Marlene Fagan's Life of Music

Marlene Fagan (1937 – 2024)

LONDON, ONTARIO – I was saddened to learn of the death in her 87th year of one of my favourite London music makers and planned to get out to the memorial celebration for Marlene Fagan last Friday at St. James Westminster Church until life abruptly decided that I wasn’t going anywhere that day. So let me extend my regret for missing that ceremony by publishing here a feature article I worked up on Marlene in May of 1998 for The Londoner - which some of my readers may remember as the supplement which appeared for a couple of years when The London Free Press (newly taken over by Sun Media) published a Sunday edition.

I conducted our interview at the Fagans’ gargantuan home on Baseline Road in South London. Marlene had to rush away from a choir rehearsal and came in a little breathless and flustered, laughing that she’d told her choristers that she had to fly as “Herman Goodden is coming over to talk to me with his tape measure.” I found something so touching about that blooper. There was never a trace of guile or pretension in this immensely talented and capable woman who knew her way around all kinds of music, including the grandest oratorios and masses. But that day I saw some nervousness at the prospect of standing apart from that army of singers she so diligently served so that she could be appraised in her own right.

---

Marlene Fagan was born with a singular musical gift: great talent combined with an intuitive grasp of how to make the most of it. This gift has not only helped her to chart a successful career or her own but turned her into a sort of musical midwife, helping thousands – piano students and choral singers as well as her husband and five children – to realize their own artistic potential. She and Gerald, her husband of more than forty years, have spent two decades developing London’s exceptionally rich choral music tradition. He’s the conductor and artistic director of the 125-voice Fanshawe Symphonic Chorus, the smaller chamber choir known as the Gerald Fagan Singers and the Concert Players Orchestra. Marlene is the general manager for all these groups as well as their accompanist (on piano, organ or harpsichord as each programme dictates) and the organization’s resident arranger. Both Fagans work tirelessly but it’s the chap waving the baton who seems to get most of the attention. Today, it’s Marlene’s turn.

Marlene Fagan’s affinity for music was obvious from the beginning. “My mother loved to tell the story about putting me down for an afternoon nap when I was three and thinking that she finally had a few minutes peace. Then she heard me playing Jesus Loves Me on the piano. I still hadn’t had any lessons or anything like that. I just picked it up by ear. She thought that was pretty amazing. My absolute pitch probably helped but we didn’t know anything about that at the time.”

Pianist Glenn Gould also had absolute pitch. If you threw a coin on the floor, he could tell you what note it struck. Fagan shuns the comparison with Gould but, with a shy smile, admits, “I might be able to do that. Yeah. Or rainfall. Or the hum of an electric fan. Whatever.”

Born Eva Marlene Love in Toronto in 1937, she and her family soon moved to Woodstock where her two sisters were born. By age five she was taking piano lessons. “I always had to play the piano in kindergarten which meant I wouldn’t get to march with the other kids,” she recalls. “I wanted to march and they all thought it was neat that this kid was playing the piano. The grass is always greener you know.”

Her father, Stafford Love, a painter and decorator, was also organist and choir director at Woodstock’s Dundas Street United Church. She sang in his choir until she found a $5-a-Sunday job playing the organ at the upscale Anglican church across town. “My mother, Helen, was probably my greatest influence,” Fagan says. “She wasn’t musically trained but no one was prouder or more supportive.”

In high school Fagan started taking lessons from Cliff Von Kuster and Leslie Munn in London. Helen Love drove back and forth every week so her daughter could learn from the best. All three Love daughters were encouraged in their music but Marlene was the most determined. “I remember being asked at age six, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I always said ‘concert pianist’.”

She would try any instrument. With the Woodstock Lions Club Boys and Girls Band, it was the euphonium – the tuba’s little cousin – then, when her arms had grown long enough, the trombone. Later she played organ for assemblies at Woodstock Collegiate Institute. At sixteen she began teaching piano and founded two musical institutions which still flourish today. One was the Woodstock chapter of the Sweet Adelines, which began as a group of her friends rehearsing in her living room. “By the time I was nineteen, I was being called the founding conductor, which I thought was reserved for really old people.”

The other was a family pop trio, The Love Sisters. “I was sixteen, Gwen was fourteen and Ruth was twelve when we started,” Fagan says. “I always played the piano and did the arrangements. Ruth sang the melody, Gwen usually sang a third higher, and I would take the alto, a third below the melody.”

They worked the usual local gigs – high schools, fairs, IODE meetings, Lions Club fetes – before winning first prize on Teletune, the amateur variety show on CKCO-TV Kitchener. At one point they were invited to audition for the Arthur Godfrey Talent Show; a big U.S. radio and TV show. But they couldn’t afford the trip. Instead the sisters ended up in Detroit on Ed McKenzie’s Saturday Party talent show on WXYZ-TV. Facing some pretty slick musical acts with names like The Four Joes and The Twin Tunes, The Love Sisters offered up their rendition of Muskrat Ramble. When McKenzie held his hand over the head of each contestant, saying, ‘Now let’s hear it’ – the Sisters took first prize: a Columbia record player. “We were so thrilled,” Fagan says. “We never got paid for any of our gigs. We just did it for the love of it – no pun intended. And we played that record player to death.”

No sooner had they won, than a man called the TV station, asking the girls if they’d like to entertain GI’s overseas for the U.S. government. “We were so naïve,” she laughs. “I told him we couldn’t possibly go on any world tours because we all had to get right back to Woodstock for school the next Monday morning. I had to practice for six hours a day. My sisters had paper routes and babysitting jobs. We couldn’t just drop all that and go to Korea.”

The Love Sisters, circa 1955. L to R: Marlene, Gwen, Ruth

That fall saw the Love Sisters begin a forty-year hiatus. Marlene, then eighteen, was off to study music at the University of Western Ontario. Gwen set her sights on teaching and Ruth joined the Armed Forces shortly after graduating high school. Fagan hurled herself into study, practice and performance. She played organ at Hyatt Avenue Church, conducted the Alma College choirs in St. Thomas, taught for the Royal Conservatory of Music at Aeolian Hall and sang with the Earle Terry Singers. Saturdays she’d take the train to Woodstock to teach piano out of her parents’ home. Then there were campus productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and Purple Patches revues, playing, arranging tunes, even composing the music for a satirical revue. And in her spare time she earned pocket money by “taking songs off records and writing out the arrangements for barbershop quartets. It was probably illegal but . . .”

But she never did finish her degree. “In those days you had to take a lot of academics as well as the music courses and that just wasn’t where my interests were,” she says. It’s perhaps just as well. At a reunion a few years ago she canvassed twenty former classmates. “I’m the only one who’s still doing music. The only one. In some ways I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do all my life. If I had that degree and was offered a teaching position . . . I’m not so sure that would be the case.”

While at Western Marlene met Gerry Fagan. Coming off a summer job, he was late starting classes and a teacher asked Marlene to look after him. On their second date, Gerry asked her to marry him. Gerry, an accomplished pianist who lacked the resources to aim for the concert stage, earned his degree and found work teaching music and English; first in Ottawa, then London, then Listowel. He and Marlene had five children in quick succession – four girls and one boy – and she scaled back her musical efforts for a while. “When we moved to Listowel, we really started working again,” she recalls. They crisscrossed Canada with the National Youth Choir; he as conductor, she as accompanist. She began teaching again, juggling a roster of about twenty-five students.

A stint as church organist at Listowel’s Knox Presbyterian Church, led to her becoming that church’s choir director as well. “My first Sunday, I had twelve in the choir (one being Gerry) and by the time I left I had about 120. I played for Gerry’s high school choirs, so he had to sing for my church choir. That was the deal.” They jumped at the chance to return to London in 1978 when Gerald became Coordinator of Continuing Education at Fanshawe College and took over the Four Counties Choir which he developed into the Fanshawe Chorus and Fagan Singers. “At first I thought I would just continue with my teaching but then I got really involved with the choirs as well.”

In 1990 rheumatoid arthritis forced Fagan to stop playing recitals and drastically cut back on teaching. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to play,” she says. “We’ll just have to see.” Undaunted, she set up EML Artists Management Inc. to represent concert singers. “I was dealing with a lot of agents at the time, bringing in soloists to sing with the choirs. I’d get off the phone and say to Gerry, ‘I could do better than that.’ Young singers don’t understand that you don’t just open your mouth and sing and it’s going to happen,” she says. “At an audition, conductors don’t care that you were up all night with your children, that you’ve had a long journey or that you couldn’t get the right accompanist. You have to show them that they can hire no one but you.”
Arts funding cuts have made things even tougher, she adds. “But the bottom line is never the money; it’s your work ethic. If you’re good at what you do and it’s all you want to do – then you’ll get the work.”

Fagan has also stepped up her work as an arranger. For The Fagan Singers’ annual Cabaret concert, she routinely tailors thirty songs for chamber choir, vocal quartets, trios, duets and solos. And she keeps a close eye on her singers. “There’s so much to do that sometimes you forget when somebody new joins the choir, how excited they are for that first concert. It was so sweet this year for one new girl. Somebody gave her flowers after her first concert. She was just beaming . . . and I thought, ‘Well, there’s what it’s all about.’”

It was Gerry’s idea to bring the Love Sisters out of retirement for last year’s Cabaret. “And it was like we’d never stopped singing,” Fagan says. “We all knew exactly how to phrase the music. We just did it . . . It was really emotional that first night because Mother had died just the September before. We were thinking about her a lot; knowing how happy she would be to hear us singing together again.”

The atmosphere at Centennial Hall was already euphoric after The Love Sisters sang Sincerely, Muskrat Ramble and Teach Me Tonight. Then three of Fagan’s daughters, Louise, Judy and Jennifer joined their mom and aunts on stage to sing Goodnight Sweetheart.

Late last year saw the limited release of a new CD, A Sentimental Journey with the Love Sisters, dedicated to their late mother. The recording was originally conceived as a family Christmas present, but Jennifer Fagan persuaded her mom to order a few hundred extra copies – and then sent one to daytime TV hosts Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. So what will Marlene Fagan tell Regis if he wants The Love Sisters to entertain U.S. troops overseas?

Fagan claps her hands and laughs. “Well, it sure won’t be that we have to go back to school.”

Here’s a link to a Hermaneutics essay from November of 2019 where I talk mostly about George Frideric Handel and his masterpiece, Messiah, and include a significant section discussing the Fagan choirs and their performances and wonderful 1995 recording of that opus: https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/a-lifetime-of-messiahs  

Marlene and Gerald Fagan