HENDERSON, Ruth Louise Watson Henderson

Come ye makers of song, tune all your voices.

And instruments play…

One of Canada’s most gifted, most gentle and most generous musical voices has left us.

After a long life filled with music, joy and love, Ruth died peacefully in her 94th year in Toronto, Ontario. She was the cherished mother of Karen (Christopher), Deborah (Peter), Anne-Marie (Bill), and David and beloved grandmother to Laura, Duncan, Hadley, Cameron, Stephanie, Melanie, Jamie, Quinn and Michael. She will be missed by countless friends and colleagues in the Canadian musical community.

At home at the keyboard for over 90 years (and still playing Debussy and Chopin on her Steinway grand through her final days), Ruth began playing the piano when she was two years old. Her first teacher was her mother, Margaret Watson. At age five she began studying with Viggo Kihl, and by age twelve she was studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto with teacher Alberto Guerrero and later at the Mannes School of Music in New York City with Hans Neumann. After appearing as a youthful guest soloist with orchestras across Canada and winning the grand prize in CBC Radio’s Opportunity Knocks music competition in her early twenties, she took time away from her professional life to be a minister’s wife and mother to four children.

Ruth Louise Watson Henderson became the accompanist for Dr. Elmer Iseler’s Festival Singers of Canada in 1968. During that time, encouraged by Dr. Iseler, she composed her first choral works. In the earlier days of the choir, she was known for dashing home to Whitney Avenue during the brief lunch break to feed her two younger children when they came home from school. She would arrive back at the keyboard just in time for the afternoon downbeat.

She also performed with many other groups including the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, the Elmer Isler Singers, the Ontario Youth Choir and the Oriana Singers, and she was a frequent keyboardist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

In 1978 Ruth joined her friend, conductor Jean Ashworth Bartle, C.M., OOnt, to serve as pianist in the inaugural season of the Toronto Children’s Chorus. Through the decades, her daughter Anne-Marie sang in the TCC as did two of her grandchildren, Laura and Duncan. Ruth, Jean and thousands of choristers over the years performed, recorded and toured with the world-renowned choir until both women retired in 2007.

Equally proficient at the organ console as at the piano, Ruth served as organist at Eglinton United Church in the 1980s and as organist and choirmaster at Kingsway-Lambton United Church from 1996 to 2013. In 2003 she was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Canadian College of Organists.

Ruth was a highly respected composer on both the Canadian and international music scenes. Instrumentally she wrote for piano, strings, winds, and organ; in 1989 her composition “Chromatic Partita for Organ” was a prizewinner in an International Competition for Women Composers in Mannheim, Germany. She also has more than 200 choral works to her credit, including her widely popular Missa Brevis, composed in 1974 for the Festival Singers of Canada; “The Last Straw,” written for the Toronto Children’s Chorus and premiered in 1990 with tenor Ben Heppner; and “Voices of Earth,” which won the National Choral Award for Outstanding Choral Composition in 1992. In 1996 she received the Distinguished Service Award from Choirs Ontario. Her music continues to be performed around the world.

Crowning her lifetime of honours, she was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal in 2025 in recognition of her dedication and contribution to choral music.

All her life, Ruth’s favourite place was always her cottage on Stoco Lake near Tweed, Ontario. As a teenager she or her mother played the pump organ while family and friends gathered to sing together. After a piano was added to the cottage, the local fishermen cast their lines while listening to Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Debussy. Decades later the cottage became a gathering place for her extended family, although she would often steal away to garner artistic inspiration from watching the clouds float above the lake.

And after the clouds, she made the music in her head come to life. As her granddaughter Laura wrote:

“It was like that, I believe: as a pianist and as a composer, she simply imagined, believed, moved the music into being, and then, where there was nothing before, there it was, triumphant or questioning, fluid or bold, expressive and true.”

Please offer your charitable gifts in Ruth’s memory to the Kingsway-Lambton United Church Music Fund; the Jean Ashworth Bartle Bursary Fund of the Toronto Children’s Chorus; or the Ruth Watson Henderson Choral Composition Competition through Choirs Ontario.

There will be a visitation at the Turner & Porter Yorke Chapel, 2357 Bloor St. W., Toronto on Friday June 19th from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

A service celebrating Ruth’s amazing life will be held at Kingsway-Lambton United Church, 85 The Kingsway, Etobicoke, on Saturday June 20 at 10:00 a.m.