Archer, Violet (1913 ~ 2000)

Dr. Violet Balestreri Archer, a seminal figure in Canadian composition, created a distinguished body of work during a career that spanned over six decades. With a life-long commitment to music that left no room for marriage, her music was heralded and performed around the world, and earned honours and awards for her both in Canada and abroad. Her musical training began before she was ten years of age with piano lessons. She began to compose at the age of 16. Following graduation from McGill University in piano and composition, she obtained the Associate Diploma of the Royal Canadian College of Organists. During those years, she was active as a professional accompanist for singers and as a piano teacher, as well as deputy organist in many Montréal churches. She continued to compose and in the summer of 1942 she was accepted by the great composer, Bèla Bartûk, as a composition student and studied with him in New York.

It was in 1946 that her first work was published: Habitant Sketches for piano. The following year she went to Yale University where she obtained the Master of Music degree in Composition. There she studied for two years with composer Paul Hindemith, one of the great musical minds of the 20th century. Dr. Archer wrote more than 280 compositions. Her repertoire is wide and extensive, ranging from music for solo flute to electronic music, with an emphasis on chamber music, choral music and songs for solo voice and piano.

Her teaching career was an extensive one and very active in the guiding of young composers. Many of her former composition students both in Canada and the United States are now professionals and recognized in their field. She was an ardent promoter of Canadian music and other 20th-century music, being active on the boards of a large number of national and regional organizations. She was also active both as a national and regional adjudicator of young composers’ contests in the United States and later in Canada.

The guiding aesthetic force in Archer’s music is best described as neo-classic. “The Norton-Grove Dictionary of Women Composers” describes her music thusly: “Archer’s music is on the one hand dissonantly contrapuntal yet on the other refreshingly folksy. Early modality gave way to a more chromatic style, with a period during the 1950s in which the influence of Hindemith and Gebrauchsmusik is strongly evident. Although she taught 12-tone technique to her students in the USA, she has not used it in her own music, and it is mainly in her variation technique or in a short-lived expressionistic phase in the mid-1960s that her study of Arnold Schoenberg is discernible. Her works are generally characterized by economical, almost lean, textures, skillful manipulation of form, and counterpoint. She has explored new sonorities using parellelism and folk tunes, while rejecting serialism and chance music.”

She was also a deeply religious person who credited her achievements to her faith: “I believe we are guided in what we do. Without my faith I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing and, of course, I always feel that each new piece should be better than the last one.” Dr. Violet Archer was born in Montréal, Québec in 1913, lived most of her mature life in Edmonton, Alberta, and passed away on February 22, 2000 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

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Bouchard, Remi (b. 1936)

Remi Bouchard, born on March 15, 1936 in Laurier, Manitoba, began his musical education with the “Presentation of Mary” nuns. After studying with Gerald Death in Neepawa, he undertook more advanced studies with Phyllis Holtby (piano) and A. A. Zimmerman (theory), in Winnipeg. In 1956 he began teaching piano in Neepawa where he still resides. In 1960 he received a piano teacher’s diploma from the University of Manitoba. A composer entirely self-taught, Bouchard is strongly influenced by French and English composers. The core of his work has always been a concern for, and commitment to, his environment. Variously described by critics as “melodically appealing,” “modestly scaled,” and “very tonal and spiritual,” his compositions reflect a continuous effort to express his impressions of his prairie homeland, deep in the centre of North America.

Bouchard is steadily getting recognition all over the continent. His music is now used in several festivals throughout Canada. It has been performed on television and radio. Recently the prestigious U.S. magazine Clavier, commissioned two piano pieces for their November 1988 issue. Several of his works are now published by the Boston Music Company. Bouchard is a member of the Manitoba Registered Music Teachers’ Association, and of the Manitoba Composers’ Association. In 1987 he became an adjudicator and workshop clinician for the Associated Manitoba Arts Festivals. He became an Associate Composer of The Canadian Music Centre in 1989.

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Coulthard, Jean (1908 ~ 2000)

Jean Coulthard was born in Vancouver in 1908 to a pioneering British Columbia doctor, Walter Coulthard, and to Jean Robinson Coulthard, a singer, music teacher, and influential figure in early musical life on the west coast. Coulthard attended public schools in Vancouver, then spent a few experimental months at the new Point Grey campus of the University of British Columbia. But Coulthard and her parents knew she was headed for a thoroughly musical life and career. In the late 1920s she traveled to London for a year of study with Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. Although these initial studies proved insufficient to allow her to work as a professional composer, her persistence in composition, combined with travels in North America and Europe, help to ex-plain her consistent productivity through the years of Depression and War. At various times, she knew and worked with Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók. Then, with her husband in war service, Coulthard chose to complete her formal composition studies in 1944–45 in New York with Bernard Wagenaar, a professor at the Juilliard School. Jean Coulthard married Donald Adams in 1935. Their daughter, Jane, was born in 1943, and in 1946 the young family returned to Vancouver. Just a year later, Coulthard began a 26-year-long career teaching theory and, later, composition in the Department of Music at the University of British Columbia. But her work at the university was often marginalized by male American and Canadian colleagues. By mid-century Coulthard’s work was often considered out of touch by the new music establishment. A year in France convinced her to write as she pleased.

By her official “retirement” in 1973 Coulthard had written and published a vast and important body of works in all genres to which she added nearly two further decades of enormous productivity. She was becoming internationally well-known and connected, and by the end of the century was recognized as one of the most significant composers of her sex. Her music was popular, occasionally with her “serious music” colleagues, sometimes with the public, and sometimes with both. It was performed by learners and by virtuosi, live, on broadcast, and in recording, to great effect. Coulthard was a member of the Order of Canada (1978), holder of honorary doctorates from two universities, and decorated many times in competitions between 1948 and her death in 2000. All through her adult life, Coulthard was staunchly of the view that her legacy was in her family; in her compositions; and in her students, a body of young and highly individualistic Canadian composers who have shaped the national musical arts from the late 1960s onward

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Duke, David (b. 1950)

David Gordon Duke was born in Vancouver and studied musicology at UBC, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Victoria. He studied composition privately with Jean Coulthard and, at the Banff Centre, Violet Archer. He has written many pieces for learners, including the Waterloo piano publications Music of Our Time, A Student’s Guide to Musical Form, Magical Years of the Chinese, and Special Days. Frederick Harris has published his works in the Encore Series for violin and piano, and many of his works are listed in the syllabi of the Royal Conservatory, Conservatory Canada, the Canadian Conservatory, and Contemporary Showcase 2005.

His concert music has been performed by Jon Kimura Parker, Desmond Hoebig, and Stephen Isserlis, and ensembles such as the Toledo Symphony, the Vancouver Cantata Singers, and the Circle Singers of Washington, D.C., (who recorded his 3 madrigals Lions, Tygers, and Bears). His Canticle for strings was recently put on CD by the Vancouver Symphony. He has been composer in residence for the BC Boys Choir, the Langley Community Music School, and Studea Musica. He has written and broadcast extensively about Canadian music and composers-most recently a biography of Jean Coulthard with co-author William Bruneau. He was head of the School of Music at Vancouver Community College until early 2004

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Sastok, Helve (b. 1958)

Helve Sastok was born August 31, 1958 in Edmonton, Alberta of parents who had recently emigrated from Estonia. She was brought up in this northern European environment, with Estonian spoken at home and only English in later years. Music is an integral part of the Estonian culture, and, and a result, she was placed into music lessons. Sastok began group piano lessons in 1964 at six years of age and was quickly placed into private lessons the following year, with Lydia Pals. In 1966, she began violin lessons with Serge Eremenko. These two stayed as her performance instruments all the way through university, with the addition of pipe organ lessons in her final years of the undergraduate degree. In 1970, Lydia Pals decided to expose her younger students to composition lessons. At the age of 12, Sastok was considered too old for this experiment of Pals’. After she protested, she was also permitted to begin her first composition classes. Thus began Sastok’s formal journey towards a degree in composition from the University of Alberta and a future life of creative work.

There were many Kiwanis Festival wins in piano or composition classes over the years. Provincial classes in composition occurred on a regular basis. Participation in concerts was frequent. Overall talent and work produced results for Sastok.

In 1976, she entered the University of Alberta, the Department of Music, and graduated in 1980, with distinction. From 1979 onwards, she performed various piano recitals, which also involved her compositions, across Canada and in Europe. These were also busy years for teaching and composing, plus raising her family of two boys.

From 1990 to 1997, Sastok focused her compositional activities on a series of piano books for children. Music Everywhere! is a program developed by here to be developmentally appropriate to the age level of a child. It is a unique program making use of improvisation and composition as a bases of learning to play the piano.

The Artist in Schools Residency Program became part of Sastok’s life in January 1993, when her proposal for a composition residency was accepted. Not only was she teaching private and group lessons (up to the Royal Conservatory ARCT level and all the theoretical subjects involved), but she began working many elementary schools in Alberta, teaching the children how to compose. Sastok have many workshops, adjudicated music festivals, saw her business grow, and continued to perform as a soloist and as an accompanist through all these years.

In 1998, Sastok opened the first public open house of the Friends of the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditoriums’ Society with her composition, Jubilee Miniatures, for piano. She also completed a commission, Outpost, for the Edmonton Composers Concert Society. Two of their pieces have been released on CD: Duologue on Brief Confessions (1997) and Elegy on Glossa (1999). In 1999, her composition Duologue will be performed at the Winspear Centre rESOund Festival of Contemporary music (sponsored for The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra).

More recently, composing larger works has been her goal along with continuing with educational materials. At the time of this writing, she is also applying to return to school for a Masters degree in composition in September 1999. The creative inner drive leads her forward in her musical life

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Stephen, Roberta (b. 1931)

The Canadian Music Centre celebrated the career of Roberta Stephen as a composer, singer, teacher and prime organizer in the field of music in Calgary. Born April 17, 1931, she received her Master’s degree from the University of North Texas and works as a teacher of singing, vocal pedagogy, composition, and advanced theoretical subjects. For over twenty years, she has been the mainstay of Alberta Keys Music Publishing Co. Ltd. and has published dozens of works by her fellow Canadian composers. Her wide repertoire of compositions includes works for various combinations of instruments as well as solo piano, vocal, choral and chamber music. She is currently President of New Works Calgary. She received the Recognition Award from the Alberta Registered Music Teachers‚ Association in 1997 for her work as a private music teacher. The main examining boards in Canada and Contemporary Showcase continue to use her pedagogical works in their piano and vocal syllabi. Recent performances of her works were in New York City, The Eye of the Seasons, Prelude for solo clarinet for Guido Arbonelli‚s recital in Calgary.