Generations/Conversations with David Gordon Duke

By Isaac Page

I remember the first time I’d ever heard about David. One evening, a handful of years ago, I was catching up with Greg Newsome over a couple of beers, and at one point in our conversation he tells me “if you ever get the chance, you need to meet David Gordon Duke.” David had taught Greg, who I was very lucky to study with privately while I was in high school. Remarkably, the opportunity to talk to David presented itself to me right as I was finishing my Masters degree and beginning to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Although I was trapped in Ohio for the next few months and unable to travel to Vancouver where David is based, from mid-April until early May, David and I discussed a wide variety of topics; his composition and teaching career, musicology, his role as a music critic, his teachers, and our shared love for and interest in Canadian composition. 

Our conversations often started with us briefly catching up, going over the highlights of the last week (which at that point in the year meant being outside for any period of time or getting your groceries delivered), and David would quiz me about my plans to move out of my apartment and cross the border. Speaking to David, it is immediately clear that he has an incredibly sharp wit, a self-deprecating sense of humour, a vast knowledge of classical and Canadian repertoire, and many opinions that he does not shy away from—probably a good trait for a critic to have. When David tells stories from his career, or of people that he’s known, he would recite all of the dialogue, occasionally slipping into slight affectations and impressions. Listening to him over the phone while I sat in my living room, it was almost like listening to a radio drama. One such story that I particularly enjoyed from our first phone call, and in fact one of the first stories that David told me, was about one of his encounters with Oskar Morawetz.

I didn’t study with Oskar Morawetz, and you’ll hear plenty of things said about him, but Oskar was one of the great musicians—ever. He was at Banff, and I was there, and he didn’t know what to do with a lot of the composers because they were snotty about style, and this, that, and the other thing. I found him absolutely one of the most remarkable people, especially in terms of helping me think through things, although I would never call myself a Morawetz student. On one occasion, after a concert—he had insomnia, I had insomnia, and we would often hang out together after concerts at Banff—he came racing up to me and said ‘Mr. Duke, Mr. Duke!’ It was always Mr. Duke, never David; very formal.

‘Yes Dr. Morawetz?’

‘I’ve just heard the most appalling thing!’

‘Oh my god! What?’

‘They tell me you’re a musicologist.’

And I said, ‘well that’s what my degree is in Dr. Morawetz.’

‘But how can this be?! You’re clearly intelligent and you obviously like music.’

The dichotomy of being a musicologist and also a composer has been a permanent aspect of David’s career. While in his undergrad, David chose to pursue musicology instead of composition. A primary motivation was David’s negative reaction to the way that composition was being taught in the 60s and 70s.

I discovered, and this is probably where my whole contrarian view of music in Canada probably stems from, I saw a lot of music that I didn’t like that was fashionable at the time, and I saw a lot of people who were decent people, but who’s methods of teaching composition didn’t appeal to me. The great accident was finding myself in [Jean] Coulthard’s third year theory class, which was twentieth century and modern music up to that point, and I realized that this was a person who thought about music the way I wanted to think about music.

It would be impossible, and incredibly dishonest, to try and talk about David without also mentioning Jean Coulthard. David and Jean had a very close relationship from 1970 until her death, and much of David’s writing and composing is, in one way or another, tied to Jean. For instance, Jean played a large part in opening David’s eyes to the world of Canadian music.

When I was fishing around for a fourth year project, by this point I’d already been having lessons with Jean on the side and helping out as her quasi-secretary, she said ‘why don’t you do something on Canadian music? As a matter of fact, the Canadian League of Composers is having their annual meeting in Victoria. Let’s just go!’ And I thought ‘this is pretty cool! Here I am, a spotty undergrad, and I get to see the beasts up close.’ And I did, and that’s when I realized that there needed to be people writing about Canadian music.

David has continued to write a lot about Canadian music, covering a lot as a critic, incorporating it into his classes and lectures, and he has also written about Jean numerous times. He co-authored a biography about her with William Bruneau, both of them approaching that book with years of expertise in Jean’s music behind them. Being as close as David and Jean were, many things had to be left unsaid, but there were equally as many things that David discovered he had never known about Jean.

Jean and her sister were remarkably consistent with coming up with a view of their shared life which was both true and surprisingly consistent, and that meant most people got the same perspectives on things. Bill, because he’d done hours and hours and hours of interviews with Jean meant that he began to see the inconsistencies, some of the biographical problems. I had the same sort of situation since I had been there since 1970 until she died, meaning that I saw things. What happened when I got access, after her death, to her papers was that I discovered again that the person I knew wasn’t the whole person. 

It’s like thinking about what your parents were like before you entered the equation. One knows what one knows, but one never knew them at 10, or 14, or 20. That’s the problem with closeness, or we call it the party line. The party line on Coulthard studies is, to a great extent, seen in the book. But every now and then we hinted at things that we wanted a sophisticated reader to think through for themselves.

The biography was not the first time that David had written about Jean in depth. David’s doctoral dissertation is about Jean’s orchestral music, and again his access to her and her music was unprecedented. 

When I did my dissertation on her orchestral music, I was already in my forties, she was around and terribly interested in it. I had all sorts of access like you wouldn’t believe. Finally at one point I said ‘well I guess you need to read this’ and I gave her a draft, and in the final chapter it has a summing up of certain things. It’s a fundamentally very positive study of her orchestral music, but one of the guys on my committee said ‘do you realize that it’s page 46 before you say anything nice about this woman?!’ And I said that that’s about right, that’s how I was brought up! Jean Coulthard was very exacting.

In the conclusion I say that one of the disadvantages of Coulthard’s orchestral music being played is that the parts are in such terrible states, and in early pieces copyists weren’t very good, besides which Coulthard wasn’t a very good proofreader and there were mistakes. When I got back the draft [from Jean], there weren’t many comments, but at the spot there was a highlight in pencil with the words ‘all too true!!’ 

And then when we did the defense, Jean came over to Victoria and we made a bit of a party of it and at one point I was being grilled and one of the members of my committee turns and says ‘Ms. Coulthard, is that true?’ and Jeanie said ‘Oh, if David said so than it must be.’ Talk about an unusual experience with academia!

For many years, David witnessed Jean’s compositional process firsthand. In one way through their collaboration on Music of Our Time—a collection of graded, pedagogical piano pieces—but David would often assist in other works that Jean wrote. David shared an engrossing origin story for one of Coulthard’s most celebrated orchestral works.

Jean did something sort of remarkable in 1973 or 1974. She was asked by the VSO to write a piece. They were going to go to China, and the Chinese government wanted them to play a Canadian piece that uses ‘folk songs of the people’ if you’re going to come here. Jean was in Hawaii, and said [to me] ‘here’s what’s happened dear: they want me to do this, and they want something that isn’t avant-garde, so they thought of me. Not exactly a compliment, but I want to do something, and I’m not just going to set the same old Canadian folk songs that everybody does. Can you go out to UBC and go through all the books of folk songs and send me everything you think is interesting?’

‘Are you interested in Ukrainian songs from the Prairies?’

‘Yes!’

‘Are you interested in…’ And I found all sorts of things and xeroxed them and sent them to Hawaii, and that’s how the piece Canada Mosaic came about. She used the title, which had been a political phrase — Jean was a very pro-Trudeau-the-First Liberal, which was difficult because her social set weren’t that way but she was — and she did this multicultural things, and it has some First Nations music in it, and it has a pseudo-Chinese Vancouver piece, and the whole thing was designed to be precisely that.¹ The whole idea that it [Canada] isn’t just French/English, but it’s also the Ukrainians on the Prairies, and it is the Acadians, and so on and so forth. It’s a nice piece. 

It didn’t get done in China because the Cultural Revolution broke out and the trip was off, but it ultimately got programmed in Japan. It was designed for a super-large orchestra, because the conductor of the VSO wanted to go on tour, and Jean made sure there was a little solo for bass clarinet, so on and so forth, but then the piece was too big to be done ordinarily.

About a decade later, or maybe even longer, Jean was asked to do a cut down version of that piece for the CBC Vancouver Orchestra . By this point, Jean was not very interested. I said ‘but it’s such wonderful music, you’ve really got to do it,’ and she said ‘fine, you do it!’ I decided what I’ll do is cut it down, because there’s nothing I like better than orchestrational puzzles, and I got a Xerox of the score and literally took an x-acto knife to the instruments we weren’t going to use, and then re-cued, as elegantly as I could, to make a piece that was for quadruple woodwinds work for double and one percussion, one timpani, etc. Jean then looked it over and made suggestions, and got sufficiently into the project that she said ‘we can’t use all the pieces, but I’ll write little new link passages between the pieces we’re going to use’ and that’s where the Introduction and Three Folk Songs from Canada Mosaic comes from, and that’s the version that gets recorded and performed quite often.

The first movement [of Introduction and Three Folk Songs] is not a folk song, and she thieved from herself. She’d written a set of duets for two female voices and piano called Songs From the Distast Muse, and the first one is a fragment by the Greek poetess Sappho about having a daughter, and saying ‘I wouldn’t trade my lovely daughter for all the riches in the world’ or something to that effect. Jean recognized that it was a good tune, so she transformed it into the opening movement, which is called “Lullaby on a Snowy Evening”, about her reminiscing about her childhood in Vancouver. Pushing seventy, thinking about this idyllic childhood that she had. She uses this lullaby as the gist of the piece. The interesting thing is that this is around the time that her [Jean’s] only daughter is having her only daughter, so there’s a sort of family connection. But here’s where I come into this.

I’d been intimately connected to Canada Mosaic from before a note was written — having gone to the university, found folk song content — and when it was finally ready to be rehearsed in advance of taking the piece to Japan… Jean by this point was living in a rather nice but quite distant suburb, West Vancouver. It’s about a 10 mile drive into the theatre. I would usually hear, if it was an important rehearsal, ‘would you please come along. I hate going to rehearsals myself. Besides which you can look at the score; I’ll be too nervous to find the mistakes’ so on and so forth. We’d done a lot of that. I went and picked her up, or rather drove my car to her house, because I had an old jalopy, and drove her car into the symphony for the first rehearsal.

I’m sitting there with the score — I’d copied the score for heaven’s sake, inked it in, so I supposedly knew the music — and this first bit of the “Introduction” starts up in the orchestra and almost completely lost it. It was so gorgeous, and I’m sitting next to the person who made this from nothing, and I know her really well, and I don’t know her at all. It was very strange and wonderful. As a result of that experience, when the idea to do the cut-down version came, I said ‘yep, I want that piece made more accessible’ And in fact, I arranged the lullaby for piano four hands for one of the later books for the Music of Our Time series, again because I love it so much.

David was involved with the Music of Our Time series from the very beginning, and since the completion of that series, continued to compose works for young musicians. 

Jean was always meddling, in the best possible way, on behalf of her students. At a certain point, Bill Brubacher, who was the head of Waterloo Music in those days wondered if Jean would write a sort of Canadian Mikrokosmos, and she thought that that was an excellent idea, but then she said ‘I’m going to invite two of my young composers to collaborate with me.’ Joan Hanson and I were brought in and we started thinking about this idea of graded piano pieces. 

Now, I am the world’s worst pianist, so it was no big deal for me. Violin was my mother tongue instrument — which came in handy in the future —but piano I’m hopeless, which in a certain way because I could play the pieces up to about book six; after seven and eight, no. We came up with a modus operandi, this is in the 70s, and I was in fact doing my first ever job which was in Red Deer, Alberta, so it was always a good excuse to come to Vancouver for meetings about books. We decided we wanted a couple of things: we wanted to have some Canadian folk song content, we decided that teachers have Christmas recitals, so we would try to do some seasonal stuff (if we were doing it now it would be entirely different, but back in the day, that seemed like a logical thing), and we wanted to have one duet for each book.

What Jean really wanted, and it was the whole point of her thing with the Bartok connection, was that she wanted it to deal with what she called ‘20th century idioms’. When she taught theory, this is how she did it. She would build up a vocabulary of classic modernist — mainly harmonic, but sometimes rhythmic and contrapuntal — idioms, cliches if you want, but things you could view in multiple composers. The obvious examples are Hungarian rhythms in Bartok or pedal chords in Stravinsky, so on and so forth. What we had to try to do is figure out which of these could be put in in the earliest grades, and you obviously can’t get into dissonant counterpoint very easily in a grade two piano piece. We came up with a plan and we would sit around and go ‘oh, I want that one!’ and we would divide up what ideas we were trying to do.

The reality was that we would then look at what we were doing and the discussions would begin. ‘I think that’s a grade two piece.’ ‘I can see that, but maybe it’s grade three, or certainly grade four.’ We’d get into these conversations, and it was always that the pieces were too hard. Now I know, or know better, that if a piece is going to succeed educationally, it needs to be 80% in the grade level — whatever that means; it changes depending on how the powers at be think at any given moment — and there should be a moment where it’s pushing outside of that so there’s a growth factor, and every piece needs a hook. If it’s a successful piece it will have some sort of hook which can grab the kid and make them actually want to play the piece if at all possible.

We had dumb luck with some of our pieces. The only piece of mine that gets played with any sort of regular basis is a little thing called March in the Lydian Mode, which I think I wrote while watching TV. Sheer dumb luck, but also that Jean had taught a lot of piano music through the 30s and 40s. She knew from a studio perspective, Joan to a lesser extent, and me not at all, but on the other hand I brought to the project the ability to write up our little discussions to the kids because we wanted to have the sense that at kid was communicating with us personally, so we would write up a little explanation to the kid and then get into the theory because, to quote Jeanie, ‘There are all these teachers off in places that don’t have access to university libraries’ and we need to give them the ammunition of where we got this information.

We each had different perspectives and strengths. Jeanie was dealing with becoming a grandmother, and she had the one grandchild —Alexa —and so a lot of her very early pieces make reference to the early childhood development of her granddaughter. Joan Hanson had two kids, two boys, and she was always arguing for ‘it needs to be more current. Kids don’t want pieces with old fashioned titles.’ And I would be [laughs] quietly but fairly insistently looking out for the poor little guys that didn’t want to have piano lessons, so I developed an idea of, for the lack of a better term, boy pieces: pieces that were designed from a young male perspective. I won’t say I got a lot of flack, but I had any number of fascinating surprises that developed because of that.

After the publication of Music of Our Time, David continued writing for young musicians. David, along with Jean and Sylvia Rickard, continued working with Waterloo Music and published a book on form.

Then it was ‘okay, we should do this for violin’, and Jean Ethridge was brought in. We sort of knew what we were doing then. One of the great professional relationships that Jean [Coulthard] had was with Thomas Rolston, who premiered her violin concerto, and at this point he and his wife, Isabelle Moore, were running the Banff Centre. That became ‘let’s go and hang out with Tom, and he’ll tell us all about Suzuki violin.’ He was very involved in the pedagogy aspect of it. I didn’t understand the pedagogy of how I’d been trained until we were writing the books and thought ‘oh that’s why I had to play that god awful piece back in grade 6!’ That one we had an external expert, which was terribly useful. The failure of the violin series was unfortunate because we were more musically sophisticated by the time we got into that, and a cello series that was written was never published. […] One of the items on my to-do list is to put the cello pieces in Sibelius and get them out there

David has written other books for young musicians, including some that have been written for and published by Music for Young Children.

Frances [Balodis] was using our stuff and our publisher wanted us to meet, and I quickly found I was dealing with a force of nature. She wanted me to write some more very beginner music, tailored to the Music for Young Children system, which was the easiest thing in the world for me to do. Through Frances, I realized she was of the opinion that — because her background was in special ed as well as music — she realized there were all sorts of things that could be done to make kids learn faster. One of them that really appealed to me was birthdays; children are fascinated by birthdays Frances told me. I wanted to write a scale book — not officially a scale book, but a mode book — and what I did was take the Chinese Zodiac, because that has animals, it’s multicultural, and I could say ‘the rat gets this mode, the tiger gets this mode’ so on and so forth. Frances wanted the pieces to have MYC (Music for Young Children), so it became Magical Years of the Chinese.

When writing for young musicians, there are objectives that a composer sets out to achieve, and more things that a composer needs to avoid. However, the success of a piece isn’t always predictable, and as David said to me, “sometimes a piece works because it does something right, which was almost accidental on the part of the composer.” David, through many years of trial and error, and success and failure, has learned the obvious and not-so obvious problems that a composer might encounter—everything from technical challenges to the issues of publication that can be found in different regions of Canada.

“Sometimes, because of pedagogy, we don’t use certain time signatures until a certain grade level, or we do things that are inappropriate. I like the wild ends at the piano, and that can be a problem if you don’t express it properly in print: you can get in trouble if you use too many ledger lines, but using 8va and 15va are challenges for very young kids unless you make a game out of finding those octaves. Sometimes it’s just a matter of coming up with the right title.

I got into a similar issue when trying to write a Halloween piece for MYC. I wanted to use a ghosts and goblins title but, I was told this wasn’t palatable in certain communities. I said alright, but I hate trick-or-treating and I’m not going to write about that, so what about fireworks? This was in Ottawa, and they looked at me and said, ‘fireworks? What do you mean? How has fireworks on Halloween?’ And I said ‘Vancouver does!’ I had never known that here on the west coast we do this Halloween fireworks things, which is a sort of debased version of Guy Fawkes day.”

Although David has composed a lot of music for young musicians, that’s not exclusively what he’s written. Throughout his career, David has often “tricked” himself into writing for people by offering to write for strange situations, resulting in pieces like his Sonata for Soprano and Harp and the time he was the composer-in-residence for the Victoria Bad Music Festival. David and I talked for a while about the strengths and benefits of miniatures. In his self-deprecating style, David confessed to me that “If I write a piece that’s more than 55 seconds, it’s a fairly long piece for me”. One project that occupied David for decades were his Preludes for Piano, which he began writing in the 80s and only published a few years ago. 

A prelude has to be a prelude, it can’t just be a short piano piece. I often use the analogy […] that a prelude is like the difference between an omelette and scrambled eggs; it’s exactly the same ingredients, but if you don’t have the technique to make it an omelette, it isn’t an omelette, it’s just scrambled eggs. That’s the difference between a short piano piece and a prelude. From the very first notes to the double bar, there’s a thread and continuity. It took me forever to decide which ones were good enough to be preludes, and then it took me forever to figure out if there was an order. There is, but I didn’t know it until long after I’d been through the process. Or rather, I figured out how to make the miniatures line up and be more than the sum of the parts.

David created a career for himself where he was able to write the kind of music he wanted, when he wanted, without bending to pressure from the dominant style or school of thought. This led him down the path of writing for young musicians, writing for irregular situations, and also having a career in academia and music criticism.

David also loves teaching—this is readily apparent in his compositions for young musicians, but I think it is much more obvious in his overall character. For David, when one teaches, the ability to help someone find their voice is a privilege and a way to pay it forward. Unfortunately, David spent a decade as a department head or a dean. When he was dean at a school, he didn’t write a note. He found that being an administrator took up the same part of the brain that composing does: problem solving. However, teaching still allowed him to write because it felt more theatrical.

I’ve tried to jumpstart my writing since 2010, when I quit being a dean, and I’ve said yes to any number of people who would like a piece for this or that. But I haven’t gotten down to the serious writing that I probably should.

David would be quick to remind you that he is not the first person to be struck by administrative-cannot-compose-itis. In our various conversations, David commented on several composers he would contend did not reach their artistic potential due to institutional obligations:

The first person I’d put on that list would be Claude Champagne. He was asked to stay behind in Paris, but he martyred himself by going back to Montreal. And how much time did he have to compose? Not a lot because he was handed this, or sent to Brazil to investigate that, and shoved into the administrative vortex, and didn’t write as much music as he probably should have. I’m so sympathetic to that because he squandered his compositional talent to improve the general standing of music in Quebec. Louis Applebaum; same sort of thing. Murray Adaskin; same sort of thing.

To this day, I have never met David, only talked to him over the phone, but I have felt a unique level of respect for him and a sense of camaraderie. Our conversations were often punctuated with “Well, when you come to Vancouver…” and “It’s much easier to talk about these things with a drink in hand.” As I interviewed him, David would offer me advice about how to conduct a successful interview, and at certain points in our conversations, would start to interview me about my interests and developing career. 

At the end of one of our early conversations, David cut himself off and said “Oh, but that’s not very good teaching You need to formulate your own ideas” He had just spent an hour talking to me, answering every question I had, in detail I did not expect, and despite opening my eyes to stories I did not know, humanizing people I admired, and engaging with my curiosity, he didn’t feel like he’d offered enough. If we had been having our conversations in person, or better yet, over a drink or walking along the Vancouver coast, I would hope that he could see how far my jaw had dropped and how enraptured I was with every word he spoke.

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¹ It is important to acknowledge the harmful history of colonialism within Canada, which extends to settler artists using Indigenous material. In a follow-up email, David informed me that he talked with Jean Coulthard about her use of Indigenous material, recommending that she use rhythms and gestures.

While this topic is beyond the scope of a Generations/Conversations feature, we encourage readers to consult existing scholarship surrounding these topics. A couple of examples include: the writings of Parmela Attariwala and Soraya Peerbaye who published Re-Sounding the Orchestra, on relationships between Canadian orchestras, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour; Dylan Robinson’s recent book Hungry Listening, which is quickly becoming required reading for practitioners in its analysis of listening positionalities, opportunities for Indigenous cultural sovereignty, and more.