Trip Retrospective

The Granville Street Bridge viewed from
the Granville Island Market in Vancouver

I'm about to prepare a video to go with the live recording of my String Quartet No. 2, premiered in three concerts in Vancouver at the end of May, so this seemed a good time to put up a post about the trip in general. As in my last trip, to Germany last summer, the travel itself was not at all pleasant. No general lessons there, it just seems that travel is more and more onerous.

But being in Vancouver, and briefly in Victoria, was very pleasant indeed. I lived a large portion of my life there, mostly on Vancouver Island, and did a great deal of performing both live and on the CBC in Vancouver. It was a treat to reconnect with some family members and with some old friends. I am still in touch with high-school friends and with a couple of friends from my music career in the area.

It was particularly great to reconnect with Richard Volet, a very fine flute player with whom I did very many performances and, until he retired a couple of years ago, was the principle flute with the Victoria Symphony. Now he is a gifted recording engineer as you will hear in the quartet recording which he did.

It was more sobering to have lunch with Alexander Dunn, the guitarist who took over my teaching jobs in Victoria when I left in 1990. He stepped into the sessional lecturer job at the University of Victoria and the head of the guitar department at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. When I left there were eight undergraduate guitar majors at the university and a host of students at the conservatory. I don't recall exactly, but I think we had four or five teachers other than myself. From what I have seen, Alex did a superb job of raising the technical standards at the university, founding a guitar society, and bringing in many great players for concerts and master classes. Alas, Victoria has not treated him as kindly.

I don't want to reveal any confidences, but the situation today is that the university has squeezed the guitar contingent down to three students and, as the position remains a sessional lecturer, the pay is correspondingly less. The situation in the conservatory is far worse. Back when I was there, it was ruled by the husband and wife team of Robin and Winnifred Wood, virtuoso pianists who trained in London. The standards in piano and string performance were high and the focus was entirely on classical music. Now, as I mentioned in a post last year, the conservatory seems to have swung around into being a community music school focussed on popular music. I guess that's ok, but it sure is not attracting any serious young classical students. Again, the pay situation for a classical guitarist there is dire.

I have the greatest sympathy for the situation that Alex finds himself in. I asked him if he envisioned still being in Victoria when he took over the jobs over thirty years ago and he looked at me with a frozen expression and said "I've been trying the leave the whole time!" Well, yes, that was my feeling as well, but I left after twelve years.

So what was wrong with living in beautiful, idyllic Victoria? And indeed it is, both beautiful and idyllic. I think the problem comes back to what we might call the aesthetic values of the society and to get into that, I will have to go back a few years.

Way back in 1973 when I was planning my trip to Spain to study with José Tomás I was applying for my first Canadian passport and needed a guarantor. I didn't have any connections with anyone in the Church so I headed up to the university. It was the summer so lots of people were not there, but the secretary was embarrassed to discover that, of the few professors available, none were actually Canadian. A guarantor has to be a Canadian citizen and of some position in society: pastor, professor, etc. Yes, the music department at the University of Victoria was, in those early days, largely peopled by Americans (and a few Czechs) from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. This is probably why the UVic music department is also called the "School of Music."

Without getting bogged down in details, the musical DNA of the school was graven in stone early on: the focus will be on the orchestra and the training of orchestral musicians. Things like early music, composition, and ethnomusicology would have to take a back seat, as would guitar of course. My getting hired to found the guitar program was a bit of an accident as the then chair of the department, Paul Kling, was a violin virtuoso who rather liked the guitar. We played quite a few concerts together. Alas, his successor was a careerist who hired other careerists and the long term plan of the school was never to include a tenure-track position for guitar even though there was one for an oboist. She had three students, rarely performed, but was an assistant professor with tenure. I remained a sessional lecturer and would always be one even though I had eight students, held a weekly master class, and did innumerable concerts (the only time the CBC came to the school of music was to record my concerts). Unfortunately I did not have the political skills back then to leverage this into a better position.

Looking into this unpromising future was what finally compelled me to leave and move to Montreal where I found it also extremely difficult to develop my career, though for different reasons.

That was probably too much detail! The general truth is that Canada, especially on the West Coast, does not care very much for music though there are certainly pockets of activity that contradict this. The winery and artisanal brewing industries are booming but classical music is moribund. This is probably the case in many places in the world outside of Europe. Early in my career I should have had the good sense to relocate to Europe.

My String Quartet No. 2 which I will be posting very soon, is a kind of farewell to the beautiful surroundings of Vancouver Island. Here is a photo from my flight to Victoria: