Thank you to Tamara Bernstein for permitting us to post this full-page obituary on Ann Southam that appeared in the Globe and Mail in December, 2010.
From: The Globe and Mail
Dec. 20, 2010
ANN SOUTHAM, 73 / COMPOSER
Minimalist sound, maximum impact
Canadian composer of new music was in search of a feminist
aesthetic: 'repetitive and life-sustaining'
Special to The Globe and Mail
©Tamara Bernstein, 2010
Less than 48 hours before she lost a long battle with lung
cancer, the composer Ann Southam sat listening to a radio station as it
broadcast the well-known Humming Chorus from Puccini's opera Madama
Butterfly. "Imagine being at the first performance of that!" she
exclaimed to a friend. "What did people think of it?"That was Southam all over: the attentive listening; the sense of wonder, the questions (to which she expected answers); the absence of artistic snobbery; the ability to experience everything in life as if it were a "world premiere" - even when breathing itself had become a struggle.
Southam is one of Canada's most revered composers - the creator of mesmerizing electroacoustic pieces that helped establish modern dance in Canada, ecstatically shimmering pianoscapes such as Glass Houses, and the haunting, contemplative music of her last decade, including the "immense, mysterious piano piece" Simple Lines of Enquiry, which New Yorker critic Alex Ross included on his list of the top 10 CDs of 2009.
Southam, who was made a member of the Order of Canada earlier this year, blazed a trail for women composers in a notoriously sexist field. She was also a transformational philanthropist, a proud feminist and a woman who inspired devotion in friends and colleagues, all of whom will miss her piercing intelligence, warmth and wit - not to mention her exclamations of "holy patoot!" "jeepers!" and "what a hoot!"
Southam's path was not always easy. She battled many demons, including chronic self-doubt, and endured the "social nightmare," as she called it, of "growing up gay in the 1950s." But over her half-century career, she remained true to her singular artistic voice.
"When you hear Ann's music, you know it is a piece of hers and no one else's," says pianist Eve Egoyan, for whom Southam wrote many of her late works. "This was especially unusual early in her career, when composers in this country were just starting to break away from contemporary European sound worlds."
Southam was born in Winnipeg on Feb. 4, 1937, to Joyce Mary Southam (née Lyon) and Kenneth Gordon Southam. Her father was a great-grandson of William Southam, founder of the newspaper dynasty that bore the family name, and held senior positions with Southam Press Ltd. When Ann was three, the family moved back to Toronto, where she lived for the rest of her life.
As a child Southam studied piano in a house she later recalled as being full of music. Her father had an extensive record collection containing both classical and popular music; her mother was "a natural pianist," and "a great storyteller," the composer said in an interview last April. "The magic and mystery of life really turned her on, and I was inspired by that. That's one of her gifts to me."
Kenneth Southam died in 1952, when Ann was 15; it was around that time that she started to compose - partly "as an emotional outlet," she said.
After leaving school, Southam found her way - via secretarial college and the University of Toronto's Music Faculty - to the Royal Conservatory of Music, where she studied composition with Samuel Dolin and piano with Pierre Souvairan. Dolin created "a very free world" for his students, she said in April.
"He always felt that rules were there to be broken." And Dolin never condescended to Southam because of her gender - "we were all just composers."
Dolin introduced Southam to electronic music, and it was love at first splice, so to speak. So in 1966, when a young choreographer named Patricia Beatty, freshly returned from New York studies with Martha Graham, asked Dolin to recommend a young Canadian composer, he sent her to Southam.
Beatty was ecstatic over the first score Southam wrote for her - Momentum, for a dance inspired by Macbeth; in 1968, when Beatty co-founded the Toronto Dance Theatre (with Peter Randazzo and David Earle), Southam became the company's resident composer. Over the next 15 years, she would create 30-some electronic compositions for the TDT, using a Synthi AKS - a compact studio that literally fit in a small suitcase.
"Ann was one of the very extraordinary people who had a gift for creating contemporary music for dance," Patricia Fraser, the current artistic director of the School of the TDT, told The Globe. "Her work resonated for dance in a way that I don't know that I've seen in the last 30 years."
Choreographers invariably speak of the spaciousness of Southam's music; of the room it leaves for dance. The composer herself said last April that she "always imagined that the dancers were energy seen, and the music was energy heard. They occupied the same space, but the dancers weren't dancing to the music. [If] from time to time there might be a beat in the music, it just happened, and they might use it or not."
Most of the TDT's early works that became classics were made to Southam's music, says Christopher House, the company's current artistic director. His own first international success Glass Houses, which the TDT took to New York in 1985, was set to one of Southam's piano pieces.
"The music was so wonderful!" House said. "It captured something of that moment in time - an excitement about the infinite possibilities of movement; a reawakened joy in physicality in our culture in the late 70s and early 80s." At the same time, Southam's work "connects to a deeper place," says Fraser. "It's not superficial, and that's one of the things in her music that touch young [dance] artists today."
Over the years, many other luminaries of Canada's contemporary dance scene have choreographed to Southam's music, including Rachel Browne, Danny Grossman, Anna Blewchamp, Carol Anderson, Peggy Baker and Julia Sasso.
The dance world, where sexuality was "higglety-pigglety," as Southam famously told The Globe in 2009, also provided her with a social haven from the straight world. But in the 1980s, she stopped writing specifically for dance, and abandoned electronic music. For one thing, the new digital, computer-based technology didn't allow her the serendipitous "partnership" that she had enjoyed with her Synthi.
Southam also had discovered feminism, and became frustrated by the persistence of stereotypical women's roles in contemporary choreography.
"I just was wishing for more," she said in April. "I was looking for a way of writing music that would have a feminist aesthetic, because what was thought of as feminist music back in those days was usually vocal music, and it would be the words that would give the feminist meaning. I wanted something where the very workings of the music would reflect a feminist aesthetic."
Southam found the answer in minimalism, also known as pattern music, in which simple musical materials are subject to a process of subtle change, over many repetitions.
"Traditional women's work" - activities like weaving, knitting, mending, washing dishes - is likewise "repetitive and life-sustaining," Southam told The Globe in 1997. "It takes great patience. It doesn't have the big climaxes that lead to something new, and often there's nothing to show for it at the end. ... I see 'process music' as the perfect way of expressing this, and as a wonderful metaphor for life."
Southam discovered process music through American composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich, whose music she continued to admire and enjoy. But her minimalist music is unique, its emotional impact all out of proportion to the simplicity of her musical materials.
Egoyan has spoken of a persistent note of questioning that runs through Southam's music; there is also a constant play of tonality and atonality; of stability and emotional "homelessness." Southam said she literally saw "a red dissonant line" running through the consonant elements of her music. "Isn't that life, in a way: trying to accommodate dissonance?"
This ambiguity; the openness to instability, gives Southam's music its depth and humanity, and its enduring fascination. But the disquiet in her music is in constant dialogue with a fundamental optimism, a life force that seems rooted in Southam's passionate love of nature.
That love is reflected in the titles of such pieces as Rivers, Pond Life and Song of the Varied Thrush. And you can hear it in Southam's voice on a 2005 Centredisc audio documentary, when she describes the thrill of standing in a field, listening to the singing of frogs, birds, crickets. "I guess that is also a metaphor for life - this constant song!" she exclaims.
A true minimalist, Southam lived modestly – in her latter years, her wardrobe consisted largely of immaculate sweats, and shirts that she purchased at a convenience store near the Canadian Music Centre for under $20. She liked a bare fridge, and savoured the moment in fall when the last of the leaves fell, revealing the dancer-like "bones" of the trees.
For much of her life, Southam was modest to the point of self-deprecation about her talent and achievements. She had, of course, a sense of humour about it. When a concert presenter asked her to supply a couple of press quotes, Southam gleefully forwarded her two favourites: "staggeringly boring" (from the Montreal Gazette); and "a rather shadowy presence on the new-music scene" (from an admiring review in The Globe).
One reason Southam had difficulty accepting herself as a serious, let alone major, composer was the fact that she had an independent income.
"Sadly, that negated all her artistic achievements in her own eyes," her brother Kip told the Globe.
But an independent income didn't buy Southam the commissions that steadily came her way, from the performers, presenters, choreographers and the CBC.
And the composer used her wealth with exceptional responsibility and generosity. As a philanthropist, she was not interested in stars. Just as she anxiously monitored the progress of fledgling mourning doves outside her window in what would be the last spring of her life,
Southam liked to support individuals at vulnerable stages of their lives and careers - penniless young artists, senior dancers transitioning into new careers, wildlife threatened with destruction. In 1980 she co-founded, and heavily supported, the Association of Canadian Women Composers, which commissioned and presented concerts of music by women who were being unjustly shut out of mainstream programming. Her seven-figure support of the Canadian Women's Foundation focused on its programs for girls.
And Southam didn't just write cheques: she donated countless hours to institutions like the Canadian Music Centre and the CWF.
Although Southam never ceased questioning the ways of the world, and her own life, in her later years she seemed to have made her peace with life, even as her music moved deeper and deeper to its still point. The self-deprecation tapered off to the occasional reflexive wisecrack.
She still raged at misogyny, but the Canadian Women's Foundation gave her a constructive philanthropic outlet for her anger. She enjoyed a close, trusting bond with pianists Egoyan and Christina Petrowska-Quilico, for whom she wrote almost exclusively in her last decade. She enthusiastically declared the 70s the best decade of life.
So the cancer diagnosis in April, 2008, was an especially cruel blow. (Southam had stopped smoking decades before.)
She treated her illness as a journey of discovery. As ever, she listened: to the life stories of fellow patients and care workers, which fascinated her; to the noise of MRI scans, which she heard as strange new music.
She adopted Olivia, the indomitable little girl/pig of Ian Falconer's children's books, as a kind of alter ego. And she kept composing, up until a few days before her death.
On the morning of Nov. 25, friends were startled to hear a robin singing its heart out, as if it were spring, outside the composer's house.
Shortly afterwards, Southam slipped from sleep into a coma, and never returned.
"There was a size to her work," Beatty said. "She was very Canadian in the best sense. I'm not talking about being diffident and careful. I'm talking about the size of the land - the scale and the space - and the size of the psyche and spirit that can go with that. That was Ann."
©Tamara Bernstein, 2010
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