Phyllis Gummer

Phyllis Mary Gummer was a Canadian composer of classical music.

Phyllis Gummer was born in Kingston, Ontario, and studied at Queen’s University, where her father was assistant professor of mathematics. In 1940 during her studies at Queen’s, her “Piano sonata” and the song “Requiescat” received first prize in an annual composition competition for Canadian composers under 22, held by the Canadian Performing Rights Society (now called the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada)^.1 The prize included a scholarship for study at the Toronto Conservatory (now called The Royal Conservatory of Music).

After receiving a Bachelor of Arts from Queen’s, she studied composition under Healy Willan and violin under Harold Sumberg at the Toronto Conservatory. In 1942 she won a fellowship in composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.²

Gummer composed several single-movement works for (somewhat curiously) the E-flat clarinet and piano: Two Romances, one Scherzo, and a half-finished Fantasy. German researcher and violinist Tobias Broeker owns the majority of Gummer’s original manuscripts, and has made his own transcriptions of her work available for free download on his website, tobiasbroeker.com. To date, no known recordings of these works exist.

Read a comprehensive biography at tobiasbroeker.com or wikipedia.org.

Romance 1 | 1939
E-flat clarinet and piano
Download free score and part