Bruce Mather

Bruce Mather (born May 9, 1939) is a Canadian composer, pianist, teacher, and writer who is particularly known for his contributions to contemporary classical music.

Career

One of the most notable composers of microtonal music, he was awarded the Jules Léger Prize twice, first in 1979 for his Musique pour Champigny and again in 1993 for Yquem. Some of his other awards include the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada's Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux prize in 1987 for Barbaresco and the Serge Garant Prize from the Émile Nelligan Foundation in 2000.

Mather is an associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian League of Composers. As a writer he has contributed works to numerous musical journals and publications, including authoring the articles on Serge Garant, François Morel, and Gilles Tremblay in the Dictionary of Contemporary Music. He has taught on the music faculties of the University of Toronto (1964–1966), the University of Montreal (1970–1973), the Paris Conservatoire (1978–1979) and McGill University (1966–2001). His notable pupils include Marc Patch, Peter Allen, John Burke, Paul Crawford, Jacques Desjardins, José Evangelista, Anthony Genge, Richard Hunt, Denis Lorrain, John Oliver, Nicole Rodrigue, François Rose, Ronald Bruce Smith, Donald Steven, and Alexander Tilley.

As a pianist Mather has displayed a strong commitment to performing new music by himself and by other contemporary composers. He has performed in many major performance venues and music festivals, often appearing with his wife, pianist Pierrette LePage, in duo-piano works. The husband and wife team have also partnered on several recordings. He served as director of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec from 1966–1981 and later served as treasurer.

Education

Born in Toronto, Mather began composing music as a young child. At the age of 10 he won a prize in the 1949 Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada composition competition. In 1952 he entered the Royal Conservatory of Music where he studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, Earle Moss, and Alexander Uninsky and music theory and composition with Godfrey Ridout, Oskar Morawetz, and John Weinzweig. In 1957 he matriculated to the University of Toronto where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1959.

Mather attended the Aspen Music Festival and School in the summers of 1957 and 1958 through a scholarship provided by the Women's Musical Club of Toronto and the Beta Sigma Phi sorority. While there Alexander Uninsky introduced the young composer to Darius Milhaud and Milhaud quickly became one of his more important mentors. He continued to study with Milhaud and with Simone Plé-Caussade, Lazare Lévy, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire from 1959-1961. In 1964 he received a Master of Music from Stanford University where he was a pupil of Leland Smith and Roy Harris, and in 1967 he earned a Doctor of Music from the University of Toronto.

Music

Mather is a composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and piano works. A disciple of Ivan Wyschnegradsky, his music often employs microtonal scales. Though he was distrustful towards microtonal music after hearing Alois Hába's works, his meeting with Wyschnegradsky in the seventies was crucial for his aesthetic and his use of microtonal scales. As a pianist, he and his pianist wife, Pierrette LePage, have performed many of Wyschnegradsky's pieces.

As a composer Mather employs Wyschnegrasky's principle of non-octavic spaces. He wrote many works using this technique, notably in his Poème du délire (Poem of Delirium), a tribute to Alexander Scriabin (as a reference to his Poem of Ecstasy and Poem of Fire) who influenced both Mather and Wyschnegradsky. Mather's compositions are also strongly influenced by his love of poetry and wine.

Works

References

Further reading

• Bazin, Paul. "L'ascendance du maître, ou l'empreinte théorique d'Ivan Wyschnegradsky sur Régime 11, Type A (1978) de Bruce Mather". Circuit, musiques contemporaines (in French). 29 (2): 83–98. doi:10.7202/1062569ar – via Erudit.
• Desjardins, Jacques (1999). "Brian Cherney et Bruce Mather : la clairvoyance du compositeur solitaire" (PDF). Circuit, musiques contemporains (in French). 10 (2): 17–28. doi:10.7202/004660ar – via Erudit.
• Griffiths, Paul (1995). "Bruce Mather". In Sadie, Stanley (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 11. Macmillan. pp. 819–20.
• Jedrzejewski, Franck (2014). "Mather (Bruce)". Dictionnaire des musiques microtonales (in French) (Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée ed.). L'Harmattan. pp. 148–49.
• Schafer, R. Murray (1974). "Bruce Mather". In Vinton, John (ed.). Dictionary of Contemporary Music. Dutton. p. 461.
• Stubley, Eleanor V., ed. (2008). Compositional Crossroads: Music, McGill, Montreal. McGill-Queen's University Press.

External links

• Bruce Mather Canadian Music Centre
• Bruce Mather The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Bruce Mather discography at Discogs

• Text by Mather on his microtonal music, with brief biography(fr)