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Claude Vivier's haunting and expressive music has captivated audiences around the world. But the French-Canadian composer is remembered also because of the dramatic circumstances of his death: he was found murdered in his Paris apartment at the age of thirty-four. Given unrestricted access to Vivier's archives and interviews with Vivier's family, teachers, friends, and colleagues, musicologist and biographer Bob Gilmore tells here the full story of Vivier's fascinating life, from his abandonment as a child in a Montreal orphanage to his posthumous acclaim as one of the leading composers of his generation. Expelled from a religious school at seventeen for "lack of maturity," Vivier gave up his ambition to join the priesthood to study composition. Between 1978 and 1981 Vivier wrote the works on which his reputation rests, including 'Lonely Child', 'Bouchara', and the operas 'Kopernikus' and 'Marco Polo'. He went to Paris in 1982 to work on a new opera, the composition of which was interrupted by his murder. On his desk was the manuscript of his last work, uncannily entitled "Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?" Vivier's is a tragic but life-affirming story, intimately connected to his passionate music. Bob Gilmore is a musicologist and performer and teaches at Brunel University in London. He is the author of 'Harry Partch: A Biography'.

In this thesis I argue that the relationship between the increasing ubiquity of digital audio technologies and the transformation of aesthetic hierarchies in electroacoustic and sound art traditions is not deterministic, but negotiated by producers and policy-makers in specific historical and cultural contexts. Interviews, observations, and historical data were gathered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian city of Montreal between 2011 and 2012. Research was conducted and analysed in collaboration with a transnational group of researchers on a programme of comparative research that tracked global changes to music and musical practice associated with digital technologies. The introduction presents Montreal as a rich ecology in which to track struggles for aesthetic authority, detailing its history as a key site of electroacoustic and sound art production, and its local positioning as a politically strategic 'hub' for the Canadian culture industry. Core chapters examine the specific role of digital mediation in the negotiation of electroacoustic and sound art aesthetics from multiple interlocking perspectives: the recursive relationship between technological affordances and theories of mediation; the mobilisation of digital technologies in the delineation of cultural, professional and generational territories; the political contestation of digital literacies and pedagogies; the articulation of the digital's opposition with analogue in the construction of instruments and recording formats; and the effects of the digital on the dynamics of genre and genre hierarchies. The concluding chapter offers a critique of the notion that digital mediation has shifted the balance between the normative and the generative dimensions of genrefication in the scenes in question, and closes by suggesting how a better understanding of this shift at an empirical level can inform an ongoing rethinking of the interaction between technology and aesthetics among scholars, policy makers, and musicians.

How can the ephemeral touch of a caress become an aesthetic object? How can a fingernail scratching the mineral surface of a sheet of schist become music? How can intimate tactile experience become the scene of a collective artistic ritual? How does Magali Babin turn electronic sound into a medium for eccentric sensoriality? This article takes us into one region of Magali Babin’s artistic practice: the tactile world of sound that she uses in her solo performances. Author of a polymorphic sonic oeuvre, Magali Babin is a Quebec artist, performer, and composer whose artistic practice has incorporated sonic installations for the past two years. She is a key figure in Montreal’s alternative audio art, “edgy” improvisation, and experimental music scenes, moving freely among cutting-edge artistic categories.

This article traces the rich Canadian legacy of the twentieth-century French musical legend Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979). Through teaching her more than seventy Canadian students, both French- and English-speaking, the renowned French pedagogue played a crucial role in the development of concert art music in this country from the 1920s, notably in Montreal and Toronto. Her numerous Canadian students went on to distinguish themselves as composers, teachers, performers, musicologists, theorists, administrators, and radio producers. Drawing on extensive archival and primary research, this study demonstrates the decisive impact Boulanger had on the development of musical styles and compositional practices in Canada in the last century.

Cette thèse est basée sur une approche méthodologique hybride relevant de recherche-création en musique et de musicologie appliquée à l’interprétation. Elle s’intéresse à cette question centrale : « Quels rôles l’interprète-chercheur occupe-t-il dans un contexte de création ou de re-création (ou d’interprétation) musicale » ? Pour y répondre, l’auteure examine et rend compte du processus créateur et re-créateur de deux œuvres significatives dans son parcours en tant qu’interprète, soit Kathinkas Gesang als Luzifers Requiem (1983-1984) de Karlheinz Stockhausen et La Machi, rituel pour flûtes, électronique et regards (2007-2011) d’Analía Llugdar. Le travail de ces œuvres mixtes qui comportent toutes deux une dimension théâtrale tout en mettant en scène des personnages instrumentaux l’amène aussi à traiter des problématiques de l’appropriation de l’œuvre par l’interprète-chercheur et de la liberté de celui-ci face aux œuvres présentant un haut degré de déterminisme notationnel. La première partie situe les contextes disciplinaires et théoriques des recherches de l’auteure. Le premier chapitre permet de comprendre comment s’exerce la recherche de l’interprète en musique et de situer les différentes modalités dans lesquelles ce type de recherche s’effectue. Le deuxième chapitre explique les notions d’interprétation, d’improvisation et de composition et il situe l’interprète par rapport à ces trois champs d’activités. L’auteure y compare aussi les modes créatifs du théâtre à ceux de la musique tout en s’intéressant aux divers types d’authenticité inhérents au travail d’interprétation. Le troisième chapitre pose le principal angle d’investigation et d’analyse adopté dans cette thèse, soit celui du timbre instrumental. La deuxième partie porte sur Kathinkas Gesang de Stockhausen. Le quatrième chapitre présente une chronologie récapitulative des différentes grandes périodes d’appropriation de l’auteure. Le cinquième chapitre présente et met en contexte le symbolisme du cycle Licht, die sieben Tage der Woche (1977-2003), dans lequel Kathinkas Gesang s’insère. Le sixième chapitre est voué à une analyse du symbolisme attribué au timbre des principaux instruments que l’on retrouve dans Licht. Le septième chapitre évalue l’impact de la présence des interprètes dans le processus compositionnel chez Stockhausen tout en traitant de la question du casting dans Licht. Le huitième chapitre s’articule en un lexique timbral présentant une exégèse des techniques de jeu employées dans Kathinkas Gesang pour produire divers types de timbres. La troisième partie porte sur La Machi d’Analía Llugdar. Dans le neuvième chapitre, l’auteure présente la structure générale de l’œuvre et son synopsis et elle traite du rôle qu’elle a joué dans le processus de création de cette œuvre. Le dixième chapitre prend la forme d’un lexique timbral présentant une exégèse des différentes techniques de jeu employées dans l’œuvre pour produire divers types de timbres. Dans la conclusion, trois sphères d’action et six rôles-types de l’interprète-chercheur en création et en re-création musicale sont identifiés. De plus, des réponses aux problématiques de l’appropriation de l’œuvre et de la liberté de l’interprète sont apportées. L’auteure y suggère également des pistes de réflexion pour la recherche- création en musique et elle y présente les principales retombées de la thèse.

In an interview with Lorraine Vaillancourt, the founder and artistic director of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (nem) recounts her musical education in Quebec, Montreal and Paris, and goes on to describe the establishment and development of her ensemble, the choice of repertoire and her plans for the future.

The imagination of composer Nicole Lizée brings together disparate elements, largely drawn from cinema, philosophy, visual arts, and so-called popular music, with a pronounced penchant for the period from 1960-1980 and the ghostly effect thus conveyed. This article illustrates Lizée’s creative process through one of her characteristic works, This Will Not Be Televised (2005-2007), scored for DJ and seven instruments. Our analysis illustrates how the composer’s “beams of imagination” take form through a unique musical language, based here on a meticulously notated DJ part and extended through the instrumental ensemble, and which draws on cultural references, repetitive effects, and montages of juxtapositions and superpositions, and whose continuous form achieves cohesion through the use of repeats. In this way, the composer focuses on the connections that are generated in the memory and subjectivity of the hearer – the tabula rasa characteristic of McLuhan’s “cool” media.

Enchanted by the vocal music of Serbian-born Canadian composer Ana Sokolović, Tamara Bernstein visited the composer at her home in Montreal. Sokolović’s music draws on several sources, including the theatrical world and the culture of the Balkans. The extended vocal techniques in Sokolović’s music are rooted not in the avant-garde music of the twentieth century, but in the oral traditions and poetic voice of Serbia. It seems that the more the composer returns to her cultural roots, the more she embraces the universality of the human soul.

The life story of Mrs. Daisy Sweeney, an African Canadian native of Montreal, Quebec, helps fill a void in the historical documentation of Montreal Blacks (especially female elders). Of particular significance is her prominence as a music educator and othermother during her life. The current literature on African Canadian othermothering experiences is not synonymous with both White or African American females and inclusion of their voices in academic, as well as mainstream spaces, is virtually non-existent. This dissertation asks: What did it mean to be a first generation 'Negro' working class bilingual female in a largely hostile White francophone Quebec metropolis in the early 20th Century? How can her narratives help shape and inform life history and African Canadian othermothering research? My sojourn with Mrs. Daisy Sweeney referenced African centered epistemology in my conceptual understanding of herself and community mothering. Capturing her conversations meant engaging with multiple methodologies articulated through African oral traditions, life history, archival canons and interdisciplinary inquiries. It is striking to note that there were not only certain tensions associated with memory loss and physical limitations (prompted by the aging process) that destabilized and enriched our 'interactive' communication, but also revealed a rupture and reversal of the participant/researcher dynamic. In spite of blatant racial discrimination that plagued Montreal's Black communities during that time, Daisy Sweeney fulfilled a life-long dream and taught hundreds of children the canon of classical piano for over 50 years. She lived her voice through her music, finding ways to validate her own identity and empowering others in the process. She used the musical stage as her platform to draw invaluable connections between race, gender, language and social class. Daisy Sweeney's generation of othermothers is dying out and, as the carriers of culture, the urgency to tell their stories must be emphasized. The account respects, reclaims and reflects those voices. It is time to write in African Canadian female elders and diversify the exclusionary genre of life history and archival research.

Composer Ana Sokolović divided her instrumental work Géométrie sentimentale into large sections inspired by pure geometric shapes — Triangle, Cercle and Carré — describing these sections as three contrasting perspectives of the same musical materials. This article uses a narrative analytical approach as a lens through which to understand these distinct sections and the materials populating them. Inspired by Sokolović’s employment of musical objects in her compositions and by the extra-musical concepts inspiring many of her works, this analysis uses a collection of colourful robot toys as metaphors for the work’s materials. Three unique perspectives of these toys are described: in Triangle, the robots interact as characters on a dramatic stage; in Cercle, they peacefully coexist in slow motion; and in Carré new combinations of robot elements are abruptly juxtaposed against each other. The characteristics and interactions between these toys, as well as the various harmonic ‘masks’ that the composer has them wear, are helpful in understanding Sokolović’s harmonic structure, variation/transformation techniques, formal organization and rhythmic characteristics. The Serbian kolo is also shown as influential on the work, relating directly to the physicality and kinetics of the metaphorical robots.

Hildegard Westerkamp's (1990) composition École Polytechnique is an artistic response to one of Canada's most profoundly disturbing mass murders, the 1989 slaying of fourteen women in Montreal, Quebec. Using the theoretical model, derived from Haraway, of the cyborg body, and analyzing the import of the mixed media (voices, instruments and electroacoustic tape) incorporated in the music, the authors examine the impact this work has had on some of those who have heard it and performed it, based on the responses of choristers and listeners in several studies. The authors explored how those who engaged significantly with the music, (including those who had no personal association with the actual events of the 1989 massacre), were able to make relevant connections between their own experience and the composition itself, embrace these connections and their disturbing resonances, and thereby experience meaningful emotional growth.

La compositrice québécoise Ana Sokolović est d’origine serbe et plusieurs de ses oeuvres font référence à son pays d’origine, que ce soit par l’utilisation de mélodies et de rythmes traditionnels ou par des références culturelles. Pour approfondir son héritage serbe, l’auteure s’est entretenue avec la compositrice en mars 2012. L’article relate les paysages de son enfance et de son adolescence, l’environnement musical, culturel et politique de ses années d’apprentissage. Le portrait de sa vie familiale et de son quotidien nous permet de saisir des éléments constituants de sa personnalité d’artiste en devenir. Sa décision de s’établir à Montréal est explorée et elle raconte comment elle a pris conscience de son héritage slave.

Lors d’un entretien réalisé par la compositrice Isabelle Panneton, Ana Sokolović discute de ses inspirations, de ses méthodes et de son rapport avec les interprètes de sa musique.

This study explores text and music relations in Canadian composer Violet Archer's “The Twenty-Third Psalm” by analysing the text of Psalm 23, Fibonacci numbers, melodic contours, motives, and the role of the accompaniment. The text focuses on David's faith in God and his acceptance of God as his shepherd on earth. The four other approaches allow us to examine the work on three different structural levels: background through Fibonacci numbers, middleground through melodic contour analysis, and foreground through motivic analysis and the role of the accompaniment. The measure numbers that align with Fibonacci numbers overlap with some of the melodic contour phrases, which are demarcated by rests, as well as with the most important moments at the surface level, such as the emphasis on the word “death” through recurring and symbolic motives. The piano accompaniment further supports these moments in the text.