6.1 • Caricatures of Eldon Rathburn, railroad enthusiast, sketched ca. 1980 by NFB animator Kaj Pindal. The caricature above hung prominently in the Rathburn home. The caricature below was used as the cover image on the 1994 CD Mostly Railroad Music (Crystal Records, CD520).
Covering His Tracks
Rathburn’s Train Music
There is something about railways and their stations that triggers the imaginations of creative artists – indeed they have played a larger role in the arts than any other form of recent technology!”
GODFREY RIDOUT1
“If there’s one single thing that turns on Eldon Rathburn more than others,” Montreal Gazette music critic Eric McLean wrote in December of 1982, “it is trains.” “He belongs to train clubs, he collects books on the subject, and it was Rathburn who composed that marvelous bluegrass score for The Railrodder, the National Film Board epic starring Buster Keaton.”2 Philip L. Scowcroft went a step further. In an extensive survey of published and recorded railway-related music, Scowcroft proclaimed Rathburn “the most prolific of all train composers.”3 “Many composers have visited railways more than once,” he wrote. “But Rathburn surely outscores them all comfortably.”4 Indeed the extent of his fascination with trains – and with steam engines in particular – qualifies him as a certified “ferroequinologist,” a tongue-in-cheek term meaning “aficionado of iron horses” (one that Eldon knew and appreciated for its humour). Kaj Pindal’s caricatures capture the delightful eccentricity of Eldon’s passion for trains (figure 6.1).
Twenty-first-century readers may be surprised to learn that this fixation was so common in the early twentieth century that Sigmund Freud theorized about it, claiming that virtually all boys and young men “at least at one time in their lives, want to become [railroad] conductors.” “They are wont to ascribe to railroad activities an extraordinary and mysterious interest,” according to Freud, with which they engage “as a nucleus for exquisite symbolisms.”5 Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1933–) has drawn similar conclusions, noting that “of all the sounds of the Industrial Revolution, those of trains seem across time to have taken on the most attractive sentimental associations.”6
A peculiar anthropomorphism seems to lie at the heart of Rathburn’s affection for steam engines. In a revealing interview with Terence Macartney-Filgate for the NFB documentary End of the Line (1959), he reflected on his fascination with the locomotives of yesteryear:
There’s something about the steam engine that isn’t just a passing thing. There’s something symbolic about it. It’s hard to explain. I went out to the Angus shops [Montreal’s CPR railcar manufacture and repair yards] a couple of years ago, and saw the old engines cut in two. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist; I would have loved to have taken one home with me. It’s a machine, but I like to think that it has a heart. I know it hasn’t, but we put it there … I liken the steam locomotive to a human being. It breathes and it pants. It gets old. It gets rusty. It gets bald. It has setbacks. It goes up the hill. It gets mad. Sparks come. It grunts. It snorts. It hisses. It belches its smoke out. It swears, maybe.7
An obsesssive preoccupation with trains? Without any doubt. To the point of anthropomorphism? So it would seem. Or perhaps it was nothing more than a fondness for wistful reminiscence that led Eldon to invest such a deep and abiding affection in steam engines. Figure 6.2 shows the elegant CPR Locomotive No. 634 that was used to push freight and passenger trains westward along Saint John’s Chesley Drive to the Reversing Falls Bridge. Eldon would have known CPR No. 634 well. In the photograph it is shown waiting to switch cars at Mills Street, near Union Station and quite close to the Rathburn home. Eldon spoke frequently of his childhood obsession with trains:
Railroads have been an interest of mine ever since childhood. Our first home was in the North End [of Saint John] and close to the train tracks. Even now I remember most of the engines: 2661, 2579, 2900, 2901, etc. I used to go down to the station to see the boat trains [port passenger trains making connection with passenger ships] come in from Halifax – some days in freezing weather.8
Figure 6.2 • CPR Locomotive No. 634 in north Saint John, New Brunswick, early twentieth century.
We heard the trains in Saint John every day. I got to know the streetcars by their sounds. I could identify them … I would have liked to have been born a little earlier, around the turn of the century, [to witness] all that railroad tunneling.9
Yet Eldon insisted that his fascination with trains involved something more than nostalgia for the bygone era of his youth. “My obsession with trains is getting worse!” he said in 1993.10 “I can’t quite understand it myself; it’s more than nostalgia.”11 Perhaps, as Murray Schafer has suggested,12 there were also purely sonic reasons for composers to be interested in the railroad as a source of compositional inspiration. “There’s a music to the railroad, a particular rhythm,” Eldon told Louis Hone. “You hear when it goes over the joints and switches; it’s like a big drum break. The whistles are also musical.”13 Recalling Eldon’s years with Bruce Holder’s dance and radio orchestra in Saint John, the conductor’s son Bruce Holder Jr recounted how Eldon was known to have caused rehearsals to dissolve into laughter when a train passed by blowing its horn. “E-flat!” Eldon would shout above the music, humorously reserving bragging rights for his perfect-pitch skills.14
It bears remembering that the steam locomotives of the 1920s were a pinnacle achievement of modern technology.15 Air travel may have been newer, and automobiles and roads were improving rapidly, but the steam engine was still the prime mover of high-speed transport. In the twenty-first century it is hard to conjure the feeling of excitement Eldon must have experienced as a young man, seeing an enormous and powerful locomotive pass through Saint John spewing steam, smoke, and cinders. Their eerie whistles were both frightening and exhilarating. They were a symbol of technology improving lives, of hope for the exciting future that lay ahead. Yet so soon after the Great War, where technology had been employed to create hitherto unimagined horrors, the experience must have been accompanied also by a poignant and heightened sense of hubris and foreboding, primeval feelings that inevitably attend our experience of awe in the presence of powerful technologies. Having lived through two world wars, Eldon knew that machines can work both for and against us. Had he lived a few years longer, he would have been deeply moved by the tragic loss of forty-seven lives in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on the night of 5 July 2013, due to an accident involving a runaway train engine towing seventy-two oil tankers.16
Perhaps unaware of Arnold Schoenberg’s fascination with airplanes and aviation,17 Eldon noted that “no one is writing airplane pieces; they’re unfriendly.”18 “We have Vaughan-Williams’ Visions of Aeroplanes, Anthiel’s Airplane Sonata, and Dallapiccola’s Vola di Notte,” he wrote, “but not much more.”19 As if it might somehow strengthen his curious argument favouring steam engines over aircraft, he liked to quip about how Percy Grainger had once said “he would never get into a vehicle that could not go backwards.”20 A recent blog celebrating the NFB’s railway films seems to adopt a similar stance: “Trains are probably the most pleasant and picturesque way of getting from A to B … One can sleep in a train, feast in a train, daydream in a train, and be lulled by the rhythmic sound of train cars gliding on rails, and dazzled by the scenery waltzing by. No GPS needed. No risk of tumbling down from the sky.”21 The analogy between musical form and a train journey of this kind is clear enough, complete with stable points of departure and arrival, dazzling scenery, reverie, encounters of various kinds, exhilarating speed, peaks and valleys, and even occasional tragic accidents.
Whatever the reasons may have been for his train obsession, Rathburn considered it an occupational luxury to have been able to make his “work and hobby come together.”22 His railroad-inspired compositional output is immense as a result. Appendix IIf provides a synoptic summary of Rathburn’s railroad music, selections of which we will discuss briefly below. It is important to note that, apart from his orchestral realization of Percy Grainger’s Charging Irishrey,23 all of the works listed in Appendix IIf have been recorded professionally. Since Rathburn’s ingenious and jazzy score for the now-classic NFB animated film The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952) and his film scores for The Railrodder (1965) and Transitions (1985)24 have been discussed in chapters 3 and 4, we will focus here on the railroad-inspired concert works written after his retirement from the NFB in 1976.
Turbo, for Brass Quartet (1978)
For Eldon, in comparison with the steam engine, the modern diesel engine “seems to have everything its own way, no struggle.”25 He was even less kind in his view of the modern turbo train. In his humorous Turbo (1978), for brass quintet – “a sardonic, nasty little piece”26 according to Rathburn – he thumbed his nose in ridicule at the new trains. The CNR’s experimental and ill-fated Montreal-Toronto high-speed turbo train “was doomed from the start,” he wrote in program notes for a recording made by the Atlantic Brass Quintet.27 “It frequently broke down and once even caught fire.” His programmatic quintet depicts how, “after a struggling start, it is on its merry way, only to encounter another breakdown; after a series of solos ‘con frustrate,’ the Turbo is on its way, two hours late.”28
The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982)
The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad (1982) – arguably Rathburn’s most heartfelt tribute to his beloved locomotives of yesteryear – has been described as a “magnificently descriptive tone poem.”29 Idiosyncratically scored for winds, steam calliope, harmonicas, three percussionists, mandolin, guitar, two banjos, piano, Jew’s harps, double bass, and synthesizer, Rathburn knew that the piece would pose challenges for listeners. “I must say that some people are puzzled by this piece,” he wrote to British banjoist David Price. “[Especially] the mixing of banjos with the other instruments, percussion and synthesizer.”30 A reaction to the work by Canadian composer Christopher Mayo is typical:
I’m not sure that I can fully express the degree to which I was baffled and perplexed the first time I heard The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad. Here was music that sounded at one moment like the soundtrack to a wild west slapstick comedy film, the next like a Wendy Carlos synthesiser arrangement of a Nancarrow player piano study. It often seemed to be doing its best impression of Don Ellis’ French Connection soundtrack re-orchestrated for harmonicas and banjos, but almost as frequently could have passed itself off as a bit from Milhaud’s Percussion Concerto!31
Rathburn describes the sectional structure and program of the piece as follows: (1) Introduction: the birth of the railroad, (2) The “good old days,” (3) Rail sounds, trains passing, etc. (percussion), (4) Modern times, dissolution, decay (synthesizer), (5) Death of steam: the wail of the whistle accompanied by light banjo arpeggios with three Jew’s harps (funeral drums in the distance).32 The piece opens mysteriously, with haunting counterpoint between harmonica and Jew’s harps. A jolly instrumental dialogue follows – the “good old days” – but is interrupted abruptly by a violent percussion section (imitating train sounds), complemented by a virtuosic banjo duo “to evoke the feeling of the 1920s.”33 The following section, dominated by percussion, guitars, synthesizer, Jew’s harps and harmonicas, employs a jazz-like idiom that alludes to the technological advancements of the twentieth century. Here “the appearance of the synthesizer (the villain of the composition) evokes the modern, confused computer age” that brought about the decline of the steam railway.34 A series of insistent and foreboding steam blasts announce the sorrowful closing “Death of steam” section, where the demise of the steam locomotive is signalled by sudden percussive crashes, slowly expiring steam whistles (calliope), despondent-sounding banjos, and elegiac chords intoned by a plaintive Jew’s harp choir.
Apart from the banjo duo, The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad was recorded in 1982 at Studio A Productions, Montreal, with Rathburn himself playing the synthesizer and calliope parts. The banjo parts were recorded in New York the following year by the renowned virtuoso players Bill Keith and Eric Weissenberg. Hiring Weissenberg was an obvious decision for Eldon, as he had been featured on the recording of the soundtrack for The Railrodder two decades earlier, and Eldon was “very impressed with his musicianship.”35 According to a published review by David Price, the Weissenberg and Keith duo “certainly let off steam in virtuoso fashion as all hell is let loose in the Rail Sounds episode.”36
Train to Mariposa (1986)
While travelling back and forth between Montreal and Ottawa on a VIA Rail train, Rathburn wrote the initial sketches for his orchestral tone poem Train to Mariposa (1986) in a notebook. The work is inspired by Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, one of the best-known vignettes from a collection of short stories by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869–1944). Unlike the Leacock story, however, Rathburn’s somewhat Holstian-sounding program piece is “more nostalgic than humorous,” drawing its inspiration from the composer’s image of a pensive and reflective old man, relaxing in a chair, “dreaming about going back in time.”37
Dorion Crossing (1987)
On 7 October 1966 a tragic accident occurred at Dorion, Quebec, when a school bus carrying forty-two children was struck at a level crossing by a CN Rail freight train speeding toward Montreal at full throttle. Eighteen students and the driver were killed instantly, and three more students succumbed to their injuries in hospital during the days that followed. A frequent train passenger between Montreal and Ottawa, Rathburn “relived the accident every time the train approached Dorion.”38 Twenty years after the accident he decided to write an elegiac chamber trio in memory of the young victims. Dorion Crossing (1987), for clarinet (or violin), cello, and piano, “does not resemble anything else I’ve done before,” he said ten years after writing the piece. “It’s completely lyrical and quite serious … hectic at the end, a reliving of the accident.” Eldon told Louis Hone that he was ultimately quite pleased with Dorion Crossing, written “in memory of those kids.”39 Reflecting on the differences between concert music and film music composition, he noted that “there would not have been room to do an expansion of rhythm like that [the score’s closing pages] at the Film Board.”40
Rathburn was sufficiently pleased with his Six Railroad Preludes for piano solo (1988) that he arranged them for orchestra two years later. The opening prelude, “Great Little Trains of Wales,” is a tribute to the narrow-gauge railroad that once transported minerals from the hillside quarries in mid-nineteenth-century Wales. The train later attracted tourists from far and wide, as it escorted passengers through the scenic hills and forests of Wales.41 “Tiddles of Paddington” is a lullaby in memory of a celebrated tabby cat who had spent most of its life in the Ladies Room at Paddington Station, London, during the 1970s and early 1980s. Eldon had read about Tiddles during a visit to London in 1982, and the story captured his fancy. He decided to visit Paddington Station, accompanied by his sister Joan, hoping to meet the legendary cat. “We had to approach two rather difficult Ladies Washroom attendants,” Joan Morris recalled years later. “But since there were no other women in the washroom at the time, we prevailed, and they allowed us a few minutes with Tiddles. The poor animal was so enormous that he could hardly stand up.”42 The homely cat had become so obese from being fed choice meats by passersby that he ended up resembling “a beach ball with fur.”43 In Rathburn’s tribute, playful references to Zez Confrey’s ragtime piano roll Kitten on the Keys (1921) are interwoven with Eldon’s version of Tiddles’s reveries about Scarlatti’s cat pawing out the subject of its master’s “Cat’s Fugue” (“La Fuga del Gatto,” Fugue in G minor, K. 30, L. 499). “Spiral Tunnel Boogie” takes us on a trip through a spiral tunnel in the Canadian Rockies, “the biggest corkscrew in the world” according to Rathburn. “In Memoriam – Jumbo” recalls the tragic death of the Barnum and Bailey circus’s celebrated African elephant, when it collided with Grand Trunk locomotive 88 in St Thomas, Ontario, on 15 September 1885.44 Rathburn wrote this piece one hundred years later in tribute to the ill-fated animal. “Thoreau’s Train” depicts how the great transcendentalist’s thoughts were interrupted by the noise of a passing train – “that devilish Iron Horse”45 – near Walden Pond, Massachussetts. The cycle closes with “Amtrak,” a musical depiction of “a sweaty confused mixture of crowds and rails … trains to the north, south and west” at Pennsylvania Station, New York.46 Rathburn’s original piano arrangement of the Six Railroad Pieces was recorded by Stéphane Lemelin on Mostly Railroad Music (Crystal Records, CA520, 1994). The orchestral arrangement was recorded the following year on a CD titled Rhapsody on Rails (1995), by the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arthur Polson.
The Iron Horses of Delson (1992)
In The Iron Horses of Delson (1992), a virtuoso fantasy piece for piano solo, Rathburn once again conveys nostalgic and anthropomorphic sentiments for the now-idle steam engines of his youth. A southern suburb of Montreal, Delson derived its name from the Delaware and Hudson railway, now a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which runs through the town. The Canadian Railway Museum (“Exporail”) was founded in 1961 by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, of which Rathburn was a long-standing member.47 Occupying a large tract of land between Delson and Saint-Constant, Quebec, Exporail maintains the largest collection of railway equipment in Canada. Eldon lamented the way in which “[although Delson’s] steam locomotives are kept well groomed, they appear like corpses in a funeral home.”48 With his usual vivid musical imagery, Rathburn asks us to “imagine them breaking out of their prison and scurrying all over the country, only to return to [their] reality,” locked away, lifeless and immobile, in their graveyard in Delson.49 Stéphane Lemelin’s inspired performance of The Iron Horses of Delson is featured on the CD Mostly Railroad Music (1994).
Train-Inspired Concert Music of the Past: Dvořák, Hindemith, Honegger, Krenek, and Morales
In addition to engaging with the railroad as a composer, Rathburn was intensely interested in railway music as a topic of study in itself. Apparently taking solace from the fact that he was not alone among composers in drawing creative inspiration from the railroad, he seemed to have a special affection for composers past and present who shared his fascination with trains.50 In a public presentation given at Library and Archives Canada in 1994, Eldon stated that he was interested not so much in the wide array of folk music that has been inspired by trains over the years (of which there are hundreds of examples),51 but rather in what he called “serious composers and railroad music.”52 “I’m surprised by the number of composers who were involved with railroads in one way or another, including Britten, Rossini, Martinu, and [Johann] Strauss senior and junior,” he told Louis Hone.53 And in his liner notes for Mostly Railroad Music (1994), he informs us that the list also includes Copland’s John Henry, Milhaud’s Le train bleu, Ovchinnikov’s Ballad of the BAM Builders, Glinka’s Traveller’s Song, Villa Lobos’s Little Train of Caipira, as well as “such composers as Lumbye and Gungl, not to forget Alkan, whose finger-busting [Étude] Le chemin de fer, op. 27, must have the honour of being the first railroad piano composition.”54 During the last thirty years of his life Rathburn was preparing a book on the topic, and it is regrettable that his extensive preparatory notes remain unpublished.55
Both movements of Rathburn’s Two Railoramas (1990) for woodwind octet – “Dvořák at 155th Street” and “Hindemith Rides the Merchants Limited” – are inspired by fellow train-inspired composers. “Dvořák was an ardent railroad buff,” Rathburn tells us, pointing out that during his time in New York “he was often seen at 155th Street watching the trains going in and out of Grand Central Station.”56 Dvořák was also known as something of a “trainspotter” in Czechoslovakia, as he loved to spend hours at the Franz-Josef Station in Prague, where he would chat at length with the locomotive engineers.57 He is even known to have said more than once that “he would give all of his symphonies had he been able to invent the [steam] locomotive.”58 Paul Hindemith was similarly obsessed with the railway, railroad timetables, and model trains. The luxurious passenger train that traversed the New England shoreline between New York, New Haven, Hartford, and Boston was known as the “Merchants Limited” (a.k.a. “the New Haven”), and when it made its last run in 1995, it was the last parlour car train in operation in the United States. Rathburn’s piece conjures an image of Hindemith riding the Merchants Limited between Yale University and New York, “possibly to attend a performance of one of his Kammermusiks.”59
In his notebook Rathburn described Swiss composer Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) as “an underrated composer who also liked trains.”60 Honegger confessed to a quasi-erotic interest in locomotives. “I have always loved locomotives passionately; for me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women and horses,” he wrote in his memoirs.61 A charter member of “le Groupe des Six,” Honegger is perhaps best known for his orchestral score Pacific 231, the work that first brought him to critical attention in 1923, and was later employed as a film score for Jean Mitry’s 1949 film by the same title. Pacific 231 an evocative mouvement symphonique that captures the exhilarating acceleration of a 2-3-1-class steam engine (counting axles, as the French do), and a work that inevitably appears near the top of any shortlist of train-inspired concert works. It is a prime exemplar of the modernist preoccupation with machines, power, energy, time, efficiency, and expanded modes of transportation.
Austrian composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) was one of Rathburn’s many railroad enthusiast correspondents. Krenek had written a number of railroad-inspired works, including the 1929 song cycle Reisebuch aus den osterreichischen Alpen (“Travel Book from the Austrian Alps”), op. 62,62 for which he wrote both the words and music. The cycle’s twenty songs were written immediately after Krenek’s 1927 vacation in the Austrian Alps, and shortly after his opera Jonny spielt auf had brought him to international attention. The opening of the second song “Verkehr” (“Travel”) is characteristic: “Into the mountains go the locomotives, always higher, always higher through the woods, over the spring-coloured meadows. The train glides on the hillside so smoothly and tidily as if it is a work of nature, not created by men.”63 In a letter to Rathburn of 4 February 1968 Krenek wrote that, like Eldon, he had “sketched many things while traveling on trains.”64 In the same letter he lists numerous other examples of his railway-inspired music, including the penultimate scene from Jonny spielt auf, “Streamliner” (also published as no. 7 from the Twelve Short Piano Pieces Written in the Twelve-Tone Technique, op. 83, 1939), his six-part choral Santa Fé Timetable, op. 102 (1945), and an incomplete operetta titled Bluff,65 op. 36 (1924), the first act of which was to take place in a railroad station somewhere in Scotland. “I remember sketching a rousing finale with lots of railroad trimmings,” Krenek wrote to Rathburn.66
Ernst Lecher Bacon (1898–1990), the prolific American composer, pianist, conductor, and music theorist,67 was another of Rathburn’s railway correspondents. “I too am a railroad aficionado,” he wrote to Eldon in an undated letter. “I haven’t written much [railway music], but have written many angry letters to the press about why we do not start a great new modern passenger network plus interurban roads in all cities to check the god-damn cement and car explosion and give 7,000,000 people jobs!”68
In late 1969, Eldon boldly wrote to the elderly Carice Irene Elgar Blake (1890–1970), Sir Edward and Lady Elgar’s only child,69 to inquire about her father’s interest in trains. Among other things, he was interested to know how Elgar felt about Great Western engine #3704 having been named the “Sir Edward Elgar” in 1932, two years prior to his death in 1934. On 25 February 1970, she replied to Eldon’s letter:
Dear Mr. Rathburn: Thank you for your letter, and your interest in my father’s life. He was very proud of our railway system … He used to love the thrill of seeing one of our big expresses go through. He was extremely proud of having an engine named after him, one of the Great Western ones, which was of course the line he used most … The [stage play] Starlight Express does not really have anything to do with railways. It only ran for six weeks and was never produced on the stage again, tho’ one does sometimes hear the songs.70
Less than six months later, on 16 July 1970, Carice Elgar Blake died in Bristol, England, at the age of eighty.
Rathburn took a particular interest in an experimental orchestral piece by the nineteenth-century Mexican composer Melesio Morales (1838–1908). La Locomotiva: An Imitative Fantasy Overture – sometimes known as Morales’s “Sinfonia Vapor” (“Steam Symphony”) – was commissioned in celebration of the opening of the Mexico City to Puebla rail line. It was premiered on 16 September 1869, Mexico’s annual “Día de la Independencia.” The score’s many novelties include new instruments invented by Morales to recreate the sound of the steam engine, its whistles, and the sounds of the wheels on the track.71 Given that the original orchestral score had been evidently lost to posterity, Eldon wrote to the director of the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica in Mexico City, seeking permission to orchestrate La Locomotiva from the existing piano reduction that he had procured from the Conservatory in 1971.72 Unfortunately the plan never came to fruition.
Grainger’s Train Music (1901)
Australian composer Percy Grainger (1882–1961) wrote the opening measures of Train Music sometime during the months of February or March 1901. Grainger was a teenager at the time, and at the end of his student years in Germany, where he was enrolled at the Frankfurt Hoch Konservatorium together with a congenial cohort of slightly older British composers – Balfour Gardiner, Roger Quilter, Cyril Scott, and Norman O’Neill, a collective that became known as “the Frankfurt Gang” and would later include Grainger. With goals not unlike those of “les Six” in France some twenty years later, they sought to liberate their nation’s music from the influences of the music of Central Europe.73 Describing the evolution of Grainger’s style during the Frankfurt period, Cyril Scott wrote that “at a young age when Wagner was writing offensively like Meyerbeer, Grainger was already writing like himself. He began to show a harmonic modernism which was astounding in so young a boy, and at times excruciating to our pre-Debussyan ears.”74
Grainger began to score Train Music on a massive scale, for an orchestra of more than 150 players, including 100 strings and an enormous woodwind section featuring a double-reed section of eight oboes and six bassoons. The score was to be an experimental and programmatic work that would recapture a noisy, bumpy, and exhilarating train journey the composer had taken along the coast of the Italian Riviera, from Genoa to San Remo, on 10 February 1900.75 It has been described as “an experiment in metre which both anticipated and surpassed the rhythmic complexities of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps.”76 Unfortunately, Grainger managed to complete only a fragment of just over two minutes in duration before moving on to other compositional projects, perhaps due to the impracticality of the scale of the mammoth Train Music score. For the rest of his life, Grainger periodically mused about revisiting the score, and in 1957 he prepared a simplified piano arrangement of the existing score fragment.77
An eighteen-year-old Rathburn had met Grainger in Saint John at the Admiral Beatty Hotel in 1935,78 and he was curious to see the Train Music manuscript fragment. In the late 1970s he procured a copy of the full score from the newly established Percy Grainger Society.79 When he found that it was in an “all but undecipherable state of disorder” he wrote again to the Grainger Society and offered to produce two arrangements of the work, one for large orchestra as originally planned, and a second adaptation for a conventional-sized orchestra. Simon Rattle, then a precocious twenty-seven-year-old British conductor with a passion for Grainger’s work, expressed an interest in the project and added Rathburn’s realization to the program of a “Grainger Centenary” concert by the London Sinfonietta at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on 25 August 1982.80 Eldon and Margot attended the concert as honoured guests of the conductor and the Grainger Society, and were seated together with his sister and brother-in-law, Joan and John Morris, and their daughter Roberta, Eldon’s niece. John Amis (a cousin of novelist Kingsley Amis, CBE), the celebrated British broadcaster and music critic, was seated beside Eldon. The composer Gavin Bryars (Eldon’s friend and collaborator) and his wife were also seated nearby.81 The premiere performance of Train Music was such a rousing success that, fifteen years later, Simon Rattle decided to include it on a City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recording of Grainger’s works.82 Encouraged by the successful release of the recording in 1997, Eldon decided to roll up his sleeves with yet another Grainger project. Like Train Music, the orchestral score of Grainger’s Charging Irishrey, also written in 1901, was left incomplete by the composer. Again Eldon corresponded with the Grainger Society and received copies of the score fragment. When he discovered that this material was in even more fragmentary condition than Train Music had been, he sent another inquiry to the Grainger Society. In a letter of 9 October 1997, the president of the Grainger Society replied: “It only seems like yesterday that we attended that 1982 concert! Unfortunately I don’t think [we] have any more material for Charging Irishrey other than what you already have.”83 Undeterred, Eldon somehow managed to complete the project. The Rathburn realization of Charging Irishrey is published by Schott Music of Mainz, Germany. Unfortunately it has never been recorded.
Rathburn and Canada’s “Musical Group of Seven”
From the moment in 1885 when railroad financier Donald Smith drove the iconic “last spike” of the Canadian Pacific Railway through to the present day, tropes related to the Canadian railway lay close to the heart of popular conceptions of Canadian identity, history, and culture. Rathburn’s contribution to the railroad music repertoire has been so prodigious that his work might therefore be understood from another perspective. In the view of University of Calgary emeritus professor Tim Rogers, Eldon was the last in a lineage of Canadian composers, performers, and folklorists who can be seen as Canada’s “Musical Group of Seven,” artists who wanted to forge a distinctively Canadian music, an aesthetic position roughly akin to that of the Group of Seven in the domain of landscape painting.84
The inspirational “founding” member of the group, in Rogers’s conception, was the Scottish-born Oxbridge visionary John Murray Gibbon (1875–1952), chief publicist for the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1913 and 1944. A novelist, publicist, musical arranger, non-fiction writer, and “organizer extraordinaire,” Gibbon was driven by a desire to rebel against the influence of Central European music on Western music aesthetics more broadly. This “national romantic school of thought” bears an affinity with the nationalistic goals of Cecil Sharpe and the British “Frankfurt Gang” of the 1890s, and the French “les Six” of the 1920s. Dipping into their own folkways for inspiration, these groups saw the music of the countryside preserved by oral traditions, as well as indigenous musics, as the proper source for an authentically national music. Gibbons used his position with the CPR to promote the promise of a united Canada “that could be forged out of the diverse cultural backgrounds of its primary founding nations and many immigrant communities.”85 In this utopian vision of Canada, there would be no assimilative melting pot, but rather Canadian society would be built on a foundation of understanding and appreciation of our diverse cultural communities. Gibbon coined and popularized the term “Canadian mosaic” and established the series of CPR Folk Music Festivals that would become models for virtually all Canadian folk music and heritage festivals that followed.86
Rogers’s Canadian “Musical Group of Seven” consists of the artists that he felt carried this ideological torch best. Six of its members were roughly contemporaries.87 John Murray Gibbon first articulated, shared, and made the group’s artistic vision manifest in the CPR folk festivals. Marius Barbeau (1883–1969) gave it new impetus by collecting francophone and aboriginal folklore from coast to coast to coast. Ernest MacMillan (1893–1973) wrote folk song arrangements for CPR folk festival concerts and a series of influential articles underlining the importance of the quest for a Canadian national music. MacMillan also accompanied Barbeau on a number of field trips, serving as a transcriber. Healey Willan (1880–1968) championed the now-outmoded view that folk music needed to be appropriated by “serious” composers of art music in order to gain cultural capital and legitimacy (a notion that has been broadly discredited during the last fifty years). Baritone Charles Marchand (1890–1930) was a folklorist, an important early advocate of French-Canadian chanson, and the leader of the “Bytown Troubadours,” a successful touring vocal quartet in the early twentieth century. Mezzo-soprano and ethnomusicologist Juliette Gauthier de la Vérendrye (1888–1972) was a niece of Sir Wilfrid and Lady Zoé Laurier, and the younger sister of the celebrated Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier. Committed to bringing French-Canadian and Indigenous music to the public’s attention, Gauthier preferred to observe the styles and accents of the original singers as closely as possible, an approach that led to a significant rupture with Barbeau, who felt that this music should be “cleaned up” for public performance. Last but not least on Rogers’s list is Eldon Rathburn. Eldon’s nostalgia for the railway, silent film music, banjos, Jew’s harps, steam whistles and calliopes, honky-tonk piano, and Canadian stories, cultures, and places amply justifies his inclusion in this group. His “modernist and ethereal compositions are, in many ways, distinctly Canadian,” Rogers writes, “showing again that the seeding efforts of Gibbon and his colleagues may have taken hold.” In Rathburn’s music, Rogers continues, “perhaps if Gibbon and Barbeau were alive today, they would recognize that their search for a Canadian music has been realized, at least in small measure.”88
