Votre recherche

Muzion a été parmi les tout premiers groupes de rap québécois à faire résonner une parole locale distinctive. Il le faisait dans un français mâtiné d’anglais et de créole haïtien, multipliant les registres et faisant des emprunts à encore d’autres langues. Cet article se penche sur les chansons du premier album du groupe, Mentalité moune morne, à partir de son hétérolinguisme et des questions d’appartenance que celui-ci soulève. Il examine la manière dont Muzion entrelace les langues, mais aussi les interpellations, défaisant l’association entre langue et identité. Le groupe s’adresse ainsi à la fois à une communauté immigrante locale (d’abord haïtienne, mais également pluriethnique et racisée) qu’il québécise, et à une communauté québécoise élargie qu’il pluralise. Le rap permet en outre à ses membres de faire entendre leurs voix individuelles distinctes, notamment grâce à des usages différenciés de la palette plurilingue du groupe. Ce faisant, ce sont les notions même d’appartenance et de communauté que Muzion se trouve à refaçonner, à l’encontre de toute forme d’homogénéisation, de figement ou de stéréotype.

Dans les années 1980, après ses études auprès de Gilles Tremblay, Isabelle Panneton fait la rencontre de Philippe Boesmans lors d’un passage du compositeur belge à Montréal. Impressionnée par sa musique, elle se rendra en Belgique pour y suivre des leçons de composition avec lui de 1984 à 1987. Cette période sera déterminante pour la compositrice, ouvrant toute grande la porte à l’émergence de sa personnalité musicale. Ce texte retrace les moments forts du passage d’Isabelle Panneton chez le compositeur belge et met en lumière les liens qui les unissent, en guise de prélude à l’analyse de son trio Les îles pour violon, violoncelle et piano.

Comment le fait d’être métis égypto-québécois·e influe-t-il sur ma manière de composer, d’écrire, de dessiner ? Et le fait d’être queer, neurodivergent·e, pauvre, ou encore d’avoir souffert de troubles de santé mentale ? Autrement formulé : comment, à partir d’une posture intersectionnelle, peut-on s’inscrire dans un cadre artistique donné et communiquer nos codes à un public qui ne les possède majoritairement pas ? Comment parler de ma voix propre, particulièrement minoritaire, afin d’éviter que d’autres s’approprient ma réalité ? Voilà les questions principales qui sont abordés dans cet article où je présente mon travail où partitions graphiques, poésie et arts visuels ont constitué le socle de ma démarche artistique au fil de plus d’une décennie de création. Pour y répondre, j’aborderai certains concepts-clés (intersectionnalité, tiers-espace, etc.) centraux dans ma réflexion, deux projets qui adressent de front ces questions et réalités, et, surtout, de nombreuses digressions proposant des bribes d’imaginaires les sous-tendant. Les projets abordés sont d’abord mon premier opéra, Le Désert mauve, d’après un texte éponyme de Nicole Brossard — chef-d’oeuvre des littératures lesbiennes, queers et québécoises. Puis le spectacle L’Outre-rêve et plus spécifiquement ma pièce L’amour des oiseaux moches, commande de l’Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), où mes mots, ma musique et mes visuels donnent vie à quatre personnages imbus de réalisme magique (Djinn, Louve, Vieux Clown et Eunuque que j’aime) par l’entremise de pièces pour voix, scie musicale, accordéon et orchestre.

The documentary Show Girls, directed by Meilan Lam, makes an unprecedented contribution to the history of jazz and Black women jazz dancers in Montréal, Quebec, and to the conversation of jazz in Canada. Show Girls offers a glimpse into the lives of three Black women dancers of the 1920s–1950s. This essay asks what the lives of Black women dancers were like and how they navigated their career paths in terms of social and economic opportunities and barriers. I seek to better understand three points: (1) the gap in the study of jazz that generally excludes and/or separates dance and singing from the music; (2) the use of dance as a way to commercialize, sell, and give visual and conceptual meaning to jazz; (3) the importance of the Black body and the role of what I would define as “Afro- culture” in producing the ingenious and creative genre of jazz. My study suggests there is a dominant narrative of jazz, at least in academic literature, that celebrates one dimension of jazz as it was advertised in show business, and that bringing in additional components of jazz provides a counternarrative, but also a restorative, whole and more authentic story of jazz and its origins. More specifically, by re- exploring jazz as a whole culture that relies on music, song, and dance, this essay explores three major ideas. First, Black women dancers played a significant role in the success of jazz shows. Second, they articulated stories of self, freedom, and the identity of the New Negro through jazz culture and dance. Third, Black women’s bodies and art were later crystallized into images that further served to sell jazz as a product of show business.

The 1920s have been touted as the golden era of jazz and Black history in Montréal. Similarly, the decade is well known for the Harlem Renaissance, a key moment in African American art history. Yet this period in Black Canadian art histories remains largely unknown. As a first step toward shedding some light on this period in Black Canadian art history, I propose to use what I term a Black feminist art-historical (bfah) praxis to discuss some visual art practices undoubtedly active alongside well-known jazz musicians and cultural producers in 1920s Montréal. This paper presents an overview of critical race art history and feminist art history, as well as Black feminist approaches to visual representation, to outline what might be considered four tenets of bfah praxis. Applying these tenets, I propose that a new art history may emerge from well-known art objects and practices as well as lesser-known ones. I posit that through a deliberately bfah approach, new meanings emerge and the voices of Black women, even when obstructed by mainstream white narratives, may begin to stand out and shed light upon a variety of histories. This praxis aims to underline the subtext lurking at the edges of these images and to make intangible presences visible in the archive and in art history. I propose bfah as a strategy for more nuanced discussion of the work of Black Canadian artists and histories that have by and large been left out of official records.

Un article de la revue Cap-aux-Diamants, diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

“Deaf music?” Faced with this question, many people think about the attempts to give Deaf people "access" to music, used here in its normative hearing form (eg a musical soundtrack). Translation of vocal songs in various sign languages, transformation of sound tracks into vibratory experience, musical rhythms broadcast by visual speakers... accessibility initiatives are numerous, but more often than not unidirectional: they aim to make hearing music accessible to Deaf people, reputed to live in a "world of silence". Our vibrant hands aim to deconstruct this concept of accessibility: what if hearing people had access to signed music? You can’t sign? Enjoy these creation by letting yourself be captivated by the vibrations. Inspired by the Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim who reclaims sound, Our vibrant hands is a research-creation carried out thanks to the collaboration of four Quebec Deaf artists of various origins. Four workshops held in 2018 allowed us to explore signed music, using (Quebec and American) sign languages, gestures and vibrations. Screened for the first time at the VIBE symposium: Challenging ableism and audism through the arts, it is here the subject of an eight- handed reflexion, produced in 2019. What attachment do we have with music? How is signed music different from hearing music? What does it mean for us to deconstruct audism in music? These are the questions that guided this multilingual exchange in Quebec sign language, French and English.

This article examines the deviated modes of seeing in the work of Canadian electro-pop band Purity Ring. Bringing their recent music into conversation with the theory of Tim Ingold and Eugenie Brinkema, I suggest that Megan James and Corin Roddick perform seeing as a granular, augmented act that continually shapes the boundaries between our bodies and the world around us. Particular attention is paid to James and Roddick’s creative engagement with optical touch and the formal capability of music to engage affectively with the act of seeing.By integrating musical examples, Tallulah Fontaine’s artwork for the band and the poetry of Kiran Millwood Hargrave, this article offers an expanded reading experience that spans the textual, the aural and the visual. I argue that the political crux of Purity Ring’s performance of perception lies in them moving beyond a reactionary response to patriarchal objectivity and towards a creative refiguration of perception as a form of subjectivation. The eyes that Purity Ring instantiate do not passively observe the world; they change it, both consoled and engulfed by the vicissitudes of perception.

Quebec-born playwright Chantal Bilodeau has been responding to the challenges of dramatizing anthropogenic climate change by developing an eight-part Arctic Cycle, each play of which is set in one of the nations that claims Arctic territory. Sila (2014) immerses audiences into a complex network of humans, animals, and mythical beings crisscrossing the Canadian Arctic. These movements circle around the Inuit concept of sila, which is the life-giving force of breath and voice. Thus, the sonic world of Sila focuses on voices speaking words, on performance poetry, and on the sounds of breath and wind. Bilodeau’ s second Arctic Cycle play, Forward (2016), addresses the long-term impact of Fridtjof Nansen’s polar exploration of the 1890s on Norway’s economy and society. In terms of sound, Forward features multiple musical performances rangingfrom traditional songs to European opera arias and Lieder to contemporary Norwegian electro-pop. The sonic features of both plays stress interdependence across time, space, as well as (non-)human, earthly, and metaphysical realms. Sila and Forward address climate change in a non-universalizing manner which promotes a heterarchical (rather than hierarchical) aesthetic fit for a growing awareness of planetary relationality.

TAGS by Joane Hétu and TanGRAM by Danielle Palardy Roger are two written works that showcase graphic scores in improvised music. TAGS creates an encounter between Ensemble SuperMusique, the saxophone quartet Quasar, and the Bozzini Quartet. The musicians make “sound graffiti” on an imaginary wall represented by a sequence of timed sections on a descriptive score where the composer uses different instrumental combinations. Using an aesthetic of articulated gestures, the work is made through these multiple signatures. TanGRAM brings together twenty instrumentalists from Ensemble SuperMusique. The game of Tangram is represented in the form of a graphic score where each piece has specific musical properties to be interpreted by the musicians. Rich in combinatorial and symmetrical games, the work presents Orion: a continuous figure, a slowly moving flow where each musician seeks their own way in a global sound.

Montreal composer Jocelyne Binet's "Cycle de Melodies sur des Poemes de Paul Eluard" was programmed in 1955 by the French baritone Gerard Souzay in a performance that was most likely the world premiere. Unfortunately, Binet's song cycle never was published, and the work soon was forgotten. In the fall of 2016, the author discovered Bineet's original handwritten manuscript pages in holdings of Bibliotheque et Archives Nationales du Quebec and began the process of reconstructing the score. This article discusses the editorial journal undertaken when resurrecting Binet's forgotten song cycle, which was subsequently published in 2018 by Classical Vocal Reprints.