Our much-loved colleague Ken McLeod died in Ottawa on March 17, 2022, shortly after his 60th birthday; his obituary is online here. The Faculty of Music has established a fund in Ken’s name to support popular music studies at the University of Toronto; donations can be made here.
Our music theory colleague Steven Vande Moortele delivered the tribute below at the meeting of the Faculty Council on March 29th, 2022 and has given permission for it to be posted here.
Ken eulogy for Faculty Council Mar 29, 2022
I think I speak for all of those who were close to Ken when I say that I’ve been touched by the outpourings of sympathy over the last few weeks, from students and from colleagues not only here but also quite far afield. It is clear that Ken meant a lot to a lot of people, in this building and in the disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology. And I will confess that I’m not just touched by that, but also somewhat surprised. I never realized so many people cared so much about Ken. Part of the reason probably is that my first association with Ken is not with this building, or even with musicology. We rarely talked about that, and when we did, it was to emphasize how little we cared about each other’s work and about the music we each worked on. Instead, my memories of Ken read like an exhaustive inventory of pubs within walking distance from the Faculty of Music, where he and I over the years consumed vast amounts of beer of variable quality. Usually, this was on Thursdays, after the METH colloquium (and if there wasn’t a colloquium, we would just start earlier). We rarely did this on our own—there was a larger group of us—but I can barely remember a time that Ken wasn’t there. Those evenings meant a lot to Ken. His wife Julie told me many times that, even when he was already splitting his life between weekdays at his condo in Toronto and long weekends at his and Julie’s house in Gatineau, she was never able to convince him to leave for Quebec any earlier than Friday morning—on Thursdays, he had to be here. And it happened often enough that Julie, when she was trying to get a hold of him, would text or call us because she knew that was her best shot.
But I think it’s more than just the fact that I personally associate Ken with beer rather than with academic publications. We all have, I think, for a long time underestimated Ken and the quality and the impact of his work. His transfer from UTSC, where his original appointment was, to the Faculty of Music took place only in 2018, several years later than it could and probably should have happened. And he was promoted to full professor only last year—again, amply late. Part of the problem, for sure, was that Ken was one of the least academic of academics around. He didn’t look like a professor, he didn’t behave like one, and he certainly never did much to promote his own work. He was too modest, even though his research interests—and the impact of his research—were much broader and much more original than most of us could claim about our own work: music and technology, music and sports, music and science fiction, popular music in Japan, popular music and advertising, as well as English theatre music of the eighteenth century as it relates to gender and political allegory. His publications, especially his books on music and sports and on music and automotive culture, continue to reverberate far beyond the narrow confines of the disciplines of cultural musicology and ethnomusicology. His teaching, too, was original and innovative: Ken taught courses on music and health, music and aging, music and race, and music and gender long before those topics became fashionable. And after his transfer downtown, he put an inordinate amount of work into his job as coordinator for musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.
Now that he’s gone, we’re only starting to realize what an immeasurable loss this is—for his family, his friends, his colleagues, his students, and not least for those pubs within walking distance of the faculty of music. The faculty of music will never be the same without him, and neither will my Thursday evenings. Dear Ken, wherever you are, I hope they’ve got decent beer.
Steven Vande Moortele