Stuart Hamilton - Opening Windows: Confessions of a Canadian Vocal Coach
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A vocal coach who has been in the vanguard of classical music in Canada for more than six decades.
Stuart Hamilton is a well-known Canadian musician who has been in the forefront of music in Canada for more than 60 years. Here, in this memoir, he recounts his sometimes hectic assault on the Canadian music world. Along the way, Hamilton encountered, as a vocal coach and accompanist, most of the great Canadian singers of the last half of the 20th century, and some international ones as well.
For 27 years Hamilton was an erudite and funny personality on CBCs Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. He has appeared across Canada with such beloved artists as Lois Marshall, Maureen Forrester, Richard Margison, and Isabel Bayrakdarian. In Opening Windows, Hamilton takes the reader into his confidence on numerous matters that have influenced musical life in Canada for decades.
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Opening Windows
Confessions of a Canadian Vocal Coach
Stuart Hamilton
Copyright Stuart Hamilton, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Allison Hirst
Design: Jesse Hooper
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hamilton, Stuart
Opening windows [electronic resource] : confessions of a Canadian vocal coach / author, Stuart Hamilton; foreword by Lotfi Mansouri.
Electronic monograph in PDF and EPUB formats.
Also available in print format.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0514-2
1. Hamilton, Stuart. 2. Vocal coachesCanadaBiography. 3. BroadcastersCanadaBiography. I. Title.
ML429.H222A3 2012 782.1092 C2012-903228-X
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Visit us at: Dundurn.com
Definingcanada.ca
@dundurnpress
Facebook.com/dundurnpress
- Chapter 1:
A Shaky Start - Chapter 2:
My Life Begins - Chapter 3:
Two Magnificent Teachers - Chapter 4:
Two Magnificent Singers - Chapter 5:
A Final Lesson - Chapter 6:
Two Audacious Recitals - Chapter 7:
New Adventures - Chapter 8:
Many Stars - Chapter 9:
Opera in Concert - Chapter 10:
Drying Out and Touring with Forrester - Chapter 11:
An Adventure with the Canadian Opera Company and a Thrilling Farewell Tour - Chapter 12:
New Stars - Chapter 13:
A Problem, and More New Stars - Chapter 14:
Broadcasting and Winding Down - Afterword:
I Spoke Too Soon
Stuart Hamilton is one of the greatest raconteurs Ive ever had the pleasure of knowing. Reading this book is like spending a delightful evening in his company as he recounts the tales of his close encounters with the denizens of the opera world. It is told with all his wit, charm, and intelligence, as well as his great knowledge and love of music and artists.
From his early days as a young rebel in Regina, through his struggles to get started in Toronto, and finally his recognition as one of Canadas musical leaders, this is a thoroughly enjoyable account of the development of opera in Canada and his own enormous contributions to that development. It will indeed open windows for his readers.
Lotfi Mansouri
Former general director of the Canadian Opera Company
and the San Francisco Opera
July 2011
San Francisco
Lotfi Mansouri (right) and the author, April 2009.
Photo by Janet Stubbs.
Several people were a great help during the writing of this book. Id like to thank John Stanley and Helmut Reichenbaecher for nagging me to put pen to paper in the first place. I am grateful to Margaret McKelvey and the late Mary Alice Rogers for their invaluable editorial advice. Thanks also to Wayne Gooding, who took time away from his all-consuming job as editor of Opera Canada magazine to make sense of my rather chaotic first chapter. And most of all I have to thank the beautiful Maria Kastellitz, whose enthusiasm and faith in the book never wavered.
The book wouldnt have happened without all of you.
One day at a piano lesson, I said to my teacher, Alberto Guerrero, You must be very proud to have been the teacher of Glenn Gould.
No, he replied. Glenn would have been great no matter with whom he had studied. If Im proud of anything in my life, it is that I was able to open a few windows onto the world of music for the less talented students who worked with me.
Guerrero was a magnificent musician and a constant inspiration. Many things he told me have illuminated my life, but the remark about the window opening has stuck with me through over sixty years of coaching singers. This book is an effort to recount my experiences as I tried to live up to Guerreros Opening Windows.
A Shaky Start
Down by the sea shore, shimmer, shimmer,
There stood a maiden, slimmer, slimmer.
False buck teeth and her hair proxided,
There in the moonlight, she looked lopsided.
Ruffles on her petticoat, ruflin in the breezes
Sounds like sandpaper ruslin on her kneeses.
Things like this that women do
Snough to make a man leave home
Without a shirt!
The Glow Worm
Okay, so its not Schubert, but its what I grew up with. If youre wondering how someone raised on songs like that went on to have a thrilling career as a vocal coach to opera singers who sang in all the great opera houses of the world, and who was accompanist for some of the worlds greatest recitalists of the second half of the twentieth century, read on.
Once I decided to be a musician I never had any doubts about it, but looking back Im not at all sure that I realized it would take over my life in the way that it did.
I was not born into a musical family. My fathers efforts to carry a tune were not appreciated by the rest of the congregation at the First Presbyterian Church in Regina a church that he frequented rarely, by the way.
We had a piano, as almost everyone did in the 1930s, but no one ever played it. Well, hardly ever. Occasionally my mother would render a version of Theres a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, a song from the First World War. The problem was, she never changed the harmony in the base. And then there was my older sister, Dorothy, who was forced to take piano lessons for a while. She got as far as The Glow Worm (for the unauthorized lyrics, see above), but then, to everyones immense relief, she threw it over. At the age of five, I deduced the relationship between the hammers of the piano and the hammer in the tool box and, putting two and two together as it were, took the tool box one and slammed the keys of the piano to make the ones in the instrument jump and bang. As the keys were made of ivory, my efforts resulted in many a torn finger later in life.
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