This Awareness of Beauty

This book considers the orchestral and wind band music of Canadian composer Healey Willan, who was known primarily for his choral work. A succinct biography accompanies historical, analytical, and critical investigations of Willan’s instrumental music, asserting Willan’s seminal place in Canadian music.

Kinder Keith W. :

Keith W. Kinder is currently a professor of music and the director of the School of the Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. An internationally recognized researcher, he is the author of The Wind and Wind-Chorus Music of Anton Bruckner (2000), Best Music for Chorus and Winds (2005), and Prophetic Trumpets: Homage, Worship and Celebration in the Wind Band Music of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt (2010).

John Beckwith:
`It is in the chapter on the band works that the author's enthusiasms emerge most strongly—and it is here that his book breaks valuable new ground. One of Willan's best-known instrumental pieces, the Royce Hall Suite for concert band, composed in 1949, bears on its title page the indication ‘edited and scored by William Teague.’. Teague, a staff arranger with the New York firm Associated Music Publishers, performed this assignment using written indications by the composer. Kinder has examined their correspondence, and uses it in presenting a bar-by-bar critique of the score, concluding with the judgement that a new instrumentation giving greater respect to Willan's notes would greatly improve the Suite's effectiveness. These pages are the most vivid in the book, and make one hope to one day hear a new version, perhaps prepared by Kinder, an experienced band director, himself.''