Obituary of Kenneth Peacock
Born in Toronto in 1922. Died in Ottawa November 22, 2000
After two years being bedridden with cancer
in an Ottawa Hospital, the outstanding Canadian musician
and composer died in his sleep from pneumonia. His most
recent honors came in 1998 when the Folklore
Studies Association of Canada awarded him the Marius
Barbeau Award for his pioneering contributions to
folksong research across Canada which aided a folk music
revival and careers of young musicians. Archives
deposited in at least 14 repositories regenerating a
tradition perceived to be threatened.
Between 1951 and 1971, Peacock made 3,336
individual field recordings on 544 reels of tape for the
National Museum. His archives hold a wide range of
ethnographic documents based on his research: audio field
recordings, photographic and film images, short journal
articles, books, radio programs and two vinyl recordings.
In 1982 he was recognized with an Order of Canada :
| |
Mr. Kenneth H. Peacock: As a musicologist, he carried out pioneering research into the folk music of various ethnic groups in Canada, thus enriching our cultural awareness. Much of his material has been used by professional singers. He has published a number of collections, including Songs of the Doukhobors and Songs of Newfoundland Outports [small coastal communities]. |
I had the pleasure of first meeting Ken in 1964 when he invited me to assist him with research contacts for recording Doukhobor music in Saskatchewan and Alberta. I got to know him well, and we were friends to his death. His legacy lives on.
Ken Peacock's formal musical training began at the age of five when his parents discovered him at the piano playing tunes he had heard on the phonograph. At the age of twelve he had a juvenile dance combo which played at local school dances and lodge banquets. But classical music was his main interest and he continued playing, composing, and teaching while attending university. At fifteen he graduated from the Conservatory in Toronto [1947: The Royal Conservatory of Music] and four years later completed the Bachelor of Music course at the University of Toronto. He later studied philosophy, English and anthropology and continued his music studies in Boston and Montreal. His String Quartet #1 won a McGill Chamber Music Society Award in 1949.
In 1949 he met Marius Barbeau, Dean of Canadian folklorists, and worked with him on a number of projects including the transcription of First Nation music from old Edison cylinder recordings housed in the National Museum. Indigenous music and literature provided the basis of much of his composition during this period. His cantata Songs of the Cedar, based on West Coast native poetry, was among the compositions chosen to represent Canada for the Art Competitions at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.
Working for the National Museum of Canada
from 1951 up to 1971, Kenneth Peacock's work took him from
one end of Canada to the other, often pioneering in areas
where folklorists had yet to venture. When Marius Barbeau
invited him to go to Newfoundland and begin to record the
folk music of the people there, Peacock told Dr. Barbeau:
"I don't know anything about recording." To which Barbeau
replied: "Neither do I. You can improvise as you go
along." And Peacock did exactly that.
'Mrs. Wallace Kinslow, Isle Aux Morts, with Kenneth Peacock.'
Photo from Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (1965), Volume 2, page 409,
With tape recorder in hand and a music
notation pad, his work in Newfoundland launched him as a
multicultural folk-song collector. Unfortunately he was
not a trained ethnomusicologist,
In between visits to Newfoundland, Barbeau
invited Peacock to collect music of Cree, Blackfoot, and
other natives of the Canadian Plains.
In 1953 and 1957, Peacock wrote and performed a series of radio lectures for the CBC about Newfoundland folk music.
 |
 |
Some of these songs along with Newfoundland
material were released in the 1950s on two albums (above):
Indian
Music of the Canadian Plains (1955) and Songs
and Ballads of Newfoundland (1956) by Ken
Peacock, based on rare material taken down by hand in
remote areas where lack of electricity prevented the use
of a tape recorder.
After his first decade in 1963, he published a 13-page summary (A Survey of Ethnic Folkmusic Across Western Canada, Doukhobors pages 1-3) reporting that so far he met with 33 ethnic groups and recorded music from 18.
After more than 10 years of field work
(1951-1961), during six field visits, Peacock collected
766 songs and melodies from 118 singers in 38 communities.
At the end of his Newfoundland research in
1961, a West German film company hired him to make a
one-hour documentary on the folk music of Newfoundland
which was later broadcast on European television.
He was founding member of the Canadian Music Council. In 1961 he was commissioned to write an orchestral composition Essays on Newfoundland Themes for a special concert devoted to music based on indigenous folk tunes.
In 1962 Peacock set out across Canada to see
if it would be feasible to study the folk music of
immigrants from Europe and Asia. In his 11,000 mile
journey he discovered a goldmine of material and spent the
following 10 years crossing the country digging for
traditional music of almost forty cultures. He also began
photographing and collecting the rich variety of musical
instruments and folk artifacts of these cultures. His
pioneering efforts formed the basis for the vastly
expanded research and display programs of the National
Museums of Canada. To help others to do what he was doing,
he compiled his advice into a 184-page book: A
Practical Guide for Folk Music Collectors (1966).
In 1963 he first visited USCC Doukhobor
and Sons of Freedom communities in British Columbia. He
was touched by the warmth, cooperation, deep faith, and
uniqueness of the singers and their voices. In 1964, with
my assistance, he continued recording with Independent
Doukhobors in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In those two years
he collected about 500 Doukhobor songs. He published 5
songs notated with musical analysis in Twenty
Ethnic Songs from Western Canada (1966)
(added to the online Internet Archive in Feb. 2024); and
then devoted a full book: Songs of the Doukhobors: An
Introductory Outline (Bulletin 231,
Folklore Series No.7.1970 -- 27 songs, Russian/
English, 167 pages, online at the Canadian Museum of
History in 9 PDFs).
In Twenty Ethnic Songs (91 pages),
covering Doukhobor, Mennonite, Hungarian,
Ukrainian and Czeck, Ken devoted 42 of 91 pages (46%),
including 12 photos and a complimentary 7-page
introduction, explaining USCC Doukhobors and
their song traditions. As the first musicologist who
transcribed the motifs of Doukhobor
psalms into musical notes, he found that their traditional
oral literature and music goes back to many centuries and
continues to unite all Doukhobors today
with beauty, culture, and spirit. One of the psalms he
transcribed explains it best: "The singing of psalms
beautifies our souls."
The following is a chronological list
spanning 30 years of most of the other publications about
Doukhobor song by and about Peacock:
- 1966 Peacock — "The Music of the Doukhobors." Alphabet
10 (1966): pages 33-44.
- 1967 Peacock — "Some Observations On Doukhobor Psalms
and Their Auditory Function," an Unpublished paper
prepared for the annual meeting of the American Folklore
Society, Toronto, Ontario Canada, Nov. 17-19. Pea-E-2.
Kenneth Peacock Fonds, Canadian Museum of Civilization
(now Canadian Museum
of History), 1967.
- 1969 Tarasoff — A Pictorial History of Doukhobors (Free account, Internet Archive) — 14 of Ken's photos published.
- 1982 Tarasoff — Plakun Trava: The Doukhobors. — 3 of Ken's photos published.
- 1970 Peacock — "Chord Songs of the Doukhobors." given
at the Faculty of Music, University of
Toronto, 12 Nov., Canadian Museum of Civilization, PEA E-1 (H 306-5), 1970.
- 1983 Peacock — Contributed four sections: "Doukhobors."; "Folk Music.";" Native North Americans in Canada. 3. Plains." and "Lithuania." Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. Eds. Helmut Kallmann, Gilles Potvin and Kenneth Winters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1981. 279-80; 336-37; 452 and 556.
- 1992 Perry — Perry, Shirley Mercedes (nee Cheveldayoff). Selected Psalms, Old Verses and Spiritual Songs of the Canadian Doukhobors: Transcription and musical analysis. Ph.D. thesis, School of Music, University of Arizona, 1992, 267 pages. — Critique of Peacock's publications.
- 1995 Peacock — 'Culture and Continuity -- A Personal
Reminiscence of the Nineteen-Sixties', in
Tarasoff, Koozma and Klymasz, Robert Bogdan, eds., Spirit Wrestlers : Centennial Papers in Honour of Canada's Doukhobor Heritage, Mercury Series, Vol. 67, Hull, Quebec : Canadian Centre for Folk Studies, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1995, pp. 33-38. (Internet Archive).
In 1965, about half of this Newfoundland material
collected in the 1950s (409/766 = 53%) was published by
the Canadian Museum of History into a monumental
three-volume collection totaling 1035-pages, Songs
of the Newfoundland Outports (1965) (above).
He documented British, French, Irish, Newfoundland and
Gaelic songs, capturing and era when many people were
still singing widely as the distraction of radio,
jukeboxes,
records, tapes, and television was beginning to affect
their cultures.
News of his work in this remote area
inspired many musicians and singers to seek out, learn and
preserve their heritage and stimulate a traditional
folk-music revival (trad-rock) in Newfoundland,
influencing the band Figgy Duff,
spreading to the USA and apparently inspiring folk
singer Bob Dylan.
In 2019 these 3 volumes were posted by the
Trent University Library, Ontario, for anyone to read for
no cost on the Internet
Archive. You need a free account to borrow
these 3 book for 1-hour increments, and access over
70 million items, most in the public domain. (Search
for 'Doukhobor' and find nearly 400 items.)
Another project, A
Garland of Rue: Lithuanian Folksongs of Love and
Betrothal (1971) edited by Ken, is a collection of
Lithuanian matchmaking songs about "the sad state of
marriage." For Peacock the songs were particularly
interesting because the Lithuanian people were
Christianized only in the 13th century; many of their
songs still contained powerful references to pre-Christian
beliefs when trees, stones, the sun and the moon were gods
and goddesses. He was fascinated with mystical folk
culture.
The Canada Music Week newsletter (Nov. 19-26, 1989) made this assessment of Kenneth Peacock:
|
|
"Several Canadian composers, including Harry Somers, John Beckwith and Keith Bissell, have made various types of concert settings of his folksongs, sometimes with specific artists in mind such as Maureen Forrester or the Festival Singers [of Canada]. And on a more popular level, professional folksingers have been using his material on recordings, radio and television for over 35 years. It has been said that his pioneering research and publications on so many cultures has contributed much to the current interest in multiculturalism in Canada." |
Kenneth Peacock was an avid reader who enjoyed the company of intellectual and creative peoples. He and composer Harry Somers were students of John Weinzweig. Although he did not personally know Glenn Gould, the two probably passed each other in the music conservatory's halls at the University of Toronto. Peacock recalls being in Marshall McLuhen's home in Toronto around 1953 when several professors were deeply engrossed arguing the merits of Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951). As he was leaving, McLuhen, the master of "the medium is the message", said: "Do you know that there is a new toilet paper for executives? It is green in color and smells sweet with chlorophyll. Why? 'For kissing sweet'".
During his teens, Peacock recalls when the famous Northrop Frye invited him and other students for classes in his home. "He was a very kind person," Ken told me, "but people were afraid of him. He was intelligent and precocious. When dealing with literary criticisms at the table, he often quoted lengthy paragraphs by memory."
Along with colleagues Marius Barbeau (1883-1969), Helen Creighton (1899-1989) and Edith Fowke (1913-1996), he is considered a pioneer in terms of his efforts to research and disseminate music in Canada. In terms of this, he was also influential in the Canadian folk revival movement. His musical talents were greatly appreciated by Helen Creighton who employed him to do most of the transcriptions of her Nova Scotia collection. He also provided musical transcriptions for Robert Klymasz for some of his Ukrainian publications. His work was readily used by such professional folk song interpreters as Tom Kines (1922-1994) and Alan Mills (1913-1977). Alan Mills autographed a copy of his book Favorite French Folk Songs (1965) "To Ken who knows so much more about our songs, then I do, and whose kindness in sharing his knowledge with others is deeply appreciated."
Although he was not interested in organized religion, Peacock was always interested in spiritual matters, the search of the inner and outer spaces, and Chinese Tao. As time permitted in the 1980s, he went on retreats with a Tibetan Buddhist on top of a mountain near Lincoln, Vermont, USA. His search for simplicity, sincerity, depth of meaning, and beauty were revealed here as they were in his photographic interests which he developed from his youth and later used in his fieldwork.
For many years he made his own horoscopes and often threw I Chings using coins for himself and friends. He once threw one for me to determine whether I should choose to go to Smith Falls or Ottawa for an operation on a ripped Achilles tendon. The choice was Smith Falls and the operation was successful.
His personal library was rich with
spiritual, occult, and paranormal information, including
such authors as Edgar
Cayce, Carlos
Castaneta, G.I.
Gurdieff, Jane
Roberts, Bertrand
Russel, George
Bernard Shaw, Plato, Aldus
Huxley, Henry
David Thoreau, Noam
Chomsky, Robertson
Davies, Northrop
Frye, and many others. Many of these volumes have
since been donated to local hospitals. He was friends with
singer k.d.
lang.
By the end of his folklore collecting career
Peacock had made over 3,300 recordings on 560 tapes. His
correspondence, essays, and visual and auditory materials
of 2,500 songs from the field collections of 552 tape
recordings recently formed the Kenneth
Peacock fonds (F 669) at the Provincial Archives
Saskatchewan, Regina; and the Kenneth
Peacock Fonds, Memorial University of Newfoundland
and Labrador Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA), with
144 audio reels (1951-1961). Earlier his full photographic
and audio collection was catalogued and is housed
at the Canadian Museum of Civilization [2013: Canadian
Museum of History] in Hull [now in Gatineau],
Quebec. He willed most of his estate to the Faculty
of Music, University of Toronto which funds the
"Kenneth H. Peacock Lecture Series", and to the Main
Branch of the Ottawa YMCA-YWCA [National Capital Region].
The legacy of this talented musician, composer, and
folklorist lives on.
| Imagine
Perfect Resonance. A chord is struck, but never
fades, sustained forever Kenneth Peacock was a distinguished alumnus of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music. His body of work, as a composer and researcher for half a century, has made a significant impact on musical life in Canada. The Faculty of Music was very grateful to learn that Mr. Peacock had made a bequest to the University of Toronto in his will for the benefit of our music programs. With this legacy gift, the Faculty of Music will establish the Kenneth H. Peacock Lecture Series in Music in keeping with his lifelong interest in and contribution to the multi-dimensional study of music. Thank you Mr. Peacock. — (Brochure: 'A World of Song: The MacMillan Singers', University of Toronto, Faculty of Music, October 27, 2001.) |
An only child, his mother Goldie died in
1975 and father Aubrey in 1978.
NEWFOUNDLAND ANALYSIS
Before Ken died in 2000, a graduate student
of folklore, Anna
Kearney Guigné (right) in Newfoundland, began a
16-year project in 1988 to review and organize his work, and
explain it to the local people in a way they might
understand. She chose Peacock as her research subject because she was familiar with the songs he helped preserve. She sang them. His tapes and notes were archived, and he was willing to help her, as were his surviving friends. She documented her extensive project in her PhD thesis and a book.
Since I lived in Ottawa, worked with and knew Ken, Anna asked me to help with some of her data collection. She would email questions to me, and I would visit Ken in the hospital and learn more about his life and send what I documented to Anna.
Most of her research was accomplished during the 6-year period before he died, tediously compiling a list and examining his entire body of work. She focused on his Newfoundland fieldwork, because it launched his lasting impact as a folk music specialist, and revived local folk song among the younger Newfoundlanders, like herself.
Anna Guigné was raised in the city of St. John's, not in the rural fishing villages that Peacock visited during Confederation. Using his notes she was able to find many of the people who Peacock recorded 40 years earlier.
He left a lasting impression, overly-romanticized, and somewhat controversial. Apparently some people did not fully appreciate his intrusion in to their secluded worlds nor his impact on the multi-ethnic cultures in their villages.
In her doctoral thesis published 4 years after Ken died, Anna explained her objective:
| '...outlining to persons who have misunderstood Peacock's research [and] what he was trying to accomplish. ... to better understanding his motivations for creating Outports and his treatment of the materials he collected. ... It later reshaped Newfoundlanders' views of the extent of their own musical traditions and contributed to the Newfoundland-centered folk revival. ... ' |
In 2008, Anna Guigné compiled a history of Ken and his work, published as: Folksongs and Folk Revival: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (below). The description says:
| |
New knowledge regarding Peacock's life and times facilitates our understanding of this man's immense contribution to both Newfoundland and Canadian folklore scholarship while at the same time allowing researchers to make greater use of the materials he so diligently collected. |
An excerpt from pages 245-246 reads:
| |
'Peacock was a man of his time. He valued songs that seemed the most ancient, the ones most like the songs brought to Canada from England, something that is just not done today. Furthermore, he gave little performance context. He did not describe when and where the songs he recorded were normally performed. When publishing the material he collected, he sometimes blended several recordings together to produce a more perfect piece, another practice that goes against current norms. Not surprisingly, what Peacock did was in keeping with the norms of his day.' |
In other words, Peacock was not a trained folklorist. A lot of information was missing and he spliced some song versions together, which changed the originals.
'Guigné is especially interested in restoring Peacock’s place both within the history of Newfoundland and with the broader development of folklore scholarship in Canada.'
A sample of 12 songs are online on the museum's YouTube channel.
The book was launched November 30, 2016, in the MMaP Gallery, Memorial University of Newfoundland. A video (56 min.) of the event is online with extensive discussion of his work by the author and three professors:
| |
Kearney Guigné, Anna. Hiscock, Philip. Willis, John. O'Bryne, Fergus. “Forgotten Songs of Newfoundland Outports Book Launch.” Recorded 2016, at the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. MMaP Special Event, 56:35 min. |
The latest review of Forgotten Songs was in 2018, nearly 2 decades after he died.
Ken was a memorable human being. I was glad to have been friends with him from our first meeting in 1964 to his death in 2000. He is not forgotten.
References
- Saugeres, Lise (1991) Figgy
Duff and Newfoundland culture. Masters thesis,
Memorial University of Newfoundland. — Figgy
Duff, Wikipedia. — Impact by Kenneth Peacock on
"trad-rock" is described on pages 94 and 135, with
examples on at least other 30 pages.
- Peacock, Kenneth. A
Guide to the Doukhobor Archives. Information
Management Services, Canadian Museum of Civilization,
1995, 1997 — a compilation of unpublished records about
the Doukhobors held in the Canadian Museum of
Civilization’s archives. 11 items by Peacock.
- Kenneth
Howard Peacock: 1922-2000 (PDF). Obituary by
Guigne, Anna K. Ethnologies, Volume 22, Number
2, 2000, p. 289–294 — Reprinted
(HTML) in The Free Library, 2014. — Error in
last sentence: Order of Canada awarded
in 1982, not 1984.
- In
Memoriam: Kenneth Howard Peacock, Composer and
Folkmusic Specialist 1922-2000, The Canadian
Folk Music Bulletin, Volume 35.1, May 2001,
pages 22-25. — Dissertation on "Negro Folk Music"
(1943). Error in last sentence, page 25: Order of Canada
awarded
in 1982, not 1984.
- Tarasoff, Koozma. 'Kenneth
Peacock: Outstanding Canadian Musician, Musicologist
and Folklorist., Iskra [Grand Forks,
B.C.] No. 1902 (2001): Pages 15-17. — The above
is an enhanced version, with images and links.
- Anna Kearney Guigne', 'Kenneth
Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports: The
Cultural Politics of a Newfoundland Song Collection',
Ph. D. thesis, Department of Folklore, Memorial
University of Newfoundland, Canada, 10 May 2004.
PDF 864 pages. — A critical review (pages 11-14)
and 'study of Peacock's life and work' to fill in
'large gaps' ... to ... 'provide new information about
the nature of folksong research in Canada in the 1950s
and '60s and its link to the Canadian folk revival
movement. (pages 6-7)
- Kenneth
(Howard) Peacock. Ethnomusicologist, composer, pianist
... by Denise Ménard and Betty Nygaard King, The
Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2007.
- Anna Kearney Guigné. Folksongs
and Folk Revival: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth
Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports,
ISER, Institute of Social and Economic Research #71,
Memorial University Press, April 2008, 331 pages
(Google
Book) — Interviews and biography.
—— Review by Mark Finch, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Ethnologies, 31(2), pages 338–341.
—— Review by Doreen Klassen (PDF), Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland & Labrador Studies, Vol. 24 No. 2 (2009), pages 281-283.
—— Review by Natalie Kononenko (PDF), Canadian Ethnic Studies, Canadian Ethnic Studies Association, Volume 41, Number 1–2, 2009, pages 245-247.
- Kenneth
Peacock, Canadian Music Centre, Music Library —
Links to: Works, Centrestreams, Products.
- Kenneth
Peacock, Wikipedia (English), 2011.
- Kenneth
Peacock, Wikipedia (German), 2015.
- Anna Guigné. The
Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports: As
Taken from Kenneth Peacock’s Newfoundland Field
Collection, 1951–1961, Mercury Series,
Cultural Studies Paper 87, November 2016, 460
pages, 17 illustrations, ISBN 978-0-7766-2384-9
—— 12 songs remain online from 27 posted on the Canadian Museum of History, YouTube channel, November 24, 2016.
—— Book launch (video 56 min. with advertising) held at The Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place, Memorial University of Newfoundland, November 30, 2016.
—— Book Review by Peter G. Toner, The Acadiensis Blog, May 19, 2017.
—— Book Review by Heather Sparling, Cape Breton University, Newfoundland & Labrador Studies, Vol. 33 No. 1, 2018.
- Research Ramblings: Kenneth Peacock and the
Newfoundland Folk Music Revival, Blog by katmakesphotos,
Part
1 (May 3, 2017); Part
2 (May 9, 2017); Part
3 (May 15, 2017); Part
4 (May 23, 2017); Part
5 (May 29, 2017); Part
6 (June 5, 2017) — The writer discovers and
admires Peacock's work, reviews those who influenced
him, his 3-volume book, his role in the Newfoundland
Folk Music Revival, and his style of ethomusicology and
it's impact on the band Figgy
Duff. Many references cited (some with errors)),
including archived items in the Kenneth
Peacock Fonds.
Photo credits: (Left to
right) (1) Appendix 5 : Plate 1, Photos of Kenneth Peacock
(Caption: Kenneth Peacock, age 5), Anna Kearney
Guigne', 'Kenneth
Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports: ...,
Ph. D. thesis, 2004. PDF, page 845; (2) Taken for the 1956
Folkways album Songs and Ballads of
Newfoundland, in Koozma J. Tarasoff collection, c. 1964;
(3) K.J. Tarasoff collection, c. 1979, from a newspaper
clipping; (4) 'Photographer unknown, Ralph Schlüter
Archive (cropped)', Kenneth
Peacock, Biographical information, Olympedia (Saved
on Internet
Archive, 15 April 2024.).