Barbara Pentland

Barry J. Edwards was a librarian with the Metro Toronto Library.

The marketing of contemporary music in most countries around the world has pitted audience against composer in an unending battle to prove a point: that the music of today is very much a sign of our times and is just as valid a form of musical expression as the great masterpieces of the past. For Canadian composer Barbara Pentland the point is well taken. “Much as we admire and learn from the old masters, we cannot afford to live mentally in the past, if only for the sake of our obligations to the future. We [contemporary composers] have something to say.”

The present volume is the third in a continuing series on contemporary Canadian composers commissioned by the Canadian Music Centre and published by the University of Toronto Press. As the first, full-length study of the life and work of Barbara Pentland (born 1912), this book satisfies an obvious and immediate need.

The emphasis here is not on the minutiae of Pentland’s personal life, but on the arduous formative years which saw her emergence as a distinctive voice in Canadian music. “She...has weathered, with few visible scars, a lifetime of intermittent poor health, unyielding discouragement from her parents, severe critical condemnation, and a myriad of difficulties all associated with her efforts to become a composer in a man’s world.” That Pentland was fully equal to the challenge she set herself is demonstrated time and again throughout this book. The authors carefully delineate the various outside influences — from Satie and Copland to Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Webern — which have shaped this composer’s own personal musical language. Defining her artistic credo, Pentland herself has written: “I am not a slave to [any] system nor [a] follower of methods of others. A creative mind can only use material through inner transformation.” The authors discuss in full the salient highpoints of her stylistic development over the years, and they rightly stress her significance as a teacher and early champion in Canada of Schoenberg’s iconoclastic twelve-tone technique.

The book is rich in musical examples, and the technical analysis of Pentland’s most representative works is clearly intended for the serious music student rather than the layman. Unfortunately, the quality of writing by joint authors Eastman and McGee is generally uninspired, and the text abounds in repetition and platitudes. Included are an index, a list of works, a bibliography, and a discography. The latter inexplicably omits a recording by Frances James (RCI-20) of two selections from Pentland’s early Song Cycle. Moreover, it strikes me as somewhat perverse to deal at length with works that have never been recorded when Suite Borealis, for instance, which is available on record, is dismissed with only the most cursory mention.

Recommended for all university and major public libraries.