowing with age. Nonsense! … I love an old-fashioned folk tune and jazz that really swings. But I’ve always been a musical adventurer, … a rebel. ¹ Later the phrase radical romantic was adopted by Larry Weinstein as the title of his documentary film about Weinzweig and by Elaine Keillor as a subtitle for her book-length study of the composer. ² The pairing of these evidently contradictory terms may be alliterative and neat, but as a summary of his musical personality it is inadequate and misleading. His work became less radical as new avant-gardisms appeared in the 1960s and beyond—not all of which he espoused. The romantic aspects of such early scores as The Whirling Dwarf reflected the repertoires he studied and performed in his youth. Later works had hints of personal feeling (irony, pathos) which might suggest a romantic, and which could have their basis in another self-characterization, as a dreamer. ³ However, his mature scores accord scarcely at all with the musical tenets of Romanticism.

Born in Toronto on the eve of the First World War (11 March 1913), John Jacob Weinzweig lived long enough to experience a number of shifts of style and aesthetics in the music of the twentieth century: not only the rise and fall of serialism (which he espoused early in his career), but also the advent of electronic music, neo-romanticism, minimalism, computer music, and so on. The elder son of Polish-immigrant parents, he was educated at Grace Street School in the west-end Jewish ghetto of Toronto, and at Harbord Collegiate Institute. He took his first music lessons on piano with Gertrude V. Anderson at age fourteen, on mandolin at the Workman’s Circle Peretz School, and on saxophone and sousaphone at Harbord. Anderson figures prominently as an early influence. Her fifteen-page handwritten account of his early career (1939) is a fond verbal portrait, with many details not related elsewhere. She speaks of his intelligent and upright parents. In his first compositions, produced when he had only been studying piano for one short year and theory for but a few months, she says she recognized the germ of true creative genius. From his HCI years, she enumerates a string of other scores: "an orchestral work, a group of piano pieces scored for orchestra and an orchestration [arrangement?] entitled ‘Scenes on the Volga’ scored for, and played by the Collegiate orchestra. This was followed later on by a violin concerto with string trio accompaniment and an overture scored for full orchestra. All of these early works shewed [sic] steady advancement." ⁴ None of these scores has survived.

Harbord Collegiate Institute was founded in 1892. The largely Jewish student population in the between-wars period boasted a high achievement record in both scholarship and the arts. Several of its talented violinists went on to occupy desks in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, ⁵ and in Weinzweig’s time bright lights included the economist Louis Rasminsky and the delicatessen king Sam Shopsowitz. Later notable graduates were the comedians Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster and the conductor Victor Feldbrill.

The extracurricular school orchestra was inaugurated in 1927 by Brian S. McCool, a member of the English department, as an adjunct of the Literary Society. A photo in the 1928 yearbook, the Harbord Review, shows twenty-five players with McCool as conductor: The Orchestra was present at all meetings of The Society and delighted us with its splendid rendering of several difficult and well-known selections. ⁶ There are similar photos in the 1929 and 1930 yearbooks, with twenty-four players in each. Accompanying the 1930 photo is a list of players’ names, but Weinzweig’s name does not appear. The Review’s photo of 1932 depicts thirty-two or thirty-three players, and offers a description: From the instrumentation …, consisting of two pianos, two cellos, tuba, trombone, trumpet, cornet, two saxophones, two banjos, traps, drums, four mandolins and twenty-four violins, it may be seen that it is no ordinary school orchestra. This adds up to a larger complement: forty-two players. It is impossible to determine whether Weinzweig is the tuba player in the photo, and this time no list of names is given. The 1932 report mentions that two boys in the orchestra have contributed original compositions, a waltz by Joseph Barshtz and a slow movement by Morris Surdin, but nothing by Weinzweig. ⁷

McCool is credited with recognizing Weinzweig’s musical aptitudes and encouraging him to perform (on sousaphone, i.e., tuba) and conduct with the Harbord orchestra. Besides the Literary Society meetings and school assemblies, the orchestra accompanied operetta productions and also played concerts at community locations such as hospitals and retirement homes. According to Anderson (see above), the orchestra introduced some of his earliest compositions, but lacking programs it is difficult to verify this. After graduation in 1931, Weinzweig continued his association with the orchestra for the 1931–2 season. In 1932 a remodelling of the school building was completed and at the opening ceremonies of the new auditorium Reginald Stewart was the invited solo pianist. This may have been Weinzweig’s introduction to his future conducting teacher.

Throughout his high-school years, John engaged in miscellaneous performing activities, often with his younger brother Morris (Mo), later a prominent professional saxophonist. On his graduation, Canada was in the throes of the Great Depression. Weinzweig enrolled in a course in bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing at a commercial school, with a view to helping in his father’s firm (Weinzweig and Perenson, furriers), ⁸ and simultaneously completed Grade XIII (required for university entrance) in night school. He now studied piano with another teacher, George Boyce, but continued lessons in music theory with Gertrude Anderson. For three years he prepared for advanced and full-time musical studies by completing the Grade X piano and Grade V theory requirements of the Toronto Conservatory and continuing his freelance performing, while living at home and holding down the daytime bookkeeping job.

Weinzweig epitomizes the self-made composer—not self-taught entirely, but certainly self-made. Asked in 1968 about his start in music, he summarized:

Between the ages of 14 and 19 I studied the piano, mandolin, sousaphone, double bass and tenor saxophone (and harmony). I played and conducted school orchestras, dance bands, weddings, lodge meetings and on electioneering trucks for a range of fees between two dollars and a promise. I played Pirates of Penzance, Santa Lucia, Poet and Peasant, Blue Danube, St. Louis Blues, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, Chopin waltzes and Tiger Rag. At age 19 I got serious and decided to become a composer. ⁹

At age 19 I got serious and decided to become a composer. ¹⁰ Not I wanted to be, but I decided. And serious, in contrast to the cited repertoire from Chopin Waltzes to Tiger Rag. At nineteen, he appears to have reasoned, you go to university to learn how to be a physician or an engineer, so that is where you will learn how to be a composer, and you prepare by writing the TCM music theory examinations. But no one ever explained tonality to me. ¹¹ The exams were a sort of Papiermusik. The chord progressions and successive key centres by which, for instance, a classical sonata or symphony movement was structured—the sharpened fourth degree of the scale leading forward, the flattened seventh degree returning back home—it was a rare teacher who put across that kind of musical perception. On enrolment in the Faculty of Music, he found his instructors, Healey Willan and Leo Smith (both English born and trained) unhelpful, and the classes and exams just as limited as those of his preparation years. Unmusical, and even anti-musical he called them, though acknowledging that Smith was a capable musician and scholar. He persevered. When the Faculty’s examiners rejected his first attempt at a string quartet, he patiently wrote them another, which they (perhaps grudgingly) accepted. ¹²

More gratifying than his classes at the Faculty of Music were his conducting lessons with Stewart, and working with an orchestra. While an undergraduate, he became the founding conductor of the University Symphony Orchestra. Producing live concerts—organizing them, choosing the music, and rehearsing it (Mozart, Schubert, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov)—brought him closer to the musical experience. The orchestra medium became the goal of compositional ambitions. Writing reviews for the student newspaper was another valued outlet, forcing him to formulate a stand on aesthetic issues. ¹³

Weinzweig expected to spend two years completing the three-year Mus.Bac. program at the University of Toronto, since with the TCM certification he was entitled to skip first year. But the time required for the second quartet attempt meant a third full year. His compositional development was delayed, but meanwhile he broadened his skills, and drew favourable attention, for his work with the University Symphony Orchestra. ¹⁴ Anderson records that during his University of Toronto years he took summer orchestration lessons with Louis Waizman, an Austrian-born orchestral musician and teacher. ¹⁵ Howard Hanson, composer and director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, visiting Toronto, interviewed him, and with Hanson’s encouragement he was accepted for the master’s course at Rochester.

Weinzweig conducting the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal, c. 1936. Collection of Daniel Weinzweig

He spent the scholastic year 1937–8 at Eastman, remaining for the summer, after completing his degree, for further lessons with his composition teacher, Bernard Rogers. It was by far the broadest expansion of his musical horizons up to that point in his career. In the 1938 Eastman School yearbook (wrongly dated 1939), a photograph shows eighty-seven graduate candidates, grouped without designation of their majors (composition, music history, performance). Weinzweig is in the front row. Prominent names among his fellow graduates are Frederick Fennell, H. Owen Reed, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Arthur Whittemore. Weinzweig’s copy of the publication is adorned with autographs of various students and instructors. Charles Arnold writes: "Dear Jack: It’s been nice knowing a real composer and musician. I hope I get a chance to play some of your things. Good luck. Nelson Watson signs with the identification string bass instructor." ¹⁶ Weinzweig played double bass in the Eastman orchestra.

Besides the welcome association with like-minded young musicians, and the tryouts of student works—his own and others—by Eastman performers, Weinzweig’s musical senses were roused by hearing new music not previously available to him—works by US contemporaries (Robert Ward, Warren Benson, Henry Cowell, David Diamond, Hanson himself) featured in Eastman festival concerts, and works by international exponents of modernism which he studied in the Sibley Library’s collection of scores and recordings. In Toronto in the mid-1930s, an orchestral concert of music by Igor Stravinsky conducted by the composer and a solo concert by George Gershwin as pianist-composer had been isolated highlights, and there was as yet no significant library of printed and recorded music; by contrast, the season in Rochester offered many such encounters, with greater challenge.

For nearly a decade, the career had been in preparation—high school, university-entrance studies, undergraduate and graduate terms of three years and one year respectively. Weinzweig was now twenty-six. How to launch a professional career? My objective … was to go to Hollywood and write music for film. But I learned from some of my colleagues, and from the general economic climate of the Depression, that Hollywood wasn’t waiting for me. ¹⁷ A younger Toronto colleague, Louis Applebaum, made the Hollywood venture around this time, resulting in good contacts and a lifelong involvement in film and theatre music in Canada. But Weinzweig was more cautious. He looked around for teaching opportunities, first in New York State and then back in Toronto, but there were no jobs. He signed a contract to teach private lessons in theory and composition for the Toronto Conservatory of Music: maybe I had half a dozen pupils. ¹⁸ There were a few local performances of his music. His student orchestral pieces were programmed, but one was too long, according to a former teacher, and another had incorrect harmonies, according to a conductor. ¹⁹ The Vogt Society had recently been formed, named for the pioneer music educator Augustus Stephen Vogt (1861–1926), with a declared commitment to newly written works. When its agenda seemed aesthetically unsympathetic, Weinzweig and other young musicians began plans for an independent group, to be called the Friends of New Music, but were forced to abandon them at the start of the war. He teamed up with other composers of his generation: besides Applebaum, the circle of communication included Godfrey Ridout, Barbara Pentland, Leonard Basham, Phyllis Gummer, and Eldon Rathburn. A common attack on professional problems was difficult to maintain in the war years, but commentators began to recognize the new voices emerging, especially Pentland and Weinzweig.

He and Helen Tenenbaum were married on 12 July 1940. Helen was working and she earned much more than I did. ²⁰ His bride was born in Poland in 1915 and came to Canada at an early age with her divorced mother. Her formative years had been marked by poverty and illness, as well as a deep love of books, foretelling the writer she would (much later) become. In her early twenties she spent two years in a Gravenhurst, Ontario, sanatorium. Shortly after she returned to Toronto, she was riding the College Street street-car when she spotted an old high school friend, John Weinzweig, on the street. She jumped out, and ran over, ‘John, it’s me, Helen Tenenbaum!’’Helen,’ he said, startled. ‘I thought you were dead!’ And so began a great intellectual romance. ²¹

In 1941 Weinzweig’s career took a decisive upward turn when the violinist/conductor Samuel Hersenhoren offered him a steady position writing incidental scores for radio dramas and documentaries produced by the CBC. He rapidly became known for his original and imaginative handling of assignments. Moreover, for him personally the job represented not only financial security (by the later 1940s he was supporting Helen and two small children) but a chance to hear his musical ideas in live performance with weekly regularity. A coast-to-coast audience heard his name in radio credits. When approached to express his views about the composing profession and the future of music, he gave interviews and wrote essays and review columns about his problems, referring to himself in the third person, though reflecting also what he had learned from his circle of colleagues. He did it well, tempering his sometimes belligerent comments with irony and humour. In 1941 the New York composer Lazare Saminsky visited Toronto to research new compositional trends, an investigation which resulted in a journal article and eventually a book. ²² Saminsky persuaded the (US) League of Composers to mount a concert of music by Weinzweig and other contemporary Canadians; this took place at the New York Public Library on 11 January 1942. In March of that year, and again in March of the following year, through Saminsky’s initiative, works by various Canadians—again including Weinzweig—appeared in programs by the choir of New York’s Temple Emanu-El, where Saminsky was music director. On 19 March 1942, an all-Canadian broadcast by the BBC Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Sir Adrian Boult featured Weinzweig’s Eastman thesis, the tone poem The Enchanted Hill. It had been performed under Hanson’s direction in Rochester, and on 5 January 1943 the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under its conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, presented it again—the first major exposure of his music in his home town.

Helen Tenenbaum and John Weinzweig at the time of their marriage, 1940. Collection of Daniel Weinzweig

The Enchanted Hill (the title and program derive from a poem by Walter de la Mare) epitomizes his absorption of late-Romantic models such as Brahms (whose Symphony No. 2 was a test piece for his conducting exam at Eastman) and especially Sibelius, much favoured at Eastman during Hanson’s directorship. But among the discoveries of his study year the twelve-tone technique was of crucial significance. Few musicians had studied or performed the European twelve-tone scores, then barely a decade and a half old, and none of Weinzweig’s Eastman instructors had any knowledge of this new musical pathway. He heard the Lyrische Suite of Alban Berg in a recording, analyzed that score, and read reports of the technique in journals such as The Musical Quarterly and Modern Music. (The definitive essay on the topic by Arnold Schoenberg was not yet published.) ²³ As he gained confidence and a measure of recognition, his ruminations about the technique influenced his creative work in fundamental ways. He became a North American carrier—and adapter—of dodecaphony, alongside such US composers as Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions, and Ben Weber.

As the war continued, Weinzweig made inquiries about enlisting in the Canadian Forces in a musical capacity, first with the Navy and then with the Air Force. ²⁴ From late December of 1943 to the end of the war, he served as a music theory instructor at the Rockcliffe base of the Royal Canadian Air Force in Ottawa, continuing to accept radio and film assignments and compose concert works as time allowed. This was the interlude of his string-orchestra work Interlude in an Artist’s Life. Positive benefits were the regular contacts with players who would later become well known in the profession, among them the music educator Ken Bray, the pianist Neil Chotem, and the flutist Dirk Keetbaas. Weinzweig contributed a chatty article, Sax Facts and Jazz, to the base newsletter. ²⁵ The two Band-Hut Sketches were composed at Rockcliffe, and on 19 July 1944 the RCAF Central Band broadcast the second sketch with Weinzweig conducting.

Back in Toronto, he found his Conservatory ²⁶ classes burgeoning, and decided to concentrate on teaching as his gainful employment, dropping incidental-music composing, lucrative though it was, in favour of the concert-music genres where he felt more creative freedom. His Divertimenti Nos. 1 and 2, his violin, cello, and piano sonatas, his Quartet No. 2, the ballet The Red Ear of Corn, and the song cycle Of Time and the World all belong to the period 1945–50. These were productive years.

They were also stimulating years. Flocking to his studio now were a number of talented pupils whose aim was not just to pass a few exams but to acquire professional know-how, and whose outlook was, like his, one of open-minded and up-to-date inquiry. Most were on veterans’ education grants. As Weinzweig recalled, About ninety per cent … had been in uniform. They were older students, a large number were professional musicians and they sought careers as composers, conductors, and jazz arrangers … That was the richest period of [my] teaching activity and the most satisfying period. ²⁷ The first extended study of his work in a professional journal, in 1960, cited some of the outstanding figures in his class from this period—Somers, Freedman, Twa, Dolin, Peacock, Nimmons, Betts, Adaskin—as disciples whose individual personalities their mentor respected, without demanding that they imitate his style. ²⁸ As a later student put it, at this time Weinzweig represented for aspiring composers a Parnassus of one. ²⁹ His alternative methods not only drew aspiring composers but also appealed to performers whose compositional aptitude had been kept under wraps (Murray Adaskin) and to contemporaries whose interest was not centrally creative (Victor Feldbrill in conducting, Howard Cable in conducting and arranging, Kenneth Peacock in ethnomusicological research, Mavor Moore in musical comedy).

The succession of new works attracted positive attention both in Canada and abroad. In 1948, the Divertimento No. 1 won a silver medal in the Olympic Arts Competition in London, and a couple of years later the British music publishers Boosey and Hawkes Ltd produced both it and the Divertimento No. 2, giving them grand treatment with full score, miniature score, and pianoreduction formats. Partly with Boosey’s promotion, performances of these works ensued in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Brazil. Howard Hanson paid tribute to his Canadian alumnus in a Toronto address in 1948. ³⁰ A New York critic enthused over his score for The Red Ear of Corn at its Toronto premiere in 1949. The suite from the ballet was performed in Vancouver (under his baton), along with two other works by him, at the Symposium of Canadian Music in March 1950, the largest gathering devoted to Canadian composers up to that time. Weinzweig attended the symposium, and later called it a seminal event in the evolution of our creative life. ³¹ On 16 May of the following year, the Royal Conservatory and the CBC were co-sponsors of a full concert of Weinzweig’s music, with a chamber orchestra and several soloists, presented in Toronto before a live audience, and broadcast on national radio.

Some critics welcomed the powerful new presence in Canadian music; others were not sure what to make of it. Milton Wilson, in the Canadian Forum, saluted Weinzweig’s exhilarating talent, and singled out the Piano Sonata for its combination of lucidity and power (it was the best composition by a Canadian that I have encountered), while William Krehm, in The Critic, said he had no idea a composer of Weinzweig’s stature was working in Canada; but, reporting on a concert by the Jewish Folk Choir devoted mainly to contemporary music from the Soviet Union, Pearl McCarthy deadpanned: John Weinzweig’s Toronto music … stood in marked contrast to the Soviet music, because of its modernism. ³²

In the 1950s and 60s, Chester Duncan, a professor of English at the University of Manitoba and an accomplished pianist and songwriter, developed a following for his CBC Radio critiques of music, which were witty but also characterized by conservative and insular tastes. Weinzweig was often a target. In a 1975 memoir, Duncan wrote: It is much easier in Winnipeg to get an audience to hear how wittily unsuccessful you are as a composer, than to manage an actual performance of your work … The CBC, of course … has regularly provided periods of soothing opportunity in which one can imagine that there is an audience. However, even the CBC naturally prefers ‘established’ composers—often those who provide with most aplomb (along with their easternness) the best combination of professionalism and unpleasantness. ³³ Living in a Canadian metropolis east of Winnipeg, and writing nasty music with aplomb—such was the unforgivable behaviour of Weinzweig and his school, in the eyes of this critic. Opposition to his ideas and to his music was real; he didn’t make it up.

Principally through his music, but also through his teaching and his leadership statements in articles and interviews, he had established a role as a rebel, an anti-establishment character, a protagonist of modernism. The problems of the musical adventurer in Canada remained acute and unsolved, and he hammered home this message, continuing to express his frustrations in the third person as the Canadian composer or in the plural as composers in Canada. A colleague, Godfrey Ridout, wondered at the time what Jack would do if he suddenly achieved a huge international success—implying that Weinzweig enjoyed being misunderstood or treated unfairly. ³⁴ But Weinzweig was a born activist, not a masochist. To focus the attack, it appeared, the collective approach of the aborted Friends of New Music could be tried anew with graduates of Weinzweig’s studio and with invited colleagues from other parts of the country. Thus, in February 1951 a new organization, the Canadian League of Composers, came into existence, with Weinzweig as its first president. It immediately became a third sponsor for the all-Weinzweig concert in May. Modelling itself on professional composers’ societies in other countries and professional guilds in other arts in Canada, it undertook advocacy and promotion of members’ music. Media commentators looked on it in early years as an aggregation of avant-gardists, although the membership covered many different composing styles. ³⁵

The wave of postwar veteran pupils (re-habs) was now over, and despite his increased professional stature Weinzweig experienced economic uncertainty in his contract position with the Royal Conservatory. Boosey and Hawkes, initially supportive, failed to follow up with further contracts. (Like other British music publishers, the firm maintained at this time a Toronto branch office, but showed scant interest in producing original works by Canadians. Moreover, British reviews of the Divertimento publications had been lukewarm.) ³⁶ Weinzweig consulted the former operatic tenor and impresario Edward Johnson, chair of the Conservatory board, who urged him to inquire about a possible appointment to the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. The director of the Faculty was Arnold Walter, musicologist and composer, whose autocratic European manner and visionary concepts had driven the institution in a new direction since Weinzweig’s student days. Their uneasy relationship dated from the previous decade when Walter was associated with the Vogt Society. Whether prodded by Johnson or on his own initiative, Walter offered Weinzweig a full-time position to teach composition and music theory. Weinzweig’s letter of acceptance was both breezy and businesslike:

Dear Arnold [faculty members rarely addressed Dr Walter by his first name]:

I have received your letter setting out the details of our agreement in full. Now I can spend the rest of the summer clearing away my per lesson career so that I can work under organized conditions. That suits me fine.

I want to thank you for your consideration and advice and I can assure you of returns in cooperation.

In the meantime, I hope you and Maria get a generous holiday.

With best regards,

Sincerely, [signed] John. ³⁷

The appointment, at assistant-professor rank, beginning in the fall of 1952, carried a particular assignment: a basic musicianship course for undergraduate performance majors. Weinzweig developed a two-year program which incorporated aural drill, Western classical part-writing and analysis, and an introduction to contemporary techniques. For students concentrating on honing their performing skills, this contrasted refreshingly with the former burden of Papiermusik. ³⁸ When, in 1954, the Faculty inaugurated resident graduate programs, Weinzweig became the principal adviser to Mus.M. candidates in composition and began offering a graduate course in contemporary music analysis. He had at first continued to teach a few composers under his Conservatory (per lesson) contract, as a sideline to his Faculty duties, but as the enrolment of Faculty composition majors grew he was able to relinquish the Conservatory connection. The Faculty became his day-job location until retirement. They were years of expansion for the Faculty, first in an RCM annex and after 1962 in its new home, the Edward Johnson Building; with increasing seniority, Weinzweig came to play an influential role in its development.

Major composing projects occupied him. Three seasons out of four, he composed at least one working day each week, and in the summer was able to concentrate, exclusive of other pressures, at the vacation home he and his family had acquired in the 1940s in Kearney, a lakeside lumber town just north of Huntsville, Ontario. The Violin Concerto (1954), Wine of Peace for soprano and orchestra (1957), and the Symphonic Ode (1958) were mature large-scale ventures.

The League’s already impressive record of concert-giving reached a peak in the summer of 1960 with another ambitious symposium, this time an international gathering at Stratford, Ontario, as an adjunct to that year’s Stratford Shakespearean Festival. The brainchild of Louis Applebaum, with the CLC as principal sponsor, the International Composers’ Conference brought fifty-five composers from twenty countries to Stratford for a week of discussions and performances. As CLC president, Weinzweig had an active part in organizing the event and chaired a panel on serialism whose participants were Ernst Krenek and George Rochberg (US) and Iain Hamilton (Great Britain). A performance of Wine of Peace highlighted one of the concerts. ³⁹

Having assimilated twelve-tone practice—as he said, not as a system but as a melodic resource—he looked to broaden his musical vocabulary with fresh influences. Like many musicians in the 1950s, he studied Anton Webern’s scores, written twenty or more years earlier but largely ignored in the composer’s lifetime. The elegance of Webern’s twelve-tone patterns, and especially his spare textures and controlled, cryptic manner of expression had a strong appeal for Weinzweig. At the same time his rhythmic instincts led him in a different direction, and he declared in 1960 an intention to include more jazz inflections in his music. The Divertimento No. 3 (1960) signalled the new interest in jazz, while the String Quartet No. 3 (1963), an elegy for his mother, who had died on 6 October 1962, was largely a product of the recent immersion in Webern. The two influences continued to mark many of the scores that followed. If the radicalism of Weinzweig’s music became gradually less pronounced, he remained open to developments in composition, taking from each what he felt his music could absorb. After Webern and jazz, he found stimulation in the experiments in instrumental sonority of the 1960s (as evidenced, for example, in Bartolozzi’s New Sounds for Woodwinds), ⁴⁰ in chance operations, and in mixed media. But electro-acoustic music and minimalism he found too limited, and microtonal tunings too esoteric (incidental microtones are called for in a few works). Where he had previously looked to European classics such as Beethoven (the model for the Violin Concerto), he now found his forms emphasizing juxtaposition rather than development—somewhat as in the cinema. He regarded composing as analogous to film editing, and spoke to Norma Beecroft of the influence of the camera in my work. ⁴¹

The 1960s were a decade of expanding horizons (a liberating period for him, as he told Beecroft), ⁴² considerable travel, and significant additions to his catalogue of works. He visited the United States, for the premiere of his Divertimento No. 5 (1961) in Pittsburgh and again for music conferences in Connecticut and Indiana; Puerto Rico and Israel for festivals and further conferences; Great Britain on the invitation of the Composers’ Guild; and Mexico for his first sabbatical leave. Principal compositional projects were the concertos for piano (1965–6) and for harp (1967), the Divertimento No. 4 (1968), and the orchestral work Dummiyah (1969). This title (Hebrew for an unspeakable, or dumb, silence) suggests his contemplation of the brooding volcanic outline of Popocatepetl, which struck him as an image of the silent horror of the Nazi Holocaust.

The solo writing for harp in the Concerto, and for clarinet in the Divertimento No. 4, evinced his new interest in timbral resources. A solo percussion piece exuberantly titled Around the Stage in Twenty-Five Minutes During Which a Variety of Instruments Are Struck (1970) transported him into theatrics and heralded further solo adventures which were to occupy him for the rest of his composing life. Two of them, Impromptus for piano (1973) and Riffs for solo flute (1974), were structured not in formal movements but in brief events, some lasting a few seconds only, with flexible playing instructions. (The same approach was applied to the brass quintet medium in Pieces of Five, 1976.) ⁴³ The Impromptus, somewhat indebted to Satie, ⁴⁴ incorporated mime elements and juxtapositions of thematic quotations from the composer’s own work with interpolations of musical memories from years past ⁴⁵ (among them a twelve-note set in Event No. 12 and a fragment of Chopin’s Minute Waltz). Other major solo explorations were the collections of short pieces for guitar (1976 and 1980) and for harp (1983).

Helen Weinzweig’s interest in creative writing occupied her more fully starting in the 1960s and 70s. Her first short story appeared in the Canadian Forum in 1968, followed by her novels Passing Ceremony (1973) and Basic Black with Pearls (1980). ⁴⁶ She came to be regarded as an exceptionally original writer, won a Canada Council grant, and was invited to give talks and workshops for young writers. Like her husband, she worked slowly and meticulously at her craft, and, like his music, her fiction often has a sardonic, sharp edge. Among the eleven short stories in her collection A View from the Roof (1989), three have titles with a certain musical resonance: Quadrille, Circle of Fifths, and "What Happened to Ravel’s Bolero?" ⁴⁷ The playwright Dave Carley adapted the title story and three others from this volume for the stage, with Helen’s collaboration, and the result was produced by Theatre Cognito in 1996 at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. ⁴⁸

Introspection and retrospection characterize much of John Weinzweig’s later music, as he introduces self-quotations and, turning again to vocal music forms, sets texts of his own invention. The range of extra-musical themes is as broad as the variety of sound resources: humour may be Dadaistic or satirical or even slapstick, while the more serious moments look outward to the mysteries of the universe or the horrors of human brutality, or inward to the tragedy of mental illness. Canadian society in his youth provided examples of injustice—racism, suppression of protest, and the like—some of which were even enshrined in the laws of the day. Weinzweig’s sensitivity to such issues took on global dimensions and became a permanent character trait. His mother had been subject to periods of depression, and when his sister Grace developed similar symptoms, preventing her from leading a full life, John and Helen assumed responsibility for her care. ⁴⁹ A heavy blow came in 1995 when their grandson Joshua withdrew from a program of psychiatric treatment and took his own life.

In earlier years, his society seemed to be telling him that only the great masters have the right to be serious: the only acceptable role for a composer apparently was that of clown. ⁵⁰ Short works in a lighter vein were welcomed. We [young composers] took up little space on the concert programmes. However, as soon as … our pieces began to exceed the five-minute limit, we ceased to be young composers and became easy targets for musical invectives. ⁵¹ If the message is that you can’t call your work a tone-poem, how about calling it a divertimento? Three more Divertimenti (Nos. 6, 7, and 8) belong to the period 1972–80. No. 9, the only one for full orchestra without a soloist, had its premiere in 1982. His early emphasis on, and enthusiasm for, the orchestra had gradually faded: there are no major orchestral works between Dummiyah and this conspicuously titled Divertimento—i.e., a diversion, not a symphony—and there was to be nothing after that. The cool reception of the Divertimento by the orchestral players was at least partly responsible: as the composer recounted in an interview, the musicians’ pencilled graffiti on the parts were the most vicious comments I’ve ever had … They hated the work. ⁵² In 1992, Weinzweig wrote to Loie Fallis, artistic administrator of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra: the TSO has become irrelevant to my music. ⁵³ Channelling creative energies into whimsy and satire—i.e., clowning?—resulted in many original and beautiful scores, but the expected further full-orchestra pieces never appeared.

(Weinzweig’s methodical habits are revealed in the numbering of the Divertimenti: No. 5 was composed before No. 4, implying that there would in fact be a No. 4, even if it took seven years; similarly after Nos. 10, 11, and 12 [1988, 1990, and 1998 respectively] the series was deemed complete, as if in fulfilment of a plan begun fifty years before.)

By his senior years, creatively and organizationally active, he had become a familiar and almost iconic figure. There were many laurels—a couple of honorary degrees, a citation from the Harp Society of America, an appointment as Officer of the Order of Canada, another to the Order of Ontario, the Roy Thomson Hall Award, the Molson Prize—but he hardly rested on them. He attended the anniversary festival conferences of the CLC—the twentieth in Victoria, thirtieth in Windsor, fortieth in Winnipeg, and fiftieth in Toronto—by which time someone reckoned that he had not missed a single one of the organization’s annual general meetings. He and Serge Garant had been the first two composers whose works were issued in the CBC International Service’s Canadian Anthology series of vinyl recordings in the 1970s. Various old and newer works of his appeared on compact disc starting in the late 1980s, on CBC Records, Centrediscs, and an independent label, Furiant. One of Weinzweig’s most successful lobbying efforts of the 1990s resulted in a grant from the