Bruce Mather

One of the most notable composers of microtonal music, he was awarded the Jules Léger Prize twice, first in 1979 for his Musique pour Champigny and again in 1993 for Yquem. Some of his other awards include the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada's Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux prize in 1987 for Barbaresco and the Serge Garant Prize from the Émile Nelligan Foundation in 2000.[1]

Mather is an associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian League of Composers. As a writer he has contributed works to numerous musical journals and publications, including authoring the articles on Serge Garant, François Morel, and Gilles Tremblay in the Dictionary of Contemporary Music. He has taught on the music faculties of the University of Toronto (1964–1966), the University of Montreal (1970–1973), the Paris Conservatoire (1978–1979) and McGill University (1966–2001). His notable pupils include, Marc Patch, Peter Allen, John Burke, Paul Crawford, Jacques Desjardins, José Evangelista, Anthony Genge, Richard Hunt, Denis Lorrain, John Oliver, François Rose, Ronald Bruce Smith, Donald Steven, and Alexander Tilley.[1]

As a pianist Mather has displayed a strong commitment to performing new music by himself and by other contemporary composers. He has performed in many major performance venues and music festivals, often appearing with his wife, pianist Pierrette LePage, in duo-piano works. The husband and wife team have also partnered on several recordings. He served as director of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec from 1966–1981 and later served as treasurer.[1]

Born in Toronto, Mather began composing music as a young child. At the age of 10 he won a prize in the 1949 Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada composition competition. In 1952 he entered The Royal Conservatory of Music where he studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, Earle Moss, and Alexander Uninsky and music theory and composition with Godfrey Ridout, Oskar Morawetz, and John Weinzweig. In 1957 he matriculated to the University of Toronto where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1959.[1]

Mather attended the Aspen Music Festival and School in the summers of 1957 and 1958 through a scholarship provided by the Women's Musical Club of Toronto and the Beta Sigma Phi International Sorority. While there Alexander Uninsky introduced the young composer to Darius Milhaud and Milhaud quickly became one of his more important mentors. He continued to study with Milhaud and with Simone Plé-Caussade, Lazare Lévy, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire from 1959-1961. In 1964 he received a Master of Music from Stanford University where he was a pupil of Leland Smith and Roy Harris, and in 1967 he earned a Doctor of Music from the University of Toronto.[1]

Mather is a composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and piano works. A disciple of Ivan Wyschnegradsky, his music often employs microtonal scales. Though he was distrustful towards microtonal music since he heard Alois Haba's Music, his meeting with Wyschnegradsky in the seventies was crucial for his aesthetic and his use of microtonal scales. As a pianist, he and his pianist wife, Pierret Mather, have performed many of Wyschnegradsky's pieces.[2]

In his composition he still uses the famous Wyschnegrasky's principle of non-octavic spaces.[2] He wrote many works using this technique and notably his Poème du délire ("Poem of Delirium") a tribute to Alexander Scriabin (as a reference to his famous Poem of Ecstasy and Poem of Fire), an influential figure for him and Wyschnegradsky.[3] His compositions are also strongly influenced by his love of poetry and wine.

• Text by Mather explaining his music and his history(fr)