In Memoriam
 | Cynthia Millman FloydMarch 13, 1938 - July 13, 2011 In memory of my Piano Professor,  Click cover to download programme for Memorial Concert. |
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A ‘truly great mentor’ remembered in music
The Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, October 29, 2011
Angela Hewitt among performers at memorial concert for Cynthia Millman Floyd
Steven Mazey
It was a rich, remarkable and productive life in music that included eight years of piano study in Vienna, thanks to an admirer named Glenn Gould, performances across Canada and abroad, marriage to one of Canada’s most distinguished oboists and a four-decade career teaching at the University of Ottawa’s department of music, where she inspired generations of students.
At the university, Cynthia Millman Floyd was a founding member of the piano faculty in 1969, she helped create and design the graduate music program, she served as chair of the music department and later as vice-dean of the faculty of arts. She spearheaded the fundraising campaign for a much-needed new music building, Perez Hall, which opened in 1988 and thrives today, its studios alive with the sounds of young musicians and their mentors at work, trying to make the music better.
When Floyd was living her final weeks at Ottawa General Hospital in July following a lengthy illness, she turned to music for comfort, listening to recordings of Mozart concertos performed by Malcolm Bilson on the fortepiano, the lighter voiced early version of the piano that became a passion for Floyd late in her career. In 1995, she helped the university acquire a beautifully-made replica of an 18th-century fortepiano that became her instrument of choice.
On Sunday, Oct. 30 at Dominion-Chalmers Church, Floyd will be remembered through music, in a memorial concert involving colleagues and students whose lives she touched.
Performers will included Ottawa pianist Angela Hewitt, who while a student at the university studied piano pedagogy (the knowledge required to teach others to play the piano) with Floyd. Hewitt will perform pieces by Brahms and Bach. Other performers will include former students Frédéric Lacroix and Shoshana Telner (both now teachers themselves) in music by Mozart and Hindemith.
There will be tributes from colleagues, including pianist Evelyn Greenberg and former university music department chair Lori Burns. Floyd’s elegant style at the keyboard will also be heard, in a recording of a Bach piece with her husband Rowland Floyd, the much admired founding principal oboist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. The two met at the opening of the NAC in 1969, married a year later and were together to Cynthia’s final days. Their daughter Margaret, a nutritionist and writer, will also speak at Sunday’s event.
The praise has been pouring in since Floyd died July 13, at age 73. Pianist Andrew Tunis, who studied with Floyd and later became a colleague at the university, wrote in a tribute that “the School of Music and indeed the entire Ottawa music community lost one of its most important and beloved members ... an inspiring woman, whose devotion to the university and the School of Music helped make it a better place. She was a pillar of the faculty, passing her vast knowledge of the piano, musical style, and especially piano pedagogy to a new generation of music students.”
Hewitt, who is in town to solo with the NACO next week, says she was a young girl when she met Cynthia Millman, whose family was a friend of Hewitt’s family. Hewitt’s mother had taught Floyd music at Glebe Collegiate.
“I knew Cynthia from the time I was a very small child, and remember hearing her play, always beautifully, on many occasions,” Hewitt told the Citizen.
“Later on she was part of my life as a student at the University of Ottawa. I studied piano pedagogy with her for one year, and I remember how thoroughly she knew her subject. Many things I had never even thought about were clarified by her and brought to life. But it was really only recently that I realized how great her knowledge was of performance practice and stylistic concerns in music through discussions we had when I visited her or also by e-mail. She was very much aware of all the latest research in her field. She had boundless enthusiasm and energy for the things that really mattered to her, even in the face of her illness. She was greatly devoted to her students. Her lovely voice always sounded fresh and young, right to the end.”
Pianist and choir director Jane Perry, former music director at Ottawa’s First Unitarian Congregation, studied with Floyd as an under-graduate and graduate student in the 1990s. “I will always regard Cynthia as a model of what a truly great mentor can do,” Perry says.
“To be one of Cynthia’s piano students was to be encouraged, challenged, enriched and mothered, often all in the same lesson. I hold those lessons dear and will carry them with me for the rest of my life. Cynthia helped me deepen what has become an abiding love for the keyboard works of J.S. Bach. We had many long discussions, at the piano and sometimes over tea, about everything from ornamentation to the faith that drove Bach to compose. In the process, I learned a lot about her, about myself and about how to live a full and rewarding life.”
Born in Toronto, Floyd moved with her family as a young girl to Ottawa, where her childhood included piano lessons, prizes at festival competitions and singing in choirs.
She earned a diploma through the Royal Conservatory of Music and then spent eight years studying in Vienna at the suggestion of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, whom she had met through mutual friends. Gould was intrigued when he heard about the young Ottawa pianist who shared his enthusiasm for the music of Hindemith and Berg. Gould admired Floyd’s intellect and tastes and they exchanged letters over several years about music and performance. At Gould’s suggestion, Floyd studied at Austria’s State Academy for Music, where she spent most of the 1960s. Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Gould, she received financial support from the Canada Council for her studies there.
In Vienna, she earned a concert diploma and a piano pedagogy diploma with distinction and was awarded the graduating prize in 1968.
On returning to Canada, Floyd developed her career as a performer, teacher and music administrator. She performed across Canada, the U.S., Europe and China while also dedicating herself to her career at the university, where she taught piano pedagogy.
Ottawa pianist Frédéric Lacroix, one of the performers Sunday, studied with Floyd in the 1990s and later became a friend, turning to her for advice on teaching.
“She encouraged students to think for themselves and to interact with the music at a deeper level than is the norm in lessons. I found her to be incredibly organized and engaging in her classroom teaching. I am always striving to emulate her in my own classes. She offered me invaluable counsel. I just wish I could be as comfortable and as prepared as she was. I think that she planned her classes down to the minute.”
Colleagues say that Floyd’s achievements were even more remarkable considering that, for much of her adult life, she suffered from a chronic illness that sometimes required surgery and time from work. But she never let it get in her way and would smartly schedule her teaching around it and find ways to ensure her students didn’t miss out.
Tunis says Floyd handled illness “with a stoicism as well as a sense of humour; never eliciting any sort of self-pity, and always focused cheerfully and energetically on others. She was always a model of strength and grace, always available and accessible. I never once heard a complaint, a negative word, or an excuse. No matter how difficult the situation, she was always smiling, engaged, and eager to help out.”
Tunis and others say one of Floyd’s major achievements was her work as a driving force behind the construction of a much-needed new home for the School of Music, which opened in 1988. The previous home had been in a small, run-down building on Stewart Street. Working closely with others, including pianist Evelyn Greenberg, Floyd helped attract major early private donations that helped convince university administration there was support for the new building.
“The building that we all take for granted now was in large part the result of the vision, planning, perseverance and attention to detail” of Floyd. Tunis wrote in a tribute, “For this alone, the School of Music owes her a huge debt of gratitude.”
Though she spent much of her career working on modern pianos, Floyd fell in love in the 1990s with the sound of the fortepiano. She performed on it in Ottawa and at festivals, including the Boston Early Music Festival and the Scotia Festival in Halifax. The instrument that she helped acquire enabled students at the university to “study and experience piano music of the 18th and early 19th centuries played on the sort of instrument that would have been current at that time.” Tunis wrote.
Floyd retired in 2003, but continued teaching as a visiting professor through 2009. She also continued researching, writing and playing the fortepiano. In 2008, she released an acclaimed recording of music of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven performed on the pianoforte.
In Floyd’s memory, her husband and daughter have asked that donations be made to the Cynthia Millman Floyd scholarship fund at the university, to continue nurturing students as she did through her career.
Lacroix says he chose the Mozart Sonata KV330, which he will perform Sunday, because of Floyd’s love for the composer. He played the first two movements at a private memorial for Floyd in July, and says the second movement in particular “captures the essence of grief,” that he and others have been feeling - evoking the sadness of Floyd’s passing, but also “remembering the beauty of her life.”