Elaine Keillor

Elaine Keillor, 2014

Elaine Keillor (born September 2, 1939 in London , Ontario ) is a Canadian pianist and musicologist .

Childhood, adolescence and studies

Elaine Keillor performed as a pianist at a medical conference in honor of Rollin Stevens, an American colleague of Madame Currie, at the age of two and a half. She graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music with a top grade at the age of ten and was the youngest graduate for over five decades. Keillor had piano lessons from her mother, Lenore Stevens Keillor , and Reginald Bedford, and attended master classes from Claudio Arrau (1956) and Harold Craxton (1959 and 1962). At the age of eleven she began her career as a solo and concert pianist. She made her first radio appearance in 1951 on CJSH-FM in Hamilton, Ontario with a series of four performances. She performed in Canada, the USA, Germany and other European countries as well as the Soviet Union (1962) and made recordings for radio and television. Her repertoire includes compositions by Bach , Schumann , Saint-Saëns , Rachmaninow , Tchaikovsky and others. In addition, she gave world premieres of works by contemporary Canadian composers such as Patrick Cardy , Nicole Carignan , Michael Colgrass , Clifford Ford , Vivian Fung , Mary Gardiner , Maya Badian , Peter Paul Koprowski , Alexina Louie , Elma Miller , Mark Mitchell , Jean Papineau-Couture , David Thériault and John Weinzweig . In 1959 the Canadian newspaper Toronto Globe and Mail recognized Keillor's technical achievement, musical talent and enthusiasm for playing. Keillor studied at York University and the University of Toronto, where she received her diploma (BA Honors Degree) in 1970 and her Masters in Musicology in 1971 and her doctorate in 1976.

Artistic work and important concerts

In the 1950s Keillor played with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, the Buffalo Civic Orchestra and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. In the 1960s she performed with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the London Symphony Orchestra. From 1965 to 1977 she was the official accompanying pianist at the University of Toronto and continued to work as a concert and chamber music pianist. In 1984 Keillor gave a solo concert at Carnegie Hall . In addition to her work as a solo and concert pianist, she continued to perform in various chamber music formations and in a duo with Christina Petrowska-Quilico . After 1990, she recorded at festivals such as the Year of Indigenous Peoples (1993), the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival (1998) and the Festival of Music by Women (2002) and made a number of recordings for Carleton Sound .

Scientific activity

Keillor was an assistant at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1974 and then taught at York University (1976-77), Queens University and McMaster University . From 1977 to 2002 she was a member of the Music Faculty at Carleton University . She worked scientifically on the biography and bibliography of Canadian musical life in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the music of the indigenous people of Northern Canada. She edited several volumes of Canadian piano and orchestral music for the Canadian Musical Heritage Society (CMHS) and wrote a biography of the composer John Weinzweig and articles for the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada , The Canadian Encyclopedia , the New Grove Dictionary , The Music in History and Present and The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music .

Honorary positions and awards

In 1958 Keillor was awarded the Chappell Medal as a young pianist in the British Commonwealth. Carleton University presented her with the 1981 Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching. In the same year Keillor became a founding member of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society. From 1989 to 2000 she was Vice President of the CMHS, which she has been President ever since. She was a member of the American Musicological Society , the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Social Sciences Federation of Canada and a representative of the Canadian University Music Society . In 1999 she received the first Canadian Women's Mentor Award in the Art and Culture category. In 2004 she received the Helmut Kallmann Award for her services to the documentation and publication of sources on Canadian music history .

Discography

• Piano Music by Torontonians 1834-1984 , 1984
• Piano Pieces of Barbara Pentland , 1997
• Views of the Piano Sonata , 1998
• By a Canadian Lady: Piano Music 1841-1997 , 2000
• Canadians at the Keyboard , 2000
• Canadian Sounds , 2001
• Romance: Early Canadian Chamber Music , 2002
• Mary Gardiner Works for Piano and Voice , 2002
• Legend of the First Rabbit
• Canadian Compositions for Young Pianists
• Sounds Of North: Two Centuries Of Canadian Piano , 2012

Fonts

• Piano Music I (Ed.), CMHS, 1983
• Piano Music II (Ed.), CMHS, 1986
• Music for Orchestra (Ed.), CMHS, 1994
• Music for Orchestra III (Ed.), CMHS, 1995
• John Weinzweig: The Radical Romantic of Canada , Scarecrow Press, 1994
• Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity , McGill / Queen's Press, 2006