The Marvin Duchow Music Library and Prof. Brian Cherney invite you to a book launch celebrating his new publication, Between Composers: The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024). 

In the fall of 1959 Norma Beecroft, a twenty-five-year-old composition student, left her home in Toronto and travelled to Rome to study with the eminent Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi. She left behind her lover and mentor, the thirty-four-year-old Harry Somers, by then recognized as one of Canada’s leading young composers. For the next five-and-a-half months they wrote each other almost every day. Somers soon came to realize that he wanted Beecroft to give up her studies and return to Toronto to marry him. Despite this pressure, however, she ultimately chose to remain in Italy to study and compose, thus rejecting a conventional woman’s role. Their intense and intimate correspondence documents lives lived apart but shared on the page, until the relationship ended abruptly in February 1960. As well, the letters show both composers at pivotal moments in their careers, working on their own creative projects and experiencing the music and culture in their respective environments. Beyond illuminating the evolution of their personal relationship, these wide-ranging letters not only provide much insight into the state of contemporary music in both Europe and Canada, but also evoke for the reader the general state of Canadian arts and culture in the late 1950s. For more information, see the publisher's website.

Please join us in launching the publication of Between Composers: The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers. During a program that will begin at 6pm, Brian will speak about and read from his new book. 

Marvin Duchow Music Library
Elizabeth Wirth Music Building
527 Sherbrooke Street West, 3rd floor