John Beckwith celebrates his 95th birthday on March 9, 2022. To honour this milestone, later this year the Institute for Music in Canada will be releasing a second collection of his selected writings on music, to complement the earlier Music Papers (Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1997). The new collection of his writings will be titled Music Annals; further details will be posted to this blog when the book is ready for purchase. In the meantime, as a sampler of the forthcoming volume, here is a previously unpublished article that is intended for the collection. The article is a study of “The Blue and White,” the official song of the University of Toronto. This article, written in 1990, reflects at least three aspects of Beckwith’s career: 1) his long association with the University of Toronto, as a student, a faculty member, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Music; 2) his interest in a wide variety of vernacular music of Canada, including hymns, traditional music, and in this case the college song repertoire; and 3) his analytical, editorial, and compositional interest in the music of Canada’s past.

12 The Blue and White 1990 [Click on the link to open a PDF copy of the article.]

Note also that the Canadian Art Song Project has released a beautiful film of Beckwith’s Four Short Songs (2014) to poems by Wassily Kandinsky in the English translation by Elizabeth R. Napier. The songs are performed by Krisztina Szabó (mezzo-soprano) and Steven Philcox (piano); the film was directed by Jennifer Nichols and Patrick Hagarty and was shot in Collingwood, Ontario in August 2021. You can watch the film on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbLylYE7Wu8.