Jewish Music Week opens this year with a tribute to the music of Milton Barnes, including a performance of Harbord Street, a composition that was named for a street in a downtown Toronto neigbourhood that was the heart of the Jewish community until the mid-1950s.
Harpist Erica Goodman, flutist Suzanne Shulman, violist Ivan Ivanovich and accordionist Joseph Macerollo perform at this Mother’s Day concert on May 10. The composer’s sons, Daniel and Micah, will be on hand to share memories of their father.
Barnes’ compositions were inspired by romantic classical music, jazz, popular music and traditional hebraic music. Although those influences can be heard in his works, he viewed himself as continuing the mainstream of classical composition.
He once said that all great composers have drawn their inspiration from the cultural cross-currents of their own time and place.
“Dad was known as a maverick and bohemian,” Micah said, because he wasn’t musically far out. As a composer, Barnes chose his own path rather than following the lead of the avant-garde composers of the the 1950s, who based their music on rhythm, texture and tone colour, instead of the traditional aspects of melody and harmony.
“He consciously stayed away from the avant-garde,” Daniel said. And Micah remembered, “Dad always said, ‘If you make music, make it something people will enjoy.”
Barnes studied at the Orchestra and Opera Conducting School of the Vienna Academy in 1961, where “they encouraged old-style romantic classicism,” Micah said. He added that his father was a renegade who “made music that is vital.”
Born in 1931, Barnes began his career as a jazz drummer and guitarist in the 1950s and used the money he earned from playing in dance bands to study composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music. “It wasn’t any easy choice for him to become a musician,” Daniel said, because his family hoped that he would join the family business.
“His dad ran a successful building company,” Daniel added. “After making that choice, he had a need to do something more substantial other than gig around in dance bands.”
From 1964 to 1973, Barnes conducted the Toronto Repertory Orchestra, which he founded, and he was music director of the Niagara Symphony and the Niagara Falls Philharmonic. In 1973, he decided to become a composer full time.
“He had to make a hard choice,” Micah said, as he felt he couldn’t continue with such a heavy workload if he wanted time to compose.
As a composer, Barnes was prolific, leaving behind 140 scores, for orchestras, films and telelvision when he died in 2001. “We’re cataloguing them for the Canadian Music Centre,” Daniel said.
Released in 2001 on the album of the same name, Harbord Street, originally commissioned by Harbord Bakery, evokes memories of downtown Toronto where Barnes grew up.
“Milton really tried to capture what it was like growing up in Torornto as a Jewish kid,” Micah said. The era was notable for its anti-Semitism and it was a time when gangs of Jewish and Italian youths roamed the streets. “He had to learn to fight. He had to fight his way to school,” Micah said. He added that his dad was always drawn to hebraic themes and “went into his blood for Jewish cultural inspiration” as a composer.
Growing up with a father who Micah said “always had music in his mind and heart,” both sons pursued musical careers. Micah, a Juno-nominated singer and songwriter, is a vocal coach who has worked with cast members of the Mirvish production of The Sound Of Music. Daniel, a bandleader, composer and drummer who can be heard backing other musicians on some 40 CDs, has released two CDs of his own and has another one on the way. He plays drums on Micah’s latest CD, New York Stories.
“Dad put up the drums and encouraged him to play,” Micah said, adding his father loved all the arts and was a full Renaissance man. “We grew up with that kind of encouragement,” he said.
Their mother, Lilly Barnes, a poet, novelist and arts journalist, was a scriptwriter for the CBC children’s television show, Mr. Dressup, for 30 years. Daniel and Micah have another brother, Ariel, who is a cellist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
The program for the Barnes salute, at 7:30 p.m. on May 10 at the Glenn Gould Studio, includes Harbord Street; Tango 99 for trio; Serenade for harp and accordion; Variations for solo harp; Lamentations for solo viola; Music for solo flute; a solo accordion piece, and Anerca 3, an Inuit folk tale, narrated by Daniel, that his father set to music for the harp. For more information about Jewish Music Week, visit www.jewishmusicweek.com.
