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~ Features ~

An Appreciation
by Neville Cohn

2003

Some days after attending a performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung at Perth Concert Hall, I telephoned Sir Frank Callaway who was in hospital at the time. I was dismayed and alarmed at how frail he sounded. Straining to hear the whispered voice, I suggested that perhaps I ought to ring at some other time. He paid no attention to this. Instead, he asked a torrent of questions. "What did you think of Götterdämmerung? Who sang Hagen? What was he like? Were the strings substantial enough? How did Siegfried's Funeral Music come across?" ­ and more. I answered as best I could, marvelling how acute and enquiring his mind remained notwithstanding the gravity of his illness and his increasing frailty. We spoke of other matters and I promised to telephone again ­ but it was not to be. Emeritus professor Sir Frank Callaway, holder of high office in international music education and a knight thrice honoured by the Queen, slipped away in the early hours of 22nd February 2003.

Only hours later, at the launch of a book by Wallace Tate, emeritus professor David Tunley, a colleague and friend of Callaway's for decades, read a message of congratulations from Sir Frank. There was barely a dry eye at the launch.

Frank Callaway did more than anyone to place Australia in general and Western Australia in particular on the international music education map.

Foundation professor of music at the University of Western Australia, retirement was a word that had no meaning for Callaway.

With the exception of a brief stint selling stationery in his native New Zealand during the Depression years, Sir Frank's was a life inextricably and joyfully entwined with music. Versatile as well as gifted, he was a superb administrator, choral trainer and director, and a more than proficient performer on violin, viola and bassoon (the last played in the band of the Royal New Zealand Air Force).

Frank was the youngest of four siblings; their father, a good cricketer who passed on his passion for the game to young Frank, was an electrical engineer. As a little boy, Frank attended primary school at Lake Coleridge Power Station in New Zealand.

"As a child, I simply loved being involved in music-making", he once recalled, and after first experiencing "the thrill of music-making as leader of an early children's orchestra, this sort of activity became central to my life."

In 1953, at 34, he came to Perth to the newly created position of Reader in Music in the University of Western Australia's faculty of education. Through hard work and an uncanny skill in choosing inspiring teachers and musical scholars of the most eminent kind as colleagues, the department ­ of which he eventually became foundation professor of music ­ developed under his stewardship into a tertiary department of international significance.

Though not for a moment diminishing the role of what he termed "the aristocracy of the gifted", he would often talk with quiet passion of "the need to cultivate a real democracy of music". He worked unceasingly to break down what he saw as "the barriers that seem to exist between performers, scholars, composers and teachers". And if such barriers have been breached, it is largely due to the energy of this avuncular, diplomatic and genial knight as President (1980-1981) of the International Music Council of UNESCO (he was subsequently elected Life Member of Honour) and Honorary President of the International Society of Music Education (ISME). In the latter capacity, Callaway was successor to eminent composers Zoltan Kodaly (Hungary) and Dmitri Kabalevsky (Russia).

A tireless traveller, Callaway, over the years, became involved in musical activities in most of the 70 member countries of the International Music Council. He was an honorary member of cultural bodies in, inter alia, Egypt, South Korea, the Argentine and the then-Czechoslovakia.

A superb administrator, he was chairperson of a myriad committees both local and international to all of which he brought, as well as a keen sense of humour, an elephantine memory.

I vividly recall my first meeting with Sir Frank to which I had brought an introduction from a mutual friend and a small mountain of papers concerning both my and my wife's work. He spread these across his desk. Then, resting his head on his right hand, he began to read, a process which took quite some time during which he did not move at all. Indeed, he was so still that I wondered if he had perhaps fallen asleep. Hardly!

Some twenty years on, I was astonished at his ability to accurately recall the fine detail of those documents. Certainly, the sage advice he gave me at that meeting proved invaluable, bearing out the recollections of Wallace Tate, former federal director of the Australian Music Examinations Board and a close friend and colleague of Sir Frank. Tate has written of Callaway's consideration and compassion for others "even at a time when his own health was fading..and whenever asked, gave generously of his wisdom, advice and practical assistance, attributes that remained with him until his closing days".

Judy Thönell, Secretary-General of ISME and, over a nine-year period, a pivotal and tireless figure in raising the profile of the Callaway International Research Centre for Music Education, testified to Sir Frank's extraordinary ability to inspire those around him, saying that "as with so many lives that he touched, he brought out in me things I did not know I was capable of achieving".

Honours rained down on him: he was a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, London (its greatest honour), he was WA Citizen of the Year in 1975, recipient of the Order of Australia and the UNESCO Medal ­ and both UWA and the University of Melbourne bestowed honorary doctorates on him. Emeritus professor David Tunley (who succeeded Sir Frank as director of the School of Music) said that he carried his many honours lightly and never lost the common touch.

John Ritchie, another long-time colleague and friend (at whose wedding Sir Frank was best man) recalled halcyon days when he and Callaway, both students of Vernon Griffiths, "a great British music educator", had their "teenage minds stoked with a love of music in the widest sense ­ composing, playing, teaching and studying at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, New Zealand.". During crowded years when Ritchie was Secretary General of ISME and Callaway Treasurer, their work often brought them together in centres as diverse as Dijon, Dresden, Brno, St Petersburg (then Leningrad), Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul.

Tongue-in-cheek, Ritchie writes that "the only negative quality I can ascribe to Frank was his relative inexperience as a drinker. He liked a glass of wine on occasion but was no connoisseur. He enjoyed a beer on a hot day but that was all. I recall at a formal ISME dinner seeing Frank vigorously shaking a bottle of champagne prior to withdrawing the cork, afterwards explaining to me that he wanted to make sure the bubbles were working!

"The result was an explosive removal of the cork, a chandelier three metres above the ground shattered on impact, the lights went out - and dining was suspended amidst a shower of glass and a host of waiters. And when the lights came on again, I noticed Frenchmen looking appalled while some Russian colleagues (perhaps accustomed to the smashing of vodka glasses) carried on as though nothing had happened. Dear Frank still held the bottle in his hand and couldn't make out why it was virtually empty".

In more serious vein, it was under Sir Frank's guidance that the department of music (now School of Music) at UWA was host to some of the most substantial and exciting music events ever mounted in the city such as, for instance, Andre Tchaikowsky playing the complete piano concertos of Mozart, a unique experience for city concertgoers. As well, Callaway campaigned tirelessly to raise the profile of idiosyncratic Australian composer Percy Grainger.

As director, for 25 years, of the UWA Choral Society, Callaway presided over more than 150 public concerts, many featuring first performances in Perth. He conducted Bach's St Matthew Passion no fewer than 20 times. He also founded ­ and for 15 years edited ­ the Australian Journal of Music Education and, with his long-standing colleague Professor Tunley, the musicological journal Studies in Music.

For a lifetime, Sir Frank worked passionately to draw people together through music, not only across national boundaries but across cultures. This was wonderfully exemplified by the remarkable and history-making Indian Ocean Festivals of 1979 and 1984 ­ one of Sir Frank's many brainchildren ­ which were a unique means of bringing together the diversity of people living on the Indian Ocean rim.

Although music was his main stage, there were other passions. Cricket, of course, and gardening. He had a green thumb; his gardens were often a blaze of colour ­ and he had a special way with roses. At his funeral, three of his grandsons shared memories of days helping their grandfather in his garden while listening to cricket commentaries on the radio.

Sir Frank is survived by his wife Kathleen, an accomplished musician in her own right (and, as John Ritchie recollects, a formidable opponent with Sir Frank in innumerable Scrabble games on long train journeys), four children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.