Composer used to criticism but don't say old-fashioned
Oscar Morawetz is everyone's perfect image of the professor of music. He looks slightly dishevelled no matter how hard he tries not to be, straightening his tie, tucking in his shirt. He can be absent-minded. He makes innocent little jokes which often zip right by his listeners.
And his English comes complete with a Czechoslovakian accent.
All this adds up to being old-fashioned, especially to many of the more modern minded
fellow composers out there. And he doesn't like [to] be seen this way. He's still writing music, he'll say. It's rich, nicely orchestrated music with a strong singing line.
It's not unduly abrasive. It has no advanced body of theory behind it. So what
if it can have "the element of strong feeling," as Veronica Sedivy
notes in her biographical sketch of
him in the new Encyclopedia Of Music In Canada
Tiny office
He'll point out that tomorrow night's Walter Hall concert at the
University of Toronto's Edward
Johnson Building celebrating his 65th birthday is only one of dozens of times his compositions have been performed this season.
The public wants more than modern abstractions, he'll add. Feeling. Emotion.
Old fashioned, eh? he'll mutter as
his shirt comes loose and his tie goes askew. He'll walk to his west-facing window
in his tiny office. Old fashioned, indeed.
He's in class. Through the window you can watch lawyers-to-be trudge through the snow to a near-by law building. But
inside, the harmony students are doing their own kind of trudging too.
"But professor, when I studied for my last exam," says one man, perplexed at sometching Morawetz said,
"the rules said ..."
"Exams are written be people who
have never composed." Morawetz says, although not unkindly. He plays a few bars of Mozart to show exactly how he broke rules too.
Nothing, it seems has changed from the days I was a student here, asking the same
kind of questions. You'd argue rules, he'd shake his head and play some
Brahms, which would prove the music right and the rules wrong.
"His is the kind of strong personality you don't find with a composer of this period,"
says John Beckwith, a fellow composer, a teacher at the very
faculty and its former dean.
"Every one of us to some degree composes from the gut. He's more purely a gut composer."
With reason. Morawetz arrived in
Canada in 1940 after escaping from the German Invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had given up a lot, too,
for he had the makings of a brilliant career in Prague. Gifted with perfect pitch, he was
a talented young pianist and at 19 was suggested by George Szell for the post
of assistant conductor at the Prague Opera.
There has been very little of the abstract about Morawetz' life, so he needed little impetus to write music
about something or someone who matters to him. His From The Diary Of Anne Frank, which Lois Marshall helped premier in 1970, is an emotion-charged work, where dissonance
is used to underline dramatic-moments.
Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich commissioned his Memorial To Martin Luther
King.
These two works represent only the most-performed of his extensive list of compositions.
His Sinfonetta for Winds And Percussion won out over 104 pieces at a 1962 competition sponsored by the
Montreal Symphony Orchestra. "Other composers often think I've bribed conductors to do my work,"
he says when pressed to explain why he is that rarest of rare birds, a popular classical composer. "It isn't
true, of course."
Irving Glick, a fellow composer, CBC producer, and one-time Morawetz student, understands the private
and occasionally public feud Morawetz has with trendy new composers. "He's
a good composer and he writes good music, but he is also a very simple man, a very direct man,"
says Glick. "He doesn't take into account the subtlety of manipulation . . . He makes a lot of enemies. But
you can't say enough about him as a musician and a teacher."
Fantastic memory
Another composer who also studied with him remembers a meeting they had after not seeing each other for years. Predictably enough, the talk got around to composing
and one piece in particular that the younger student had worked on years before.
Morawetz had only seen the score once or twice, but immediately went to the piano and from memory
played a major portion of it.
"So much modern music is just effect and they are effects anyone could do," he says,
sitting in his office. The shelves are packed with music books and the walls covered with concert announcements
and notes to himself. One lists a towing service.
"What has happened of course with this kind of music is that the public
can't understand it, then the composers blame the public for being stupid and say
the public needs education. Well, the public can be reached."
He, for one, reaches it. "This in itself may be an unpopular position," says Glick. He's not
a composer of today. But his music lasts and he could be a composer of tomorrow."
