In the fall of 1959 Norma Beecroft, a twenty-five-year-old composition student, left her home in Toronto and travelled to Rome to study with the eminent Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi. She left behind her lover and mentor, the thirty-four-year-old Harry Somers, by then recognized as one of Canada’s leading young composers. For the next six months they wrote each other almost every day. Their intense and intimate correspondence documents lives lived apart but shared on the page, until the relationship came to an abrupt end.

Selected from the full extant correspondence, the letters show both composers at pivotal moments in their careers, processing music and culture in their respective environments in ways that would remain influential for themselves and to each other. Beyond illuminating a tempestuous love affair, their wide-ranging letters capture the development of Canadian arts and culture of the period. They record observations about significant figures in their circles; the performances, theatre, and art Somers experienced in Toronto; and Beecroft’s attempts to forge a viable compositional approach through contact with important artists and composers abroad. Somers eventually realized that what he wanted most was for Beecroft to give up her studies and return to Toronto to marry him. She turned him down and remained in Italy to study and write music, cementing her commitment to the vocation that would shape the rest of her creative life. She would break ground as a woman in her field, a producer for the CBC, and a composer and early champion of electroacoustic music.

A window into cultural life in Canada and Rome at the end of the 1950s, Between Composers is a striking record of a turning point in the lives and careers of two young artists that would mark them and their music for decades.

Since 1972, Brian Cherney has been on the staff of the Faculty of Music (now the Schulich School of Music) at McGill University, where he teaches composition at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. His extensive compositional output includes orchestral, choral, and instrumental music. His monograph on the Canadian composer Harry Somers was published in 1975.

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“Not only does Between Composers reveal in extensive detail two composers at critical junctures in their careers, it also throws light on other significant figures in the development of Canadian arts, while engaging with what was happening in Europe, and especially Rome, with regards to music in the 1950s. The Beecroft letters, made available to the reader for the first time, are an intimate window into how difficult it was for a woman to set out on a path of becoming a composer in the mid-twentieth century.” Elaine Keillor, CM, author of Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity