John P. L. Roberts
John Roberts came to Canada from Australia. A former dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary, he is considered an authority in the arts of electronic media and on cultural policy - subjects on which he has both lectured and published widely in Canada and abroad. Dr. Roberts has had a long career in the radio, television, and recording areas. He began in 1955 as a CBC music producer in Winnipeg. Moving to Toronto, he was in charge of music broadcasts until 1975 as supervisor of music, head of music, and later head of Radio Music and Variety. Considered a pioneer, he established the CBC as a major producer of recordings in Canada and provided new opportunities for composers and performers to reach national and international audiences through the recording medium. Later, while director general of the Canadian Music Centre he established the Centrediscs Label which became a prime outlet for music by Canadian composers, and later still he established Unical Records at the University of Calgary.
While at the CBC, Roberts was responsible for the numerous visits of Igor Stravinsky to Toronto and the various historical broadcasts that resulted. At the same time, he coordinated these CBC projects with CBS Records in New York, and this allowed a substantial number of commercial recordings of Stravinsky’s music to come into being, which were released world-wide. He also established the CBC as one of the foremost producers of radio music documentaries in the world and encouraged the development of CBC festivals in principal Canadian cities.
Roberts met Glenn Gould in 1955 and they quickly became fast friends and colleagues. From Gould, Roberts commissioned several documentaries, numerous radio broadcasts (including one for the European Broadcasting Union) and the multi–week series The Art of Glenn Gould, which was rebroadcast several times. Roberts has written numerous papers and articles on Gould which he has presented in Canada and abroad and is the joint editor of Glenn Gould Selected Letters, published by Oxford University Press, as well as editor of The Art of Glenn Gould, published by Malcolm Lester Books, Toronto.
When Gould died in 1982 at the age of fifty, his father asked Roberts to arrange an ecumenical commemoration in St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Toronto to which three thousand people came. Roberts later established the Glenn Gould Foundation, which has as its major project the awarding of the $50,000 tri-annual Glenn Gould Prize for music and communications.
John Roberts was the first visiting fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montreal, is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has two honorary doctorates as well as the Cross of Honour for Science and the Arts from Austria and other distinctions as well.
