This year marks the 50th anniversary of the University of Victoria’s School of Music, and from Dec. 1 to 3, as part of its season-long celebrations, it will host a reunion weekend full of special events for visiting alumni and the public, including concerts.
UVic began offering some music courses in 1964, and a Division of Music offering undergraduate degrees was formally established in 1967.
In 1969, it became the Department of Music and was authorized to grant graduate degrees, and in 1978 it moved into the facility it still occupies, the MacLaurin Building’s B-Wing. The following year, it became the School of Music.
The school’s range grew over the years; today it encompasses performance, composition, musicology, theory, jazz, ethnomusicology and other sub-disciplines. (There is a separate music-education department within the Faculty of Education.) The school is also crucial to Victoria’s musical life. It hosts scores of concerts every year, featuring students, faculty members, guest artists and its resident ensembles — chorus, orchestra, wind groups, chamber singers, Sonic Lab, instrumental and vocal jazz ensembles.
Today, the school has 55 faculty and staff members, about 180 undergraduates, 32 graduate students and 40 students in a joint music and computer science program.
It has had many distinguished faculty members, and can boast of alumni who have gone on to major careers elsewhere, including pianist Eve Egoyan, tenor Isaiah Bell and composers Linda Catlin Smith and Rodney Sharman (who just this month won the Canada Council’s Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts).
And some alumni have had prominent careers while remaining local, including performer Daniel Lapp and composer Tobin Stokes.
(Full disclosure: Your humble narrator himself attended this fine institution as a mewling youth, and left in 1988 toting a Bachelor of Music degree in music history.)
The coming reunion weekend will include an open house at the school, a social and dinner, a movement workshop, a campus tour, a “beer choir” at the campus pub, a brunch and an open-mike concert.
(Some of these events require registration, which in a few cases has already closed. For details, visit finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar/signature.)
The main attractions for the public, however, will be two concerts on Saturday.
At 2:30 p.m., through the Orion Series in Fine Arts, two bachelor of music graduates from the class of 2001, violinist Kerry DuWors and pianist Stephen Runge, will offer an intriguing program devoted to works composed exactly a century ago, in 1917 (Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, free admission).
Both musicians grew up in Saskatchewan and now have wide-ranging concert careers. DuWors won the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition in 2003, and since that year has taught at Brandon University, in Manitoba, though she is also pursuing a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York.
Runge is head of the music department at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., and is currently recording major solo works by Schumann.
The duo’s program on Saturday samples a variety of early-modern idioms, through sonatas by Debussy, Elgar and Fauré and short pieces by Rachmaninoff and Sibelius.
On Saturday, the school will host a gala concert featuring UVic’s chorus and orchestra conducted by Timothy Vernon, the founding artistic director of Pacific Opera Victoria (8 p.m., Farquhar Auditorium, University Centre, $25/$20/$10, UVic Ticket Centre; streaming live at finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar/listen).
Vernon, who grew up in Victoria, was awarded an honorary doctorate by UVic in June, though that was not his first connection with the university.
I myself recall singing in the UVic Chorus under his spirited direction in Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Orff’s Carmina Burana, during the 1985-86 school year, when he took over conducting duties while George Corwin was on sabbatical.
Saturday’s program comprises Handel’s “Utrecht” Te Deum, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis after Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
The latter, from 1933, is a real treat — a wild ride (the hilarious finale especially) concocted by a prodigious young composer mobilizing every musical weapon in his considerable arsenal.
The soloists, both UVic faculty members, will be pianist Arthur Rowe and, on the prominent trumpet part, Merrie Klazek.
