Ann Southam

Ann Southam, (4 February 1937 – 25 November 2010) was a Canadian electronic and classical music composer and music teacher.

She is known for her minimalist, iterative, and lyrical style, for her long-term collaborations with dance choreographers and performers, for her large body of work, and, according to the Globe and Mail, for "blazing a trail for women composers in a notoriously sexist field".

She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1937, and lived most of her life in Toronto, Ontario.

She began composing at age 15 (in 1952) after attending a summer music camp at the Banff School (now known as The Banff Centre).

After dropping out of secretarial school, she studied piano and composition with Samuel Dolin at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, who introduced her to "tape music".

She studied piano with Pierre Souvairan and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto from 1960 to 1963.

Southam's passion for electronic music began in the 1960s, and she built a home studio with synthesizers, tape recorders, a mixer and what she called a "minimum of sound equipment", including Electronic Music Studios synthesizers such as the AKS.

In 1966, she began teaching electroacoustic composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

In 1966, she was introduced to Patricia Beatty, a Canadian choreographer who had just returned from studying modern dance in New York.

Shortly afterward, Southam began working on a new score for Beatty's adaptation of Macbeth and the two became friends.

With this relationship as the catalyst, she began a collaboration with the New Dance Group of Canada (later known as Toronto Dance Theatre) in 1967, where she became composer-in-residence in 1968.

Over her life she composed around 30 pieces for the group, as well as quietly supplying financial donations to keep the group afloat.

In the 1970s, when Southam was in her thirties, she came out as lesbian to her mother.

In the 1970s, Southam purchased a house and installed a grand piano, beginning to compose purely acoustic pieces for the first time: first Rivers and then Glass Houses.

In 1977, she created Music Inter Alia, a concert promotion organization in Winnipeg that existed until 1991, with Diana McIntosh.

She was the first president (1980–'88), life member (2002), and honorary president (2007).

She was also an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.

Ann Southam wrote work that was commissioned by organizations including the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Music Gallery, and the CBC.

In the 1980s, Southam began developing an interest in music by American minimalists Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

She founded, with Mary Gardiner, the Association of Canadian Women Composers in 1981.

Her composition Glass Houses (1981) is constructed from short tonal units that combine and re-combine, creating an overall sense of lyricism.

She asked Christina Petrowska-Quilico to record her performances of the pieces, as a means of preserving them; by 1982, Petrowska-Quilico had begun to perform the pieces live in her tours.

In the 1990s, Southam largely abandoned the electroacoustic compositional style and began creating instrumental works such as Song of the Varied Thrush (1991) for string quartet; Webster's Spin (1993) for string orchestra, and Full Circles (1996, rev. 2005).

Of her work and interest in incorporating feminism, Southam has said:

"I was looking for a way of writing music that would have a feminist aesthetic, because what was thought of as feminist music back in those days was usually vocal music, and it would be the words that would give the feminist meaning. I wanted something where the very workings of the music would reflect a feminist aesthetic."

Southam found that minimalist, iterative compositions reminded her of "women's work" – repetitive, monotonous tasks such as knitting and cleaning that nevertheless sustain life.

Southam's favourite quotes about herself were "staggeringly boring" (from the Montreal Gazette), and "a rather shadowy presence on the new-music scene" (from The Globe And Mail).

Ann Southam worked for over thirty years with Christina Petrowska-Quilico on Rivers (2005), Pond Life (2008) and Glass Houses, which was revised by Southam in 2009 and by Petrowska-Quilico in 2010.

She died, aged 73, on 25 November 2010.

She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010.

Southam was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

She is the great-great-granddaughter of newspaper baron William Southam, and benefited from the inherited wealth of the family business.

At the age of three, her family moved to Toronto, where Southam lived for the rest of her life.

Southam attended the private Bishop Strachan School for girls in Toronto, and dropped out after a year of Shaw's Business School for secretarial studies.

Throughout this time she developed a hobby interest in music.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, and died, aged 73, on 25 November 2010.

Eve Egoyan and Christina Petrowska-Quilico performed at her memorial.

Southam's early works are lyrical atonal pieces written in a Romantic style, and lyricism remained an important element of her later electronic scores.

She also worked with 12-tone techniques.

Southam has been described as having "composed with exacting technique, intent on coaxing warmth out of her machines and bringing electronic music into new spaces".