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Interest in audio-visual works of art that are performed by a live pianist while integrating projected moving visual images has waxed and waned over a period of almost 300 years. The past twenty years or so has seen a re-emergence of this genre of classical music composition which places extra demands on the pianist performing these works. This dissertation explores the history of this genre, proposes a framework for analysis of these pieces, and examines from both analytical and performance perspectives three contrasting works for this medium: Michel van der Aa’s 'Transit', Nicole Lizée’s 'Hitchcock Études', and 'Surface Tension' by Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby. This research was

En 1940, deux femmes élégantes prennent le thé dans le lobby du Ritz-Carlton. Ne vous fiez pas aux apparences: leur rencontre annonce un grand chambardement dans l’univers de la musique classique. La mécène Madge Bowen et la violoniste Ethel Stark fondent à Montréal ce qui deviendra le premier orchestre symphonique canadien composé uniquement de femmes. […]

Ce mémoire-création porte sur la conception sonore pour le théâtre et la danse contemporaine. Il vise à fournir des connaissances qui puissent faciliter l'intégration du son au sein d'une création scénique. La recherche dont il est question ici se concentre uniquement sur les aspects conceptuels et non techniques, toutes deux intrinsèques au processus de création du son. Me basant sur mon expérience de concepteure sonore, plus précisément à partir de l'étude de mes notes de chantier de création entre 1999 et 2014, je dégage dix principes récurrents qui indiquent des conditions optimales pour concevoir le son. Ce mémoire-création est l'analyse d'une approche personnelle et le processus méthodologique a été autopoïétique et heuristique. L'étude se présente en trois sections. La première s'intéresse aux récits des processus de création où chaque principe émerge à partir de l'expérience qui est racontée. Dans la deuxième section, les principes s'explicitent davantage au travers l'étude de textes sur la conception du son. Un corpus d'auteurs, surtout des praticiens de la création sonore, est déterminé pour cette partie. Un livret compose la troisième section. Il incarne la partie « création » de ce mémoire. Il s'agit encore de préciser les principes, mais cette fois au travers de dix lettres fictives, destinées à des étudiants-es. Chaque lettre, dont le sujet est un problème rencontré en cours de processus de création, vise à expliquer un principe dans un contexte concret. Le titre du livret est La conception sonore selon Nancy Tobin 01. Mon nom apparaît dans le titre pour signifier qu'il est surtout question de mon approche personnelle. La mention des chiffres « 01 » indique que le livret démarre une série où d'autres personnes conceptrices sont invitées à écrire sur leur propre expérience. Peu de textes sur la conception sonore - sur l'expérience concrète du faire - existent. Ce mémoire-création vise à combler en partie cette lacune et à inviter d'autres créateurs à écrire sur leur pratique. L'expression par le sonore est riche et diversifiée. Plus les pratiques seront partagées et diffusées, plus il sera possible de multiplier les possibles de l'espace de l'écoute.

In the field of composition in Quebec, women composers are still less numerous than men composers. While the profession of composer has difficulty being recognized in Quebec society, women composers are twice as marginalized. Many of give evidence to the challenges they face when it comes to integrating into the musical community, and several musicologists have tried to better understand—and eventually solve—the problems specific to women in the field of composition.

This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschênes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Université Laval and Université de Montréal. An account of Deschênes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.

The author discusses the visibility and participation of women in electronic music culture. She argues that most electronic music social networks privilege male inclusion and success, and that skill-sharing is an important strategy to encourage women in the field. To seed this discussion, the author examines her own history with reflections on the gender dynamics within electronic music communities outside the academy, and the role that social and technical currencies play within them. She also discusses Ladies club, a music distribution project that led to several solo female electronic musicians taking the stage and organising events in Montreal during 2007.

This study examines the creative layers and continuities evident within the composition and rehearsal processes of Nicole Lizée’s Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop (Fibre-Optic Flowers), written for the Kronos Quartet in 2012. Lizée’s compositional approach to the historic and the new, and the mechanical and the human, are interpreted through Simon Emmerson’s three themes of combination, transformation, and control, and his three “impulses within composition” that combine live and acousmatic soundworlds – integration, antithesis, and co-existence. These concepts also help to articulate the way the players engage with the physical, psychological, and expressive demands of the piece. Discussions arising from the Kronos Quartet rehearsing the piece with the composer reveal how extensions are made to the performers’ mind and body experiences when they are required both to initiate and integrate sounds emanating from unfamiliar, analogue machines into their acoustic, yet amplified soundworld. Creative layers and continuities are seen to evolve from compositional experimentation and from composer–performer and co-performer dialogues in rehearsal in the BBC Maida Vale studio prior to the world premiere at a BBC Prom concert on 24 July 2012.

In this study, four sets of songs composed by Violet Archer are examined, all of which were written at different points in her career. Archer studied with Paul Hindemith in 1948 – 49, and his teachings had a tremendous impact on the young composer. The first set of songs to be analyzed, Moon Songs, was written before her time with Hindemith, and will provide a baseline from which her later, post-Hindemith, works can be compared. Following her studies with Hindemith, Archer wrote three songs, “Cradle Song,” “April Weather,” and “First Snow,” all of which show evidence of Hindemith’s influence. Her later, more mature works, Northern Landscape and Caleidoscopio Quatro, demonstrate a refined compositional technique; one in which Archer has created her own style, while maintaining aspects of the approach taught by Hindemith at Yale. This study will elaborate on the aspects of Archer’s music that evolved throughout her compositional career.

Among the forms of oral history, the song, within the Inuit culture, was general practice and quite versatile. Inheriting this tradition, the contemporary Inuit song has risen in popularity starting in the 1970’s and has not diminished since. Within the literary field, the lyrics to the Inuit songs demonstrate a remarkable vitality in which the author-composers explore various aesthetics, navigate languages and transmit a part of their culture. Taking into consideration the historical context, this article aims to reflect on the formal evolution of the modern Inuit song and examine the relations that are maintained through more traditional portrayals. Finally, the ultra-contemporary body of musical works in Nunavik is notable for being particularly trilingual yet reveals an upsurge of texts in Inuktitut. What significance will this have on the overall discourse?

This article advances claims about Montreal’s electronic dance music scene through mapping the career of one of the key actors who shaped the electroclash scene from the early 2000s onwards—music producer/DJ Mini (née Evelyne Drouin). By way of detailing the career of DJ Mini, this text attempts to add to the queer musical narratives currently emerging from music scene analyses. Counter to the experiences of many women DJs and musicians participating in heterosexual and male-dominated music scenes, Drouin received extensive mentoring and support from various informal queer social networks spread throughout the circuits of the city. Not only did she gain access to a local production network of equipment and skill sharing, Drouin was also given access to spaces where she was able to develop production skills on her own time and at her own pace. DJ Mini’s story offers a telling case for the ways in which the politics of access—institutional, social, technological—remain central to the vitality and inclusivity of local music scenes.

What is the internet? It began as a military research experiment, but the internet has since become a sweeping cultural phenomenon. One of the most prevalent areas of the internet’s cultural dominance is in popular music, and this thesis addresses how the internet is being understood and discussed by popular music artists. I study the works of Grimes and Childish Gambino, two popular music artists who grew up alongside the internet’s rise to cultural dominance and explicitly address this experience as an integral component of their lives and works. I look specifically at discourse surrounding Grimes’ “post-internet” music and Childish Gambino’s expansive conceptual work Because the Internet (2013). This research concludes by addressing how popular music artists like Grimes and Childish Gambino are helping produce the ways in which we understand and discuss the cultural phenomenon of the internet, and how they provide a foundation for future artists and research to build upon.

Cette étude inclut les œuvres de Mara Tremblay, Ariane Moffat et Salomé Leclerc et vise un objectif double : d’une part, il s’agit d’analyser des textes lyriques qui ont une indéniable qualité poétique et d’autre part, de réaliser une étude intermédiale alliant texte, musique et clip-vidéo afin de voir comment le sens d’un de ces éléments est infléchi, modifié ou complété par celui des autres éléments. L’hypothèse de recherche est qu’aujourd’hui, les auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes conçoivent leur art à travers trois langages esthétiques (le texte, la musique et la vidéo), faisant de la musique une expérience plurisensorielle et intermédiale. Pour faire émerger le message de ces artistes, on mobilisera les théories du care et l’écoféminisme afin d’analyser le discours portant sur le sujet et le monde. On vise à dégager les grands thèmes de ces œuvres à travers une synthèse de ces trois approches critiques. L’analyse du corpus vise à déterminer la qualité poétique des textes et la vision du monde que ces trois artistes diffusent.