If Canadian composer Healey Willan isn’t getting the last laugh, he’s getting the last chord.

His longtime home base, the Anglican Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Toronto, is hosting a concert on Friday to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, one of several commemorations taking place this year in Canada and abroad. There is even a burgeoning Healey Willan Society based in Chicago.

As a church organist, I’ve lived with — and loved — Willan’s choral and organ music for decades. I’m not alone in this. Giles Bryant, the now-retired organist of St James’ Cathedral in downtown Toronto and sometime Willan chronicler, says the composer’s organ music is particularly prized in England. His choral music, on the other hand, continues to be sung everywhere in the United States.

Andrew Adair, the current chief musician at St. Mary Magdalene, says tourists from the U.S. regularly show up at the church to hear the master’s works, and see his piano and writing desk — both still in use in the choir room.

Few in the Canadian musical establishment at Willan’s death in 1968 would have predicted that the composer’s name would endure past the 20th century.

In the 1950s, a younger generation of Canadian composers called him old and outmoded.

Canada’s chief avant-garde composer, John Weinzweig, who died in 2006, didn’t have kind words for his former teacher. When he and John Beckwith, another brash young thing, helped organize the Canadian League of Composers after the Second World War, they made sure to include an age limit so that people such as Willan would not be able to join.

Willan, at least in public, couldn’t care less. His lifelong artistic motto had been, “to add beauty to the past, not to seek out the shape and sound of things to come.”

The English-born composer, who came to Canada at the age of 30 in 1913, had immersed himself in the rules of harmony and counterpoint of the great European masters. He insisted his students at the Toronto (now Royal) Conservatory and the University of Toronto master those basics before doing anything else.

Willan may not have been a trailblazer, but he was a consummate craftsman. His output numbers somewhere around 850 pieces, a good number of them excellent.

He was commissioned to write music for two royal coronations. The BBC regularly broadcast his orchestral pieces, as did the CBC. He wrote two operas. The second, Deirdre (with libretto by John Coulter), was the first full-length Canadian opera broadcast on the CBC in 1946 and, 20 years later, produced by the Canadian Opera Company.

The composer’s Symphony No. 2, written in 1948, was so loved by local audiences that when the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) didn’t program it for several years in a row, the Star’s music critic Walter Susskind organized his own concert sponsored by the paper in March 1958. The TSO buckled, not only presenting it again, but recording it with music director Karel Ancerl as a stand-alone album in 1970.

Now, from the perspective of a new millennium, Willan has an assured place as a notable Western classical composer. Often bristling with the rhythmic vitality of great counterpoint, there is a lot of great listening here.

It’s in the listening (and performing) that the value of Willan’s contributions shine. Friday’s concert at St. Mary Magdalene is an ideal opportunity, allowing us to experience some of his best choral and pipe-organ compositions in the church where he worked for so much of his life.

See stmarymagdalene.ca for more details.

Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

Online listening sampler

Here are five of my favourite Healey Willan creations:

Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue for Organ: Written for the great organ at St Paul’s Bloor Street in 1916, it was played by one of Canada’s finest organists, Patrick Wedd.

Piano Concerto in C minor: Written for pianist Agnes Butcher in 1944. It is performed here by Canadian Arthur Ozolins and the late conductor Mario Bernardi with the Toronto Symphony for a 2000 album that paired it with Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

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O Lord, Our Governor: An homage anthem for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. It’s sung here by the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey and Ely Cathedral.

The Violin Sonata No. 1: Also from 1916. Here’s the enchanting Adagio movement played by violinist Carissa Klopoushak and pianist Philip Chiu.

Rise Up My Love: A sacred motet written for the choir at St. Mary Magdalene in 1929, it’s sung here by the Kantorei of Kansas City.