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Pendant près d’un demi-siècle (1920–1970), Montréal a été un centre névralgique du jazz en Amérique du Nord. Le légendaire nightlife de la ville et l’abondance de travail qu’il offrait attiraient des musiciens de tout le continent. Dans ce livre, John Gilmore décrit l’effervescence culturelle de cette époque. Il nous transporte à Montréal, après la tombée de la nuit, dans les lieux mythiques aujourd’hui presque tous disparus où ont vécu et joué les Myron Sutton, Johnny Holmes, Oscar Peterson, Louis Metcalf, Steep Wade, Maury Kaye et René Thomas. Dans cette contribution fondamentale à l’histoire du jazz, on découvre que les Noirs américains venus s’établir à Montréal au début du XXe siècle ont largement contribué à la culture populaire nord-américaine. Gilmore souligne qu’au-delà des réalisations individuelles des musiciens, la production du jazz a été profondément influencée par des facteurs politiques, sociaux et économiques : la prohibition et la ségrégation raciale aux États-Unis, l’essor économique – notamment du secteur ferroviaire – de Montréal puis la Grande Dépression des années 1930, la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le « nettoyage » de la ville et la renaissance de la « moralité civique » des années 1950 et, enfin, l’émergence de l’indépendantisme québécois.

In September 2008 Canada’s most prestigious orchestra, the acclaimed Orchestre symphonique de Montreal (OSM), embarked on its first ever tour of the Canadian Arctic. Lead by internationally celebrated conductor Kent Nagano, the OSM's program featured a concert of music from the classical repertoire, including Stravinksy’s Histoire du soldat narrated in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit people, and a new work inspired by Inuit throatsinging from Canadian composer Alexina Louie. Offering viewers intimate access to Maestro Nagano, the artists, and the remote Inuit communities they visit, this stunning documentary captures an extraordinary meeting of two worlds through music.

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.

We examine the uses of and attitudes towards language of members of the Montreal Hip-Hop community in relation to Quebec language-in-education policies. These policies, implemented in the 1970s, have ensured that French has become the common public language of an ethnically diverse young adult population in Montreal. We argue, using Blommaert's (2005) model of orders of indexicality, that the dominant language hierarchy orders established by government policy have been both flattened and reordered by members of the Montreal Hip-Hop community, whose multilingual lyrics insist: (1) that while French is the lingua franca, it is a much more inclusive category which includes ‘Bad French,’ regional and class dialects, and European French; and (2) that all languages spoken by community members are valuable as linguistic resources for creativity and communication with multiple audiences. We draw from a database which includes interviews with and lyrics from rappers of Haitian, Latin-American, African-American and Québécois origin.

Through ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2003 to 2010, discussion with local musicians, and analysis of concert programs, recordings, live performances, rehearsals, press reviews, musicians’ websites and textual sources, the author examines the means by which the Chinese diasporic community in Montreal negotiates its cultural identity and exerts its agency through musical performance. The author also explores how the tangled relationships of regionally- diverse Chinese immigrants to their birthplaces and their chosen homeland are unravelled, reflecting simultaneous positions as “insiders” and “outsiders.”

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.