Readers of this book will soon become aware that many individuals have contributed substantively to its preparation. To begin, profound thanks are due to the outstanding McGill-Queen’s University Press editorial and production team: the ever-inspiring Jonathan Crago (editor-in-chief), Ryan Van Huijstee (managing editor), Kathleen Fraser (associate managing editor), Finn Purcell (editorial assistant), Elena Goranescu (production manager), Linda Iarrera (sales manager), Jaqui Davis (publicist), Amy Hemond (publicity assistant), and Jeremy John Parker for his inspired cover design. Copy-editor James Leahy and indexer Siusan Moffat have been extraordinarily generous with their time and expertise. It has been a luxury to work with editorial collaborators with this level of skill, experience, and professionalism.
For their kind permissions and supportive collaboration, I want to thank Joanna Aiton Kerr, Joshua Green, and Julia Thompson (New Brunswick Provincial Archive, Fredericton); Debbie Beggs (music librarian, University of Ottawa); Madelaine Bédard, Tandi Hooper-Clark, and Jennifer Longon (New Brunswick Museum); Johanna Bertin (Don Messer biographer); Bob Borgen and Alex Kev (Buster Keaton Society); Peter Christ (Crystal Records); Werner Chudik (Anton Karas’s grandson); Ravida Din (executive producer, 7th Coalition); artists William Danard and Andreas Loutas; Zoë Druick (Simon Fraser University); Robin Elliott (Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music, University of Toronto); Berkeley Fleming (Robert Fleming’s son); Julie Grahame (Estate of Yousuf Karsh); Leah Grandy (Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick); John Grimshaw (Havergal Brian Society); Florence Hayes (Encyclopedia of Music in Canada); Glenn Hodgins, Christopher Mayo, and Will Callahan (Canadian Music Centre); Jessica Kilford (Nova Scotia Archives); Mathieu Lavoie (Université de Québec à Montréal); Stephane Lemelin (McGill University); Debbie Lindsey (CBC Digital Archives); Suzanne Lovejoy (music librarian, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University); Janine Marchessault (Canada Research Chair, Cinema and Media Studies, York University); Patti Melanson (Harbour View High School, Saint John); Geoff Mitchell (senior recording engineer, NFB Chester Beachell Studios); Maureen Nevins and Suzanne Lemaire (Library and Archives Canada); Philip Pacey and Philip Scowcroft (British railroad authorities); Curtis Perry (Ottawa New Music Creators); Pietro Serapiglia (producer and VP distribution, The Stephen Low Company); Lois Siegel (Lois Siegel photography); John Tibbetts (University of Kansas); Laurence Wall (CBC Radio One, Ottawa); and Jeffrey Wright-Sedam (caricature artist, New York).
Special thanks are due to Eldon’s many musical collaborators and correspondents who have been generous with their time and support, including Canadian cellist and impresario Julian Armour, UK composer Gavin Bryars, pianist Marc-André Hamelin, and British banjoist David Price. Eldon also enjoyed affable and mutually respectful association with the many conductors with whom he collaborated during his career, many of whom generously offered their time and reminiscences, including Howard Baer, Victor Davies, Victor Feldbrill, Bruce Holder Jr, and Richard Hornsby. Conductor Daniel Swift kindly shared an important archival recording of a concert titled “A Tribute to Eldon Rathburn,” hosted by the Ottawa Chamber Music Society on Eldon’s eighty-first birthday (21 April 1997), featuring the Chamber Players of Canada and a variety of guest performers, including Swift as conductor.
I am especially grateful to five retired NFB directors and animators who generously shared their time and memories of Eldon Rathburn: Don McWilliams, Kaj Pindal, Gerald Potterton, Robert Verrall, and the late Colin Low. To spend an afternoon with Potterton at his home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships is to be profoundly charmed and impressed by the irrepressible creative energy of the great filmmaker. Eldon’s longtime friend, collaborator, and correspondent Kaj Pindal, the Danish-Canadian animator, kindly granted permission for the use of his caricatures of Eldon (shown in figure 6.1), and engaged in helpful dialogue in 2015 and again in 2018. In 2014, together with Allyson Rogers, I met with animator Robert Verrall and his son David, an important NFB animation producer and filmmaker of the next generation. One of the first artists hired by Norman McLaren to the NFB’s newly formed animation unit in the mid-1940s, Verrall shared his fond and vivid memories of working with Rathburn – on The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952), A Is for Architecture (1959), and The Family That Dwelt Apart (1973) in particular – and spoke about the importance of film music and of his profound admiration for Eldon. Don McWilliams also spoke to us at length about his collaboration with Eldon on Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) and The Passerby (1995), the second-last film Eldon would score during his career (Peter Stephenson’s 1997 animated IMAX film Paint Misbehavin’ was his last). In a touching memorial tribute to his friend and collaborator titled “Bach tous les matins: Eldon Rathburn (1916–2008)” (24 Images, vol. 140, 2009, p. 4), McWilliams writes admiringly about Eldon’s gentle and self-effacing nature, and about his pride in being able to say that he worked in “the same métier as Bach!” We had the honour of meeting Colin Low in the autumn of 2015, thanks to the kindness of his wife Eugénie. Low’s memory was failing him, but the ever-present genius, grace, and dignity of the legendary Canadian filmmaker was palpable during our visit, and he encouraged our project. His impact as a film industry innovator and visionary has gained an almost mythical status, and his passing in February of 2016, less than six months after our visit, was mourned throughout the Canadian film industry, and around the world.
At an early stage in the preparation of this monograph, director Stephen Low became the greatest friend and supporter we could have hoped to encounter. Among other contributions, Stephen generously shared fond memories of Eldon, and provided detailed accounts of their many collaborative projects. Following in the footsteps of his father, he has become one of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers working in the large-format medium. Stephen’s filmography, compiled during a career that has spanned more than three decades, includes five important IMAX films scored by Rathburn, his go-to composer during the last decade of Eldon’s career as a film composer: Skyward (1985), Beavers (1988), The Last Buffalo (1990), Flight of the Aquanaut (1993), and Titanica (1995). In conversations with Eldon and Stephen, it became clear that they enjoyed a special relationship, a bond based not only on mutual respect but also on a quirky sense of humour and a shared passion for the railway. During a conversation in 2015, Stephen provided a touching reflection on Eldon’s legacy: “Eldon’s music is ecstasy,” he began. “He always got the emotion right and he always did fascinating things with the films he worked on. It was Eldon, as much as anyone else, who made the NFB’s reputation.”
The NFB’s extraordinary library and archive staff – archive technicians Pierre Boucher and André D’Ulisse, photo librarian Claude Lord, senior librarian Katherine Kasirer – contributed crucially important support and resources without which the research compiled in this book would have been severely handicapped. We are deeply grateful for their constant encouragement and enthusiasm, and for their dedicated effort in making vast amounts of documentation readily available to us.
I am indebted to my many friends, colleagues and students at Carleton University who have supported and encouraged this research, including Jack Coghill, James Deaville, Nancy Duff, Mihaela Irina, Laurie Jaeger, Alexis Luko, Michael Ostroff, Roseann Runte, and graduate students Rachel Clothier, Mishona Collier, Mihaela Irina, Pamela Morrow, and Kyle Zavitz. I am particularly grateful to Dean Emeritus John Osborne for his kind support and mentorship, and for modelling what committed advocacy for the arts and humanities can achieve. I also wish to thank Research Professor Emerita Elaine Keillor for her generous support, her tireless advocacy of Canadian music, and her helpful insights as both a musicologist and a pianist who has produced brilliant recordings of some of Eldon Rathburn’s works. I am also grateful for the support of Carol Payne (art history) and André Loiselle (film studies), NFB scholars whom I am fortunate to count among my friends and colleagues at Carleton University. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Emeritus Professor Alan Gillmor for his abiding friendship, his constant encouragement, and for lending his renowned editorial eagle eye to the task of reading an early draft of the manuscript.
I also wish to thank Therese Muxeneder and Eike Feß, archivists at the Arnold Schoenberg Centre (Vienna), and the extraordinary Schoenberg family, Lawrence and Anne (L.A.), Ronald and Barbara (L.A.), and Nuria (Venice), for their constant kindness and encouragement, and for their interest in Eldon’s story. One of the proudest moments of Eldon’s life was when he met with all of them in Ottawa in the summer of 2007, one year prior to his death and sixty-two years after he first met them as children in Los Angeles, with their father, in 1945.
Thanks are due also to a number of gifted journalists for their interest, dialogue, and public coverage of the Eldon Rathburn story, including Charles Enman, Stanley Péan, Peter Robb, Richard Todd, Dan Rubinstein, Denys Lelièvre, Alayne McGregor, Peter Prentice, Alan Neal, and Nick Ward.
The members of Eldon’s immediate family have been extraordinarily kind and collaborative during all stages of this research. Eldon’s sister Joan Morris and brother-in-law John Morris (Mississauga, Ontario), niece Roberta Morris (Mississauga), and nephew William Cooper (Moncton, New Brunswick) have been especially helpful. From the age of twenty-eight, following his father’s death in 1944, Eldon was responsible for the care of both Joan (then age seven) and their ailing mother Blanche. Joan’s many fond and detailed reminiscences, shared generously by email and in conversation – together with those of John, Roberta, and William – are peppered liberally throughout this book and in the endnotes. Without their enthusiastic support from the outset this project might never have been launched. I am also grateful for the kind support of Lise Payette-Leroux, Margot Rathburn’s niece, and the late Dolores Parent, Margot’s longtime friend. Together with Eldon’s sister Joan, Dolores was at Eldon’s hospital bedside when he passed away in Ottawa in 2008. I am also grateful to Robert Boehm Rathbun of Franklin, Tennessee, for kindly sharing the family history research he has compiled for the Rathbun-Rathbone-Rathburn International Family Association (RRRIFA), building upon the foundational research done by his father, Frank Hugo Rathbun II (1924–2010), of Fairfax, Virginia.
My longtime friend and collaborator Dianne Parsonage came to know Eldon, Margot, and the Rathburn, Morris, and Cooper families well. She encouraged the project from the outset in innumerable ways, providing invaluable perspective, reading and research assistance, and unfailingly level-headed counsel, as well as important grant application and proofreading support. Dianne’s assistance, patience and kindness have had a considerable impact on this research.
Several retired members of the NFB’s expert sound team generously shared their time and recollections, including Jean-Pierre Joutel, Julian Olsen, Jackie Newell, and Louis Hone. Without the extraordinary kindness and support of Louis Hone, Eldon’s close friend and collaborator during his later years, this book would have been severely diminished. Among his many contributions to the project, Louis granted free access to hours upon hours of interviews he had recorded with Eldon in preparation for his masterful documentary portrait Eldon Rathburn: They Shoot … He Scores (NFB, 1995). We came to refer to these recorded interviews – which were among our most centrally important research resources – as the LHT collection (“Louis Hone Tapes”). Louis also made himself available for interviews, enthusiastically encouraged the project when the tasks at hand seemed overwhelming, and proofread the manuscript. He is a treasured friend of all who knew and cared about Eldon Rathburn, with whom he shared a special bond based not only in mutual respect, but also in a shared sense of humour. Our research team always understood that Louis’s generous and enthusiastic engagement with our project reflected the extent of his affection and admiration for Eldon. The title of this book has been adapted with permission from Hone’s cleverly punning documentary film title.
It is impossible to give a full account of the debt of gratitude I owe to my research collaborator Allyson Rogers for her steadfast commitment to this research and for the dedication and original insights that she brought to chapters 2 and 3 in particular. Over a period of four years, Allyson watched films and read stacks of production files at the NFB archives, poured over hundreds of film scores and other documents at Library and Archives Canada and the New Brunswick Provincial Archives, prepared extensive summaries of her findings, and engaged with me in hours of animated discussion about NFB film music. Allyson has shown extraordinary patience with the countless sweat-of-the-brow tasks the researcher encounters when engaging with a project of this scope and never lost her enthusiasm or sense of humour in the process. The research aptitudes she has brought to this project are skills that she is now engaging in her doctoral research at McGill University, where her dissertation on the NFB’s music department is forthcoming. Allyson knows the NFB film music research field as well as I do, and the appearance of her name on the book’s cover is an acknowledgment of my profound gratitude for the level of commitment, research acumen, time, and skill that she has invested in this project. Together with colleague Adrian Matte, Allyson also conceived, coordinated, and produced a recording that is making an important contribution to the Rathburn legacy in tandem with this book. Working with jazz-inspired themes from Eldon’s scores for three timeless NFB short films, the recording The Romance of Improvisation in Canada: The Genius of Eldon Rathburn (Montreal: Justin Time Records, 2018) presents a series of Matte-Rogers arrangements that were designed as a springboard for the improvisatory skills and imagination of the five leading Canadian jazz artists who enthusiastically accepted the challenge. The recording was made in February 2018 at the NFB’s historic Chester Beachell studio, the very studio where Eldon had worked and collaborated so frequently during his career. The result is a uniquely inspiring Canadian creative project, one that combines a tender nostalgia and the best of forward-looking twenty-first-century jazz.
Suffice to say that all of these friends and collaborators expressed agreement with everything claimed in this book, and they therefore take full responsibility for any remaining errors, omissions, or oversights. This research was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.