Canadian Music

This book is a practical guide to Canadian classical music of the twentieth century; it includes extensive lists of scores and recordings, arranged chronologically by performance medium.

Music and dance in Canada today are diverse and expansive, reflecting histories of travel, exchange, and interpretation and challenging conceptions of expressive culture that are bounded and static. Reflecting current trends in ethnomusicology, Contemporary Musical Expressions in Canada examines cultural continuity, disjuncture, intersection, and interplay in music and dance across the country. Essays reconsider conceptual frameworks through which cultural forms are viewed, critique policies meant to encourage crosscultural sharing, and address ways in which traditional forms of expression have changed to reflect new contexts and audiences. From North Indian kathak dance, Chinese lion dance, early Toronto hip hop, and contemporary cantor practices within the Byzantine Ukrainian Church in Canada to folk music performances in twentieth-century Quebec, Gaelic milling songs in Cape Breton, and Mennonite songs in rural Manitoba, this collection offers detailed portraits of contemporary music practices and how they engage with diverse cultural expressions and identities.

Kwakwaka'wakw welcome songs, an aria from Joseph Quesnel's 1808 opera Lucas et Cécile, rubbaboos (a combination of elements from First Peoples, French, and English music), the Tin Pan Alley hits of Shelton Brooks, and the contemporary work of Claude Vivier and Blue Rodeo all dance together in Canada's rich musical heritage. Elaine Keillor offers an unprecedented history of Canadian musical expressions and their relationship to Canada's great cultural and geographic diversity. A survey of "musics" in Canada - the country's multiplicity of musical genres and rich heritage - is complemented by forty-three vignettes highlighting topics such as Inuit throat games, the music of k.d. lang, and orchestras in Victoria. Music in Canada illuminates the past but also looks to the future to examine the context within which Canadian music began and continues to develop.

Although limited to materials predating the guide's 1997 publication, useful resources related to music and musicians in Canada are presented, with 900 annotated entries organized under 13 topics. Reflecting a variety of music in Canadian society including music derived from the European tradition, First Nations and Inuit music, jazz and popular works, folk and ethnic music, education, research and bibliographical materials.

This volume contains both reprints of articles and new essays about specific aspects of the social history of Canadian music. Designed for courses in Canadian music history, it brings together a body of interdisciplinary research that students often overlook within their specific foci of the individual areas. Studies of Euro-Canadian classical music and jazz are integrated with studies of traditional and popular music, thereby acknowledging that these domains, while tenaciously separated in university curricula, are interconnected. Many of the articles focus on the experiential rather than on objectified works of art; the processes of creating and using music are emphasized.