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À la fois superstar et femme secrète, Diane Dufresne est une des rares artistes à susciter autant de passion au Québec, en France et dans toute la francophonie. Depuis quatre décennies, ses admirateurs sont légion des deux côtés de l'Atlantique et le milieu artistique reconnaît unanimement son audace et son immense talent de créatrice

Cet article étudie la notion de reprise sous l’angle de l’Hommage à La Bolduc rendu par sept compositrices à Mary Travers (alias La Bolduc), icône de la musique populaire au Québec dans les années 1930, à l’occasion du Festival SuperMicMac. Par des allusions, des réfé­rences précises et explicites ou par de simples emprunts et citations, ces hommages sont autant de lectures que de relectures des chansons sélectionnées en abordant différents modes de jeux d’«  intertextualité musicale  ». Celle-ci se situe à deux niveaux  : le pôle de la production, qui montre que les chansons engagées de La Bolduc sont elles-mêmes le témoignage d’une époque  ; le pôle de la réception, pour exposer les résonances de ces chansons à partir de références autres et communes à la fois, comme la place des femmes dans la création musicale. Cette étude envisage ainsi la reprise à partir des aspects, des significations et des enjeux musicaux posés par l’intertextualité musicale, ici abordée sous l’angle de l’hommage alors conçu comme «  réactivateur  » de sens.

Ce mémoire de création littéraire se divise en deux parties. La première propose une série de chansons intitulée Chansons Fleuve. Ce sont huit pièces créées autour de l'idée de l'intime, dont j'ai composé les paroles et la musique1. Elles ont été enregistrées sur un support audio qui accompagne la copie papier de ce mémoire. La seconde partie consiste en une analyse des rapports qu'entretiennent le texte et la musique d'"Arbre à fruits, arbre à fruits" de Marie-Jo Thério, avec l'intime. À travers les paroles de la pièce, les marques de l'intime sont présentes comme contenu (l'essence de l'intime, les thématiques) et comme forme (les relations, les situations, le temps, l'espace). Dans l'enregistrement de la voix et l'interprétation, sont véhiculées plusieurs émotions qui installent un climat d'intimité, appuient le texte et contribuent à rapprocher le public de l'artiste.

In the 1930s, Mary Travers wrote folk songs dealing with the thorny issue of the working poor during hard times. A self-styled “woman at the service of the community”, she focused on those who lost their jobs as a result of the economic crisis. Heeding tradition, she lauded the work of famers whom she perceived as the mythical representatives of an idealised “old era”. How did she reconcile her songs praising tradition with an increasingly industrial labour market ? How did she react to women entering the workforce ? What did she think of government actions in the face of dwindling employment and pressing poverty ? Did she consider herself to be a career woman, what with hers being the first successful recordings of Quebec folk songs ? Confronting or buttressing established taboos such as those about women in the workforce, she wrote songs reflecting those societal issues prevalent at the time. Yet, she set herself apart both through her trade as a songwriter and her depiction of it. The economic situation in the province of Quebec influenced how labour was perceived, and her writings, favouring the standpoint of a working woman from the lower classes where employment is a matter of both survival and pride, echoed this perception with originality. A sociological and critical analysis of her songs illustrates the societal discourse on labour that prevailed during hard times.

The successful compositional careers of Jean Coulthard, Barbara Pentland, and Violet Archer spanned all but the first three decades of the twentieth century. Entering a compositional career at this time had many challenges: as Western Canadians, these composers had to establish their credibility with a public that could not be counted on to recognize the worth of their work due to sexist bias and a prevailing critical stance: public approval was evidence of a lack of true creativity. This was especially problematic for women, who had to keep to the center of progressive composition, away from the experimental and conservative margins, in order to gain recognition. Following World War II, the pressure of modernism increased, due at least in part to initiatives by the U. S. Government in occupied Germany, countering the stereotype of the unsophisticated American with a new narrative of American experimental tradition.

J'écris c'qui m'chante , dit-elle. Et elle a bien raison ! Au lieu d'une biographie pompeuse, Diane Dufresne nous livre avec bonheur une vie en éclats. Écrivain, peintre, chanteuse : nous la retrouvons sous ses multiples facettes – l'existentialiste, la rockeuse, l'amoureuse impudique (sur scène) et la femme secrète, inattendue. Nous nous retrouvons aussi nous-mêmes, à travers les émotions que Diane exprime. Des pages magnifiques sur l'amitié, l'amour, la solitude... D'intimes confidences où resurgissent nos peurs : peur de l'inconnu, de la mort, du destin de la Terre et du nôtre. Et parmi toutes ces craintes un oubli capital : celui de savourer la vie. Pourquoi sentons-nous toujours qu'on a quelque chose à faire au lieu de quelque chose à vivre ? Avec ses splendeurs d'écriture, sa fantaisie, son humanité, son humilité, cette diseuse de belle aventure nous enchante et nous fait du bien.

A review of “masculine” and “feminine” attitudes towards music composition of the past fifty years highlights the contributions of Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux and Marcelle Deschênes to the development of Québécois electroacoustic music. The author re-creates the historical context for the composers’ childhoods, adolescences, and periods of training in Montreal and Paris, and follows this with a discussion of how they negotiated the dominant trends of the 1970s. She then turns to the composers’ roles as pioneers: in their wish to depart from well-trodden paths, Coulombe Saint-Marcoux and Deschênes turned to new technological tools that would allow them to express a new artistic sensibility. From this perspective, they should be considered the “sherpas” of Québécois electroacoustic music.

This article is an incursion into the domain of sound ecology based on interdisciplinary research about artists and researchers. We expose the fundamental principles of sound ecology, a discipline that emerged during the seventies, and discuss the best practices of women in sound ecology, demonstrating how this constitutes a relevant research area for women’s studies. The link between feminism and sound ecology being established, we summarize three sociopolitically relevant research projects whose methods resemble feminist action research. We conclude by reflecting on the best means to foster interdisciplinary collaboration.

La musique actuelle née au tournant des années 1970-1980 a connu ses heures de gloire pendant de nombreuses années. Trois femmes font partie de la lancée et demeurent à ce jour des musiciennes actives et des administratrices hors pair. Mais d’autres, artistes sonores plutôt qu’instrumentistes, émergent, au moment du tournant technologique et plus particulièrement au milieu des années 1990. Un nombre important de ces femmes développent des pratiques non instrumentales d’art audio, de musique bruitiste, de musiques mixtes, électroniques expérimentales, d’installation et de multimédia. Elles sont mal connues, méconnues des grands médias et de la plupart des lieux d’enseignement de la musique, bien que plusieurs d’entre elles les aient fréquentés. Ce moment de rencontre avec certaines d’entre elles souhaite les faire apparaître, en plein jour.

My dissertation explores the eclectic singing careers of sisters Eva and Juliette Gauthier. Born in Ottawa, Eva and Juliettte were aided in their musical aspirations by the patronage of Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier and his wife Lady Zoë. They both received classical vocal training in Europe. Eva spent four years in Java. She studied the local music, which later became incorporated into her concert repertoire in North America. She went on to become a leading interpreter of modern art song. Juliette became a performer of Canadian folk music in Canada, the United States and Europe, aiming to reproduce folk music “realistically” in a concert setting. My dissertation is the result of examining archival materials pertaining to their careers, combined with research into the various social and cultural worlds they traversed. Eva and Juliette’s careers are revealing of a period of transition in the arts and in social experience more generally. These transitions are related to the exploitation of non-Western people, uses of the “folk,” and the emergence of a cultural marketplace that was defined by a mixture of highbrow institutions and mass culture industries. My methodology draws from the sociology of art and cultural history, transposing Eva and Juliette Gauthier against the backdrop of the social, cultural and economic conditions that shaped their career trajectories and made them possible.

The powerful concept of orientalism has undergone considerable refinement since Edward Said popularized the term with his eponymous book in 1978. Orientalism typically is presented as a totalizing process that creates polar oppositions between a dominating West and a subordinate East. U.S. orientalisms, however, reflect uniquely North American approaches to identity formation that include assimilating characteristics usually associated with the Other. This article explores the complex relationship among three individuals—U.S. composer Charles T. Griffes, Canadian singer Eva Gauthier, and German-trained Dutch East Indies composer Paul J. Seelig—and how they exploited the same Javanese songs to lend legitimacy to their individual artistic projects. A comparison of Griffes's and Seelig's settings of a West Javanese tune (“Kinanti”) provides an especially clear example of how contrasting approaches manifest different orientalisms. Whereas Griffes accompanied the melody with stock orientalist gestures to express his own fascination with the exotic, Seelig used chromatic harmonies and a chorale-like texture to ground the melody in the familiar, translating rather than representing its Otherness. The tunes that bind Griffes, Gauthier, and Seelig are only the raw materials from which they created their own unique orientalisms, each with its own sense of self and its own Javanese others.