A well-composed life

When a University of Manitoba dean came to inform Victor Davies that he was booted from pre-med in the late 1950s, it was — to permit a cliché — music to his ears.

“In his mind, what he heard was much more encouraging. He heard, ‘Follow your own dream. Listen to your own melody. Speak with your own voice,’” says Davies’s daughter, Heather.

Davies, who died at 87 from pancreatic cancer and PLS in late September, was nevertheless about to take a major gamble, one that would eventually earn him an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba and a nomination to the Order of Canada.

Few careers are as uncertain as music, and at a time when the composition departments were saying au revoir to tonality, embracing the heavily dissonant styles of France and Germany, Davies was about to go against the grain. He would soon find a new home across the border in Bloomington, Ind., where for four years he studied at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

One of the world’s most prestigious music schools, IU’s culture in the early 1960s also seemed to reflect its midwestern environment: a little resistant to some of the heady, avant-garde styles of elite coastal universities.

“He believed in music being for everyone, and he didn’t see a hierarchy in the value of different musical styles. He believed in the inherent value of all music and its intention to connect with audiences,” says Heather, drawing a connection between Victor’s anti-elitism and IU’s culture.

But in many ways, Davies was still the maverick back in his old dean’s office.

While many of his peers pinned their hopes on careers in teaching or academia, Davies was determined to do something that seemed almost impossible for a Canadian composer at the time.

Having moved back to Winnipeg in the late 1960s, where he was now raising a young family on Montrose Street, Davies worked project to project, surviving almost exclusively on commissions. He was determined to primarily make a living as a composer, not a teacher.

Among Davies’s notable works of this period was The Mennonite Piano Concerto (1975). Its whimsical, cinematically romantic strains have, over decades of performances, transported audiences in Canada, China, the U.S. and England back to the Volga River and Mennonite old country — or perhaps to the early days of Steinbach.

For an artist who left Winnipeg for Toronto only a few years later, but retained a lifelong connection to our prairie city, it’s also fitting that this artist of Welsh lineage would pay homage to one of Manitoba’s best-known musical communities. Davies adopted motifs from dozens of Mennonite hymns, recognizing many from tunes he sang as a boy in the United Church, though he gave them something more sultry, even dance-like.

While the concerto is one of his best-known works, Heather says few were closer to his heart than his rock opera Beowulf (1974). The 1970s were a potent period for highfalutin hybrids of classical music and rock, from prog rock’s epic walls of sound to rock operas such as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972) and the film Phantom of the Paradise (1974).

Described as a Canadian classic, Beowulf ultimately had an off-Broadway production in no small part thanks to Davies’s gumption: rallying musicians, assembling a choir and orchestra and finding clever ways to finance the work himself.

“Two words that really sums up Victor as a composer: entrepreneurial and…” begins Darren Fung, a Canadian Los Angeles-based composer who Davies mentored. He wants to call Davies a “populist,” but searches for another term because of its nasty associations under the leadership of the country where Fung resides.

“Accessible” and “tuneful” come to mind for a composer who wrote not just operas and ballets, but over 600 children’s songs for TV series such as Let’s Go! and The Rockets.

But those terms may seem a little too jejune for a composer of Davies’s depth.

“You’ll often find great complexity, but within the complexity and dissonance of his music, you’ll find a great sense of melody,” says Heather.

“He’s not an academic composer,” adds Fung. “But despite his love of rock and pop music, he remained someone who was, in so many ways, loyal to that almost old-fashioned idea of orchestral music.”

When it comes to Davies’s entrepreneurial success, Fung gives much credit to Davies’s wife Lorraine.

She had made it further in medicine than Davies, working as a nurse until 1979, but like him ultimately came to music. After moving from Winnipeg with their two daughters to a three-storey home in Toronto’s Beaches area in the late 1970s, the couple — sometimes affectionately known together as “Fish and Chips” — founded Lily Pad Productions.

“The house was always filled with one kind of music or another, whether it was the kids playing the grand piano on the ground floor or dad on the top floor. The neighbourhood hadn’t gentrified yet, but it was a creative community and a great place to grow up — there were always friends and artists around,” says Heather.

Heather and her sister Suzanne left their father alone in the third-floor study if his door was closed. Though the family cat Mr. Brown Ears was often sitting on the piano or by his side, and Lorraine was in and out of her husband’s musical laboratory to discuss creative business.

A savvy administrator and networker, two key skills in the contract-heavy world of film and television scores, Lorraine managed marketing, promotion, printing and sales for Lily Pad.

“You’d be at a party, and she would say, ‘Oh, I really want you to meet this person,’ and you’d be gliding across the room together. She was doing that kind of work all the time, creating the glue in in relationships,” says Heather.

If successful Canadian composers such as Davies depend on the people by their side, they also depend on an ecosystem of fair opportunities and reasonable negotiations, which have been hard-won for score composers.

Understanding Canadian composers’ precariousness — especially those without academic tenure — in an industry steered by larger commercial and American interests, Davies was moved toward advocacy. He served on SOCAN’s board from 1996 to 2012 and chaired its tariffs, licensing and distribution committee for about a decade. Davies also led the Canadian League of Composers, pressing to ensure that composers weren’t just paid and treated fairly, but also had a stronger voice to shape their industry.

“A culture of good governance is incredibly strong within the music ecosystem and I think from the screen composer side of things, it’s because Victor was a stickler for governance,” says Fung.

As a screen composer, Davies scored several films that should be recognizable to Winnipeggers, including The Last Winter (1989) and For the Moment (1993), starring Russell Crowe.

Another Winnipeg work was Transit of Venus, Manitoba Opera’s first commissioned full-length opera, with lyrics by Maureen Hunter. Premièred in 2007, Transit of Venus — which the Free Press acclaimed as a “Canadian masterpiece” — is a love story of sorts about 18th-century French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil, much more interested in his astronomical adventures than his young fiancée.

“Winnipeg was foundational to his creative ethos, his sense of creative values. I’m gonna get misty-eyed. It’s a very special place in its support of the arts and with Winnipeggers’ support of each other,” says Heather.

Fung says that Davies brought these same communitarian values everywhere he worked.

“If there’s one thing that was important to Victor, it was community and the importance of good music,” he says. “Building a community, a community of composers, and advocating for those composers to be able to have the right conditions to do their best work. And that’s Victor in a nutshell.”

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com