Healey Willan

F.R.C. Clarke is Professor Emeritus and former director of the School of Music, Queen's University.

'Clarke's excellent book provides a stimulus for a wider appreciation of his music.'- Choice Magazine 'A warm and sympathetic portrait of the most prolific composer this country has ever known. ... Above all, it is a book which celebrates the attitudes of Willan as a teacher, composer and performer. Every choirmaster should read it, if only for one of the most trenchant pieces of advice any of them could ever have: "Sing words, sing words – any fool can sing notes - it takes brains to sing words."'- Arnold Edinborough (Canadian Churchman) 'Willan's contribution to Canadian music, even though he remained essentially an Englishman in manner and temperament, is enormous and far-reaching. A cursory list of his students (Louis Applebaum, John Beckwith, Robert Fleming, George Maybee, John Weinzweig – and of course F.R.C. Clarke) reads like a Who's Who in Canadian music.'- David Barber (Kingston Whig-Standard) 'A fine, generous, balanced, not uncritical, important and wise book about a man whose contributions to music in Toronto from his arrival in 1913 until his death in 1968 were, and remain, legendary.'- William Metcalfe (The American Review of Canadian Studies) 'An exceptionally well-organized book for serious students and concert-goers'- John Kraglund (The Globe and Mail)