On March 21, Abigail Richardson-Schulte will be hosting a Talk & Tea Series event on the music by Ravel and Mussorgsky that will be performed at the next concert by the Hamilton Philharmonic. It’s just one of her many functions as the HPO’s Composer-in-Residence, and beyond that, a multi-faceted career.
We caught up with Abigail to talk about her journey to becoming a composer, and her work today.
Abigail Richardson-Schulte, composer
Composer Abigail Richardson-Schulte was born in Oxford, England. As a child, she was diagnosed as incurably deaf. Yet… after moving to Calgary as a young child, her hearing gradually returned.
It’s an incredible story, and one that is even more remarkable by her success as a composer. Richardson-Schulte’s works have been commissioned and performed by orchestras and festivals across Canada and in Europe.
She won first prize at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and her music was consequently broadcast in 35 countries. It’s not the only prize or recognition on her impressive list, which includes the CBC Karen Kieser Prize, a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Opera, the Quenten Doolittle Award from New Works Calgary, the City of Hamilton Arts Award and the Prairie Region Emerging Composer Award.
During her tenure as former Affiliate Composer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Abigail curated their New Creations Festival. Her piece, composed to accompany the Canadian classic story by Roch Carrier, “The Hockey Sweater”, was a co-commission by the TSO, National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (a first), and has been performed more than 180 times across the country, along with multiple presentations in France. She has composed works for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, several pieces for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra — where she is serving in her tenth year as Composer-in-Residence — and a full concert orchestral version of Dennis Lee’s classic children’s story “Alligator Pie” as commissioned by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Today, she also teaches composition at the University of Toronto. Recent commissions include pieces for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Russell Braun with the Magisterra Soloists, and the Lafayette String Quartet, among others.
The Interview
“My dad is an engineer, and he was asked to head up a branch of the company in Calgary. They didn’t want to move to Canada!” Richardson-Schulte recalls with a laugh. To persuade them, the company invited the family to vacations in Niagara Falls and Banff, and eventually, it worked, and her father accepted the job offer.
Abigail was about five years old at the time, and after a string of persistent ear infections, was for all purposes functionally deaf. But — remarkably — no one from parents to other family members to teachers was aware of that fact.
Abigail had become adept at lip reading and other means of interpreting language, and thought, in her child’s mind, that this was simply how everyone communicated. A master adapter, she fooled everyone up until the doctor who examined the family for their potential immigration.
“The next step was the medical for the whole family, and they determined that I was deaf,” she recalls.
As a result, the province of Alberta initially rejected their visa application on medical grounds. However, there was an option to consult up to three specialists to provide more information for reconsideration.
“I remember becoming aware that my world wasn’t the same as the outside world, in terms of what I was hearing.”
The last specialist they took her to see, who was also a family friend, and incidentally, one of the doctors to the Queen herself, was hopeful. “You never know — Calgary has a dry climate,” she remembers him saying.
It proved to be prophetic. Within a few months of arriving in Canada after the appeal was won, her hearing began to trickle back. Hearing tests were administered, and about a year after they arrived, the transformation was complete. “After one year, it was perfect.” The infections, and the accumulated scar tissue which had caused the lingering problem, and which began when she was only about two weeks old, were gone.
“It seems quite simple,” she says. “I didn’t even know I was deaf, because it happened quite gradually.” Even after three years of school, none of the teachers had noticed.
“My speech was normal, I had an English accent,” she laughs. Some people, in fact, doubted that she was deaf even after the diagnosis. “Of course, my parents felt terrible.”
Some details seemed to stick out more in retrospect. Her mother, for example, took her habit of not answering unless they had eye contact as a personality quirk.
Then Comes Music
Her hearing restored, music wasn’t necessarily the first thing on her mind. “Once I got to Canada, I was slow to get into music,” she says. Abigail says she was more involved with sports as a child. Her parents, in turn, fell in love with Canada and stayed beyond her father’s original two-year contract.
“I was at a school that happened to have a great music program,” she says. It drew her in.
She began with singing, and singing competitions. Once instrumental music was introduced, she took on the flute in grade six. “”We had an hour of music in school everyday.” Piano followed at age 12.
“When it came time to go to university, I went into something else.” Richardson-Schulte initially went into a science program, but then dropped out, and auditioned to study piano in Calgary. She credits a teacher for helping her sort out her ambitions.
The family had moved to Bragg Creek. “There was one piano teacher,” she says. Abigail describes a unique character, a former British army instructor in survival skills who lived off the grid, and who preferred country and western music, but earned an ARCT from the Conservatory to teach.
He focused not only on the nuts and bolts of learning the instrument. He’d ask her about the music she’d study, and talk about the stories involved in the music. Then came composition exercises.
“By the time I went into my audition at the University of Calgary, I came along with stories to go with the music,” she says. As a performance candidate, it made her stand out as eccentric. But, she was approached by one of the faculty members on the jury later who’d seen the potential in her, and helped her access the program on a probationary basis. “There was a lot of competition,” she says.
Abigail studied with composer Allan Gordon Bell, and her final assignment was to both compose and perform a work. After her undergrad degree, she earned her Masters and Doctorate at the University of Toronto.
These days, she teaches at the UofT on contract.
The Hamilton Philharmonic: Composer-in-Residence
“That started off as a three-year position,” Richardson-Schulte recalls. The position was funded by a grant for what was a fairly typical term at the time back in 2012.
“Right away, I started to be involved in community and education in a big way,” she says. Along with writing music for the HPO, much of her work with the organization is off the main stage. Her Talk & Tea Series is held a day or two before each concert. For each, she dives into the lives of the composers, performing some of the music on piano. Participants also get to experience a bit of the rehearsals.
“A lot of what I do is community work,” she explains. “So I’m very glad that it continued.” Abigail also hosts the orchestra’s preconcert talks, which have become very popular. “I’m very pleased with how that’s turned out,” she notes. “Sometimes 500 people come early for the talks.” Adding context to the music adds to the experience. “It makes the audience realize that these composers were human.” It’s also about connecting the audience with the soloists and conductor. “I think we really do have that strong sense of community with HPO.”
She takes on another hosting gig with the HPO’s Intimate & Immersive series which spotlights new music, and often her own works.
“I really love having the composers there to talk about their music,” she says. “We have done a lot of work with contemporary music over the years, and our audiences are not scared by it.”
She reports, in fact, that a guest conductor who visited a few years ago was very surprised by the Hamilton audience’s enthusiastic response to a brand new composition.
What’s Next?
Also on the horizon is a production of Richardson-Schulte’s opera Sanctuary Song, which premiered at Luminato in 2008. With a libretto by Marjorie Chan, and based on a true story, the family-friendly opera tells the story of Sydney, an Indian elephant, and her journey from captivity to release into a Tennessee sanctuary.
Produced by Tapestry Opera, the one-hour all-ages opera combines music and dance, and will open their new hall at 877 Yonge Street from May 9 to 25.
- Find more details about Sanctuary Song [HERE].
- Find more details about the Hamilton Philharmonic’s Talk & Tea event on March 21 [HERE].
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