“Marvellous!”: The Life and Music of Elliot Weisgarber is the first full-length biography of Elliot Weisgarber, the American-born Canadian composer, clarinetist, and ethnomusicologist who served on the faculty of the UBC School of Music from 1960 until his retirement in 1984.
Written by his daughter, flutist, music publisher and UBC Music alumna (’77) Karen Suzanne Smithson, the book draws on decades of archival research including Weisgarber’s own memoirs, correspondence, and manuscripts, to offer an intimate and comprehensive portrait of an artist whose influence on Canadian music, and on the UBC School of Music in particular, was profound and lasting.
The book traces Weisgarber’s life from his childhood in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, through his studies at the Eastman School of Music, where he earned both his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in clarinet performance and composition under the tutelage of Edward Royce, Bernard Rogers, Howard Hanson, Halsey Stevens, and Nadia Boulanger. It follows his fourteen years on the faculty at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina before his arrival in Vancouver, where he would spend the remainder of his career and his life.
Central to the biography is Weisgarber’s transformative encounter with Japanese music. Supported by several Canada Council grants between 1966 and 1969, he immersed himself in Japan, becoming proficient in the shakuhachi, koto, shamisen, and biwa. He was among the first Western musicians to be granted the status of master in the Kinko school of shakuhachi.
“Marvellous!” illuminates how this deep cross-cultural engagement reshaped Weisgarber’s compositional voice, yielding a catalogue of more than 450 works — spanning art song, chamber music, orchestral writing, and choral music — that fuses the Western art music tradition with the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of Japanese music.
Smithson, who co-founded Elliot Weisgarber Associates with her father in 1994, has spent more than two decades preserving and extending his legacy: cataloguing his compositions, transcribing manuscripts, completing his unpublished book Shakuhachi: The Voice of Nature (2019), and editing his memoirs. “Marvellous!” is the culmination of that work. It is a labour of love and scholarship that ensures this singular figure in Canadian music history receives the recognition he deserves.
“Marvellous!”: The Life and Music of Elliot Weisgarber is available to purchase now.
