MacMillan on Music: Essays by Sir Ernest MacMillan

Ernest MacMillan

Sep 1997 · Dundurn

About this ebook

In addition to his activities as conductor, administrator, educator, composer, and organist, Sir Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973) found time to write more than one hundred essays and lectures on music. Always ready to use his enormous prestige to further the causes of music, MacMillan took every opportunity to admonish Canadians to develop our own composers, to honour our own performers, to educate our children musically, and to offer opportunities for all to hear, learn about, and enjoy great music.

This selection of twenty essays and lectures covers the period from 1928 to 1964, and ranges over the gamut of MacMillan’s life and interests: the cause of the Canadian composer; music education for adults as well as children; critical reviews; his early years as an organist; internment in a German prison camp during the First World War; Shakespeare and music; church music; and the lighter side in two humorous send-ups of academic lectures on Bach and Wagner. Here is a panorama of music over thirty-five years at mid-century, through the eyes of one of Canada’s most brilliant and all-embracing musicians.

About the author

Carl Morey is a frequent writer, lecturer, and broadcaster on opera, and includes among his many publications An Opera Sampler: Miscellaneous Essays on Opera (Dundurn, 1998). During thirty years as professor of Musicology at the University of Toronto, he occupied the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music (1991-2), and was the Dean of the Faculty of Music (1984-9).