By Isaac Page
There is something extraordinarily exciting about speaking with Donald Coakley. Growing up, members of my family had been telling me about Don: his work as the head of instrumental music at the Scarborough school board, his time at Scarborough Music Camp, and his compositions. As I got older and became more active as a musician, Don’s presence in my mind only grew. I started to realize how much of an impact he has had on so many educators throughout Toronto, throughout Ontario, and throughout Canada. Having the opportunity to speak with him was something I had been looking forward to for a long time, even if I hadn’t quite known.
I talked with Don over the phone at the beginning of May 2020. Don was at his home in Scarborough; I was in my apartment in Bowling Green, Ohio, in the final weeks of my Master’s degree, trying to figure out the best way to move across the border. In the constant chaos of the moment, talking to Don was immediately settling. From our first words, he spoke to me as if I was an old friend and colleague. Don speaks in a bright, animated, enthusiastic tone—one that makes you hang onto every word. I got the sense that I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much energy he has; energy that fuelled his career of teaching, administrating, conducting, and composing.
Donald Coakley has been writing music for most of his life. He started when he was around eight years old. “I’d make arrangements of tunes when I was a kid, and I had no idea what I was doing. I was just doing it, and something propelled me to do it” he told me. His interest in composition didn’t reach fruition until he met Vincent Persichetti. “That really fired up my interest and it never waned. I’m still writing.” Don speaks fondly of Persichetti. “I studied with him in Philadelphia, where he lived. That in itself was just a great opportunity because he was an excellent teacher, and also very affable, friendly, easy to work with, and so forth. At the same time, he was no less demanding. You know this isn’t gonna work, he shows you why and how, and how it could be fixed. That was a great two years for me. That’s what really moved me into composition seriously. Right from the get go.”
Don began studying composition with Persichetti while pursuing two concurrent graduate degrees at Temple University and the Philadelphia Conservatory—which included trombone performance with Henry Smith, the principal trombonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. “I wasn’t headed for a symphony orchestra. I was not bad for a trombone player, but I wasn’t headed for that. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t. It’s wonderful, and I have a great admiration for symphony musicians, I really do because I wanted to be one, but it wasn’t in the cards. That’s when it shifted.”
After his graduate studies, Don began teaching at a Catholic high school in Philadelphia, Cardinal Daugherty High School. While teaching, Don began to write for his ensembles. “I wrote this work for cello and piano for a cellist at Temple. That’s the first thing I did after studying with Persichetti. Then I started writing for the wind ensemble at the high school, and then I never stopped writing.” Most of the works that Don has written have come out of similar opportunities, and are usually targeted towards younger musicians—more on that below.
After five years of teaching at Cardinal Daugherty, Don got a job teaching at Temple University. “I was teaching all of the Music Ed techniques class and reorganizing them. Nobody who had been doing it had any experience in schools. That’s just the way it was at the time. When I went there, my job was Assistant Director of Instrumental Activities on the Band side. My job was to rewrite and redesign all of the instrumental technique classes. I was at Temple for three years, and then I came up here to conduct at the Scarborough Music Camp. I didn’t know anything from anything. I just had this offer that I’d come up… so my wife and I came up and then a job opened up in the central office [of the Scarborough Board of Education], running the whole instrumental program at the elementary level. I thought ‘this looks interesting’. In fact, what I did was build the elementary instrumental program.”
When Don arrived in Scarborough, one of his primary goals was to restructure the program he inherited. “There was no rhyme or reason, there was no planning, when I walked into the system. The potential was there, but it was all disorganized.” Don set about making sense of and solving the jigsaw puzzle in front of him. “When I came into the system there would be an elementary string program in elementary school A. The problem was that the high school that those kids would go into had no music program, or they never offered a string program at the high school level. So I’m scratching my head and saying ‘why do we have string programs in schools that don’t go anywhere; that just stop at grade 8 and that’s the end of it?’ So we pulled out all of the string programs that I called ‘dead-ended,’ because they ended at grade 8, and we took the string program out of school A that wasn’t going to go anywhere in high school, and put it into school B that was gonna go to a high school.”
After revamping the elementary instrumental program, he moved onto revamping the All-City groups — which meant starting them in the first place. “There were no All-City groups when I came in. I started with the Symphony Orchestra. It wasn’t a big orchestra, but the kids were interested in working and developing something. We started with an All-City Symphony Orchestra, and worked down. We had an elementary string orchestra; on the other side, winds, elementary band. They were enrichment programs, so if the kids wanted more they could come to those programs. We had hundreds in those five programs.” He used the All-City groups to expand the musical literacy of the students, having them play “everything from Beethoven, Bach, to Stravinsky.”
Speaking to Don, one thing that is evident is that he centred his decisions around the impact it would have on the students and how it would strengthen them as musicians. Specifically regarding his approach towards staffing the Scarborough Music Camp, Don said “I never hired anybody, first of all, who wasn’t interested in kids and teaching. If you weren’t, I couldn’t use you. You had to be interested in teaching and interested in kids, and having them leave the camps better than they were when they entered ten days earlier.”
Don makes it clear that his intention was not to push students into a professional career as musicians, but rather to create a sense of well-rounded joy and appreciation for music. Many of the students that Don worked with have had a lasting impression on him. While telling me about the All-City groups, he took a moment to single out my uncle Tom and tell me how he was “a hell of a good cellist.” For those students that did go into music, Don proudly sees them as the success of the system. “Some kids went into music and did very well, came out, became professionals in their field; symphony orchestra musicians, pit musicians, and a lot of good music teachers came out of the Scarborough program.”
Don spent a long time restructuring and building the elementary music program into something that he is still, to this day, proud of. “This sounds like a little hubris, but it was the best music program in the city, but you’re not gonna get the Toronto or Etobicoke people to say that.” Don went on to say, “I used to have coordinators of music come to see me from other jurisdictions and school systems. I would take them through what we did in Scarborough, and they were exhausted. They would say ‘there’s no way we can do this.’ But we built it up gradually.”
In addition to all the aspects of his job that Don was proud of, working in the central office for the Board of Education meant that he could write a lot of music. “I could write choral music, I could write for band, I could write for strings. It was my great laboratory because I had that freedom. I wasn’t locked in one school.” As I mentioned earlier, most of Don’s output as a composer is geared towards younger musicians. When Don was teaching high school he spent a lot of time writing for his ensembles. At the Scarborough Board of Education, he was able to write for ensembles across the entire system, leading towards a greater and more varied output.
Many of Don’s works from this time were written at the request of different schools. “People would say ‘would you write this for us’, and sure, away we’d go. I could never have done that if I was in one class or one school.” Of course, the opportunity to write doesn’t always translate into time to write. Don’s job still required a lot of hands-on administrative work, in addition to his work conducting some of the All-City groups. “Through all this time, I was writing. Just non-stop. The only time I could do it would be in the summertime, so I used to write in the summer and write as many pieces as I could for different idioms, and then I would score it in the fall. My Saturday/Sunday in the fall of the year, I would be scoring what I wrote in the summertime.”
Don sees himself and the music he wrote for young musicians in the same tradition of composers such as Holst, Vivaldi, and Hindemith; music written for amateurs, and specifically amateurs within an educational setting. When writing for young musicians, there are a handful of things that Don keeps in mind, such as range restrictions and dynamics. For an elementary level band, “you only have a certain level in terms of high, and a certain level in terms of low. And what it ends up being is you’re being asked to make a work of art with five notes per instrument.” Additionally, dynamics play a big part in writing for young musicians. “Kids can’t play too loudly, they can’t play too softly, because if they’re playing too loudly, they could be distorting embouchures. You’re much more aware of technical things, and you have to be with young kids.” Don’s approach to technical limitations is the same when it comes to band as it is with strings. “You’re pretty much playing in first position all the time, and you’re not gonna get out of first position because at the 5/6 level that’s where they are.”
However important the technical limitations are, Don insists that they are not the most important consideration when writing for young musicians. “The one thing that is absolutely important is that everybody, including the tuba, gets a chance to play the melody. If you have some kids just going oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah for the whole piece and they have maybe five bars of rest here and six bars of rest there, they’re not going to be interested in playing. One thing that’s very important with young kids is that everybody in the group gets to play melody, and that’s not hard to do, but it’s very important.”
Since retiring, very little of what Don has written has been for young musicians. “I’m not writing much elementary music any more unless I’m asked to; when I write for winds it’s far more difficult than kids would touch.” One such recent composition for band is his work Sound Bites, a concerto for trombone, winds, and percussion. “Two years ago I had a lot of fun writing for a very talented kid who ended up at the Curtis Institute. He was a trombone player up at Agincourt Collegiate. He was a monster; he could just play anything. Nobody asked me to do this, I just did it. One movement was for brass and trombone, another movement was for woodwinds and trombone, another section was percussion and trombone, and then finally the full band and trombone. That one was a lot of fun to write because the soloist was so damn good I didn’t have to worry about restrictions as far as he was concerned. I did have to worry about restrictions as far as the band was concerned, but they had a good program up there so I could just let myself go.”
As for other projects, Don has many on the go, including some solo and chamber works, but when he hasn’t been commissioned for a specific work, Don said to me, “Since I’m free to do whatever I want, I’m writing some choral music. That’s where my head is now, and probably gonna be for a little while.”
Isaac Page is a Toronto-born composer and conductor.
Generations/Conversations is a project of CMC Ontario which pairs early career artists with elders in the composition community to share personal and community histories, and reflect on their artistic practice. Check back regularly for future instalments in the series!