Peter Gorman

National Librarian

Bachelor of Arts (Hons), 2006

Even as I’ve worked in other fields and gone to school for other things, music has always been there…. Playing music is a kind of superpower you can carry with you forever.

From the time he was a boy in Moncton, his feet dangling beneath the bench, Peter Gorman, BA(Hons)’06, has practised, played, performed and composed at the piano. In his teens, he was in a rock band, which later put out an album and toured the country the summer after he graduated from King’s. When he first arrived in Halifax, he brought his keyboard with him, joining a jazz band, playing for theatre productions and at the Wardroom, and finding solace in the practice rooms at the Dal Arts Centre.

Music gives Peter joy, a way of coping with stress and a creative outlet. And he feels gratitude that music is such a big part of his career too. He’s the National Librarian at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto where he lives with his wife Sophia Bearden, BA’07, and their two young children. At the Canadian Music Centre, he tends to a repository of nearly 50,000 works, including scores and recordings, by Canadian composers, helping to build the collection that continues to grow by over 1,000 new works a year.

Did you anticipate being able to have a career in music?

No, it doesn’t seem an easy thing to do. But at the same time, it’s been a continuing thread in my life. You know, even as I’ve worked in other fields and gone to school for other things, music has always been there. Like now—I live in a tiny apartment with a family of four and I have a piano in my living room and a Fender Rhodes in my bedroom. Obviously, that space could be for other things but it’s important to me. It doesn’t seem totally by accident that this is where I’ve ended up.

Can you tell me more about the Canadian Music Centre?

We are a national organization and also have regional offices across the country, including Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal. We don’t have a physical office in Halifax, but we do have a regional director based there. It’s an organization founded in 1959 at a time when many such arts organizations were being created and starting to flourish. It was established by a group of Canadian composers who decided they needed to get organized and have a place as a repository where they could keep their works, where they would be kept and cared for and live in perpetuity. And also, a place where people who wanted to study and perform those works could come and find them. That repository is the library now and that’s what I oversee.

Anyway, fundamentally we’re all about supporting, preserving and celebrating the works of Canadian classical composers.

Besides keeping a library, there are other things we do. We sell and rent scores and parts to performers and ensembles. We have a record label, Centrediscs, that releases albums featuring works by Canadian composers. And we have a performance space in our Toronto office, as well as in a few of our regional offices, where we host concerts, rehearsals and recordings.

What do you like about your job?

I’m dealing with music every day, which is such a gift. A lot of what I’m doing day-to-day is cataloguing, helping composers manage their works, helping people find works in the catalogue and supporting the record label. The rhythm is fairly constant.

What keeps the job eternally new and fresh is the astounding range of composers and compositions I deal with. We have everything here from more conventional chamber music to jazz to electroacoustic to sound art, including some really out-there stuff. For example, just in the past few weeks in the performance space we’ve hosted a solo piano CD release, a flautist in residency, an avant-jazz show and an experimental electro-noise concert.

And, I’ve got to say, I love the commute. I walk five minutes to work and come home for lunch every day. That is hard to beat.

Who would you say is an important up-and-coming Canadian composer?

There are so many. For a sense of scale, we intake a new batch of associate composers twice a year, and it’s usually between one and two dozen. I feel like our record label is a good representation of the sheer range of music. At this point it’s one of the very few record labels dedicated to the works of Canadian composers, and even as it was effectively on pause for the last year as we worked on refining the business model, we still put out over a dozen records in 2024. A few were just nominated for Junos. One is Vestiges d’une fable by Gabriel Dharmoo with members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. His music is wild, surreal—it’s very cool.

We had another Juno nomination—not that I care to be so awards focused—for the Canadian Art Song Project. They put out an album of works by Black Canadian composers, Known to Dreamers: Black Voices in Canadian Art Song, including pieces by the late Robert Fleming as well as current folks like Maria Thompson Corley and Larry Strachan. And that’s a really wonderful album.

Do you compose music as well?

Yes … I write music for sure. Mostly I just try to spend time at the piano, tinkering and improvising.

My main musical project right now is trying to get my kids into a daily practice routine, and I feel like we’re currently in a decent place. The six-year-old just recently started on piano, and it’s been so far so good. The nine-year-old has been at it long enough now that we’ve had some ups and downs, but right now we’re up.

I know a lot of folks who had bad experiences as kids being pressured to practise, so I try not to be too aggressive about it.

So, we fill our lives with music in any ways we can—playing it, listening to it, talking about it, going to concerts and festivals. Whatever we can do to instill in them: Playing music is a kind of superpower you can carry with you forever.