Istvan Anhalt, born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1919, studied with Zoltán Kodály before being conscripted into a forced labour camp during World War II. In the late 1940s he studied under Nadia Boulanger and Soulima Stravinsky before emigrating to Canada in 1949, where he has been an important figure in the Canadian music scene for the last fifty years.

Robin Elliott taught at University College Dublin for six years before assuming the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music at the University of Toronto in 2002. He has edited several books, including , with Gordon E. Smith, Istvan Anhalt: Pathways and Memory (2001) and with Friedemann Sallis and Kenneth DeLong, Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile: Interpreting the Music of Istvan Anhalt and György Kurtág (WLU Press, 2009).

Gordon E. Smith is a professor of ethnomusicology at Queen’s University. Formerly director of the School of Music, he is currently Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science. His recent publications include Istvan Anhalt: Pathways and Memory (with Robin Elliott), Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology: Canadian Perspectives, Past and Present (2007); and Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture (2008).

Robin Elliott's profile page

Gordon Smith is a Vancouver painter and printmaker whose international reputation rests on his abstracted images of the Canadian landscape. His work can be found in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Gordon Smith's profile page

"A fine tribute to one of our very great composers, long overdue. It is good to see that some of Anhalt's previously unpublished writings are being made public at last." Alan Gillmor, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University "A fascinating and important book in the history of Canadian music and musicians. Anyone interested in Canadian music, composers' thought processes, or Anhalt's life and music will find it quite absorbing." Paul Pederson, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

"A fine tribute to one of our very great composers, long overdue. It is good to see that some of Anhalt's previously unpublished writings are being made public at last." Alan Gillmor, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University
"A fascinating and important book in the history of Canadian music and musicians. Anyone interested in Canadian music, composers' thought processes, or Anhalt's life and music will find it quite absorbing." Paul Pederson, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto