CHAPTER 8

The Concert Music

Toward the end of his career Rathburn mused wistfully about the fact that he had “not written as much concert music as I have film music.”1 This was a source of considerable regret for Eldon, given that he had set out from the Saint John Vocation School in 1933 to forge a career as a composer of instrumental concert music. As grateful as he was for his career at the NFB, after thirty years at the Film Board he was somewhat self-conscious about the ways in which habits he had formed as a film composer may have handicapped him as a composer of concert music. In writing film music, Eldon generally prepared a series of sketches for the film’s scenes and then “assembled them to see how they fit together.”² With instrumental concert music, formal principles need to be formulated, expanded, and developed quite differently. His insecurity in compositional technique – particularly with regard to the area of formal development – was among the primary reasons he sought further training as a composer as late as the mid-1960s, when he was approaching age fifty. On the other hand, Rathburn noted that there was actually something quite “filmic” about twentieth-century concert music, given the motivic concentration and abrupt formal disjunctures and juxtapositions that characterize so many works of musical modernism. In a 1965 article titled “Thoughts on My Craft” he observed that: “Film music differs from traditional concert music in that it is often constructed of short, telescoped phrases, climaxes reached with little preparation, violent colour and textural changes and the lack of long transitional passages. Oddly enough, some present-day modern concert music has many of the above characteristics.”³

As we have seen, Rathburn wrote a great deal of film music after his retirement from the NFB in 1976, and he accepted and undertook these projects with energy and enthusiasm. Increasingly, however, he came to see the creative subordination of the film composer as a role from which he sought liberation. Exploring new formal principles and procedures was only one of the challenges involved. In the composition of concert music he also saw greater opportunity to explore alternative tonal languages, to work with programmatic themes reflecting his own interests and passions, and to expand his exploration of dissonance and posttonal technique, as well as his orchestrational palette. In these and other ways, concert music composition offered Rathburn a degree of artistic autonomy that he had yearned for at the NFB. In 1993, he told Louis Hone that as a film composer “sometimes you want to do more progressive things, a chance to explore new things … however filmmakers generally don’t approve of such things.”4 By writing concert music he could be his own boss and, in his own way, fully enter the community of musical modernists that he so admired.

We will discuss some of Rathburn’s most important concert works under ten general headings: art song, orchestral music, concerti grossi, concertinos, string quartets, works for piano solo, explorations in twelve-tone technique, pedagogical pieces, and other chamber works. The works discussed below were produced over three distinct and overarching creative periods: early works (1933–50, youthful chamber, vocal, and orchestral works), middle-period works (1950–80, largely orchestral music) and late works (1980–2008, largely chamber music).

Art Song

Throughout his career, film, orchestral, and chamber music were the exclusive areas of Rathburn’s interest as a composer. Unlike so many Canadian composers and mentors of the previous generation – and notwithstanding his wartime experience as an organist and choral director in Saint John – Eldon wrote very little vocal music. In stark contrast to composers such as Willan, for example, he often remarked that writing texted music for voice or choir did not come naturally to him, and that the organ was not one of his favourite instruments.⁵ Almost all of Rathburn’s vocal works were written prior to 1946, before he was hired by the National Film Board, and most of them were written during his year of study with Willan in Toronto (1938–39). Rathburn never wrote so much as a single choral piece during his long career.6 In this respect, he may be wholly unique among Canadian composers of his generation. To some extent, the paucity of vocal works in Rathburn’s catalogue may reflect his sympathy with some of the goals of the fledgling Canadian League of Composers – the “League against Willan” – that was taking shape during his formative years as a composer.⁷

In chapter 1 we saw that at the age of twenty Eldon submitted his first art song, “To a Wandering Cloud” (1938), to a composition competition sponsored by the Canadian Performing Rights Society.⁸ For this vocal setting of a poetic text of his own authorship, together with a two-piano work titled Silhouette (1936), he won first prize, a scholarship that allowed him to spend the following academic year at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. In Toronto, Rathburn wrote three art songs under Healey Willan’s tutelage: “A Ship, an Isle, a Sickle Moon” (1939, a setting of poetry by the British poet James Elroy Flecker),⁹ “Twilight” (1939, words by Canadian poet Duncan Campbell Scott),¹⁰ and “Spring” (1939, poem by the first-century Greek poet Meleager of Gadara). These are youthful pieces, and more than any of Rathburn’s other works they reflect the influence of Willan’s teaching and style. Songs of the Seasons (2003), a song cycle for tenor and piano written during the last decade of his life, may be Rathburn’s least successful work in any genre. The cycle sets four poems by Fredericton-born poet Bliss Carman (1861–1929):¹¹ “An Autumn Song,” “The Winter Scene,” “How Spring Came to Pierrot,” and “A Remembrance.”¹² When it was premiered at the New Brunswick Summer Music Festival in August of 2003, the reviews were underwhelming. In a letter to his friend Helmer Biermann, written a few months after the premiere performance, Rathburn expressed his own misgivings about Songs of the Seasons: “Excerpts from the summer festival will be broadcast on November 4th and 5th on CBC ‘Take Five’ (2:00 pm Ottawa time). I believe my song cycle ‘Songs for the Seasons’ will be broadcast. It was sung by a Swedish tenor [Håkan Starkenberg]. I have mixed feelings about this work. I have written very little vocal music, only a few songs during my time with Healey Willan.”¹³

Clearly art song composition was not Rathburn’s forte. And unlike other NFB staff composers he had no particular interest in opera (as Blackburn and Fleming did, for example). His wartime song “Mr. Churchill, Our Hats Are Off to You” (1941, discussed in chapter 1) – popularized on the CBC radio variety program The Happy Gang and published in a collection of popular songs of the era – is probably his most successful work for voice.

On 23 December 1997, after listening to a recording of the closing movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the French conductor André Cluytens, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Choir of St Hedwig’s Cathedral, Rathburn jotted the following comments into his listening journal. Lovers of choral music will be astonished to read that he actually disapproved of Beethoven’s famous choral finale: “Note the intrusion of the voice. I admit that this is a blind spot in my musical upbringing. I remember reading an article by Anton Rubinstein in an old issue of Étude Magazine. He wrote that the voice is no match for instruments in expressing emotion. When I hear a choir, I think of ‘churchy’ people, sheep-like, jealousies, etc. I may grow out of this prejudice.”14 However he went on to concede that choral music can be exquisitely beautiful when it is well performed: “My greatest choral experience was hearing the Elmer Iseler Singers in some simple pieces,” he wrote. “The blend was perfect, like satin.”¹⁵

Orchestral Music

On 12 April 1996, Rathburn sent a letter in reply to a young pianist who had written to him after performing selections of his piano music on a Boston recital program, and who had enclosed a cassette recording of his performance for Eldon’s interest and enjoyment.¹⁶ The concert took place at Boston’s Jordan Hall, a prestigious American concert venue that has been designated a US National Historic Landmark, and is the principal recital hall associated with the New England Conservatory of Music. In his letter of reply, Eldon reminisces about attending a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Jordan Hall at age sixteen in 1934, and how it was the first time he had heard a symphony orchestra. He recalls being astonished and deeply moved by the experience:

Thank you very much for sending me a cassette of your performance of my piano pieces … Years ago, in 1934, I played the piano in a country music band [Don Messer and the New Brunswick Lumberjacks]. We were sent to Boston to represent the Maritimes, particularly New Brunswick, in the annual Sportmen’s Show. It was my first visit to a big city. It was also the first time I heard a symphony orchestra. I remember the concert. Koussevitsky conducted the Mendelssohn Italian Symphony, the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony, and a piece by the American composer [Frederick] Converse. I also attended a piano recital by George Fior at Jordan Hall. Little did I realize that one day my own music would be performed there.17

Building upon his early formation in Saint John under the mentorship of W.C. Bowden, Eldon’s lifelong passion for the composition of orchestral music may have taken firm root in Boston’s Jordan Hall in 1934.

Excluding his arrangement and completion of Percy Grainger’s Train Music (1981) and a few orchestral arrangements of piano works – Six Railroad Preludes (1988, orchestrated 1990) and Schoenberg versus Gershwin (1994, orchestrated 1997) – all of Rathburn’s orchestral works were written before 1980 (see Appendix IIb). His later concert works were almost exclusively for chamber soloists and ensembles of various kinds and sizes. During the last year of his life Eldon lamented the fact that he had not written a substantive orchestral work in more than twenty-five years, and he confided in composer Mathieu Lavoie that his most ambitious current project was to rework his chamber score Harbour Nocturne (2001, discussed below) for full orchestra. “I want to write another large-scale orchestral piece before I pass away,” he told Lavoie.¹⁸ Unfortunately this goal was left unfulfilled when Rathburn died in August of 2008.

Below we will survey a selection of some of the most important orchestral scores written by Rathburn between 1940 and 1960: Symphonette (1944), Cartoon No. 1 (1944), Cartoon No. 2 (1946), Five Short Pieces (1949), Images of Childhood (1950, revised 1972), Gray City (1960), and a number of smaller works written for Eugene Kash’s Children’s Concerts, including Family Circle Suite (1951), Overture to a Hoss Opera (1952), Nocturne (1953), Variations and Fugue on Allouette (1953), Overture Burlesca (1953), and Milk Maid Polka (1956).

In chapter 1 we discussed the success of Symphonette (1944), Rathburn’s pivotally important early orchestral work, and its March 1945 performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra after he had won the orchestra’s Young Artists’ Competition on the recommendation of a committee of American composers chaired by Arnold Schoenberg. Rathburn was hired at the NFB a few years later, and Symphonette languished on his shelf for more than fifty years, unperformed, unpublished, and unrecorded. However he dusted off the score in 1996 when he received a “call for scores” from Victor Feldbrill, the distinguished Canadian conductor, who was seeking Canadian works that might be workshopped and recorded during his upcoming International Conducting Master-classes in Olomoucs, Czech Republic.19 Rathburn revised and reworked the score and submitted it to Feldbrill, who was surprised but delighted to receive a submission from such a mature composer. Feldbrill considered Symphonette the finest Canadian score that he took with him to Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1997. Eldon and Margot travelled to Olomoucs to attend the workshops and sit in on the recording sessions. The Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra enjoyed performing Symphonette so much that they asked Feldbrill to return to Czechoslovakia the following year in order to record the work more professionally.²⁰ On 18 March 1998, in Olomoucs, Czechoslovakia, Victor Feldbrill and the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra performed and recorded a slightly revised version of Rathburn’s Symphonette, together with a somewhat larger-scale orchestral work, titled Myth (1996), by the young Canadian composer Scott Wilkinson (1962–2011).²¹ During the last decade of his life, to have this fine recording made of his Symphonette, the orchestral work that had taken him to L.A. in 1944 and launched his career, Eldon must have felt as though he had come full circle.

Cartoon No. 1 (1944) and Cartoon No. 2 (1946), vignette-like pieces for small orchestra, are the most successful of Rathburn’s orchestral works from the 1940s. In keeping with their titles, both are playful, lyrical, and colourfully orchestrated works. They call to mind Gershwin’s American in Paris in their lively character and motivic concentration. Eldon originally wrote Cartoon No. 2 as a string quartet titled “Scherzo Humoresque” during his year of study at the Toronto Conservatory of Music.²² The “Cartoons” were regularly performed by orchestras across Canada in the 1950s and ’60s, and they were recorded by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sir Ernest MacMillan.²³ Whether MacMillan ever recalled his earlier rejection of Rathburn’s Symphonette during the war years is unknown.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Eldon wrote a number of orchestral works for Eugene (“Jack”) Kash’s Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra series of children’s concerts. In addition to serving in his role at the NFB (including that of music director, 1948–50), Kash was one of Canada’s leading music educators at mid-century. He served as principal violinist and concertmaster with the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra (1944–50) and ultimately became its conductor in 1950. From 1946 to 1954, Kash presented a successful series of educational music programs designed for children,24 and a number of Rathburn’s early orchestral works were premiered at Kash’s children’s concerts. Children’s Concert (1949), an early NFB documentary film about the series, featured Rathburn’s music throughout, and won high praise for the NFB at the Edinburgh and Venice Film Festivals.²⁵ Excerpts from his Five Short Pieces (1949) for chamber ensemble are heard throughout the film (one of the movements, “Miniature,” quotes Handel’s Water Music, Liszt’s Les préludes, and the traditional eighteenth-century folk tune Carnival of Venice among other well-known classical melodies).²⁶ All of the Five Short Pieces are light-hearted, playful, and clearly intended for young audiences: “Miniature” (picc, ob, cl, bsn, hn, trb and two tpts), “Parade” (fl, picc, ob, cl, bsn, tpt, hn, trb and perc), “Waltz for Winds,” and “Second Waltz for Winds” (both for fl, ob, cl and bsn). These pieces are scored for such different instrumental combinations that they appear to have been bound together for convenience, rather than with the intent that they be played in sequence as a set. All five of these short pieces have received frequent performances as individual stand-alone works.

Rathburn’s orchestral tone poem Images of Childhood (1950) is a UN-commissioned concert adaptation of his film score for Hungry Minds (1948), Tom Daly’s award-winning NFB/UNESCO documentary short film on the tragic circumstances confronting the youth of postwar Europe (discussed in chapter 2). Eldon scored Images of Childhood for full orchestra, since he had a larger budget to work with in 1950 than he had in 1948, and wanted the film’s themes to be projected with a more expansive and emotionally impactful orchestral palette. He structured the work as a suite in six sections, each with a distinctive character reflecting the original score’s film sequences: an introductory Molto semplice (mm. 1–12); vigorous, animated, and playful Bright (mm. 13–47) and Marcia (mm. 48–94) sections; a virtuosic, capricious, and foreboding Allegro section (mm. 95–143); a Slow section (mm. 144–75) that expresses longing and includes Rathburn’s “Song of Hunger” leitmotif; and a closing noble and string-rich Broad section (mm. 176–203) that signals the promise of the future. According to an Ottawa Journal review that was published following its premiere performance, “[Images of Childhood] describes children at play, marching and playing among the ruined buildings of Europe. The music reflects the surroundings, with a solo [unison] part using all the violins called Song of Hunger … The suite ends with a richly developed theme bearing hope for the future.”27 Images of Childhood was premiered and recorded in 1950 by Sir Ernest MacMillan and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (Radio Canada International: RCI-19-TSO),²⁸ and by Eric Wild and the CBC Winnipeg Orchestra on a 1960 LP featuring works by Otmar Nussio, Lars-Erik Larsson, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Violet Archer, and Eldon Rathburn (CBC SM 199).

As always in his instrumental music, Rathburn’s skills and instincts as an orchestrator are evident throughout this score. In a 1997 interview with Victor Davies, Eldon reported that he “went through a Copland stage” while writing Images of Childhood.²⁹ Copland’s influence is clearly audible in the wholesome and sparsely scored opening measures Molto semplice (reminiscent of passages from Appalachian Spring, 1944, Copland’s roughly contemporaneous orchestral suite), as well as in the lively wind- and percussion-heavy Marcia and Allegro sections that follow (reminiscent of some of the dance-inspired passages from Copland’s ballet Rodeo of 1942). Figure 8.5 on page 212 shows Rathburn’s chromatically serpentine “Song of Hunger” theme, which hints at other influences (Prokofiev’s dreamy “Juliet theme” from the 1940 ballet Romeo and Juliet, for example). In the sweeping and broodingly noble closing theme (“Broad”), Rathburn’s orchestration and motivic approach shows the influence of contemporary British film composers with whose work Eldon was well familiar, including Richard Addinsell, William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold, and Lennox Berkeley, among others. The closing measures provide the most impressive example of full orchestral scoring that Rathburn produced during his early career. However his final perfect authentic cadence in D major seems strangely unsatisfying, perhaps for tonal reasons (the larger-scale architectonic trajectory of the work seems not to point to D major at the close), perhaps for formal reasons (we have seen that Rathburn often struggled with matters of form in his concert music, and with the musical rhetoric of “endings” in particular), or perhaps because the pregnant motivic content of the suite seems to be begging for further exploration and development. To use a railroad analogy that Eldon might have enjoyed, Images of Childhood seems to build up an impressive head of steam, but he brings the work to a sudden crashing halt with his abrupt and dislocated final cadence, rather than allowing its tonal, rhythmic, and motivic energy to dissipate gradually and letting the train slowly roll to a stop at the station. Rathburn knew that his habits and compositional processes as a composer of film music were hard to shake when writing concert music. This is perhaps most evident with respect to his conception of form.

Rathburn’s orchestral Family Circle Suite (1951) was premiered at Kash’s children’s concert series. The Suite is an adaptation of his score for an award-winning NFB documentary film by the same name30 in which “four families illustrate the shared responsibility of home and school in fulfilling children’s emotional needs.”³¹ Much in the vein of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Rathburn’s Variations and Fugue on Alouette (1953), for small orchestra, was designed to introduce the instruments of the orchestra to children. When the concluding fugue was set to choreography and danced by members of Nesta Toumine’s Ottawa Classical Ballet Company, it was a unique experience for Eldon since, unlike some of his composer colleagues at the NFB who wrote for ballet (Robert Fleming, for example), his music had never been set to dance.³² Overture to a Hoss Opera (1952, for small orchestra),³³ Nocturne (1953, for small orchestra),³⁴ the Stravinskyan and ostinato-saturated Overture Burlesca (1953, for full orchestra),³⁵ and Milk Maid Polka (1956, for medium-sized orchestra), were also first performed in Kash’s series. Overture Burlesca was constructed from a number of pieces of “stock music” Eldon had written for the NFB, during a period when he was under the spell of the music Stravinsky and Hindemith. “Every composer has a bit of Hindemith in him,” he wrote about the Overture in his notebook.³⁶

Gray City (1960), a one-movement work in two sections – Slow and Allegro moderato – was written in fulfillment of a Canada Council commission by the Halifax Symphony Orchestra. Its premiere performance was given by the HSO on 13 January 1961 under the Viennese-born conductor Leo Müller,³⁷ and Müller and the HSO later produced an archival recording of the work.³⁸ Gray City became quite popular with orchestras across Canada during the decade following its composition, with performances by orchestras such as the CBC Winnipeg Orchestra (7 November 1968, directed by Eric Wild) and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (1 September 1968, directed by John Avison).

Concerti Grossi

There are no traditional large-scale concertos for solo instrument and orchestra in Rathburn’s composition output. This lacuna is particularly surprising given that in 1940 he wrote that his most pressing goal as a young composer was to write a concerto for piano and orchestra.39 During the mid-1970s, however, he wrote two concerti grossi in which a small group of virtuosic soloists (the “concertino”) alternates with the larger “ripieno” (full orchestra): Steelhenge (1974) and Three Ironies (1975).

The years 1974–75 were hectic ones for Rathburn. While completing other concert works such as The Nomadic Five for brass quintet (1974, discussed below), and simultaneously managing a heavy workload at the NFB during his final two years as a staff composer – a period during which he created a dozen scores for films such as King of the Hill (1974), Icarus (1974), The Hecklers (1975), Cold Journey (1975), Enemy Aliens (1975), and My Name Is Susan Yee (1975) – he received two commissions to write concerti grossi, one from the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra and another from the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. On 22 December 1974, the celebrated American pops conductor Russell (“Skitch”) Henderson directed the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra and Saint John’s Lancaster Kiwanis Steel Band in the premiere performance of Rathburn’s Steelhenge at Cohen Hall in Halifax, Nova Scotia.⁴⁰ A novel concerto grosso for steel band and orchestra, Steelhenge appears to be the only known work of its kind. Henderson was highly enthusiastic about the piece and about the Lancaster Kiwanis Steel band’s virtuosity.⁴¹ “There are a lot of transplanted Jamaicans who have steel bands in New York,” he remarked before the premiere performance, “but never anything like this, at least not in my experience … [this] is the only band of this virtuosity in North America.”⁴² True to the model of the historical concerto grosso, Rathburn’s Steelhenge unfolds in three traditional movements: Moderato, a second Moderato, and Fast and Driving. It is a truly remarkable and dramatic work that ought to be heard more frequently in concert. In 1974 and 1975 Steelhenge was performed on tour throughout the Maritimes provinces with the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. It was also performed in Montreal at the 1976 Olympic Games.

With the support of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, conductor Boris Brott commissioned Rathburn to write a concerto grosso for brass quintet and the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. The commission may have been the result of successful collaborations between Rathburn and the Canadian Brass in 1974, a year in which he had produced two virtuoso brass quintet works, The Nomadic Five and the rowdy two-step Canadian Brass Rag (1974).⁴³ The completed work, titled Three Ironies (1975), is in three movements: I. Allegro con brio, II. Slow (blues), and III. (Fast). In a 1980 interview with CBC Radio, Rathburn gave the following summary account of the work:

I wouldn’t say it was far out. A lot of my music and musical thinking follows a pattern of impurity. Stylistically, I like to write what I call crossbreed music. If I write in blues or waltz style, it’s never quite pure; I like to add elements of other things to it. I think this is the result of film work; there’s no doubt that film work has left a mark on me.44

The work’s first movement features lively interplay between the quintet and orchestra, and its bluesy second movement features contrapuntal exchanges between the members of the quintet, together with a “mystic weaving between strings and vibraphone.” The work’s final movement is a “lively burlesque on military band music.”⁴⁵ Three Ironies became highly successful with orchestras and audiences across Canada following its premiere performance in Hamilton.

Concertinos

Among musicians, the term “concertino” is generally used to refer to the small group of soloists who play in alternation with a larger “ripieno” (full orchestra) as we have seen in the preceding discussion of the historical concerto grosso.⁴⁶ However the word is also used in a second, broader sense, as a diminutive for “concerto.” Although Rathburn wrote no concertos, he wrote four “concertino” works with string quartet accompaniment, and one “double concertino” for violin and cello soloists with string orchestra accompaniment.

In all five of Rathburn’s concertino works – Pastorella (1949, revised 1972), the Concertino for Banjo and String Quartet (1999), A Farewell to Lou (2000) and the Two Pieces for Celesta (or Carillon) and String Quartet (2001), and Two Moods (2002) – the string quartet furnishes a chamber-scale accompaniment for the soloist.⁴⁷ In the gentle Pastorella, the oboist weaves a playfully lyrical and seductively serpentine melody above a texturally varied quartet accompaniment that alternates between pizzicato and arco playing. As with many of Rathburn’s one-movement concert works, the motivic richness of his charming Pastorella causes one to wonder why he did not build a larger-scale form, or a multi-movement work, from the wealth of motivic material available in the smaller piece. In fact, when it was first written in 1949, Rathburn grouped his Pastorella with a collection of small-scale works for chamber ensemble titled Five Short Pieces (1949, discussed above).

In A Farewell to Lou (2000), for clarinet and string quartet, Rathburn pays tribute to his longtime friend and colleague Louis Applebaum.48 In this contemplative work the clarinet’s plaintive voice and the quartet’s searching harmonies contribute in equal part to the establishment of an elegaic mood of melancholy, introspection, and loss.⁴⁹ Eldon felt that this was perhaps one of his finest chamber works.⁵⁰ As music director at the NFB from 1942 to 1948, it was Applebaum who first brought Rathburn to the NFB in 1945 with a contract to score the film To the Ladies for the NFB’s Canada Carries On series. And it was Applebaum who subsequently hired him to join the team of NFB staff composers in 1947. It was also Applebaum who conducted the recording of Rathburn’s score for the Labyrinth installation at Expo 67, a piece Eldon proudly described at the time as his “most successful work” to date.⁵¹ In 1980, together with Jacques Hébert, Applebaum co-chaired the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee that had been launched by the Government of Canada, the mandate of which included a review of the role and future of the NFB. Two years later, the Applebaum-Hébert report recommended that the NFB abandon its ambitions as a producer and distributor of films, and that this role should henceforth be taken up exclusively by the private sector. The “Applebert” report went on to recommend that the Board be trimmed back to a research and training centre, a recommendation that was subsequently rejected by the NFB.⁵² By suggesting that the Board had outlived its usefulness, Applebaum, a former NFB film composer and music director, was committing an act of almost parenticidal scale and implications, in the view of some. Rathburn’s views on the Applebaum-Hébert report are not known. By 1980 he was fully retired from the Board and had shifted his focus to concert music and occasional film music projects (IMAX films in particular). After his retirement he seemed somewhat apolitical in his view of the Board, its role, and its future. He was intensely proud of the Board’s achievements and legacy, but he knew that it was now in the hands of a new generation of creators and political masters, and he had moved on to other pursuits.

In 2001, Rathburn wrote Two Pieces for Celesta (or Carillon) and String Quartet – “Summer Nocturne” and “The Cats on Parliament Hill” – for Ottawa’s summer Chamberfest, the world’s largest annual International Chamber Music Festival.53 The carillon arrangement was prepared with Parliament Hill’s iconic Peace Tower Carillon in mind, an instrument Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King described as “the voice of the nation” in a dedicatory speech delivered on 1 July 1927.⁵⁴ More than fifty years prior to composing the Two Pieces for Celesta (or Carillon) and String Quartet, Rathburn was involved in the Peace Tower Carillon’s orchestral debut when he wrote and recorded the score for the NFB’s A Capital Plan (1949), a documentary film about the Gréber Report, a study commissioned by the federal government with a mandate to make recommendations on the development and beautification of Canada’s national capital city. At the time, an NFB source was quoted as saying that since “it was impossible for the carillon, with one of its bells weighing twelve tons, to come to the recording studio … they slung a microphone onto the House of Commons rooftop, seated composer Eldon Rathburn beside Mr. Donnell [Robert Donnell, Dominion carillonneur, 1940–1975] in the carillonneur’s room, and connected them by telephone with the recording engineers.”⁵⁵

Cellist Julian Armour, Chamberfest’s artistic director at the time, describes the lyrical “Summer Nocturne” movement as “a perfect depiction of Ottawa’s gentle, soothing summers.”⁵⁶ It is a relatively static, placid and pensive piece that gives prominence to the solo celesta (or carillon), and has a feeling of warmth, well-being and reverie that might accompany a siesta, or a hazy summer sundown. For Rathburn, a lifelong cat lover and a frequent supporter of the Humane Society and other animal welfare charities, “The Cats on Parliament Hill” is his third feline-inspired piece (together with “Tiddles of Paddington” from his Six Railroad Preludes, and “Blue Cat,” a piece of stock music written and recorded at the NFB). Throughout his life, Eldon always held a special affection for animals in general, and for cats in particular. His family owned several cats during his childhood years, and sometime in the mid-1970s Margot presented Eldon with a unique Valentine’s Day gift: a large pedigreed Persian cat, “Oliver,” who received doting attention and affection from the couple during their later years.⁵⁷ (Visitors to the Rathburn home frequently noted not only that Oliver’s presence loomed large, but also that it was filled with almost as many cat-themed knick-knacks as there were train-related items.) With “The Cats on Parliament Hill” Rathburn pays tribute to a community of feral cats that was given sanctuary behind the Parliament Buildings in an assembly of makeshift shelters. Prior to its demolition in 2013, the colony had been maintained for ninety years by generations of dedicated Ottawa donors and cat lovers.58 In both of his pieces for celesta (or carillon) and string quartet, Rathburn’s treatment of his programmatic subject is essentially filmic in nature. Composed with a selection of “modes of limited transposition,”⁵⁹ which cleverly provide a feeling of scampering simultaneously in multiple directions, “The Cats on Parliament Hill” is as frisky, playful, and mischievous as one might expect from a lover of furry felines.

Rounding out the list of Rathburn’s concertino works are Light and Shadow (1993), a “double concertino” for violin and cello soloists with string accompaniment,⁶⁰ and Two Moods (2002), for trumpet and string quartet.

Works for Piano Solo

When writing concert music, Rathburn generally preferred to work with orchestral instruments, whether on a large or chamber scale. However he was also a versatile and gifted pianist, and he wrote piano music with great facility. Eldon habitually composed at the piano, even when writing orchestral and chamber music. One of his lifelong musical heroes was José Iturbi, the multi-talented Spanish-American pianist who appeared in Hollywood musicals during the 1940s. (Eldon sent Iturbi’s family a letter of condolence when the pianist died in 1980.)⁶¹ Although his childhood aspiration to become a silent film pianist was sidetracked by the advent of “the talkies,” Eldon felt that it was this early pianistic goal that ultimately led to his pursuit of a career as a composer of film music.

A complete list of Rathburn’s piano music is given in Appendix IId. Unfortunately most of his earliest piano works appear to have been lost to posterity. Missing works include a Sonatinette (1940), a set of Piano Variations (1944) on a well-known popular song tune (“Just Wearyin’ for You,” by the American composer Carrie Jacobs-Bond),⁶² and the Don El Preludes (mid-1950s), piano pieces inspired by the fictional character “Don-El,” a member of the noble House of El on the planet Krypton, and Superman’s cousin (“Kal-El” was Superman’s name at birth).⁶³ In chapter 6 we looked briefly at Six Railroad Preludes (1988), Iron Horses of Delson (1992), and Ghost Train (1992). And in chapter 5 we discussed Schoenberg versus Gershwin (1997), a musical “tennis match” between two of the great titans of twentieth century music. We will now turn to a brief discussion of Rathburn’s other middle- and late-period piano works.

Figure 8.1 • Black and White (1960), for piano solo (Waterloo Music, 1970), mm 19–24.

Figure 8.1 shows the closing six measures from Rathburn’s Black and White (1960), for piano solo, a piece recorded by Elaine Keillor in 1999 for a four-CD box collection titled Canadian Compositions for Young Pianists.⁶⁴ With the lower clef devoted almost exclusively to the diatonic pitch collection (i.e., the “white notes” on the piano keyboard), and the upper clef playing its “photo negative” pitch complement (i.e., the blacknote pentatonic pitch collection), this piece can be seen as an étude-like exploration in bitonality.

In 2004 Rathburn completed a three-movement Suite for Piano consisting of: I. “A Memory,” II. “Valse Languendo,” and III. “Tarantella.” The opening sixteen measures of “Valse Languendo” (shown in figure 8.2) – a waltz caricature of sorts – provide insight into Rathburn’s late compositional style. In its grotesquerie, the “Valse Languendo” may be thought to bear an affinity with Ravel’s self-destructing La valse (1920), with Richard Strauss’s ecstatic closing waltz in the opera Elektra (1909), or with the demonic waltz parody in Alfred Schnittke’s film score for Agony (1975), Elem Klimov’s film on the last days of Rasputin.⁶⁵ But Rathburn’s waltz is neither as politically caustic as Ravel’s, nor as serious in connotation as those of Strauss and Schnittke.⁶⁶ As its title suggests, “Valse Languendo” is simply a lethargic waltz, the intense chromaticism and moderate tempo of which seem to suggest nothing more than the reverie of a languid summer day, or perhaps morning regrets after a dizzying night of dancing and revelry in Vienna. Crediting Rathburn’s music with the capacity to invoke imagery of this kind may seem fanciful, but it is a characteristic of his work to which numerous commentators have drawn attention. According to New Brunswick music critic Alex Cook, for example, Rathburn always “creates a sound picture.”⁶⁷ His music always “portrays images,” Cook continues, even in his concert music.⁶⁸

Figure 8.2 • Opening theme (mm. 1–16) from “Valse Languendo” (second movement, Suite for Piano, 2004).

Rathburn’s capacity for witty musical parody is another of his most striking compositional trademarks. He knew that in order to caricaturize a tune, style, or genre, the composer must first understand and represent it accurately before distorting or commenting on it musically. In both eight-bar phrases shown in figure 8.2, the music clearly references the nineteenth-century Viennese waltz tradition while at the same time sounding wholly original. Apart from the angular and idiosyncratic posttonal chromaticism in the piano right hand, “Valse Languendo” is a parody on the Viennese waltz. It is largely conventional in its tempo, metre, and motivic treatment, as well as in its symmetrical phrase structures and cadence points, and the way its conventional left-hand accompaniment figuration provides a firm harmonic and rhythmic underpinning. Each of Rathburn’s eight-bar period-type phrase structures consist of conventional four-bar antecedent and consequent phrases (mm. 1–4 and 5–8 and mm. 9–12 and 13–16), and both lead to motivically unifying two-bar cadential gestures (a dotted half-note caesura approached by a sixteenth-note anacrusis). In this example, as in countless examples that could be drawn from Rathburn’s concert music, he is indulging in one of his favourite musical games, one that provides him with a rich source of both humour and a sense of nostalgia, namely playing with stylistic elements of both high- and low-brow musical culture.⁶⁹ In both of the piano pieces discussed above he is also “playing post-tonal games” in a way that would have been impossible in his film music projects.

“Valse Languendo” was not Rathburn’s first Viennese waltz parody. His main theme for the 1957 animated film It’s a Crime (1957), titled “Happy in Vienna” (see figure 3.5, chapter 3), is simultaneously a Viennese waltz parody and a free variation on Anton Karas’s “Harry Lime Theme” from the classic film noir The Third Man (1949).

Works for String Quartet

During his teenage years Rathburn wrote a short string quartet movement titled Scottish Melody (1933). In Julian Armour’s words, Scottish Melody shows “his gifts for creating beautiful string sonority at an early age.”⁷⁰ Eldon was determined to hone his string-writing skills in the 1930s, and during his year of study in Toronto he wrote both the lyrical Andante (1938) for string quartet and the playful Scherzo Humouresque (1939). Although both quartets are referenced in lists of Canadian music catalogued by Helmut Kallmann,⁷¹ and by MacMillan and Beckwith,⁷² in performance they lay dormant until 1993, when they were rediscovered by Armour and the Ottawa String Quartet. Scottish Melody, Andante, and Scherzo Humouresque were recorded by the Canadian Chamber Players in 1996.73 In 1946, Rathburn rearranged the Scherzo Humouresque as an orchestral work titled Cartoon No. 2 (discussed above).

Reverie (1998), a single-movement work for string quartet, is a moving and lyrical meditation on Beethoven’s “Canadian Canon” (WoO 195 in the Kinsky–Halm catalogue of “works without opus number”).⁷⁴ Rathburn was fascinated to learn of the Canadian story behind the creation of the canon, the manuscript of which is housed in Library and Archives Canada.⁷⁵ On 16 December 1825, less than two years before Beethoven’s death, the composer presented a canon on the text “Freu’ Dich des Lebens” (“Rejoice in Life”) to the German-born Canadian organist-composer Theodor-Friedrich Molt (1795–1856), who was touring Europe at the time. The meeting is thought to have been Beethoven’s only direct connection during his lifetime with a musician from the New World. Figure 8.3 shows how, although Beethoven’s canon is written in C major, Rathburn gives it a reflective and brooding treatment in his string quartet, underpinning it largely in the Phrygian mode.

Subway Thoughts (1993) was written for Julian Armour and the Ottawa String Quartet in early 1993, and premiered by the OSQ at Ottawa’s Museum of Civilization in April of that year.⁷⁶ Armour described the composer’s programmatic intention: “The eerie beginning of this work suggests the beginning of the day, when the steam is slowly rising from the subway grates. In no time at all, the hustle and bustle of the day begins and we’re quickly taken on a roller-coaster of a subway ride.”⁷⁷ A review of a 2014 recording by the Saint John String Quartet provides a slightly different interpretation of Rathburn’s programmatic intent: “Subway Thoughts is … not so much about the actual sound of a subway train, but rather the physical experience one would have of a subway train approaching and leaving a station. The piece is an arch design, where the calm opening – the experience of waiting for a train – gradually increases in rhythmic and dynamic energy as the train approaches the subway station, only to return to the calmness as the train leaves.”⁷⁸ A charming and typically Rathburnian feature of the work is a brief quotation from Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor that is heard at about the mid-point. One might wonder why Rathburn would opt to place Mendelssohn’s music, or any classical music for that matter, in the New York subway system. The Mendelssohn quotation is a tip of the hat to the legendary Juilliard-trained violin virtuoso James Graseck, who has been giving solo violin performances on New York City subway platforms from the 1970s to the present day. According to one blogger, Graseck’s goal was to “make great music and virtuoso performances accessible – virtually at arm’s length – to anyone with the good luck to stumble onto him.”⁷⁹ Rathburn’s Mendelssohn quotation in Subway Thoughts may also reflect his abiding affection and respect for working musicians, wherever and whenever he encountered them.

Figure 8.3 • Beethoven’s “Canadian Canon” (“Freu’ dich des Lebens,” WoO 195), and mm. 1–12 from Rathburn’s string quartet, Reverie: After a Beethoven Sketch (1998).

For countless composers of twentieth-century Canadian art music – as for their counterparts in Britain, continental Europe, Russia and elsewhere – folk song was the ultimate fons et origo of an authentically national music.80 Canadian composers interested in the folk song revival could turn to a number of important published folk song collections, anthologies, and studies that were compiled by leading Canadian musicologists and folklorists at mid-century.⁸¹ Rathburn’s Green Shores of Fogo (2002), for string quartet, is one of many works in which he shows pride, affection, and nostalgia for both folk song and his eastern Canadian heritage. The Newfoundland folk song from which Rathburn draws inspiration for the quartet is a melancholic love lyric about a sailor’s sorrow as he parts from his beloved, to seek fortune “in a far distant land o’er the sea”:

Fare ye well to the green shores of Fogo. Fare ye well Katie dear, true and kind.

For wherever I’ll be, I’ll be true to thee, since old Fogo I’m leaving behind.

This song was discovered, transcribed, and recorded by Kenneth Peacock during a field trip to Newfoundland in 1952. Its words are clearly of Newfoundland origin (Fogo Island, situated off the northeast shore of Newfoundland, is the province’s largest offshore territory); however the melody may be of older, Irish provenance.⁸² Rathburn knew Peacock well, as both had studied theory with Healey Willan and piano with Reginald Godden at the Toronto Conservatory of Music in the 1940s. Peacock described “The Green Shores of Fogo” as the most moving and attractive folk song he collected during his many fieldtrips across Canada. Rathburn’s quartet is equal to the task. In the gentle, foreboding, and hazy textures of its opening measures, the mist slowly withdraws from the shores of Fogo Island, giving way to an initial introduction of the plaintive tune in the cello. Every member of the quartet gets a taste of the tune as Rathburn’s deftly handled string writing leads the movement forward. With each entry, the accompanying trio provides a haunting and mystical cloak around and through which the tune unfolds, until the folk melody eventually fades back into the mist, again in solo cello, at the close. In its atmospheric modality, its gentle string writing, and its loving treatment of its theme, Rathburn’s Green Shores of Fogo calls to mind Vaughan Williams’s mystical and transcendent approach to the instrumental setting of the folk songs of the British Isles.

Explorations in Twelve-Tone Technique

Under the heading of “stock music” we find a number of pieces written by Rathburn that could be considered as either film music, concert music, or both. Stock music (or “production music” as it is sometimes called) is a term for composed and/or recorded music that is wholly owned by a corporate music library (that of the NFB in this case), given that it was either purchased with blanket permission for its use, or written by a composer under contract to create music for use in film, radio, television, or other media. Whereas popular and classical music publishers typically own less than 50 percent of the copyright of any given composition, stock music libraries are the sole copyright owners of the music in their collections. The NFB’s staff composers spent many hours writing stock music for the Board’s music library, ostensibly for future use, when time permitted and they were not under immediate pressure to score a current film project.

In 1958, Eldon wrote a peculiar short piece of stock music titled Test Tube, the twelve-tone serial structure of which he decided to keep to himself. “I wrote a purely serial piece of stock music called Test Tube,” Rathburn recalled years later, “but I never told anyone at the Board.” “If I had told anyone that it was serial music, they would have thrown it out!”83 With these comments in mind, and given Eldon’s fondness for word play and inside jokes, we can safely assume that his title “Test Tube” was code for “Twelve Tone.” Figure 8.4 shows a passage from this piece (mm. 11–15). In the figure, ordinal numbers show three statements of the original (or “prime”) form of Rathburn’s twelve-tone row: C-G-A_♭-B-F_♯-A-C_♯-F-E-B_♭-E_♭-D. Since the row starts on C, Rathburn’s prime form is therefore labelled “P₀” in the figure, since by convention 0 equals C in Allen Forte’s influential “pitch-class set” approach to the analysis of post-tonal music.⁸⁴ It is noteworthy that the first and last trichords in Rathburn’s row, C-G-A_♭ and B_♭-E_♭-D, are inversionally equivalent pitch-class sets, and are therefore considered identical in Forte’s system (i.e., they belong to the same three-note “set class”).⁸⁵ This unique property of Rathburn’s row substructure gives rise to a number of possibilities for pairing twelve-tone rows that begin and end with the same trichords. Throughout Test Tube, Rathburn employs two such forms of the row exclusively, the P₀ form and the RI₁₀ form (i.e., a retrograded and inverted permutation of the twelve-tone series that starts on the pitch B_♭, or “10” in pitch-class set theory): Ab-G-C-F_♯-F-A-C_♯-E-B-D-E_♭-B_♭.

Figure 8.4 • Mm. 11–15 from Rathburn’s Test Tube (NFB stock music, 1958). Ordinal numbers show three statements of the original prime form of Rathburn’s twelve-tone row, starting on C (hence P₀, C=0).

Figure 8.5 • Theme from Images of Childhood (1950, rev. 1972), unison strings and flute, mm. 144–9. Rathburn’s quasi-serial thinking is evident in his employment of a symmetrical hexachord C-B-F-E-B_♭-A that alternates semitones and tritones (C-B-tritone-F-E-tritone-B_♭-A) in a roughly forward-backward palindromic fashion (i.e., B_♭ A E F B C B F E B_♭ A), pivoting on pitch-class 0=C, which falls roughly at the melody’s mid-point.

It should be noted that at precisely the time Test Tube was written, Rathburn was enthralled with the music of Schoenberg’s student and disciple Anton Webern (1883–1945), as were so many forward-looking musical modernists during the 1950s (including not only Pierre Boulez and the entire Darmstadt School,86 but also Stravinsky, who had become enamoured with twelve-tone technique under the influence of Robert Craft).⁸⁷ In 1957 Rathburn had ordered Craft’s newly available three-volume recording of the complete works of Anton Webern.⁸⁸ In Test Tube, Rathburn’s trichordal twelve-tone row substructure points to the influence of Webern. Rathburn seems to have been thinking somewhat serially as early as 1948, ten years before composing Test Tube, and a few years after his visit with Schoenberg in L.A. The theme shown in figure 8.5 is taken from Rathburn’s score for Tom Daly’s UNESCO-sponsored documentary film Hungry Minds (1948), a score he reconceived, expanded, and re-orchestrated two years later as the orchestral tone poem Images of Childhood (discussed in chapter 2). In this theme, Rathburn’s serial thinking is evident in his employment of the symmetrical hexachord C-B-F-E-B_♭-A (Forte pitch-classes 0-11-5-4-10-9) in a roughly forward-and-backward palindromic fashion (i.e., 10 9 4 5 11 0 11 5 4 10 9), pivoting on C=0, which falls roughly at the melody’s mid-point.

Another experiment in twelve-tone technique can be found in Rathburn’s three-movement Bout: In Three Rounds (1971) for guitar and double bass: Moderato (Round One) – Allegro (Round Two) – Slow (Round Three). According to his sister Joan, Eldon’s passion for boxing took priority over just about everything else. In order to arrive at a New York boxing match in time, he once missed the second half of a Carnegie Hall concert that he had been excitedly anticipating for months. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s he was a regular attendee at an annual series of boxing matches at Montreal’s Maurice Richard Arena. Rathburn’s fondness for boxing is clearly manifest in this piece, where the two instruments take on the roles of the individual combatants. A performance of Bout: In Three Rounds, by bassist Peter Dagostino and guitarist Davis Joachim, was broadcast on CBC Radio Two on 16 October 1980.⁸⁹ This archival recording reveals how Rathburn’s syncopated, complex, and counter-metrical rhythms convey the parry and thrust of the boxing ring with extraordinary clarity and vitality. The score ends with a musical “knock-out punch” delivered by the bass, and received by the guitar in a pungent and crunching ffz A_♭^7♯9 chord. After “seeing stars” (depicted with a series of descending harmonics), the guitar gradually loses consciousness with a dynamic decrescendo from _P to _PP while the machismo bass victor stands by, grunting like a primate with a repeated low-pitched perfect 5th (E-B).

Figure 8.6 shows a passage from “Round One” (mm. 1–9). In the figure, ordinal numbers show the unfolding of a prime (P₄) and retrograde (R₄) form of Rathburn’s twelve-tone row. The constituent trichords of this row are all major and minor triads, and the row is symmetrical in that the first and last triads are “minor” in quality, and the second and third triads are “major” in quality (i.e., [e-g-b]-[A_♭-C-E_♭] [D-F-B_♭]-[a-c_♯-f_♯]).⁹⁰ Similarly, the constituent hexachords of Rathburn’s row, taken as pitch collections, are both “hexatonic” sets consisting of three semitonal dyads, a major third apart (i.e., [(E_♭-E)-(G-A_♭)-(B-C)]-[(F-F_♯)-(A-B_♭)-(C_♯-D)]).⁹¹ The hexatonic set is highly invariant under transposition, such that transposing it either upward or downward by a major third will yield an identical hexachordal pitch collection. In Messiaen’s well-known formulation, it is therefore a “mode of limited transposition.”⁹² When the hexatonic set is a substructural feature of the tone row in twelve-tone technique, as it is in Rathburn’s Bout: In Three Rounds, this property gives rise to an extensive array of related row forms that can be exploited for their unique combinatorial properties.⁹³ The hexatonic set is also characterized by its supersaturation with major, minor, and augmented triadic subsets, a property Rathburn exploits to the fullest throughout the piece.⁹⁴

Figure 8.6 • Mm. 1–9 from “Round One” of Bout: In Three Rounds (1971). Ordinal numbers show Rathburn’s employment of prime (P₄) and retrograde (R₄) row forms. Rathburn’s row and its triadic substructure are shown at bottom.

In both Test Tube and Bout, Rathburn appears to be working in a vaguely Webern-like manner, pre-compositionally constructing his rows from four trichordal pitch-class sets that bear familial intervallic and collectional relationships with one another. Twelve-tone technique was clearly a source of fascination for Eldon, as it was to so many composers of his generation in both Europe and North America. However he vowed that in his compositional practice he would never adopt a single system, theory, or procedure in a doctrinaire way. In this respect, Ives, rather than Schoenberg or Webern, was his model.95

Pedagogical Pieces

Although Rathburn wrote relatively few works that could be described as being fundamentally pedagogical in nature, during the war years he composed three pieces for the rhythm band of King George Public School, a school he had attended as a child: Nursery Rhymes (1943), Three Blind Mice (1944), and A Holiday in the Country (1946). After the war he added two more pieces in this genre, Trip around the World (1947),96 a work that visits a variety of musical styles and cultures, and Rhythmette (1949), for rhythm band, two pianos, percussion, and musical water glasses. All of these pieces were given their premiere performances in the Ottawa “Children’s Concerts” series hosted and directed by Eugene Kash during the 1940s and ’50s. Rathburn’s contrapuntal Conversation for Two Clarinets (1958), a piece featured on an educational recording of Canadian music for clarinet titled New for Now: An Adventure in Learning for Young Clarinetists, may also be viewed as a pedagogical piece.⁹⁷ Black and White (1960, discussed above), for piano solo, also appears to have been written with pedagogical goals in mind. An exercise in partitioning complementary (diatonic and pentatonic) pitch collections between the hands (see figure 8.1), Black and White can be seen as a pianistic study in a contemporary composition technique. This may explain why it was published by Waterloo Music in 1970 (a decade after it was written) in a pedagogical piano series titled Studies in Twentieth Century Idioms.⁹⁸

The Metamorphic Ten, The Nomadic Five, the Ottawa Suite, Harbour Nocturne, and Other Chamber Works

In 1971, Rathburn received a Canada Council grant enabling him to take time away from his duties at the NFB to write a new work for chamber ensemble. The Metamorphic Ten (1971), for chamber dectet, is one of the most abstract works Rathburn ever wrote, and he completed it in record time. He provides the following description of the twenty-minute work:

A group of [ten] musicians, metamorphically inclined, play their way through a series of transformations in the following order: primeval mysticism, fretted baroque, Italian Serenade, slapstick, nocturnal fragment, bluegrass, pointillism [a tip of the hat to Webern in its sparseness and leaping intervals], leading to a bass ostinato upon which they head toward a mass collision, a “written out” improvisation in which fragments of previous sections are tossed around in disorder. When the air is cleared, a quiet chorale emerges, later to die away amidst echoes of the beginning.99

Rathburn’s characteristic predilection for cross-genre exploration is everywhere evident throughout the score, as is his fondness for large and varied percussion sections, the Jew’s harp, the flexatone, and fretted stringed instruments, including acoustic and electric guitar, banjo, mandolin, and zither.¹⁰⁰ In 1974, “one of the producers” at the NFB suggested that the piece might be used as the inspiration for a film. With this goal in mind, the piece was recorded by a dectet of Montreal’s finest jazz musicians under a film contract at the NFB’s Montreal studio.¹⁰¹ However in 1976, when it had become clear that The Metamorphic Ten would never be used in a film, Rathburn sought and obtained the NFB’s permission to release the recording commercially.¹⁰² In 1977, after Lou Applebaum and others helped him pitch the work to various labels, and after dialogue with Peter Christ, president of Crystal Records, the recording of The Metamorphic Ten was released on side B of a vinyl Crystal Records disc with John Rodby’s Concerto for 29 on side A.¹⁰³ For Eldon, it was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with Peter Christ and Crystal Records.

The Nomadic Five (1974), for brass quintet, was conceived as a companion piece for The Metamorphic Ten, with which it shares a pastichelike neoclassical style.¹⁰⁴ Rathburn provides a programmatic description of The Nomadic Five in his liner notes for the Mostly Railroad Music CD: “After a cranky tune up, a group of [five] strolling musicians are off in many directions including some Handel, a flash of an old pop tune, a bow to Liszt, Beethoven, Shostakovich, and ragtime. After a soulful tuba solo they finish with a spicy cadence.”¹⁰⁵

During the 1990s, Rathburn wrote four independent movements for cello and piano, all of which were given premiere performances by Ottawa cellist Julian Armour: Apparition (1990),¹⁰⁶ Elegy (1995), Scherzo Diabolique (1996), and Romp (1998). Given the close dates of their composition, their relative stylistic uniformity, similar durations (each movement is approximately three minutes in length), and contrasting tempi (Andante, Moderato, Bright, and Allegro con brio), these four movements for cello and piano can be performed together as a set. The fact that Rathburn’s Scherzo is the third of these four pieces chronologically suggests that this may have been his intention all along, given that this is the customary position of the Scherzo movement in a four-movement Sonata. Apparition has subsequently been listed in the Grade 8 Royal Conservatory of Music syllabus of standard repertoire for cello.107 For Canadian audiences, Rathburn’s eleven-movement Ottawa Suite for chamber orchestra (1996, revised and expanded 2001), is arguably his most popular concert work. Record critic Dave Lewis has described the Ottawa Suite as “a hilariously tongue-in-cheek patchwork of quotations.” “The familiar tunes creep in and out of the quodlibet fabric and are always recognizable,” Lewis writes, “even if they come overlaid on one another.”¹⁰⁸ Julian Armour was effusive in his praise for the Ottawa Suite in his liner notes for the Canadian Chamber Players 2006 CD, Eldon Rathburn Works:

The Ottawa Suite makes fun of many aspects of Canada’s capital … Humour in music is always a great challenge and very few composers have succeeded in composing music that is truly funny, especially after repeated hearings … [Rathburn’s] compositions are all that great music should be. They are well-crafted and concise, and they display the complete spectrum of human emotions. They have always encountered total respect from musicians who perform them (a rare feat, indeed!), and have always been extremely well received by audiences … The Ottawa Suite ranks as the single most popular work that the Ottawa Chamber Music Society has programmed in the over 1000 concerts of its twelve-year history.¹⁰⁹

A brief march for the full ensemble introduces the Ottawa Suite (“Opening: Ottawa Chamber Music Festival”), and a satirical neoclassical movement titled “National Arts Centre” follows, quoting Haydn and Mozart (the NAC Orchestra’s core repertoire at the time) and generally poking good-humoured fun at Canada’s national orchestra. Armour notes that “National Arts Centre” is “not so much a spoof of the NAC’s superb resident orchestra as it is of the interesting twists and turns that one encounters when governments get involved in running arts institutions.”¹¹⁰ Rathburn engages a chorus of snoring kazoos to lampoon Canada’s aging legislative assembly of sober second thought in “The Senate Sleeps.” “Winterlude” celebrates Ottawa’s annual winter festival with a brief fantasy on “Les patineurs” (“The Skater’s Waltz”), Émile Waldteufel’s well-known tune. In “Byward Market” Rathburn depicts a colourful farmers’ market with jazzy variations on “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and a brief quotation of Tchaikovsky’s balletic “Waltz of the Flowers.” “Palladium” celebrates the 1996 opening of an 18,000-seat arena – a new home for the Ottawa Senators NHL hockey franchise – in Kanata, a large and thriving suburb to the west of Ottawa.111 To invoke the image of Ottawa’s new rough-and-ready professional hockey team, Rathburn engages Romberg and Hammerstein’s song “Stout-Hearted Men” from the 1929 Broadway musical The New Moon (“Give me some men who are stout-hearted men … Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder they grow as they go to the fore”). Aggressive “horn honking” is also written into the score in reference to the traffic standstill that Ottawa fans inevitably encountered en route to the Palladium. Armour describes “Civil Servants” as “a movement that has relevance to all cities and countries throughout the world where clockwatching bureaucrats reign supreme.”¹¹² In “National Gallery of Canada,” Rathburn juggles with themes from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. “Amalgamation” is a musical vignette highlighting both the hostilities and rapprochements that accompanied the 2001 amalgamation of the former cities of Ottawa, Nepean, Kanata, Gloucester, Vanier, and Cumberland, the former townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau, and Osgoode, and the former village of Rockcliffe Park, into the newly amalgamated City of Ottawa. In “Boom City,” Rathburn tries to capture some of the spirit of vigour and innovation that drove Ottawa’s hightech sector and economy in the late twentieth-century (led by companies such as Nortel, Corel, Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Cognos/IBM, Siemens, and Telesat, among others). The Ottawa Suite concludes with a musical salute to Parliament Hill, Canada’s iconic national legislature, perched on top of a steep embankment on the Ottawa River. In his closing movement Rathburn quotes the Canadian national anthem, and his ensemble includes a part for Canada’s Peace Tower carillon, an instrument he had employed on two prior occasions.

The premiere performance of a revised and expanded version of the Ottawa Suite was given at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival on 20 April 2001, the day before Eldon’s eighty-fifth birthday. The Chamber Players of Canada were joined by Canada’s fourth Dominion carillonneur, Gordon Slater, for the performance. Nearly a half-kilometre away from the venue, Slater and the carillon were able to join in the finale by the magic of microphones placed in the Peace Tower, headsets, and a challenging not-quite-real-time audio link.113 The audience spontaneously burst into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” to close the concert, with Slater and the carillon joining in.¹¹⁴

In Harbour Nocturne (2001), written for a chamber octet comprised of flute, clarinet, two trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba, and percussion, Rathburn takes a nostalgic look back at his childhood years in New Brunswick, complete with foghorns, rising tides, harbour mist, and breaking waves. Critics have described it as “a genuinely gorgeous piece of music,”¹¹⁵ and as “une évocation magnifique et debussyste d’un décor néo-brunswickois.”¹¹⁶ However one critic also noted that Harbour Nocturne “rather fritters out with no definite ending, or even the hint of one.”¹¹⁷ For Rathburn, insecurity concerning matters of form was always his Achilles heel, and in Harbour Nocturne he was well aware that some aspects of the form “were not quite right.”¹¹⁸ Although Rathburn’s concerts works are masterfully composed, he struggled to avoid reverting to engrained habits he had adopted as a film composer at the NFB, habits that were not readily transferable to the composition of concert music, which requires a more purely music-structural conception of form.¹¹⁹ This may explain the preponderance of pieces of relatively short duration, one-movement works, and collections of short movements among Rathburn’s chamber works. The long-range formal thinking required to create coherent larger-scale structures was always elusive for him: “a danger in writing film music,” he told Louis Hone in 1993, “is that you lose the long line of the music.”¹²⁰ Rathburn often remarked that one of the unfortunate consequences of working with film is that the composer is likely to gain little experience with the formal challenges of writing longer works. He once told Don McWilliams that he regretted not writing more concert music, noting that as a film composer “I was asked to do these things for eighteen seconds or one minute, but when I first sat down to write a string quartet I found that I could not write anything longer than five minutes.”¹²¹

During the last years of his life, Rathburn wrote two works featuring the double bass. Diabolus in Musica (2007) – for flute, clarinet, string quartet, double bass, and piano – was written in celebration of a summer 2007 symposium hosted by Carleton University, titled “I Feel the Air of Another Planet: Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World.” In an interview broadcast on CBC Radio on 27 July 2007, the day of the premiere performance, Eldon explained to Lawrence, Ronald, and Nuria Schoenberg (the composer’s surviving children) that his initial working title had been “Arthritis,” since he had been suffering recently with arthritis in his knees. “But as I went on with the composition of the piece,” he continued, “I noticed that it included a lot of augmented-fourth intervals – ‘the devil’s tritone’ – so I decided to title it Diabolus in Musica.”122

Father and Son (2008), for piano and jazz bass, is the last work Rathburn completed prior to his death in late August of that year. In this brief piece, the piano assumes the role of the father, the bass that of his son. Although it soon becomes apparent that father and son are in frequent disagreement with each other, they gradually approach compromise and dénouement as the piece progresses and ultimately arrive at an amicable agreement with a unison final cadence. Although Rathburn had initially planned to title the piece “Two Part Invention,” he recounted with a chuckle that since a peculiar programmatic character emerged during its composition, he decided that “Father and Son” was “more fun.”¹²³

The piece was premiered on 17 March 2008 at Ottawa’s Maxwell’s Bistro by pianist Frédéric Lacroix and jazz bassist Adrian Cho, in a “New Music in New Places” concert co-sponsored by the Ottawa International Chamber Music Society and the Canadian Music Centre. After Margot expressed concerns about Eldon’s arthritic knees, and how they might not be able to handle the staircase leading up to the Bistro, Eldon and Margot decided that he would be unable to attend the performance.