Dr. Walter Herbert Kemp, beloved former professor of music at Laurier, passed away on June 9, 2023. Walter made an indelible impression on many students during the 60s and 70s, when Laurier was still known as Waterloo Lutheran University. He moved on to Dalhousie University in 1977, where he spent the remainder of his career.
Coming to Waterloo from Oxford University at the age of 26 in 1965 as the full-time music director, Walter helped to establish the Department of Music, becoming its chair in 1967. He also developed the highly regarded University Choir that, with his support, evolved into the WLU Alumni Choir in the early 2000s. He returned to Waterloo many times to perform with the WLU Alumni Choir, which included many of his former students as members. In this memorial to a beloved teacher, mentor and friend, WLU Alumni Choir members share their memories of Walter and celebrate his legacy.
I arrived on the campus of Waterloo Lutheran University in the fall of 1966 as a very shy 17-year-old. At registration, various university clubs and organizations had set up information tables. I had always loved to sing, in church and school choirs, and thought that I would sign up to join the University Choir. I was almost deterred by the fact that an audition was required, but I signed up anyway. As the time for the audition approached, I almost backed out, but gathered my courage and off I went. Walter was such an intimidating figure to a young woman with no voice training. I don’t remember everything that he had me do in the audition, but at the end he said there was a place for me in the choir if I was willing to sing tenor! It had never occurred to me that I might be anything other than a soprano, but Walter sure got that one right. I have been comfortably ensconced in the tenor section of various choirs for the past 57 years.
He introduced us to Canadian composers through the Waterloo Lutheran University Choral Series - the late John Beckwith's Sharon Fragments and Norma Beecroft's The Living Flame of Love come immediately to mind - as well as to his own compositions - his arrangement of the Latvian Boat Song and his Five Poems of William Blake. An English major friend of mine from the choir told me years later that knowing the Blake poems got him through a final exam question! Walter also introduced us to some amazing affiliate artists, Peter Van Ginkel, Eileen Shelle and Carol Anne Curry.
It wasn’t until approximately 30 years later that the connection with Walter and the University Choir had a profound effect on my life. After I graduated in 1970 and moved to Sudbury in 1973, I lost contact with the university and my friends from those days. In late 2003, I was contacted by those who became the basis for the WLU Alumni Choir about a proposal to put together a concert to raise money for a scholarship to honour our fellow choir member, the late Keith Knights. I jumped at the chance and was delighted to reconnect with friends from those days and spent a weekend singing under Walter’s direction (and eating pigs’ tails at Heidelberg Inn). I’ve attended almost every Homecoming choir reunion since. And through those connections, I ended up moving to Guelph and vowed to never again lose touch with people I’ve come to love dearly.
In the spring of 1972, I auditioned for Walter hoping to be accepted to the WLU Music Piano Performance program. I was from a small town (Wallaceburg, Ont.), had poor high school marks, no elevated musical credits and grew up with garage bands, rock radio and Motown music. At my audition he didn’t ask me to perform a classical piece, he just asked me to play. He joined me at the piano and asked me to improvise responses to his musical questions. He allowed me into the program. He shouldn’t have, since I was not very good as a “classical” player, but in spite of my inadequacies as a classical pianist he accepted me anyway. Throughout my years at WLU he encouraged me to simply be creative, telling me that “the only reason you’re learning the rules is to know which rules you are breaking.” Under his guidance I graduated as the very first Composition grad from the Bachelor of Music program in 1976, became a studio musician, arranger, composer and producer, and built a life, career and family through the music business. My wife Brenda and I met while singing in the WLU Choir. We have two amazing daughters each with a wonderful husband and five beautiful grandchildren. Thank you, Walter, a mentor and friend.
Eileen Mercier is Laurier’s Chancellor.
As a 17-year-old first-year student looking for friends and a university “home,” I joined the University Choir in September 1964 when it was directed by Charles McLain. Despite the awfulness of Room C315, all of us who loved singing persisted because we found friends there with a common love of music. When Walter arrived in my second year, he was a strange creature. I think we all thought he was old because he was just as we all assumed an Oxford professor would look and sound like. I think he was scarcely 10 years older than we were! He brought a new discipline to our singing and immense variety to our repertoire. Who could forget the Sharon Fragments, commissioned for us, or the Latvian Boat Song, actually written for us! The centennial tour in February 1967 was so memorable. I’m not sure how he got permission for us to sing in the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde in Montreal, but I will never forget him trying to find a place for us to stand where the music would not simply fly to the immense ceiling instead of out to the audience. I drove him to the home where he was staying at the time of his last appearance with us in the 2000s, and I remember wondering if I would see him again. I did not. But forget him? Never.
Others have written about their time with Walter while on campus or in the University Choir. I would like to share my comments around the formative years of the WLU Alumni Choir and Walter’s commitment to that initiative.
We first put out a call for interested choir members and met in Keffer Memorial Chapel in the spring of 2002. Walter was then on staff at Dalhousie University but agreed to come back at his expense to lead us in song. We reminisced, sang a few songs from our former choir repertoire, agreed that we wanted to honour Keith Knights – a former University Choir member who had passed away – in some meaningful way and discussed holding a concert in the fall of 2002. Walter returned in the fall to rehearse a choir of some 60 former singers and we performed at the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall. We raised a little money and officially kicked off the Keith Knights Memorial Award with plans to present our initial – and what we thought would be one-time – award at a future concert in 2004.
Over the next years, Walter returned to Waterloo and Toronto on several occasions to work with a small committee, which included Bob Richardson (BA ’70), to develop the gala event. Bob would lead weekend workshops geared to learning the music for the upcoming concert. Walter returned for a full weekend workshop culminating in a Sunday performance concert featuring the Fauré Requiem in May 2004 that was recorded live with a choir of just under 100 singers.
I can’t recall whether Walter ever conducted the WLU Alumni Choir after that event. But I can say without reservation that the infectious enthusiasm that he exhibited toward so many former University Choir members that he hadn’t worked with for upwards of 30 years is probably the number one reason that so many of the grads from the 60s and 70s are still coming back to Laurier to join in the choir today. Can Walter have possibly left a more meaningful legacy?
Like some other University Choir members, I came to Waterloo Lutheran University with no musical background other than singing in the high school glee club, which my father directed. My dad instilled in me an appreciation of music, but as for the talent part – that was always more questionable. What Dr. Walter Kemp did was open up a whole new musical world to the students at WLU regardless of their backgrounds or abilities. He was not a snob when it came to our musical aptitude. He treated those who came to the university because of its developing Faculty of Music the same as those students who were there in the Business program or, like myself, in the Arts program. I studied psychology and sociology.
We sang the various Passions by J.S. Bach and the Messiah and so much more. Many years later, I would listen to the Christmas readings or the Easter readings and hear the music in my head. We had associate artists who mingled with the choir and travelled with us. Maureen Forester came to the after-concert party at Rob Asselstine’s place after a successful performance of Carmen with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony!
Dr. Kemp gave us the opportunity to sing some phenomenal Canadian compositions and that is a gift that the WLU Alumni Choir is working to maintain. We have two commissioned pieces, With Light Unending by Leonard Enns and The Anniversary Allleluia by Rob Asselstine, who incidentally sang together in the choir during their time at WLU. This is Dr. Kemp’s legacy and one I am so very fortunate to have been a part of.
The arrival of Walter Kemp in the autumn of 1965 was certainly attention-getting: English clothing, including an Oxford scarf that appeared with cooler weather. He was a seasoned punster and we had to listen carefully as they came easily and often to spice up our rehearsals in C315 on choir days.
He exhibited a joy and liveliness that captivated choir members new and old. Suddenly we were a choir delivering music as he wanted, which was a change from previous directors. Dr. Kemp was getting the choir noticed in Kitchener-Waterloo as we sang for the turning on of the city Christmas lights and non-Lutheran churches. He developed new courses, he coached solo voice performers and he kept growing the choir until it filled two buses for high school tours. For Canada’s centennial, we undertook an
expanded choir tour, singing an all-Canadian program of French and English music across southern Ontario and Quebec with guest soloists. Walter allowed for some free time for us in Montreal and Québec City!
After 1967, there was growth in the music department – more practice space, more faculty, more student performances of opera and musical trios. In the spring of 1970, the choir, with over 60 members, was invited to the International Church Music Conference in Valparaiso, Indiana to perform Canadian music to great applause.
It was a life-changing moment for me.
Having experienced a checkered six-year career in high school and finally graduating grade 13 via night school, I had launched a full-time career as a stock boy for an international company headquartered in Toronto earning the princely sum of $76 a week.
I had applied to Waterloo Lutheran University hoping to gain admittance to the Bachelor of Arts program majoring in music or maybe a Bachelor of Music. My ambition was to teach music in public school – a road, as it turned out, I did not follow. To my surprise, Walter phoned and asked if he could meet with me for an interview at my parents’ Toronto home, where I was living at the time.
My music background consisted of grade 5 piano conservatory, which I had abandoned at the age of 12 for my road hockey career (that went well!), five years as a treble in church choirs and a year or two conducting a children’s choir at our church. Nowhere near the qualifications for admission to the music program.
The doorbell rang and in came Walter, associate professor and the chair of the Department of Music at WLU. It was a life-changing moment for me. For reasons I may well never fully understand, I was admitted, despite high school marks which would not even be considered these days. He took a risk and accepted me into the life of WLU and music.
Walter is credited with founding the fledgling music department at WLU just a few years earlier, which while not yet a faculty had developed a decent reputation for vocal music, organ and piano performance and church music, in a short time. The physical facilities were sketchy to say the least. The music building was a three-storey converted house. How they ever managed to get upright grand pianos into the third-floor piano rooms through the narrow staircase defies my imagination!
Walter clearly enjoyed teaching and conducting. He opened his students’ minds to music from around the world, from folk to baroque, French Chanson to German Lieder, China to India, North to South America, 12 tone avant-garde to a bit of the Beatles. He was demanding but supportive. He sought to share not only his passion and love of music, but to bring out the absolute best in his students. A number of students from those days went on to have international careers as concert pianists, opera singers and musical producers.
He loved conducting, not only for the sheer delight inherent in making choral music but intentionally using it as a vehicle to promote WLU’s music program. His 90-voice University Choir, opened to any student who enjoyed singing, produced fine performances in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, tackling Handel’s Messiah and three Bach Oratorios on a four-year cycle with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony;
Operas such as La Traviata and Carmen with the great Maureen Forrester; and annual choir tours throughout southern Ontario and the northern United States, aimed at places known for producing WLU students. He commissioned pieces by Canadian composers (R. Murray Schafer comes to mind) for world premieres, some of which (especially the tone cloud pieces) really stretched the performers’ abilities. None of us will forget singing at the annual Boar’s Head Dinner held in the old Theatre Auditorium, during which Lettermen (varsity athletes) served hundreds of attendees, seeking to break the previous year’s record time. As you might imagine it was literally a smashing success!
Walter wrote music, notably for our group, the Latvian Boat song in honour of his wife Valda’s homeland.
When Walter left WLU in 1977 he moved on to Dalhousie University where, according to one tribute recently offered, he transformed the face of the performing arts in Nova Scotia. He never lost his passion for WLU and would return to conduct the WLU Alumni Choir until he simply could no longer manage it.
It is important to remember those who go before us in whatever field we find ourselves in. Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before. We learn from them and build from them. While Walter would certainly want to acknowledge those who collaborated with him – Victor Martens, Barrie Cabena, Jan Overduin, Raffi Armenian and Howard Dyck, among others – he was the leader and thus the one on whose shoulders the superb Faculty of Music at Laurier now stands.
It has been over 45 years since Dr. Walter Herbert Kemp strolled the hallowed halls of WLU. He died in June this year in Nova Scotia, two weeks after his last production of Cosi Fan Tutti. He was a man of vision, someone who offered every opportunity he could to his own students, a person who favoured local artists and the local music scene, a man willing to give others a chance, even someone who had given up his piano in favour of his road hockey career. It was a life-changing moment for me.
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