Volume 23 Issue 9 - June / July / August 2018

Andrew Staniland
he completed the full orchestration of his North Country Suite.
Somers returned to Paris in 1960 on a Canada Council fellowship,
seemingly a fully formed, mature composer. He began supporting
himself on his commissions, writing major orchestral compositions,
such as his Lyric (1960) for the Koussevitzky Foundation in New York
and Stereophony (1963) for the Toronto Symphony (TSO). The point of
this is that the support he received as an emerging composer set him
up to make that transition to maturity.
A comparable path can be traced for Alberta-born Andrew
Staniland (b. 1977), who at age 23 moved east to pursue his graduate
degrees in composition at the Faculty of Music of the University
of Toronto. Staniland began winning composition prizes immediately
and steadily. Following two SOCAN prizes in 2002, he then
won the second Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music ever awarded
in 2003, as well as the Toronto Emerging Composer Award in 2004.
Staniland went on to win the Pierre Mercure Award in 2005 and the
Hugh Le Caine Award in Electroacoustic Music in 2006. He received
appointments as associate composer to both the National Arts Centre
Orchestra (2002-2004) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006-
2009) and earned a residency at the Centre du Creation Musicale
Iannis Xenakis in Paris in 2005. In 2007, CBC Radio presented his
TSO-commissioned orchestral work Gaia at the International Rostrum
of Composers (IRC) in Paris, resulting in numerous international
broadcasts. At the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s (WSO) New Music
Festival, Staniland won the Prairie Emerging Composer Award in
2008, and in 2009 he was not only Grand Prize winner of the CBC/
Radio-Canada Evolution Composers competition, but also received the
Prix de l’Orchestre de la Francophonie in the same competition.
In 2010, Staniland joined the faculty of the School of Music at
Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, where he
teaches composition and directs the group he created, the Memorial
ElectroAcoustic Research Lab (MERL) and its cross-disciplinary
research team. By the time Staniland was 35 years of age, in 2012, he
had composed 50 works, including his JUNO-nominated Dark Star
Requiem (with poet Jill Battson), nine orchestral compositions, the
large song cycle Peter Quince at the Clavier on poetry by Wallace
Stevens (1879–1955), commissioned by American Opera Projects, and
The River is Within Us, winner of this year’s Classical Composition
of the Year at the East Coast Music Awards. In the six years since
then, his creative output has kept pace. Certainly, if ever there was a
Abigail Richardson-Schulte
Canadian composer since Harry Somers for whom there was evident
cause for support from an early point, it would be Andrew Staniland.
On Canada Day in St. John’s, NL, Staniland’s major new work for
five choirs from across Canada, On the Surface of Water, will receive
its world premiere. The piece uses the writings of Leonardo da Vinci
and was commissioned by Podium, the national choral conference
and festival that has been held by Choral Canada every second year
since 1982. Podium 2018 will be the first time this national conference
and festival has been held in Newfoundland and Labrador, with daily
concerts from June 29 to July 3. The choirs featured in Staniland’s On
the Surface of Water are the Oakville Choir for Children and Youth,
the Elektra Women’s Choir, Ullugiagâtsuk Choir (a student choir from
Nunatsiavut, Labrador), the Choeur de chambre du Québec, and the
Newman Sound Men’s Choir.
Several weeks later on July 28, the Toronto Summer Music Festival
will offer the world premiere of a new string quartet with a historical
program: The Corner House, by Abigail Richardson-Schulte. Whereas
Andrew Staniland was the second winner of U of T’s Karen Kieser
Prize in Canadian Music, Richardson-Schulte was the first, in 2002.
Her winning work, a trio, titled dissolve, was broadcast on CBC Radio
Two, and then submitted by CBC Radio Music to the IRC in Paris,
where it was selected as the best work by a composer under 30 years
of age. This resulted in broadcasts in 35 countries around the world. In
addition, her selection won her a commission from Radio France: her
second string quartet, titled Scintilla. Richardson-Schulte is currently
composer-in-residence with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra
(HPO), serves as artistic director of the HPO’s What Next Festival,
hosts community events, and teaches composition for the University
of Toronto Faculty of Music.
These composers didn’t just wake up
one morning ready to give us the new
works that will contribute to our
contemporary point of view. Their
emergence needed support.
Richardson-Schulte thinks of her new work as a sort of tone poem for
string quartet. It’s a programmatic piece, based on the experiences of
Ernest MacMillan during his internment in the Ruhleben prison camp
during WWI. MacMillan had been in Bayreuth, Bavaria, when Canada
declared war on Germany in 1914, and he spent five years interned,
along with over 4,000 men of English, American, Australian and
Canadian descent who just happened to be in Germany when war broke
out. The title of the piece, The Corner House, is taken from the name of
the arts club MacMillan was a member of at the camp. The three movements
depict the contrasting moods and atmospheres representing the
many formative experiences he had while he was there. When I spoke
with Richardson-Schulte, she revealed that, though details have not yet
been made public by TSM, the concert will be a part of this year’s TSM
Academy, where TSM artistic director Jonathan Crow will be featured
as first violin in the work alongside three Academy Fellows. The Corner
House was commissioned by TSM, with the financial assistance of the
Ontario Arts Council. The performance will take place at Walter Hall,
University of Toronto at 7:30pm on July 28.
Investment in support for these composers during their formative
years has made it possible to have these new works this summer.
Richardson-Schulte, Rolfe and Staniland didn’t just wake up one
morning as seasoned composers, ready to give us the new works that
will contribute to our contemporary point of view. One cannot look
past the innate talents and creative work that brought them forward in
their careers, but their emergence needed support, as with all creative
endeavours.
David Jaeger is a composer, producer
and broadcaster based in Toronto.
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