You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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. A CD by the author of previously unrecorded Canadian music is included.
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.
John Weinzweig (1913–2006) was the pre-eminent Canadian composer of his generation. Influenced by European modernists such as Stravinsky, Berg, and Webern, he was the first Canadian composer to employ serialism, thereby bringing a spirit of innovation to mid-twentieth-century Canadian music. A forceful advocate for modern Canadian composition, Weinzweig played a key role in the founding of the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre during a buoyant and expansive period for the arts in Canada. He was an influential force as a teacher of composition, first with the Royal Conservatory of Music and later with the University of Toronto’s music faculty. This first comprehen...
The Guess Who. Gordon Lightfoot. Joni Mitchell. Neil Young. Stompin' Tom Connors. Robert Charlebois. Anne Murray. Crowbar. Chilliwack. Carole Pope. Loverboy. Bryan Adams. The Barenaked Ladies. The Tragically Hip. Céline Dion. Arcade Fire. K-oS. Feist. These musicians are national heroes to generations of Canadians. But what does it mean to be a Canadian musician? And why does nationality even matter? Canuck Rock addresses these questions by delving into the myriad relationships between the people who make music, the industries that produce and sell it, the radio stations and government legislation that determine availability, and the fans who consume it and make it their own. An invaluable resource and an absorbing read, Canuck Rock spans from the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s through to today's international recording industry. Combining archival material, published accounts, and new interviews, Ryan Edwardson explores how music in Canada became Canadian music.
Joel Plaskett has earned an awful lot of honourifics in his career so far, counting folk hero, indie darling, and national treasure among them. And that's just since the Halifax musician started making records of his own in 1999. For a decade before that, he was one-quarter of Thrush Hermit, a band of scrappy Superchunk mimics who became hard-rock revivalists and one of the last survivors of the '90s pop "explosion" of major-label interest in Halifax. Canada's east coast has never been much of a pop-culture mecca. Most musicians from the region who've ever made it big moved away. But armed with a stubborn streak and a knack for great songwriting, Plaskett has kept Halifax as his home, buildi...
The first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism and its transnational diasporic network of composers, musicians, and institutions.
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.
This book explores several musical styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene that has emerged in the western Canadian province of Manitoba. Focusing on fiddling, country music, and Christian hymnody, as well as step dancing and the pow-wow, author Byron Dueck advances a groundbreaking new performative theory of music culture that acknowledges tradition without losing sight of the dynamic negotiations that bring it into being.
Harry Freedman has been an important and respected figure in Canadian music for over half a century, and his productivity as a composer has been both prodigious and eclectic. Born in Poland in 1922 and raised in Winnipeg, Freedman studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music and played English Horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He resigned in 1970 to become the orchestra's first composer-in-residence, and has created some 175 works in a wide variety of genres including symphonies, concertos, string quartets, operas, ballets, film scores, popular songs, and jazz pieces. In The Music of Harry Freedman, Gail Dixon investigates Freedman's music with a view to illuminating its underlying pri...
"Based on years of detailed and extensive interviews with some seventy people, and supplemented by a wide range of archival material, Growing with Canada reveals how these men and women came to Canada and the roles they played in developing musical culture here, weaving the larger story of post-war Canadian music performance, production, and education around their testimony. Paul Helmer shows that émigrés were at the centre of the developing musical milieu, particularly in Toronto and Montreal. They were able to overcome the dominating British presence in post-secondary music education and vastly expanded the role music played in universities. They also pioneered the performance and production of opera in Canada. From British Columbia to Newfoundland, they served as educators, teachers, and administrators as well as outstanding performers, conductors, composers, music historians, radio and television producers, and benefactors."--Pub. desc.