Following his death 20 years ago on February 13, 1999, a bequest of about $450,000 in 1999 was made to the Faculty of Music that was matched by the province of Ontario. This established an endowment to support merit-based scholarships for undergraduate and graduate music students.

Since then, the endowment has paid out over $1 million dollars to support hundreds of Faculty of Music students.

Who made this generous gift?

Arthur Plettner (1904-1999) began his career under serendipitous circumstances. His mother had arranged for a piano teacher to come teach his older brother Edwin at their house and when Ed went on to other endeavours, Arthur’s mother wanted the teacher to remain employed, so she had Arthur take lessons in his brother’s place. And, when Arthur went with his parents to a symphony concert when he was 15, he observed the conductor and declared “That’s what I want to be!”

His parents, Frederick and Louise (Haarbrucker) immigrated from Germany to the United States; he from Wurzburg, Bavaria and she from Karklienen, East Prussia. Arthur’s father became a U.S. citizen in 1892 and played the trombone in the U.S. Navy. Louise had been married, but her husband and two young children had died, all within a year of each other. Widowed, she subsequently began a business as a seamstress. One day, fortuitously while crossing 14^th street in New York City, she and Frederick recognized each other; he had been a friend of her deceased husband. They were married in June 1896. Arthur’s brother Edwin was born in March 1897, and Arthur on November 15, 1904 in Bronx, New York.

Arthur’s parents took him to Germany when he was five or six years old. They may have meant to only stay for a few years, but the outbreak of World War I delayed their return. As a result, Arthur was educated in Germany. He studied flute and piano at the oldest conservatory in the country, the State (prior to WW I, Royal Bavarian) Conservatory in Wurzburg. The family returned to New York in 1924.

At this time, Arthur became Associate Conductor and Chorus Master for the German Comic Opera Company in New York. From 1928 to 1931, he served in a similar capacity at the Ziegfield, New Amsterdam, and New Yorker Theaters in New York. Following the onset of the Depression, Arthur joined the faculty of the Emma Willard Conservatory as a piano and harmony teacher in November 1931. As the effects of the Depression continued, the school decided to cut back the music department and he left in the spring of 1932.

Undaunted, Arthur soon won a three year fellowship in 1932 at the Juilliard Graduate School in conducting where he studied under Albert Stoessel. During this period, until 1936, Arthur was staff arranger and member (flute and piccolo) with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, and was pianist for the Children’s Concerts and Opera Orchestra as well. Simultaneously, he was staff arranger and member of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Festival Orchestra. Arthur’s association (and later his wife’s) with the Chautauqua Symphony continued into the 1940s.

In 1937 Arthur was appointed Juilliard Professor of Music at the University of Chattanooga, now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He was elected Conductor of the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra in October 1937 and continued in that capacity until 1949.

Arthur’s personal life changed at this time as well. In July 1938 he married Isa McIlwraith, who he had met in the Juilliard Graduate School conducting program, where she also had a three year fellowship. Her musical background was deeply impressive as well, having a BA from Barnard, a MA from Columbia, and a degree in sacred music from Union Theological Seminary. Following their marriage, she joined the Faculty of Music at Chattanooga as an Assistant Professor of Music, teaching history of music, counterpoint, form, and analysis. She also wrote program notes for the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra and conducted when Arthur was a soloist. Later, Isa added the title of University Organist to her responsibilities. In addition to the several orchestral and choral compositions he had to his credit, Arthur wrote many organ compositions specifically for his wife’s use. More info on Isa’s career can be found in this thesis “Choral Activities at the University of Chattanooga From 1886-1969” by Ashley Nolan Cisto.

While a Professor, Arthur furthered his own education earning a Bachelor of Music degree in 1943 and a Doctor of Music in 1951, both from the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Most of his studies were completed off-campus, although he travelled to Toronto periodically.

In addition to his mastery of Music, Arthur had a breadth and depth of knowledge of topics outside of his chosen field. His grasp of history was impressive and he had a special interest in model trains and a fascination with railroads in general.

Following their retirement from the University in 1973, the couple remained in their home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. Dr. Plettner’s wife Isa passed away in December 1997 at the age of 88 and he died on February 13, 1999 at the age of 94.

Biography largely taken from letter from niece in 1999.

Top photo of Arthur and Isa from The Chattanooga Times, 27 November 1938.

Appointed as Associate Professor in performance and music education in July 2005, Dr. Gillian MacKay took over conducting duties of the Wind Ensemble as well as teaching trumpet and conducting. Prior to joining the Faculty she was Director of the School of Music at the University of Windsor.

Gillian has an active professional career as a conductor, adjudicator, clinician and trumpeter. She has conducted honour ensembles throughout Canada and the United States, and is Associate Conductor of the Denis Wick Canadian Wind Orchestra. Dr. MacKay has adjudicated Canadian band festivals at local, provincial, and national levels in Canada. She has conducted honour bands and judged competitions in the US, Singapore, Thailand, and Korea.

Currently, she is investigating the application of the Michael Chekhov acting technique to movement and meaning in conducting. Recognized as a conducting pedagogue, Gillian leads the University of Toronto Wind Conducting Symposium each July.

For an excellent look at her philosophy of teaching, performing, and her story as a musician, graduate Dylan Rook Maddix (MMus 2016) interviewed Dr. MacKay in September 2017 for his podcast The Band Room.

See Dr. MacKay lead the Wind Ensemble this Saturday, February 2 at 7:30 pm in MacMillan Theatre. It will be a collaborative effort with percussion professors Aiyun Huang and Beverley Johnston as well as the strings of the UTSO.

Next Tuesday on January 29 marks what would have been singer Lois Marshall’s 95th birthday.

Canada’s most well-known soprano in the 1950s and 1960s, Lois Marshall received an Artist Diploma from the RCM in 1950 (when she also won the Eaton Graduating Prize for top performance graduate that year).

Following an incredible New York debut (wonderfully captured in this 1953 MacLean’s article – ‘”John Briggs, of the Times, stayed for the encores and the critics never, simply never, stay for the encores. And Peggy Hicks, of the Herald Tribune, applauded enthusiastically. If Lois doesn’t get good reviews I’ll shoot them.'” ) and many performances in North America, she was one of the first foreign artists to tour the USSR in 1958 with pianist (her vocal coach and later, her husband) Weldon Kilburn.

Here is footage of Lois Marshall performing “Hark! The Echoing Air” from “The Fairy Queen” by Henry Purcell. She is accompanied by the Amsterdams Kamerorkest in this performance which aired on 29 September 1963.

In 1965 Marshall was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate degree from the Faculty of Music.

She began singing as a mezzo-soprano in the mid-70s. In 1986 she began teaching at the Faculty of Music until she passed away in 1997 at age 72.

In 2000, accompanist and lyric diction instructor Che Anne Loewen established the Lois Marshall Chair in Voice with a donation of $250,000. Following additional gifts reaching $750,000 from friends and colleagues, the university matched the donations for a total endowment of $2 million. Voice Professor Lorna MacDonald has held the Lois Marshall Chair in Voice since its inception.

Below is a photo from September 30, 1987 in the common room (now the Barker-Fairley Room) with Professor Oskar Morawetz (left) and Professor Carl Morey at a reception honouring Marshall as recipient of the 1987 Award for Music presented by the Toronto Arts Awards Foundation and Morawetz for receiving the inaugural 1987 Order of Ontario.

After writing about the Electronic Music Studio last week we discovered some more things to share! So here goes, in no particular order:

Carl Morey loved the sound of the human voice and spent his career teaching the joys of music to students and the public at large.

Morey was a professor in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto for three decades, served as dean from 1984 to 1990, and held the prestigious Jean A. Chalmers Chair at the Institute for Canadian Music in the 1990s. He died on Dec. 3 at the age of 84.

For more, please click here.

In May 1959, the Electronic Music Studio at the Faculty of Music was officially established by Dr. Arnold Walter. Dr. Hugh Le Caine of the National Research Council of Canada was technical advisor and the original faculty members included Dr. Walter, Professor Harvey Olnick, and Professor Myron Schaeffer.

The studio was the second one in North America, following the creation of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center the previous year. It was originally located on Division St (now the site of the CAMH building near Spadina and College) but plans were already being made to expand into a new space.

Once the Edward Johnson Building was completed, the Electronic Music Studio was moved to a basement location, placed there to avoid other noise and vibrations in the building.

Work at the studio expanded quickly and composers and composition students across North America flocked to the facility, such as composer Lowell Cross who went on to invent laser light shows. While a student here, Cross designed and constructed a musical chessboard whose March 1968 performance of Reunion included John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. (Further details here and here.)

Composer Norma Beecroft was an independent scholar here, and in 1971 the Canadian Electronic Ensemble was established by David Grimes, David Jaeger, Larry Lake, and James Montgomery.

New instruments and equipment were commissioned and invented here, and alumni went on to establish or were involved in new electronic music studios at universities around the world, such as composer Dr. Jean Eichelberger Ivey (DMus 1972) who founded the electronic music studio at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at John Hopkins University and Bruce Pennycook (shown in top photo in 1975, image courtesy of eContact!) who is currently a composition professor at the Butler School of Music at University of Texas at Austin.

Professor Gustav Ciamaga joined the Faculty in fall 1963 and took over the studio in 1965 following Professor Schaeffer’s death.

From the Canadian Encyclopedia: “Composer, teacher, writer, b London, Ont, 10 Apr 1930, d Toronto, 11 Jun 2011; MFA (Brandeis) 1958. [Gustav Ciamaga] attended the University of Western Ontario 1951-4 while studying privately with Gordon Delamont. He studied composition 1954-6 with John Weinzweig and John Beckwith at the University of Toronto and composition and musicology at Brandeis U in Waltham, Mass, where his composition teachers were Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Irving Fine. He continued his studies in Waltham until 1963, and also organized an electronic studio. He joined the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, in 1963 and became director of the Electronic Music Studio in 1965 and chairman of the theory and composition department in 1968. On sabbatical in 1970 he worked in several European electronic studios. He was dean of the Faculty of Music 1977-84 and acting principal of the RCMT 1983-4.”

During the 1994-95 academic year, half of the electronic music studio was transformed into a recording studio. And during the 2017-18 and current academic year the electronic music studio has been undergoing another renovation with new equipment.

The New Music Festival is now in its 22nd year. We are excited this year to host composer Toshio Hosokawa, the 2018-19 Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition. His music will be performed throughout the festival. Tonight will be an opera double bill: The Raven and The Maiden from the Sea (Futari Shizuka).

Additional Resources and references for the Electronic Music Studio:

The Electronic Music Studio of the University of Toronto by Myron Schaeffer (Journal of Music Theory Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1963), pp. 73-81 (9 pages))

A Nation of Tinkerers: How a Canadian University Shaped Electronic Music in North America by Michael Rancic (Thump, vice.com, February 26, 2016)

Electronic Music in Toronto and Canada in the Analogue Era by Norma Beecroft (eContact! 11.2, July 2009)

Research is vital for any academic institution, and the Faculty of Music is no different. We have led and continue to lead Canada in a number of ways.

Harvey Olnick established the first musicology program in Canada in the mid 1950s and Miceczyslaw Kolinski taught the first ethnomusicology courses in Canada here in the late 1960s.

Now, the Faculty has an Associate Dean, Research (Professor Sherry Lee) and students and professors are at the forefront of music research.

Here are some highlights from 2018:

• Prof. Steven Vande Moortele won the top award in the field from the Society for Music Theory for his 2017 book The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner.
• Alumna Dr. Emily Wang (PhD 2018) has won no fewer than three prizes for her work on “Sound, Diasporic Intimacy, and Everyday Movements in Chinese Toronto,” including the 2018 Charles Seeger Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology for the most distinguished student paper on an international scale.

• PhD student Hamidreza Salehyar has won multiple awards for research on Iranian music, including for his paper “Beyond Resistance and Subordination: The Paradox of Popular Music in Shi’ite Rituals in Post-Revolutionary Iran”.
• Winners of the Faculty’s inaugural Undergraduate Research Showcase in April included Elizabeth Legierski for her work on 19^th century opera and Czech Nationalism, Sophia Wang for her look at Canadian wind band music in Canadian schools, and Shreya Jha for her exploration of the relationship between expressive piano performance and heart rate variability.
• Prof. Farzaneh Hemmasi has won multiple grants to support her team of graduate students in studying how music intersects with immigration, culture, and urban development in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

As the year comes to an end and another starts, we are going to say Happy Birthday to Dean Don McLean, whose birthday is on January 1!

Don McLean, Dean of the Faculty of Music since 2011, is Professor of Music Theory and Musicology. Awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal through the Canada Council in 2012 for his “exploration of the changing context of music in the academy and society, and innovations in infrastructure development and interdisciplinary teaching and research.”

The Faculty of Music welcomed Dean McLean with a UTSO and MacMillan Singers concert on February 5, 2011. The program culminated in Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9.

Trained in piano performance and pedagogy, coaching and accompanying, conducting and composition, musicology and music theory, Don McLean is a three-time graduate of the University of Toronto and a two-time graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Music, and taught for both institutions from 1978–1989.

In 1988, he moved to Montreal and McGill University, where, as Dean of the Faculty from 2001–2010, he played key roles in strategic expansion of faculty and programs, the creation of CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology), the realization of the New (now Elizabeth Wirth) Music Building (a world-class research, performance, and library facility), and, through a transformative gift from Seymour Schulich, the naming of the Faculty as The Schulich School of Music of McGill University.

During his time as Dean of the Faculty of Music, he has overseen the creation of the Music and Health Degree Program, the Music and Technology Degree program, the Digital Media at the Crossroads conference, and the Faculty’s first Strategic Academic Strategic Plan in decades.

The U of T is reaching the end of term and if music students are not rehearsing in practice rooms (or if they are lucky and are finished!), they are likely to be found in the music library.

The first librarian was Jean Lavender (1918-2005), who held the position from 1947-1973. After receiving her Bachelor of Library Science degree from U of T in 1940 and working at the Royal Conservatory of Music Library, Ms Lavender oversaw major growth following the appointment of Harvey Olnick in 1954 which established the first musicology program at a Canadian university. She also oversaw the expansion of the library on the 3rd floor of the Edward Johnson Building after it opened in 1963.

Kathleen McMorrow headed the Music Library from 1974 to 2013, with particular responsibilities for building the recordings collections and special collections. During her tenure, the Library holdings increased from about 100,000 to nearly 500,000, and were moved into a purpose-built wing of the Edward Johnson Building.

Kathleen oversaw the library’s transition from card catalogues to computers. UofT Music library was the first major library to do this. Here’s an article she wrote in the mid-70s about it.

Suzanne Meyers Sawa was Interim Head Librarian for several years until Jan Guise joined the Faculty where she previously had been Head Librarian for the music library at the University of Manitoba, 2007-2017.

Today our Music Library has over 300,000 books, scores, periodicals and microforms. The Sniderman Recordings Collection has 180,000 sound recordings, from cylinders to blu-ray.

The Olnick Rare Book Room has 2,500 volumes exemplifying the history of music and of music editing, performance and printing — from liturgical manuscripts and early printed treatises, to first editions of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Gershwin, and early Canadian sheet music and tune books. A significant number of 18th- and 19th-century opera full scores, with particular strength in the French repertoire, complements the large libretto holdings of the Central Library.

Our Archival Collections documents the creative activity of composers and performers associated with the University and the city. The collections include manuscripts, correspondence, programs, photographs and recordings of artists such as John Beckwith, Talivaldis Kenins, Udo Kasemets, the Hart House String Quartet and Kathleen Parlow.

With thanks to Canadian Encyclopedia for details on early history of music libraries in Canada.

The first woman in the British Empire to earn a doctoral degree in music did so from the University of Toronto in 1903.

Meet Eva J. Taylor.

According to the Conservatory Bi-Monthly 3, no. 6(November 1904), p180:

“This month the Bi-Monthly takes special pleasure in presenting a picture of Miss Eva J. Taylor, Mus. Doc, an account of whose exceptional achievements will be read with interest.

Miss Taylor began her Conservatory career in 1894,studying the piano with Dr. Fisher and theory with Dr. Anger. She graduated in both departments in 1897, took the degree of Mus. Bac. at Trinity University in 1898, and that of Mus.Doc. in 1903.

The Provost stated at Convocation that she was the only woman in the Empire who had won this highest musical degree, though two others had received the latter as an honor, Queen Alexandra, whose portrait in her Musical Doctor robes is said to be her most popular one, and Dr. Annie Patterson, an organist in Dublin.

Miss Taylor was organist of St. James’ Church, Guelph, for five years, and is now director of St. George’s Church Choir, a surpliced organization of forty-five members. She finds teaching very interesting and has a large class of pupils. Doubtless she will gain further distinction in the realm of composition.”

This degree, of course, predates the official establishment of the Faculty of Music, but this is important in acknowledging the role of music at U of T at Trinity University and Victoria University.

Additional information online about Dr. Taylor is scarce. We do know she became known as Dr. Nurse a decade after receiving her degree.

From The Greater Vancouver Chinook, June 28, 1913, p10:“The wedding took place in St. Michael’s Church last Wednesday of Miss Eva J. Taylor, Mus. Doc., daughter of Mr. and Mrs. S. J.Taylor, to Rev. Oscar nurse, M.A., rector of St. Luke’s Church, South Vancouver. Rev. G. H. Wilson officiated, and there were a large number of friends present. After the ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Nurse left on a honeymoon to Victoria and Alaska, and on their return they will reside in South Vancouver.”

There may be more information available about her and her career, but additional research is needed. At some point she and her husband moved to the United States as we found a note in a newsletter that Dr. Eva Nurse was an accompanist for a singer at a church service at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California in 1946.