{"id":51946,"date":"2018-11-19T10:53:12","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T15:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=51946"},"modified":"2025-10-17T16:40:56","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T20:40:56","slug":"nfb-composer-eldon-rathburn","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/nfb-composer-eldon-rathburn\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsung Hero: Projects Honour NFB Composer Eldon Rathburn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Unsung Hero: Projects Honour NFB Composer Eldon Rathburn\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

For three decades, he composed music for films that helped define Canadian culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He collaborated with celebrated artists at home and abroad, including fabled silent-film star Buster Keaton<\/a>, legendary filmmaker Norman McLaren<\/a> and beloved New Brunswick bandleader Don Messer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He played an instrumental role in a production that had a major impact on director Stanley Kubrick, whose sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> was inspired in part by a documentary<\/a> featuring a soundtrack by the longtime Ottawan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And although he was a staff composer at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB<\/a>) for 30 years, Eldon Rathburn<\/a> is not a household name. That\u2019s why Carleton Music<\/a> Prof. James Wright<\/a> wanted to write a book about \u201cone of the most multi-dimensional, prolific and endlessly fascinating composers of the 20th century, who wrote more music than any other Canadian composer of his generation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And why musicians Adrian Matte<\/a> and Allyson Rogers, a Carleton Music master\u2019s student and master\u2019s alumna respectively, produced and arranged a companion jazz album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThroughout his entire career he flew under the radar \u2014 he was incredibly modest and he shied away from the limelight, but he was always making music,\u201d says Wright, whose book, They Shot, He Scored<\/a><\/em>: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn<\/em>, will be launched in tandem with the CD The Romance of Improvisation in Canada<\/a><\/em>: The Genius of Eldon Rathburn <\/em>at the Carleton University Art Gallery on Nov. 23<\/a>, 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe had such a significant impact,\u201d Wright says of Rathburn, who also scored the first generation of IMAX films and created a diverse catalogue of orchestral and chamber works, \u201ceven if he has been for too long a largely unsung creative figure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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An Indelible Presence in NFB Films<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Although Wright had heard Rathburn\u2019s music over the years at music festivals and in films, he first connected personally with the composer in 2006, the year before he hosted a conference at Carleton dedicated to the chamber music of Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rathburn had sought guidance and mentorship from Schoenberg in Los Angeles after winning the prestigious Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra Young Artist Award for composition in 1945, and when Wright was organizing the conference, Schoenberg\u2019s children told him about \u201ca composer in town\u201d who had connections with their father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wright went to meet with Rathburn, who had two condos in Ottawa: one where he lived with his wife, Marguerite, and another full of scores he had composed, as well as musical and cinematic memorabilia and correspondence he had amassed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More Interesting Reads<\/h4>\n\n\n\n