It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Beverly Lorna Joyce Porter. She was bright and active until a heart attack took her at the age of 94. Her parents were Allie (nee Coleman) and Joe Fowler of Vancouver and she was the older sister of Joanne and Roger. Her mother passed away in February of 1937 when Beverly was only six years old. She and her siblings were looked after by her grandmother and then an aunt until her father remarried Grace in 1942.

It was her grandmother Margaret Kelly that paid for her piano lessons beginning when she was 8, and she excelled at it. Beverly started her teaching career as a young teen in Vancouver where her first students were younger relatives. By the age of 20 she had earned both ARCT (Royal Conservatory) and LTCL (Trinity College London) pedagogy diplomas. Her teachers were Glenn Nelson and Pearl Kerr for piano and Norma Cowan King for advanced theoretical studies. Summer courses at Banff, with Jacques Jolas, and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara California, with Soulima Stravinsky, were followed by studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, with Alberto Guerrero and later with Clifford Poole.

Beverly was married to Earl Porter in 1953 in Toronto. They arrived in Kingston in 1965 with their family of five children. Beverly decided to go to university, not having had the opportunity for that as a teenager, and began her coursework in the summer of 1972 at Queen’s. She graduated in 1977 from the School of Music at Queen’s where she majored in voice with Randall Marsh and composition with Clifford Crawley.

Beverly taught piano out of a studio in the Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston from 1972 until 2016 when she moved and taught out of her new home in Kingston. She continued to teach piano until 2022.

Beverly was also a composer of piano music, becoming well-known when her piece Chromatic Rag was included in Conservatory Canada’s Grade 1 piano repertoire book. She was a founding member of Red Leaf Pianoworks in 2007, a collective of composers that started with 3 close friends and now includes 17 composers from around the world. Some of her most popular solo piano publications include Lady Bug and Friends, Land of the Silver Birch, Along the Shore, and Into the Woods. Many students and teachers were also attracted to her outstanding duets and trios for piano. Her compositions always had a sense of whimsy, humour and expressiveness, and appealed to all ages.

Beverly is predeceased by her husband Earl and her son Ross. She is survived by her four children Grant, Keith, Glenn, and Janet, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her family will remember her remarkable kindness, patience, and humour. Hers was a life well lived and she will be deeply missed.

A celebration of life for Beverly will be held on Saturday September 27th at 3pm at Wartman Funeral Home, 980 Collins Bay Rd Kingston, ON K7M 2H5. If friends so desire, memorial donations can be made to Plan International or the Canadian Red Cross.

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