A Pair of Canadian Nostalgiana

While I was in college I would go develop little habits upon returning home for vacation, including going through some of my old piano lesson rep.  My favorite series of pedagogical collections was the Celebration Series, published by Frederick Harris Music to create printed versions of the Royal Conservatory of Music repertoire.  There wasn't a lot of modern music in these books (I only had volumes 4-7), but what they did have turned out to be unique for its reliance on Canadian composers (as it was a Canadian publication).  I got little encouragement to explore modern classical music from my teachers before entering college, so I played it by ear (sorry) and took what I could get, including works by Canadian composers I had never heard of before (and some never heard from since).  I went through them again recently and found two leaves that are quite nice, and I've made new performances of them for this blog.

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The more difficult of the two is Ghost Town by Clifford Poole (1916-2003), who taught at various universities including the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto.  He appears to have written a lot of pedagogical piano music, as a cursory search on YouTube reveals about 20 different performances of his work on the first page alone (out of more than 1,000 matches).  Ghost Town is one of the more intense pedagogical pieces I've seen, and it'd be a good candidate for being reprinted in other collections, including American ones.  It's a very concentrated piece of writing, with effective materials and high expression.  I'd be a little curious to know if he had a particular ghost town in mind, as Canada is the possessor of a heck of a lot of plains territory that has a history similar to the American West (minus Mexico).  I never took a lesson on this one, which is a shame, but I've vindicated its name with this new performance (though not the only recording):

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Nestled at the very back of an easier collection, the lovely Barcarole (for Vivienne) is a nicely nostalgic piece of postludia, spanning nearly the whole range of the keyboard and featuring some really subtle writing for a children's piece.  I was also not taught this one, and though I have no proof of this its composer, David Gordon Duke, may have had trouble promoting his music in the U.S. because of the unfortunate similarity, in name and birth year (1950), to the notorious White Supremacy spokesman David Ernest Duke.  That, or nobody around here cares about his music, just like the majority of Canadian composers.  Too bad, really; I quite like this little piece, first published in 1977:

~PNK