As a sociologist Simon Frith claims music is the result of the play of social forces, whether as an idea, an experience, or an activity. The essays in this important collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous proc

Providing access to virtually any subject related to music and musicians in Canada, more than 900 annotated entries are organized under 13 topics, and indexed by author, subject, and title. Background and supplementary information and suggestions for research are presented in introductory essays. The material covered reflects the broad spectrum of music in Canadian society including historical, analytical, and biographical studies of music derived from the European tradition, First Nations and Inuit music, jazz and popular works, folk and ethnic music, education, research and bibliographical materials. The reader is also directed to some important on-line resources. Musical activity in Canada has developed remarkably in the past 50 years, with a parallel growth of musical scholarship examining historical, social, and ethnological aspects of Canadian musical life. This Guide is the first to draw comprehensively on the wealth of studies now available, which are often dispersed and not easily located. Consequently, this information is invaluable to students and researchers interested in Canadian music, the music of North America, and Canadian studies. Index.

Offers a history of Canadian musical expressions and their relationship to Canada's cultural and geographic diversity. This book features a survey of 'musics' in Canada and includes forty-three vignettes highlighting topics such as Inuit throat games, the music of k d lang, and orchestras in Victoria.

Canadian composer John Beckwith recounts his early days in Victoria, his studies in Toronto with Alberto Guerrero, his first compositions, and his later studies in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger, of whom he offers a comprehensive personal view. In the memoir’s central chapters Beckwith describes his activities as a writer, university teacher, scholar, and administrator. Then, turning to his creative output, he considers his compositions for instrumental music, his four operas, choral music, and music for voice. A final chapter touches on his personal and family life and his travel adventures. For over sixty years John Beckwith has participated in national musical initiatives in music education, promotion, and publishing. He has worked closely with performing groups such as the Orford Quartet and the Canadian Brass and conductors such as Elmer Iseler and Georg Tintner. A former reviewer for the Toronto Star and a CBC script writer and programmer in the 1950s and ’60s, he later produced many articles and books on musical topics. Acting under Robert Gill and Dora Mavor Moore in student days and married for twenty years to actor/director Pamela Terry, he witnessed first-hand the growth of Toronto theatre. He has collaborated with the writers Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, and bpNichol, and teamed repeatedly with James Reaney, a close friend. His life story is a slice of Canadian cultural history.

What is music -- where does it come from and what does it mean? If music is in the background, and no one listens to it, does it still exist? Why do composers write music, and how do they learn their profession? What about Canadian music -- a regional dialect of this "universal language"? How has it been created inside the country -- how well is it understood abroad? Music papers are reflections from a life of composing and teaching. These articles, talks and reviews, whether intended originally for general or professional audiences, communicate a passion for music rooted in a North American culture and place, informed by long and loving familiarity with masterpieces from elsewhere. Also included are alternative versions of the early life of Glenn Gould, proofs of the existence of musical life in Toronto, and some questions still unanswered.

The composers, writers and musicologists who contributed to this issue embrace aesthetics as far apart as neo-romanticism and post-Darmstadt "complexity," whole-scale computerization and non-computerization and deal with problems of word-setting and operatic composition in English, German, Italian and Swedish.

Music education in Canada is a vast enterprise that encompasses teaching and learning in thousands of public and private schools, community groups, and colleges and universities. It involves participants from infancy to the elderly in formal and informal settings. Nevertheless, as post-secondary faculties of music and programs are growing significantly, academic books and materials grounded in a Canadian perspective are scarce. This book attempts to fill that need by offering a collection of essays that look critically at various global issues in music education from a Canadian perspective. Topics range from a discussion of the roots of music education in Canada and analysis of music education practices across the country to perspectives on popular music, distance education, technology, gender, globalization, Indigenous traditions, and community music in music education. Foreword by composer R. Murray Schafer.

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. At a historical moment when identity politics, multiculturalism, diversity, immigration, and border crossings are debated around the world, Contemporary Musical Expressions in Canada demonstrates the many ways that music and dance practices in Canada engage with these broader global processes. Contributors include Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw (Queen's University), Meghan Forsyth (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Monique Giroux (University of Lethbridge), Ian Hayes (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Anna Hoefnagels (Carleton University), Judith Klassen (Canadian Museum of History), Chris McDonald (Cape Breton University), Colin McGuire (University College Cork), Marcia Ostashewski (Cape Breton University), Laura Risk (McGill University), Neil Scobie (University Western Ontario), Gordon Smith (Queen's University), Heather Sparling (Cape Breton University), Jesse Stewart (Carleton University), Janice Esther Tulk (Cape Breton University), Margaret Walker (Queen's University), and Louise Wrazen (York University).

This book examines the impact of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio Canada (CBC/SRC) on the development of art music in Canada during the broadcaster’s first fifty years (1936-1986). In so doing, it investigates the achievement of one man: John Peter Lee Roberts. Born in Australia, he arrived in Canada in 1955, and, over the next thirty years, he worked tirelessly as a producer, administrator and adviser at the state broadcaster to bring the music of Canada to the world and the world of music to Canadians. Roberts also played a crucially important role in commissioning, disseminating and promoting new music by Canadian composers.