Maurice Blackburn

Biography

Sample Works

Maurice Blackburn (1914-88) was born in Québec City. He studied at Laval University from 1937-39, finishing as piano lauréat in 1939, and took private lessons in composition from Claude Champagne and harmony and counterpoint from Georges-Émile Tanguay. He later studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston (1939-41) after being awarded a Québec Government scholarship. There he won the George Allan prize in 1940 for his Sonatine pour piano.

On his return to Canada he began a long career as a composer for the National Film Board (1942-46, 1948-53, 1955-78). With Norman McLaren, he created the process of etching sound and image directly onto film. He composed the music for McLaren's film Blinkity Blank (1954) which won l2 prizes, including the Palme d'or at the Cannes International Festival. During this period, his symphonic poem Charpente was performed at the Prague Festival (1946) and played by the London Philharmonic the same year. From 1946 to 1948, Blackburn studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and during a second visit to that city in 1954-55 was a member of the Groupe de recherches de musique concrète directed by Pierre Schaeffer. In 1954, UNESCO invited him to take part in a conference of composers for film in Cannes. When Expo 67 took place in Montréal, he wrote the music for the films shown at the Québec pavilion and the Man and His Music pavilion. Blackburn collaborated in theatrical and television productions and composed music for 115 films, including feature length dramas. The last McLaren work which he put to music was Narcissus, which was premiered at the World Film Festival in 1983.

Léo-Pol Morin described Blackburn as "imaginative, impulsive, a vibrant and caustic poet, one whose chief concern is to give expression to the responses of his mind through music. A creator of images, he has a gift for colour and design, and the stories he tells are original, vivid and spontaneous"1

1 Encyclopédie de la musique au Canada, sous la direction de Helmut Kallman, Gilles Potvin, Kenneth Winters, Montréal, Éditions Fides, 1983, pp. 90-91.

CAPAC

1988

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