Faculty of Music receives historic $1-million donation for Music and Health

The Faculty of Music is pleased to announce the establishment of the Elaine Keillor Music and Health Research Innovation Fund, a substantial enhancement to music research at the University of Toronto and to the science and practice of Music and Health, made possible by a historic $1-million donation from scholar and musician Dr. Elaine Keillor.

The recent gift is the biggest made by a Faculty of Music graduate to date, and with Dr. Keillor’s rich personal history with the Faculty, marks a significant moment for Canadian music research, in particular to the future of Music and Health.

The Elaine Keillor Music and Health Research Innovation Fund is structured to produce recurrent annual funding that may be applied to support doctoral and post-doctoral fellows, as well as to direct funding opportunities for research projects of the Faculty’s Music and Health Research Collaboratory (MaHRC). A portion will be used to take advantage of the Provost’s current matching fund in support of graduate and international students for studies in Music and Health.

Who is Dr. Elaine Keillor?

“Elaine Keillor’s knowledge of Canadian music, as both scholar and performer, is legendary. She began her career as a remarkable child prodigy, completing the piano performance and theory requirement for the ARCT diploma at the age of ten - Glenn Gould was a late bloomer by comparison, as he did not earn his ARCT until the age of thirteen,” says Professor Robin Elliott, Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music, and Director of the Institute for Canadian Music.

Dr. Keillor was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in musicology at the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Order of Canada and a Carleton University Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, recognized for her research on music of Indigenous peoples of North America - particularly First Nations music in Canada. Along with scholarship, Keillor is an internationally recognized pianist with 30 CD recordings of solo and chamber music and numerous tours in her decades-long career. Dr. Keillor’s many research and artistic achievements, along with so many more in the areas of publications, awards and presentations, are thorough and impressive, and she is still actively teaching, performing and researching.

Elaine Keillor was born 2 September 1939 in London, Ontario. Her father, Stanley Keillor, ran a hatchery and was a singer and cellist. Her mother, Lenore Stevens Keillor, was a violinist and piano teacher. “Although my parents had limited means, they encouraged me, and ours was a musical household,” recalls Keillor. Her mother taught at home, and Elaine, a natural talent, was soon performing with orchestras. With the Canada Council not in place yet, and without a wealthy sponsor, Keillor took short-term lessons with teachers in the United States, England and Germany, paying for it with the money she made from performing, teaching, and being a church organist.

Unfortunately, during a cross-Canada tour in 1959, Keillor faced a great setback: “… I suffered an injury to my left hand while actually performing a recital on a day that had been very difficult, and for which I had not had any opportunity to even do a warm-up on the piano I had to use.” The pain was excruciating and she could not even stretch an octave with her left hand. At the local emergency, x-rays were taken, but there was no clear diagnosis available then. She completed the tour somehow, but it took four long years to get a diagnosis: a torn ligament in the left thumb. Facing invasive surgery that was likely to fail, she took the option to rest from professional touring for five years, to hope, and wait for the thumb to heal naturally.

Elaine Keillor and the University of Toronto:

Meanwhile, Keillor had met Vernon McCaw, a teacher, and in 1963 they married and moved to Toronto. He was teaching full-time for the Toronto Board of Education (now merged into the Toronto District School Board), and he decided to work towards a Master of Education degree at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, simultaneously. “My husband had obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree though night courses and summer school”- they were no strangers to hard work.

While helping with Vernon’s research, Keillor found that she enjoyed academic work. As she was mostly homeschooled to accommodate her busy performance schedule, she did not experience much academic context till then: “Because of the hours I had needed to practice the piano and then the violin as well from the age of six, my parents had decided to homeschool me – a very unusual decision at that time, but my mother had a couple of school teachers among her students, so one of them would come for a piano lesson, then stay an extra hour to coach me,” says Keillor. She did attend secondary school part-time, but her remaining credits were done through correspondence courses and self-study.

With some private teaching and occasional gigs in her calendar, Keillor started to take courses at York University, as they had a much more generous policy for mature students. When York decided on a campus extension, therefore creating a long daily commute, Keillor decided to explore the possibilities at U of T Music.

During her initial entrance interview, Professor Harvey Olnick told her that she would have to begin at the second-year level, and recommended that she should look into studying musicology. “During that first year, I had to take many Mickey-Mouse courses, but fortunately I found some sympathetic professors who realized it was crazy that I should have to take them. They gave me final grades early, and that meant I had time to explore the wonderful resources of the music library,” recalls Keillor.

Elaine Keillor’s prowess as an academic and musician was quickly noted, and soon, she started to receive academic funding from U of T Music. Obtaining her Master’s degree in a year, she then accepted a full-funding offer for doctoral studies. Her dissertation project, an extension from the long-established tradition of studying ‘Kleinmeister,’ minor composers who influenced genres and other more famous composers, was on Leontzi Honauer, 1737-ca1790 and the development of solo and ensemble keyboard music. Completed in 1976 under the supervision of Professor Carl Morey, Dr. Keillor became the first woman to receive a PhD in musicology from the Faculty of Music.

Dean Don McLean remembers her from his undergraduate days at the Music Library back in the 1970s. By then, Keillor was at the end of her doctoral studies: she was widely regarded by the students as a formidable individual, already known for her capabilities both as a researcher and performer. “At that time, these things tended to be isolated from each other, and, indeed, research on Canadian music was in its early, formative days,” says McLean.

Post School:

After graduation, Keillor continued her work as a church organist, and briefly taught at Queen’s University. “It was nearly 45 years ago, that I first became aware of Dr. Keillor, when she was appointed to teach at Queen’s University while I was an undergraduate student here,” recalls Elliott. After a year at Queen’s, Keillor accepted a position at Carleton University. She remembers: “For eleven years, I commuted between Toronto and Ottawa, until my husband retired.”

Professor Elliott and Dr. Keillor worked together on many occasions through the Canadian Musical Heritage Society (CMHS), a project started by Keillor and Canadian musicologist Helmut Kallmann at the Music Division of the National Library of Canada. Through the CMHS, the community built not only professional relationships, but also created strong personal impressions of one another; Elliott became better acquainted with Keillor’s selfless devotion to the cause of Canadian music, and Keillor was deeply impressed by Kallmann’s dedication. “I had always thought it amazing that this Jewish refugee, Kallmann, would take it upon himself to investigate the musical heritage of his adopted country when Canadians themselves showed little interest,” says Keillor.

Through CMHS’s work in tracking down Canadian notated compositions created before 1950, some 1,000 works were published, selected from 35,000 traced works; and Keillor felt that something must be done to mark Helmut Kallmann’s legacy: “Because I knew that he did not have children to carry on his heritage, I wanted to honour both him and also keep alive the tradition of Canadian musical scholarship that had been built at Carleton over the years,” says Keillor. So when the project faced difficulties due to lack of funding, Keillor dug deeply into her own pockets to ensure it and established the Helmut Kallmann Chair in Canadian Music at Carleton University in 2017. “Elaine’s donation to establish the Helmut Kallmann Chair in Canadian Music was an act of unparalleled kindness - and what a lovely, selfless tribute it was to name it after Kallmann, who was a kindly father figure to all Canadian music scholars,” says Elliott.

Elaine Keillor Music and Health Research Innovation Fund and Elaine Keillor Music and Health Research Fellowship

When Don McLean, the Dean of the Faculty of Music since 2011, heard about the establishment of the Kallmann Chair at Carleton University, he asked for a meeting with Keillor, and inquired if she might be interested in setting up something at the faculty that bore her name. “When he informed me about the Music and Health initiative, this was intriguing,” says Keillor.

The current education system’s lack of focus and appreciation for music has been personally troublesome for Keillor, and she is greatly concerned about the young generation who may have no possibility of discovering the joy of music. “I know that we have to go way beyond the so-called Mozart Effect, to create a change in attitude among the general public, and particularly among those in charge of our education systems. My hope is that the future work of MaHRC will go a long way towards achieving that goal,’ says Keillor.

Jennifer Bremner, Interim Director of Advancement at the Faculty of Music, first met Keillor in January 2019, while visiting alumni in the Ottawa area. She recalls that during their initial meeting, when she inquired about Dr. Keillor’s personal philosophy of philanthropy, Keillor expressed the values that her parents had instilled in her - that naturally one would give in whatever capacity they are able to.

Music and Health Research Collaboratory (MaHRC):

Established in 2012, MaHRC has been able to build a large community of research collaborators, becoming an international leadership centre for research, teaching, and clinical application of the latest developments in music and health science.

Located at the University of Toronto’s downtown Toronto campus, the current MaHRC in-house facility includes: a VICON motion capture lab (pictured above); two EEG systems and two Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy systems for brain imaging; a digital music lab; and individual work stations for all students and post-doctoral fellows. Collaborative resources include PET, fMRI, and MEG brain imaging.

“MaHRC runs about 18 research projects currently - some are on hold due to COVID-19, with 12 collaborative units across campus and teaching hospitals,” says Dr. Michael Thaut, Director of MaHRC. With Dean McLean’s invitation in 2015, Thaut left Colorado State University where he worked for 25 years. Since then, his main focus is on building a team of affiliate collaborator faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and students to develop a new comprehensive research plan.

In 2016, MaHRC started to focus its research into the basic and clinical neuroscience of music, studying how the brain processes music, in particular the connectivity between auditory and motor, language, and cognitive networks in the brain. Clinical translations of the neuroscience of music perception, music production, and music cognition have become standardized in Neurologic Music Therapy which utilizes research-based techniques to treat the brain using music and rhythm to optimize function and rerouting of neuropathways to achieve improved functionality and to produce rehabilitative results in non-musical domains, like speech, physical movement and cognition. Dr. Thaut was appointed a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Music, Neuroscience, and Health in 2017.

“The combination of fundamental neuroscientific research with clinical applications, notably in various forms of rehabilitation covers wide topics, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer diseases, dementia, traumatic brain injury, cardio rehab, autism, and more recently mental health,” says McLean.

The most profound significance of Dr. Keillor’s gift to U of T Music is its assurance of creativity in the present and the future. The unpredictable nature of the clinical research process means a project can often have limitations due to funding, especially for brain-related research. “Dr. Keillor’s endowment will provide a tremendous foundation in perpetuity to advance research in music and health on all levels, and support outstanding work of graduate students like Nicole Richard,” says Thaut. 

“I’ve had clients who went from being non-verbal to being quite loquacious with the help of music therapy, and have seen how NMT [neurologic music therapy] techniques can help organize the sensorimotor system to enable focus, concentration, and calm for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”
– Nicole Richard, PhD candidate, Music and Health Sciences
(pictured above, second from right, front row)

 Current collaborative projects in partnership include:

- Alzheimer’s Disease (MaHRC and St. Michael’s Hospital)
- Parkinson’s Disease (MaHRC, CAMH, and Toronto Western)
- Depression and Suicide (MaHRC and CAMH)
- Post-Stroke Recovery Study (MaHRC and TRI)
- Dissertation Project on Autism
- Centre of the Study of Brain, Performance, and Music Creation

“… With the potential to help treat depression non-pharmacologically, to reduce suicide risk, to help persons with Parkinson’s Disease improve their ability to stay mobile, to improve cognitive/memory abilities and induced brain plasticity for Alzheimer’s patients, to rethink the role of music in the neurodevelopment of autism spectrum disorder and to improve applications for high-performance movement, U of T Music is reimagining the potential that music embodies for the health and well-being of musicians, individuals and society.”
– Excerpt from Music and Health Overview, Faculty of Music

The Boundless Future:

Dr. Keillor’s life has been comprised of many amazing ‘firsts,’ and her scholarly activities and performance history reflects a deep dedication to excellency, especially in solidifying our Canadian identity. “Two signal events in Dr. Keillor’s career were the publication of her magisterial textbook, Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity, and the release of her four-CD set of recordings, Sounds of North: Two Centuries of Canadian Piano Music,” says Elliott.

Looking back to Keillor’s own student days in the late 1960s and 1970 shows her blazing a trail for Canadian music research. “At this time, research on Canadian music was still in its early days, and was somewhat frowned upon in the academy - this was before the establishment of the Institute for Canadian Music, now called Institute for Music in Canada,” says McLean.

Since then, there has been an impressive development in the field, and in particular, Dr. Keillor’s dedicated work in Canadiana – in her daily teaching, written works and recordings, especially those of the twentieth century, First Nations musical tradition, and popular music – form an integral part of Canadian music. With her philanthropic contribution - especially with the establishment of the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada and the Elaine Keillor Music and Health Research Innovation Fund, her dedication will continue to grow into the future as a rich legacy.

“I am deeply moved by Dr. Elaine Keillor’s generosity and her lifelong championing of Canadian music. As the first female PhD graduate from U of T Music, we should all be particularly proud of her pioneering achievements. To now have her name permanently associated with support for one of our leading areas of innovation is most gratifying. Philanthropy in the arts often comes from outside the field, from those who have achieved their success in business and industry. And we are grateful for their love of the arts and for their support. But it is a signal moment when someone who has dedicated their life to music, music research, and music teaching finds it in themselves to make such a transformative financial contribution. We know that Elaine’s gift will be a model and inspiration for us all.”
– Don McLean, Dean and Professor, Faculty of Music

Article by Dr. Hye Won Cecilia Lee, BMusEd, MMus, DMA

Images courtesy of Dr. Elaine Keillor and MaHRC. Learn more about Music and Health at the Faculty of Music.