[microsound-announce] Fwd: Otto Joachim 1910-2010

[CEC jef chippewa]

Article in English in The Gazette (Montréal)
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Composer+revitalized+music+Canada/3348239/story.html

Article en français dans La Presse (Montréal)
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/arts/musique/musique-classique/201008/01/01-4302954-le-compositeur-canadien-otto-joachim-est-mort.php

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Sunday, August 01, 2010

Composer revitalized music in Canada
His activities were as varied as those of any musician in the world

By ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, The Gazette August 1, 2010 4:04 AM
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Composer+revitalized+music+Canada/3348239/story.html
Additional material, Kevin Austin, Montreal, 09:30 EDT


http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/3348240.bin
Otto Joachim, seen the week of his 99th birthday 
in his home in Cote St Luc, was principal viola 
in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM). He also 
founded the Montreal String Quartet.


Otto Joachim - composer, violist, teacher, 
electronic music pioneer, instrument builder, 
painter and one of the sharpest wits in musical 
Montreal -died late Friday at the Jewish General 
Hospital, less than three months short of his 
100th birthday. His son Davis Joachim said the 
cause was heart failure.

One of scores of refugees from Nazi Germany who 
revitalized music in Canada, this native of 
Dusseldorf, Germany, arrived in Montreal in 1949 
after working for more than 15 years as a 
musician in Singapore and Shanghai, including a 
stint at the Raffles Hotel in the former city. 
While in the Orient, he had also worked in 
electronics shops repairing radios and other 
equipment. He had continued to experiment with 
building electronic instruments, something had 
been doing in Germany starting around 1929.

Outstaying his Canadian visitor visa -his 
ultimate destination was supposed to be Brazil 
-Joachim worked at an electronics shop while 
waiting out the mandatory year of residence then 
required by the Montreal Musicians' Guild. His 
interest in gadgetry never left him. It was not 
unusual in the 21st century to find a 
disassembled computer on the dining table of his 
home in Cote St. Luc. During the 1970s, he was 
the Canadian distributor of EMS (England -- 
Synthi etc) equipment, selling equipment to 
composers, rock bands and even the RCMP. (They 
bought two vocoders.)

When he finally secured a section position in the 
Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Joachim found the 
erratic standards difficult to abide. "The MSO 
consisted of old and young, but few young ones 
and quite a few tolerated ones," he recalled last 
October, a few days before his 99th birthday. 
"The conductor was not strong enough to kick them 
out."

As principal viola under the energetic young 
music director Zubin Mehta in the mid-1960s, 
however, Joachim became one of the pillars of the 
orchestra, along with his cellist brother, the 
late Walter Joachim. He also founded (with Walter 
and the violinists Hyman Bress and Mildred 
Goodman) the Montreal String Quartet, which 
performed contemporary music (including Joachim's 
own First String Quartet) as well as standard 
repertoire. It made a notable recording of Glenn 
Gould's String Quartet and, with Gould, Brahms's 
Piano Quintet.

Joachim's activities from the 1950s to the 1970s 
were as varied as those of any musician in the 
world. As a composer, he was unabashedly atonal 
and avant-garde, employing serialism, exploiting 
the possibilities of chance in music, and being 
actively involved in live interactive 
electronics. His personal electronic music studio 
was the third in Canada, the first being at the 
University of Toronto.

Yet in the 1950s Joachim also founded the 
Montreal Consort of Ancient Instruments, years 
before early music was in vogue. Many of the 
instruments in this ensemble, including portative 
organs, were of his own manufacture. Like another 
central European Jewish composer exiled by 
politics, Arnold Schoenberg, Joachim also 
cultivated a pastime as a painter of 
expressionistic and hard-edge canvases. In his 
70s, he took up sculpture for a period of time 
but stopped when it became clear to him that 
welding in his basement was much too hazardous 
and could shorten his life.

Joachim taught chamber music at both McGill 
University and the Montreal Conservatoire, adding 
notoriously earthy French to his repertoire of 
languages. He is an Honorary Member of the 
Canadian Electroacoustic Community / Communauté 
électroacoustique Canadienne (CEC), and received 
an Honorary Doctorate from Concordia University, 
Montreal in 1993. In 1996, the Concordia 
University Music Department named its 
multi-channel studio, The Otto Joachim Production 
Studio.

As a composer, he had a notable success with 
Katimavik, a work on four-track tape commissioned 
by the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67. Around then 
also he travelled to New York for a performance 
of his Contrastes. There he met Elliott Carter, 
born in 1908 and in recent years Joachim's only 
elder among living composers of note.

Unlike Carter, Joachim did not mellow much in his 
80s and 90s. In Stacheldraht (Barbed Wire), a 
1993 commission by the Societe de musique 
contemporaine du Quebec, Joachim confronted the 
Holocaust in a stark style. His Metamorphoses of 
1994, a firmly atonal but bracingly clear essay 
for orchestra, was premiered by the Orchestre 
Metropolitain under Joseph Rescigno and revived 
in 2006 by the MSO under Jacques Lacombe.

"It's about 13 minutes," the composer said about 
Metamorphoses, "which is long enough for any 
piece. Not that I would say Mahler and Bruckner 
were wrong to write longer pieces. That was their 
right. I am only a newcomer."

In recent years, his failing eyesight restricted 
his composition, but not his music appreciation. 
Joachim was an avid listener to the radio and 
recordings, showing a special interest last year 
in the music of Bach.

"He is not superhuman: He produced 20 children 
He's pretty human, no? Or he was superhuman to do 
that?"

Funeral arrangements were not finalized at press time.

-- 

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