Anglais seulement
Messy marriages of Canadian mid-century modernists
« From the mid-1950s into the early years of the 1960, Harry Somers, by then fairly established as a composer, and Norma Beecroft, a young music creator just finding her bearings, had a tumultuous relationship. Mutual friends knew about it — Somers lived separately from his wife during this period – but with the passing of time the affair paled in memory and only reached Brian Cherney in 1975, by the time he was working on a book on Somers, as a vague rumour which he didn’t bother addressing in the manuscript.
The topic reappeared on Cherney’s radar in 2014 and this time he decided to contact Beecroft herself, on the off chance that there would be letters. Somers had died in 1999 and his papers, turned to Library and Archives Canada, contained no letters to Beecroft. Beecroft however still had them all, and lent them to Cherney who decided on the train back from Beecroft that they should be published. Apart from documenting a doomed love, they tell a story of a fledgling new music scene in Toronto, then still Canada’s second city which was about to grow up and fast. Beecroft, Somers and many other musicians appearing in these letters had part-time gigs in the CBC as music copyists, script writers, producers and of course commissioned composers and musicians, and came across each other in the CBC offices. The the role of, again, what used to be the CBC, in the making of these careers was huge… »
