Ann Southam, was a Canadian electronic and classical music composer and music teacher.
23 Facts About Ann Southam
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Ann Southam was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1937, and lived most of her life in Toronto, Ontario.
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Ann Southam was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010.
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Ann Southam is the great-great-granddaughter of newspaper baron William Southam and benefited from the inherited wealth of the family business.
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At the age of three, her family moved to Toronto, where Southam lived for the rest of her life.
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Ann 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.
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Ann Southam began composing at age 15 after attending a summer music camp at the Banff School.
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Ann Southam studied piano with Pierre Souvairan and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto from 1960 to 1963.
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Shortly afterward, Ann Southam began working on a new score for Beatty's adaptation of Macbeth and the two became friends.
10.
Ann Southam founded, with Mary Gardiner, the Association of Canadian Women Composers in 1981.
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Ann Southam was the first president, life member, and honorary president.
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Ann Southam was an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
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Ann Southam wrote work that was commissioned by organizations including the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Music Gallery, and the CBC.
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Ann Southam was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, and died, aged 73, on 25 November 2010.
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Ann 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".
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Ann Southam asked Christina Petrowska-Quilico to record the pieces, as a means of preserving them; by 1982, Petrowska-Quilico had begun to perform the pieces live on her tours.
17.
Ann Southam worked for over thirty years with Christina Petrowska-Quilico on Rivers, Pond Life, and Glass Houses, which was revised by Southam in 2009 and by Petrowska-Quilico in 2010.
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Ann Southam was first introduced to Eve Egoyan in 1998, when David Jaeger of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble suggested Egoyan play on a new recording he was producing.
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Ann Southam worked on several collaborative projects with Eve Egoyan throughout the late '90s and early 2000s including: Qualities of Consonance, Figures, In Retrospect, and Simple Lines of Enquiry.
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Ann Southam received the Friends of Canadian Music Award in 2002.
21.
In 2010, Ann Southam was named a Member of the Order of Canada but was too ill to attend the ceremony.
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Ann Southam left $14 million to the Canadian Women's Foundation, creating the Ann Southam Empowerment Fund and investing in the Girls' Fund.
23.
Ann Southam's published works remain the property of the Canadian Music Centre.