On 3 February 1951, Canadian composer John Weinzweig and two of his students, Harry Somers and Samuel Dolin, met at Weinzweig's house in Toronto and discussed the tremendous difficulties experienced by Canadian composers. As Weinzweig recalled about this historic evening, “We talked about the problems of composing in Canada. [We] were experiencing the sense of isolation in a career that held out little hope of publication and recording, the high cost of reproducing extended works and the unlikely prospect of their performance.”Footnote ¹ After some prodding from John's wife, Helen, that they “stop talking and organize,” the three decided to launch a composer's league, and Helen brought out cherry pie and wine to celebrate.Footnote ² In subsequent weeks and months they invited other composers into their venture, and by the end of that year, the Canadian League of Composers (CLC) was officially born.Footnote ³

According to Weinzweig's biographer, Elaine Keillor, the idea to begin a composers’ group had been “germinating” in Weinzweig's mind for some time, and he had even discussed it with members of the U.S. League of Composers, including Aaron Copland, Lazare Saminsky, and Robert Ward.Footnote ⁴ After learning from this bit of research, in his words, what “not to do,”Footnote ⁵ he went so far as to draw up a constitution in 1939 for a group called Canadian Friends of New Music, but nothing ever came of the organization.Footnote ⁶ During the early 1940s he lived in Ottawa while doing military service in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and he continued thinking about the idea after discussing it with fellow composer Louis Applebaum, who was also in Ottawa working at the National Film Board (NFB). Applebaum had studied with Roy Harris and Bernard Wagenaar and became familiar with the activities of the U.S. League while he lived in New York. Both composers felt even more strongly that a comparable organization was needed in Canada after the U.S. League presented a concert of Canadian works at the New York Public Library in January 1942 that included their compositions.Footnote ⁷ Where was this kind of support in Canada? Applebaum even wrote the U.S. League of Composers inquiring about establishing an Ottawa branch of that organization and sent letters to composers around the country asking if others might be interested in this venture, but nothing came of this initiative.Footnote ⁸

The momentum for a Canadian composers’ union grew in the postwar years, however, spurred by a handful of notable occasions when Canadian contemporary music was featured. The works of Canadians were highlighted in a special concert by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) in January 1948,Footnote ⁹ and in May 1950 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) presented a series called “Music of Canada,” which featured Canadian compositions.Footnote ¹⁰ In March of that year an unprecedented and highly ambitious festival of Canadian music (the First Symposium of Canadian Contemporary Music) was organized in Vancouver.Footnote ¹¹ This four-day event featured the music of thirty-three living Canadian composers in a wide variety of styles. It gave many of the participants, including several who would soon join the league, a sense of pride in their accomplishments and frustration at their lack of support in Canada. Weinzweig famously complained at this conference that “Canadian composers have the distinction of being the most unpublished, unheard, and unpaid musicians in the world.”Footnote ¹² One solution to these problems suggested at the event was that “composers should band together for collective action.”Footnote ¹³ For Weinzweig, this idea was “a prophetic note that aroused in me a sense of urgency,” and the Canadian League of Composers was established the following year (see Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 1. Group picture at the annual meeting of the Canadian League of Composers, May 1955. Photo by Helmut Kallmann. Back row: Louis Applebaum, Samuel Dolin, Harry Somers, Leslie Mann, Barbara Pentland, Andrew Twa, Harry Freedman, Udo Kasemets. Front row: Jean Papineau-Couture, John Weinzweig, John Beckwith. Courtesy of the administrative office of the Canadian League of Composers. Used with permission.

In addition to agreeing on “collective action,” the league's founders also needed to agree on the group's identity and mission. As Weinzweig later recalled, “There was some argument. What kind of an organization [would it be]? Would it be one to embrace all the styles? After all, we were dedicated to the new sound—led by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók. Or, should it be an organization with a very select group of people whose aesthetic idea was a common one, like ‘Les Six’ in France?”Footnote ¹⁵ This question was problematic, because those in the small group who founded the league were among the first composers in Canada to be significantly influenced by musical modernism, which came to Canada, as composer and scholar John Beckwith has described it, “rather late in the day,” in the late 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ¹⁶ These composers felt doubly ostracized: as composers, first, and as perceived “radicals,” second. Despite their own allegiance to modernist styles and their shared Toronto location, the founders decided to aim for solidarity among all Canadian composers and commit themselves to stylistic and regional inclusiveness.

To understand this decision to open their doors to composers of a wide range of styles, one must have an appreciation for how few inroads composers had made as professionals in Canada in the postwar era. Many promising foundations for musical life had been laid—the organization of local symphonic, choral, and chamber groups; flourishing church musical activity; the establishment of conservatories and university music departments; and a small but blossoming music industry—but a weak professional infrastructure and lack of arts funding meant that composers had virtually no support to compose, perform, or publish their works.Footnote ¹⁷ Having audiences find time and money to support music was difficult enough; having them support Canadian music was harder still, especially works in modern styles. As Beckwith has commented, “For most of our hearers ‘Canadian’ and ‘contemporary’ were synonymous terms, both tending to be pejorative.”Footnote ¹⁸ As an example of the tenor of the times, Jacques Singer, who organized the historic First Symposium of Canadian Contemporary Music that helped inspire Canadian composers to band together, was fired from his position as music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in part because of his championing of contemporary works.Footnote ¹⁹

Because of this inhospitable climate, Weinzweig and his students decided to band together in a “common cause” with all Canadian composers and create an inclusive, national organization.Footnote ²⁰ As he explained later, “I was against [a small exclusive group] because then we would not have any influence in attempting to change the climate in this country[;] as a small group you would isolate yourselves.”Footnote ²¹ And, so, the CLC's constitution envisioned an inclusive organization that would be part support group, part promoter, and part lobbying firm. No explicit reference to style is made in the three main objectives listed in their constitution:

1. (a) To provide an organization and facilities by means of which Canadian composers may advance their joint and several interests

2. (b) To promote the composition and playing of creative music

3. (c) To stimulate the interest of the people of Canada in the work of their composers.Footnote ²²

Similar language can be found in an advertisement for their inaugural concert with the TSO in 1952, which frames the new group's activities as a remedy to the frustration and isolation experienced by Canadian composers in the past—“No longer need the embryonic composer grope for information and guidance.”Footnote ²³ The advertisement also explains specific ways in which the CLC hoped to encourage Canadian composition both at home and abroad (concerts, scholarships, commissions, score dissemination) in very broad terms, making no mention of style.

Indeed, the pluralistic make-up of the group became a point of pride for league members. When they began to put on concerts of their own music, they emphasized the group's regional diversity by listing in the concert programs the members’ home cities alongside their names. The advertisement for the league's inaugural 1952 concert with the TSO boasts that “composers in Ottawa, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Québec, Toronto, and Montreal now hold membership” in the organization and that “similarly, all schools of musical thought are represented.”Footnote ²⁴

This issue of the league's stylistic identity was by no means settled after the group drafted a constitution and put on their first few concerts, however. The founding members were, as Weinzweig had put it, “dedicated to the new sound,” and were especially keen to promote modern styles. A tension between these two sometimes competing goals—to promote composers generally and to champion the “new sound”—shaped their activities in the dynamic first decade (1951–60). This tension is particularly noticeable in two of the CLC's main activities during this period that are the focus of this article: membership choices and concert programming. In both endeavors one can discern both a desire to promote the cause of composers generally and a bias toward younger and more modernistic composers, especially those in Weinzweig's circle in Toronto.

Membership: Struggling with Inclusivity

The most famous example in the league's early history of the leadership's failure to be inclusive was a policy passed at the 1953 Annual General Meeting that set an age limit for membership. The constitutional guidelines already gave the executive council “the right to refuse membership to any person in their discretion,”Footnote ²⁵ but a new policy was drafted that explicitly barred older, presumably more conservative, composers from being members. The motion passed at this meeting resolved that “there be no lower age limit for League members, and that the upper age limit be set at sixty.”Footnote ²⁶

This blatantly exclusive policy can be understood as a manifestation of the resentments and suspicions of the founders of the league—young Toronto composers associated with John Weinzweig—toward an older, conservative musical leadership in that city, especially Healey Willan, Leo Smith, Arnold Walter, and Sir Ernest MacMillan. Willan, arguably Canada's most well-known composer at the time, was an organist and composer known especially for his Anglican liturgical music written in a late-nineteenth-century style; Sir Ernest MacMillan was conductor of the TSO, and all four men had teaching and/or administrative positions at the University of Toronto. Weinzweig had been an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto in the 1930s but grew to resent the musical conservatism of these leaders after he had life-changing encounters with musical modernism while doing graduate work at Eastman. He was especially taken with the works of Stravinsky and Berg,Footnote ²⁷ and after his return to Toronto in 1938, he became a champion for modernism and a leader among young avant-garde composers.

Teaching first at the Toronto Conservatory of Music and then serving on the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, Weinzweig developed a reputation for advocating modern trends generally and serial techniques in particular, and teaching composition and theory in a way entirely different from his colleagues and former teachers Healey Willan and Leo Smith. He wrote articles in which he argued that modern music was not a break from the past but an evolution of musical ideas and he criticized the lack of exposure given to modern musical trends in Canada.Footnote ²⁸ He was probably thinking of the TSO under Sir Ernest MacMillan and his own education under Willan and Smith when he railed against conservative programming and teaching in his 1942 article, “The New Music”:

Other young composers, such as John Beckwith, who attended the Toronto Faculty of Music in the 1940s, experienced a similar sense of dissatisfaction with the Toronto music establishment. As Beckwith later described it, the Faculty was both musically conservative and decidedly British:

Barbara Pentland, a young composer who became known as a radical while she lived in Toronto (1942–49) and developed a highly dissonant style, was frustrated enough with Toronto's musical leadership that she famously decreed that her generation was the first “real” generation of composers in Canada. In a 1950 essay she argued, “We are actually the first generation of Canadian composers. Before our time music development was largely in the hands of imported English organists, who, however sound academically, had no creative contribution to make of any general value.”Footnote ³¹ Pentland, who was a friend of Weinzweig's and his colleague at the Conservatory of Toronto, undoubtedly had the British-born Willan in mind when she disparaged “imported English organists” as well as other prominent organist-composers of the time such as Thomas Crawford.Footnote ³²

The phrase “no creative contribution” that Pentland used here to describe these men demonstrates how the term “creative” came to have the connotation of “new” or “modern” among young composers interested in new styles—the idea being that to simply repeat older traditional styles was not very “creative.” Helmut Kallmann commented on this usage of the term in the Toronto Daily Star in 1955: “Some of our younger composers love the word ‘creative composition.’ In other words, every composer who uses an up-to-date idiom is ‘creative,’ whereas Leo Smith and T. J. Crawford were not because their idiom was traditional.”Footnote ³³ The use of this term is subtle, but noticeable in early league documents, such as the stated constitutional aim (quoted above) “to promote the composition and playing of creative music,” and in an early ad that declares the organization's purpose as “rendering available to all Canadians a full understanding of the creative musical culture already realized within Canada” (emphasis mine).Footnote ³⁴

It did not help the young composers’ sense of frustration that the celebrated Healey Willan himself not only ignored modern trends in his own composing and teaching, but was also openly critical of such styles, which he called “unbeautiful,” “uncouth,” and “boring.”Footnote ³⁵ To the older leaders of Toronto's musical establishment such as Willan, the young modernists became known, not necessarily kindly, as “the Weinzweig gang,”Footnote ³⁶ and were even described as “ultra radicals.”Footnote ³⁷ Keillor reports that Weinzweig's ideas were considered so dubious by his more conservative colleagues that they began to refer to him as the “fifth column” because of his “advocacy of the suspect German twelve-tone technique.”Footnote ³⁸

Reflecting on the misunderstanding and lack of respect between the younger composers and their conservative teachers, Beckwith describes the CLC as being “born out of generational confrontation.”Footnote ³⁹ Although the league was established with the intent of being a national organization, its early history was very much shaped by powerful personalities centered primarily in Toronto, both in the “young moderns” camp led by Weinzweig, who began the organization, and in the “old conservative establishment” camp epitomized in the figure of Willan, in whose steps they did not wish to follow. As Beckwith postulated many years later, these older established musicians were not only viewed as representing “non-progressive styles of writing” but also “powerful musical interests with which the League did not wish to be associated (or which it did not want to be taken over by—?!).”Footnote ⁴⁰ No doubt all of these various conflicts—of generation, style, and personality—helped to prompt the age-limiting membership policy drafted by the CLC in 1953.

The first and only composers to actually receive an Honorary Membership status were Willan himself and Claude Champagne (renowned Quebecois composer and music educator), arguably the most important composers in the early twentieth century for Anglophone and Francophone Canada, respectively.Footnote ⁴¹ According to Helmut Kallmann's account of the story, these titles were given to Willan and Champagne under pressure from celebrated Quebecois conductor Wilfrid Pelletier.Footnote ⁴² When Pelletier learned that the esteemed Champagne was not included in the CLC membership or their concert programs because of his age, he was outraged and made an official complaint to the league executive committee in 1954, writing, “If the League was called the Canadian League of Young Composers, I would understand.”Footnote ⁴³ The following year both Champagne and Willan were made honorary members,Footnote ⁴⁴ which Kallmann speculates was offered “as a gesture of reconciliation,” rather than arising from a desire to honor the venerated musicians.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is unclear what the elder composers thought of the kafuffle surrounding their induction, but Willan's famous quip in reply to the honor, “Old man, tell me, does this mean I have to write like you chaps now?” suggests that he at least continued to have a detached and even paternalistic attitude toward the young group.Footnote ⁴⁶ As for the league members, they never again offered honorary or regular memberships to other notable leaders in Canada's musical establishment. By the time the league's founders themselves reached the age of 60, the age-restricting policy was no longer in effect.

In contrast to this snubbing of older composers associated with the musical establishment, league leaders were quick to include young composers. Initially, membership was by invitation only, and the minutes from the first meeting of the CLC report that invitations were immediately extended to young composers such as Kenneth Peacock, Eldon Rathburn, Alexander Brott, Jean Papineau-Couture, Godfrey Ridout, and Oscar Morowetz. Soon after, Jean Coulthard, Walter Kaufmann, Barbara Pentland, François Morel, and Clermont Pépin also received invitations to join.Footnote ⁴⁷ What is striking about this list of composers is the degree of stylistic variety among them, and how similar they all are in age. As Table 1 indicates, most of these composers were born between 1912 and 1926 (except Kaufmann and Coulthard who were somewhat older), and the league leadership may have seen them as safe allies in the generational conflict described above. The invitations to Papineau-Couture and Pentland—both composers with highly dissonant styles who occasionally used serial techniques—seem natural for league founders interested in new trends, but the invitations to Ridout, Morawetz, and Coulthard are also notable, because all wrote in traditional, Romantic, and/or lyric styles. Indeed, Ridout was a devoted student of Willan. The inclusion of these more conservative composers is further evidence that age or generation was a significant factor in the league's early identity.

Table 1. Members of the Canadian League of Composers, 1951–1960. A (C) indicates a charter member of the league; (H) indicates an honorary member.

¹ Leslie Mann resigned from the league in 1956, and presumably Walter Kaufmann gave up his membership after moving to the United States in 1957.

A similar trend toward inclusion of younger composers is evident throughout the first decade. In fact, the most striking commonality among the forty-three composers who eventually made it into the league in the first decade is age (see Table 1). Composers interested in joining the league were required to submit samples of their work to a membership committee made up of five league members of some regional diversity, who evaluated the works in regard to their “professionalism.” Aside from the sixty-year limit, age was not a condition for membership; nevertheless, the league's roster in the first decade was heavily weighted toward younger composers. With the exception of the honorary members and Sonia Eckhardt-Gramatté, all of the composers in the league in its first decade were born after 1906, and all but Murray Adaskin, Walter Kaufmann, Jean Coulthard, and Otto Joachim were born after 1912. As such, the great majority of members were in their twenties, thirties, and early forties during the league's first decade.

The youth of the group's founders was pronounced enough that, in an ad for the 1952–53 concert series, the origins of the organization were explained by league members themselves as follows: “It was in order to pool their talents and their common problems that a group of the most active younger composers banded together early in 1951,”Footnote ⁴⁸ and a 1955 program boasts that “the league now numbers among its members the majority of the better-known composers of the younger generation” (both emphases mine).Footnote ⁴⁹ Journalists regularly commented on league members’ youth as well. When the creation of the CLC was announced and celebrated at an all-Weinzweig concert in May 1951, a Toronto Globe and Mail editorial alluded to the youth of the organization, and its assumed commitment to “newer trends” in music: “[Weinzweig's] abilities as a composer and teacher have made him the dean of Canadian moderns, and it is noted that other officers and initial members of the League also are followers of the newer trends. These young men and women deserve a sympathetic hearing” (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁵⁰ Before the inaugural concert of orchestral works the following year, another Globe journalist wrote a human interest piece about the group that also emphasized their age: “The Canadian League of Composers’ symphony concert in Massy Hall next Wednesday is causing so much interest that many of our readers want to know who these young composers are” (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁵¹ This introductory concert prompted a series of human interest pieces about the composers in the Toronto Daily Star as well, in which their youth was continually emphasized—some articles went so far as to list the ages of the composers featured on the program. Harry Somers, for example, is described as a blond, cheerful, pipe-smoking, twenty-six-year-old Torontonian of great talent who was forced to drive a cab because he could not make ends meet as a composer in Canada.Footnote ⁵²

It may be that because the league developed a reputation as a group of younger composers who were either using newer musical idioms or sympathetic to them that older and more conservative composers were not interested in joining. Willan's reaction to his honorary membership certainly suggests that he had no interest in being involved, and it would seem that none of the other established Toronto composers or those from other Canadian cities applied to be members. In the case of MacMillan, he may have felt snubbed both as a composer and a conductor, because the league did not invite him to conduct its historic inaugural orchestral concert in Toronto in 1952. According to Louis Applebaum's biographer, Walter Pitman, the league members “had little confidence in [MacMillan's] commitment to Canadian music”; so they hired Geoffrey Waddington instead, whom Applebaum knew from their joint connection to the NFB.Footnote ⁵³ Applebaum reported that this decision “caused a rift with Sir Ernest, who felt slighted.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Tensions must have eased in later years as MacMillan did eventually conduct a league-sponsored concert of orchestral works with the TSO in February 1955.

As for other composers who did apply and were rejected, it is difficult to get an accurate and complete picture, because the collection of minutes of the executive council meetings from this period, housed at Library and Archives Canada, is incomplete. What is clear is that discussions about membership took up a significant amount of time and energy in council meetings, especially between 1954 and 1957, when the league received at least thirty-two inquiries and applications for membership. These discussions ranged from procedural matters to questions about eligibility criteria: Who has the final say about an applicant, the membership committee or the membership at large? What is the definition of “professionalism”? Should accomplishment or potential be the most important measure of qualification? Does an applicant need to be a Canadian citizen or a Canadian resident, or both? In many cases there was disagreement about whether or not to accept a new applicant. Reflecting on charges that the league was sectarian in its early years, Beckwith confirmed years later that early meetings discussing such matters were sometimes “acrimonious.” He recalled, “At one meeting we were arguing heatedly and using occasionally strong vocabulary. At a lull in the proceedings Harry [Somers, recording secretary], who up to then had said nothing, looked up from his notebook to ask, “Do you spell ‘shit’ with one ‘t’ or two?”Footnote ⁵⁵

Most of the applicants who were refused membership did not have, or go on to have, particularly notable careers in composition, with the exception of Galt MacDermot, Alfred Kunz, and, most notably, Graham George.Footnote ⁵⁶ MacDermot and Kunz were young when they applied and may not have had a mature body of works to show to the CLC's membership committee, who required the submission of three or four scores to study and evaluate for membership. However, it is also quite possible that it was their chosen styles and genres—jazz and musical theater for MacDermot and accessible choral music for Kunz—that were not deemed “professional” enough. MacDermot would go on to have a successful career in music theater, famously writing the score for Hair in 1967, and Kunz became a prolific composer of choral music.

The most noteworthy membership decision in the first decade was that regarding Graham George, who was refused after much discussion and a mixed three-to-two vote against him among members of the league's membership committee.Footnote ⁵⁷ George taught at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and had by this point already composed extensively, won several prizes for his compositions, written works in several genres (dramatic, orchestral, chamber, choral, organ), and studied for a period with Paul Hindemith at Yale.Footnote ⁵⁸ It seems incredible that he would not meet the league's professional standards. He also fit the league's predominant age demographic, having been born in 1912. On the other hand, he was an English-born organist-choirmaster who wrote primarily choral works in a somewhat traditional English style, and thus he may have been judged as the type of composer (the quasi-Willan type) that the league leadership wanted to avoid.

Another factor that likely led to George's exclusion from the league was an article he published called “Canada's Music—1955” that set out to evaluate the state of composition in Canada.Footnote ⁵⁹ In it he reviewed the works of thirteen composers in a highly condescending manner. Curiously, the article treats the composers anonymously, assigning each a number and withholding their names. George divides his subjects into two patronizing categories: “composers using easy technical devices” (nos. 1–7), who, despite the reputations they may have enjoyed, George “ruthlessly expose[s],” and “composers whose technique is potentially adequate for the expression of serious musical thought” (nos. 8–13), but who, it seems, in all cases fall short of the mark.Footnote ⁶⁰ George later circulated a “key” to the composers’ identities,Footnote ⁶¹ which revealed that several of the league's most prominent members were included in his scathing survey, including Weinzweig, Beckwith, Papineau-Couture, Pentland, and Brott. (The full list of composers with their corresponding numbers is as follows: 1. Papineau-Couture; 2. Barclay; 3. Turner; 4. Coulthard; 5. Kaufmann; 6. Beckwith; 7. McIntyre; 8. Pentland; 9. Weinzweig; 10. Brott; 11. Johnston; 12. Duchow; 13. Archer.) One member, Robert Turner, whom George described as having “both talent and intellect, but [. . .] frustrating the one and not using the other,” was on the membership committee that eventually refused George admittance into the league.Footnote ⁶²

The evidence given by the league's membership list, taking into account those who were included and those who were not, presents a contradictory picture. On the one hand, one can observe a surprising amount of stylistic pluralism, given that the founders were themselves primarily interested in modern trends. League composers wrote in a wide variety of styles, including experimental, atonal, neoclassical, folk-inflected music, and film scores. In fact, two members, Udo Kasemets and Pierre Mercure, later left the league because they felt it should have held a stricter allegiance to experimental music and the avant-garde.Footnote ⁶³ On the other hand, the age limit for membership, the fact that there was no effort to include older established Canadian composers, and the rejection of composers such as MacDermot, Kunz, and George strongly suggest a generational and stylistic bias.

This contradictory picture is echoed in the recollections of the league members themselves. When I contacted some of the founding and early members of CLC in the late 1990s and asked them to characterize membership issues of the early years, their accounts did not agree.Footnote ⁶⁴ Several mentioned Willan's honorary membership but interpreted it in different ways. In a letter from 1999, Murray Adaskin described the league's membership policies as highly inclusive:

However, this account conflicts with an earlier version of events Adaskin gave for an interview with Gordana Lazarevich in the 1980s. At that time he mentioned Willan, Leo Smith, and Arnold Walter specifically as personalities the league wanted to avoid.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, his characterization of the honorary membership was much less generous: “We invited Healey Willan to become our first honorary member. We were callow young people, and we felt that he was an old-fashioned English Wagnerian. As I think back on it now, I regret this attitude on our part.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Louis Applebaum characterized the CLC's attitude in the early years as so exclusive that their rejection of composers such as Willan and Walter became a key aspect of their identity. He described Willan's honorary membership in negative terms:

In an interview in 1978 with Florence Hayes, Weinzweig characterized the league initially as an inclusive national organization, rather than a “select group,” but later in the same interview he admitted, “The older generation was not invited because this was going to be for a new generation of composers. There was a rift between us. It was some years before we invited Healey Willan and Claude Champagne to become honorary members.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Andrew Twa also acknowledged the exclusion of older composers and described the musical circles in Toronto as demonstrating “divisive hostility” during this period. In his account of events, these difficulties arose primarily from bad blood between Weinzweig and the older members of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto:

A final perspective on the group's inclusivity in these early years comes from Harry Freedman. In reflecting on Willan in particular, Freedman replied, “Later, when we looked at Willan we looked at it differently. . . . Some of us became good friends with Willan. . . . Then we were concerned with being modern.”Footnote ⁷¹ He argued that despite their concern with “being modern” they were aware of their own bias and were sincere in their efforts to work against their prejudice. He insisted that the CLC was “very successful” in being inclusive, and he reported that “the [membership] committee bent over backward, even if they despised [a certain composer's] style, to include.”Footnote ⁷² Freedman's nuanced description is a telling one that may cut to the truth of the matter—that the younger composers dedicated to new styles who led the league did indeed “despise” more conservative styles, but that they made an effort, even if they were not always successful, to overcome their biases to include a wide range of fellow composers.

The CLC Concerts: Diversity within the “New Sound”

One of the most ambitious activities of the league during the first decade was the programming of concerts featuring works written by their members. With the help of independent concert-promotion organizations in Toronto and Montreal,Footnote ⁷³ the league presented an impressive total of thirty concerts of Canadian music in the 1950s, either on their own or with the help of cosponsoring organizations. Half of these performances (fifteen) took place in Toronto, eight were given in Montreal, two in Hamilton, two in New York, and one each in Stratford, Ottawa, and Vancouver (see Appendixes 1 and 2 for detailed lists of these events). The group also hosted a series of film nights in Toronto showcasing film scores written by their members (see Appendix 3) and published the book Fourteen Piano Pieces by Canadian Composers (Frederick Harris, 1955). In all, the league was involved in the performance of 216 Canadian concert works in its first decade (although some of these works were repeat performances) and the screening of approximately forty films with scores written by their members.

Already in the year after their formation, with no money in the bank, the league made ambitious plans to hire the TSO to present a concert of orchestral music in March 1952 in Massey Hall. An all-Weinzweig concert cosponsored by league, the Royal Conservatory, and the CBC had been used to officially announce the newly formed league the previous year, but the TSO concert was touted as the organization's “world premiere” and was used to showcase the works of seven members. The event created quite a stir; it enjoyed a lot of press coverage and was transmitted across the nation by the CBC. Governor General Vincent Massey was a patron for the event, which drew greetings and congratulations from Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. Lazare Saminsky, who thirty years earlier had been a founding member of the U.S. League of Composers,Footnote ⁷⁴ and whom Weinzweig had consulted when making plans to create the Canadian League, was a special guest.Footnote ⁷⁵

The cause of Canadian music was given a further boost when the following year (October 1953) an even more grandiose orchestral concert of Canadian music was organized to take place in Carnegie Hall in New York, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The league was one of the many groups to cosponsor this elaborate event hosted by BMI Canada, and although no league members were on the program committee,Footnote ⁷⁶ four of the six pieces programmed were by league members (Mercure, Brott, Morel, and Ridout; the others were by Colin McPhee and Willan).Footnote ⁷⁷ Olin Downes described the concert in the New York Times as being “of exceptional interest and artistic significance.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In subsequent years league concerts were not always as elaborate, celebrated, or costly as these first performances, but they were nevertheless significant: six more orchestral concerts, a double bill of two short operas by Somers and Blackburn, and almost two dozen other concerts featuring a variety of chamber, vocal, and choral pieces. In addition to giving a public voice to contemporary Canadian composers on a scale never heard before, these concerts had the unforeseen consequence of establishing, for the first time, a small repository of Canadian music scores, kept in the house of John Beckwith (the league's secretary) throughout the 1950s. This library (about 300 scores) was eventually donated to the newly established Canadian Music Centre in 1959, making up the humble beginnings of what would eventually become an immense national repository of Canadian music.Footnote ⁷⁹

An examination of the musical styles and personalities showcased in these league concerts reveals that similar trends guiding their membership policy also guided their programming choices: On the one hand, one can observe a wide array of stylistic influences, including serialism, polytonality, chromaticism, Romanticism, and folk-inflected styles; on the other hand, even among this diversity a preference for more modern styles and a bias toward Weinzweig's Toronto circle in particular is also apparent. Table 2 lists league composers and the number of times they had works performed at league concerts. Although this tally is a somewhat crude measure, in that it does not take into account repeat performances or the length or intricacy of the work involved, it nevertheless provides a sense of whose works were favored.

Table 2. Members of the Canadian League of Composers, 1951–1960, and the number of times they had works programmed on regular league concerts, or on concerts cosponsored by the league. Blanks indicate zero works performed. This tally does not include film music played during the league's film nights (see Appendix 3) because these works were first and primarily supported by the NFB, and they were programmed by one member, Louis Applebaum, rather than a league committee.

* Willan's Coronation Suite was featured in the 1953 Carnegie Hall concert cosponsored by the league, but no league members were on the programming committee for this event (see p. 461), nor was Willan yet an honorary CLC member.

As Table 2 demonstrates, Weinzweig and a handful of his more prominent students—Somers, Beckwith, Adaskin, Betts, and Freedman—received a very high number of performances compared to other members. Performances of works by this collection of six composers make up about 43 percent of the total performances in the first decade. Everyone in this Toronto group was also involved in the league's executive leadership in the early years, except Adaskin, who moved to Saskatchewan in 1952, and they were all modernists. Indeed, this group was often described as “the Toronto twelve-tone school,” even though very few of them used serial techniques consistently. Beckwith has described the group as “eclectic modernists” who show the influence of twelve-note processes, Bartókian rhythms, and jazz inflections.Footnote ⁸⁰

Other modernist composers filling out the top spots on the list of most-performed works are Papineau-Couture, Morel, and Brott, all working in Montreal. Papineau-Couture, like Weinzweig, was an influential teacher of modern styles and wrote in a highly chromatic style influenced by impressionism and serialism. Morel's compositions of this period used modes, chant, and cluster chords somewhat similar to Messiaen, whereas Brott wrote in a robust and sometimes harsh musical language with hints of Romanticism, analogous to Shostakovich. Pierre Mercure, Jean Vallerand (both in Montreal), and Udo Kasemets (an Estonian émigré composer working in Hamilton), who each worked in modern or avant-garde idioms, also received a generous representation on league concerts.

Thus it seems that league leadership had a perceptible preference for modernistic composers and their works when choosing repertoire for concerts, and especially key personalities in Toronto and Montreal. On the other hand, several more moderate and even conservative composers were represented in league concerts as well. Perhaps the most notable in this regard are Jean Coulthard, a Vancouver composer with a lyrical and even pastoral style (nine performances); Oskar Morawetz, an émigré composer of romantic leaning who used expanded tonal techniques (seven); and Godfrey Ridout, a student of Willan whose style shows the influence of Elgar and Walton (four). League concerts also included a handful of works by Peacock, Jones, and Matton—composers with folk-inflected styles.

Another important exception to the league's tendency to privilege modernists from Toronto and Montreal is the programming of film music by Applebaum, Blackburn, Fleming, and Rathburn, who were current or former employees of the NFB.Footnote ⁸¹ Several of their works were included in regular concerts (Fleming—eight performances, Blackburn—six, Rathburn—two, Applebaum—one), and their film scores dominated the nine film nights hosted by the league in Toronto (see Appendix 3). The scores for the films shown (which were almost all documentaries or animated shorts) were occasionally experimental—especially those produced by the renowned animator and film director Norman McLaren. Several of his films in which he experimented with drawing synthetic sounds directly on film stock were featured.Footnote ⁸² The more traditional films with scores by league members offered a wide variety of styles from impressionism to big band jazz to folk song settings and lush Romanticism, but on the whole the music heard on film nights tended to be more conventional than that heard in the league's regular concerts. Although they did not receive the same amount of publicity as the regular concerts, the film nights broadened the stylistic scope of league activities in the early years.

Despite these concessions to moderate and traditional styles, the league's tendency to feature works perceived as inaccessible gained them a reputation as modernists and even radicals. Although very few of these composers were truly radical avant-gardists by European or New York standards, in Canada members of the league “were considered the avant-garde of [their] time.”Footnote ⁸³ Their reputation as rebels has to be understood in the context of the conservative musical climate in the country at the time, and the fact that their approach to composition marked such a striking contrast with that of the previous generation of composers.

Evidence of this modernist reputation abounds in the reviews for the league's concerts throughout the first decade: Reviewers praised the group's pioneering efforts but also commented on the difficult modernism of the works programmed. Hugh Thomson described the “world premiere” concert as “an occasion for patriotic pride,” a “significant evening,” and “literally a howling success.”Footnote ⁸⁴ At the same time, his remark that the audience's clapping was “never less than that given in the same hall to so-called ‘safe’ works of the standard repertoire” hints at the perceived modernist bent of the evening.Footnote ⁸⁵ In a subsequent review, Thomson applauded the fact that “young Canadian composers had a chance to be heard,” but noted that the “accent throughout was heavily on modern style.”Footnote ⁸⁶

John Kraglund suggested that listening to new Canadian music was important regardless of its quality: “Good or bad, music by Canadian composers must be heard, and only the listeners can pass final judgment on the value and durability of the works.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In another review he reflected: “[At a concert like this] there is a feeling that things worth hearing are being accomplished by our national composers.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He did add, however, that listening to a full concert of new music was “a little demanding.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In a similar vein, Eric McLean made a plea for readers to attend an upcoming league concert, arguing that it would be stimulating and important, rather than necessarily enjoyable: “It would be foolish to suggest you should take in this concert because all of it will please you. At a distance of four days I can already guarantee that such a reaction will be impossible.”Footnote ⁹⁰

The league was sometimes openly criticized for the stylistic preferences of its members. One review complained that the league's composers so far had “managed to achieve little that is joyful or lighthearted,”Footnote ⁹¹ another accused them of sharing “an almost pathological fear of convention,”Footnote ⁹² and a third asserted that league composers believed that “to avoid sounding like Healey Willan is itself a virtue.”Footnote ⁹³ In his weekly column on music in Toronto, Leslie Bell argued that Canada needed “lighter” composers in addition to “young composers earnestly trying to blaze new trails,” and doubted that such composers would be included in the CLC.Footnote ⁹⁴ Bell also criticized the league's published piano album, suggesting that some of the pieces showed evidence of a “self-conscious striving for effect,” and wrong notes “for the sake of being different.”Footnote ⁹⁵ He was supported in that view by McLean, who thought that the volume contained too many works of a twelve-tone idiom for the average pianist. “After all,” he remarked, “twelve-tone music is an acquired taste, like olives.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Several specific works were criticized for their alleged harsh qualities. Thomson complained, for example, that in the first movement of Weinzweig's Divertimento No. 2 the oboe is made “to crackle, barnyard style,”Footnote ⁹⁷ and Jacob Siskind suggested that the work would be ideal as “background for film—perhaps one of the National Film Board's mental health series.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Thomson also disliked the third movement of Somers's Violin Sonata, describing it as suffering from “a form of modernistic ‘rigor mortis'” that resulted in music “so sour your toes curled under.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This same review praised the more conservative style of Morawetz's songs, commenting that this composer, at least, “apparently . . . doesn't feel it's corny to express deep feeling in his music.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Thomson swore that Pentland's Piano Concerto was written with “the avowed purpose of exasperating the average listener,” and declared melodramatically that he would rather “take the gas-pipe and end it all” than listen to it again.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Occasionally, the league was praised for its stylistic explorations and criticized for not being modern enough. In an early review for radio, William Krehm of CJBC AMFootnote ¹⁰² noted that audiences had come to expect that league concerts would be “unabashedly modern.”Footnote ¹⁰³ He defended this modernist inclination, however, and went so far as to criticize the more conservative pieces programmed, such as Robert Fleming's Six Improvisations on a Liturgical Theme, which he commented was so “commonplace” that it illustrated precisely what “drives composers to write modern music.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As this diversity of commentary demonstrates, the music presented in league concerts was different enough from the conservative programming heard in Canada in the past to give the organization the reputation of being “unabashedly modern.” Although the league composers were frequently chided for their programming biases, they were also praised for their efforts to bring the music of Canadians to the Canadian public, no matter what the style. Indeed, because of their efforts in this valiant first decade, Canadian music gained a much higher profile in the nation's musical life. Eventually other groups also began to pay attention to and program Canadian music, and so the members of the league felt they could be “relieved of their concert-giving mission” at the end of the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As Applebaum expressed it, they could finally “[lift] a great load from weak and thinly structured shoulders.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Many league members went on in the 1960s and 1970s to be involved in other new-music organizations where Canadian works were featured alongside non-Canadian pieces.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The capstone of the league's dynamic first decade of activity was the International Conference of Composers, which took place in Stratford in August 1960. With the help of a grant from the newly formed Canada Council, and with the support and cooperation of the Stratford Festival, the CBC, and several other organizations, league leaders planned a weeklong gathering intended to foster international dialogue and raise the profile of Canadian music. The impressive list of composer-delegates from twenty different countries included Luciano Berio, Henri Dutilleux, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Henk Badings, Edgard Varèse, Ernst Krenek, Gunther Schuller, George Rochberg, Roy Harris, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky.

The series of concerts programmed for this international event provide a final example of how the league's leadership balanced their interest in modern styles with their commitment to diversity. The five concerts featured works by several leading modern and avant-garde composers, such as Varèse, Krenek, Rochberg, Stravinsky, Berio, Cage, and Messiaen. Of the six Canadian compositions, five were by leading Canadian moderns—Anhalt, Freedman, Joachim, Papineau-Couture, and Weinzweig. On the other hand, the concerts also included music of more middle-of-the-road composers, such as Roy Harris, Godfrey Ridout, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Otar Taktakishvili (Soviet Union), Juan José Castro (Argentina), and Héctor Campos-Parsi (Puerto Rico). This range of styles prompted George Rochberg to comment in his review of the event, “One thing stands out: namely, the scope and range of the conference, quite remarkable in an era of extreme partisanship. The Canadians were interested in all sides of today's musical life and created an atmosphere of peaceful co-existence, however temporary it may have been.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ironically, the stylistically diverse Stratford conference was one of the catalysts for the more rigorously avant-garde ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1960s. Several of ONCE's future organizers attended the conference and came up with the idea for their own festival on the car ride home.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

If the goal of league's leaders in hosting this conference had been to prove to the world that Healey Willan was not Canada's only composer, they were certainly successful. Alfred Frankenstein's review of the conference praised the works he heard by Joachim, Anhalt, Freedman, and Weinzweig, and it offered the following assessment of the conference in general: “In 30 years’ activity as music critic for U.S. newspapers, the only Canadian composer I had ever heard of was Healey Willan, whose choral works are often performed in the U.S. That there was a Canadian League of Composers was completely news to me when I was invited to the Stratford festival, and that these composers practise all manner of styles and media was an even more striking revelation. . . . In short, what this festival did was put Canada on the map.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Having established a solid reputation both at home and abroad, the league changed focus beginning in the 1960s from concert-giving activities to lobbying, representing composers to politicians and arts organizations. Because of the CLC's efforts, throughout the following decades protection was sought for the rights of composers in the areas of broadcasting, recording, publishing, performing organizations, education, copyright, and income. As the years passed, the generational conflict that had colored their early years faded into the past, and the league became a much larger and broader organization, which today includes more than 300 members.Footnote ¹¹¹

CLC Identity in the Context of Postwar Canada

The tension in the league's early history between promoting Canadian composers generally and modernistic styles specifically can be understood as a reaction on the part of young composers to their unique Canadian context, especially a conservative music climate, lack of musical infrastructure, and generational conflicts felt particularly keenly by composers living in Toronto. Another important Canadian context that may help explain how and why the league began when it did was the flood of public dialogue that occurred during the postwar era about Canadian culture. This dialogue was prompted in part by a surge of patriotism during the war and in part by a series of government studies after the war evaluating various aspects of Canadian culture.Footnote ¹¹² The most famous was a study launched to investigate the areas of culture and education—a Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences was established under the direction of diplomat Vincent Massey in 1949. The study's findings, released in 1951 and known as the “Massey Report,” painted a bleak picture of the arts and scholarship in Canada. In keeping with the rebuilding, progressive spirit of the times, however, the report also gave many suggestions for improvement. The most influential was the institution of an arts and letters funding organization, which was realized six years later (1957) with the establishment of the Canada Council—an organization that subsequently had an enormous impact on the development of the arts in Canada.Footnote ¹¹³

It is no coincidence that the league began in the year that this report was published, and in the context of this national discussion on the arts in Canada, nor is it very surprising that the league and its supporters worked so hard to improve their lot in Canadian culture after having their negative experiences confirmed in the report. During these postwar years, which were also economic boom years, many artists and intellectuals, both native-born and new immigrants, joined together to further their own causes.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As Kallmann put it: “Everyone not only dreamt of a great future, but got busy building this future.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The formation of the Stratford Festival (1953), the National Ballet Guild of Canada (1951), Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (1952), the Canadian Music Library Association (1956), the Festival Singers of Canada (1954), and the Painters Eleven (1953) are a few of the many examples of groups that helped to raise the standard of cultural life in their country before government support was available through the Canada Council.

This context of national arts building offers another nuance to the league's struggles to be inclusive in its early years. In trying to explain why composers finally succeeded in creating a league in 1951 after repeated failures, Applebaum credits this dynamic nationalist spirit among artists: “By 1951, things were different. A new national consciousness[—]or is it perhaps a self-consciousness[—]was stirring up energies and attitudes that were certainly not evident a few years earlier, and on a scale that just couldn't be politely smiled aside.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ League members likely felt the weight of the responsibility to create a place for composition as a profession in Canada, but at the same time they were keen to construct an image for Canadian music that was progressive. They were anxious in particular to make sure that the more conservative British model epitomized in the compositional career of Healey Willan was not the only option available to them, and that Canada would not gain (or keep) a reputation as a musically conservative colonial backwater. Although the CLC's founders did not attempt to build a specific national style, their tireless ground-breaking activities and their stylistic and generational biases did indeed redefine what “Canadian music” was at the time and continues to be today. Although we may criticize their failure to live up to the inclusive goals they set for themselves, it is difficult not to sympathize with their concerns and admire the tenacity of their activities in these early years as they sought to create a place for themselves and future generations of composers in the Canadian cultural landscape.