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Carefully preserved in the archives of the Ursuline and Hôtel-Dieu Monasteries of Quebec are several manuscripts containing Canada’s first sacred works for female voices. The manuscripts contain dozens of intricate motets composed in the French Baroque style, a repository of music which has not been sung for hundreds of years. These motets form a neglected part of Canada’s musical heritage which is waiting to be unearthed and explored. Ursuline and Augustinian nuns arrived to the French territories of the New World to educate and evangelize young women. Singing formed a core element of their teaching and worship. For over one hundred years (1639-1760), church music provided a backbone to Canada’s vibrant musical culture. When the French territories were lost to Britain and Spain, musical culture shifted radically and the sacred French music simply faded into obscurity. An overview of the sweeping events of the French Baroque era includes discussion of France’s social conditions, the political and religious climate, the flowering of the arts and the exploration of the New World. In France, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of great strife which heralded the massive social changes to come in the nineteenth century. France’s struggles directly impacted the colony of New France, including that of its religious institutions and music. This study traces the musical activities in the Ursuline community of New France as the nuns lived their mission on the frontier, teaching Aboriginal and colonial girls. The evolution of female emancipation stemming from religious evangelism is considered. Examination of a trove of 160 motets located in the female monasteries of Québec City reveals the high caliber of music practiced by the nuns. No interpretive editions for performance purposes exist. Newly transcribed works have been generated from the manuscripts, with period performance guidance for appropriate ornamentation and ensemble requirements. An in-depth discussion of New France Baroque vocal and choral musical styles is provided, with reference to historical records of how it was taught, as described in contemporaneous music treatises and many original documents specific to these religious female communities.

Ce mémoire explore la notion d’intermédialité autochtone au sein de l’oeuvre de Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. Les imbrications entre les médias seront notre point d’appui pour penser les questions de l’esthétique dans l’art autochtone actuel. Par le biais de la représentation d’un média dans un autre, nous aborderons ainsi la réactualisation des traditions orales telles que le conte, le mythe, le chant et le tambour au sein des productions de cette artiste. Notre parcours observera les structures intermédiales qui mettent en exergue la mémoire ainsi que les connaissances ancestrales. Les croisements entre l’identité et le territoire seront également discutés dans l’optique des représentations intermédiales. Ainsi, les phénomènes d’affirmation et de réactualisation des savoirs se déploient par l’utilisation de divers médias. De ce fait, la résistance environnementale et culturelle ainsi que la néo-oralité sous-tendent l’oeuvre de l’artiste et s’expriment à travers les territoires imaginaires et médiatiques.

Towards an African Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance, is the first book to consoloidate the field of African Canadian Art History. In this book, Charmaine A. Nelson and her colleagues--a group of established and up-and-coming artists, scholars, and cultural critics--argue for an African Canadian Art History that can simultaneously examine the artistic contributions of black Canadian artists within their unique historical contexts, critique the colonial representation of black subjects by white artists, and contest the customary racial homogeneity of Canadian Art History. Challenging the traditional notions of artistic value, this groundbreaking book examines art, artists, and visual and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing "high," "low," and popular art across various media, with a focus to offer a new perspective on Canadian Art History--an African Canadian Art History

Réflexion sur la dépolitisation et l’éclaircissement du hip-hop lors de son passage dans la culture de masse.

Il y a très longtemps, hommes, femmes et enfants de tous âges, clans, allégeances et nations se sont unis au son des vibrations du teweikan, qui signifie tambour traditionnel. Entre les mains des auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes Pakesso Mukash (Cri/Abénaquis), Shauit (Innu) et Moe Clark (Métis), il s’avère toujours un puissant outil de communion. Sous des airs désormais folk, électros ou reggae, le teweikan s’efforce encore aujourd’hui de créer des ponts entre les générations, les vivants et les morts, les territoires, ainsi que les conquis et les insoumis. Nous en profiterons pour remonter le fil de l’histoire de la musique des Premières Nations, du teweikan à l’électro, de Montréal à la baie d’Hudson, des plaines canadiennes à la Côte-Nord.

The singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela (1972-2010) launched her career and produced her three records in Montreal where she arrived in 1991. Not only did she change the face of migrant song in Quebec, but she also enjoyed international success, embarking on long world tours and selling more than a million records. This analysis will focus on the songs from her second album, The Living Road, and will show that Lhasa de Sela transcended linguistic and artistic frontiers by crossing the geographical border when she made Montreal her home and creative hub.

Durant la Crise et la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, on imagine Montréal sans ressources pour la culture, Montréal ligotée, bâillonnée. C’est bien mal la connaître. Au contraire, elle s’engage alors dans une des grandes révolutions du siècle, soit celle des médias qui parlent et qui chantent. Le cinéma, la radio, le disque y recomposent l’environnement du divertissement et des arts d’une manière surprenante. Et ces nouveaux médias ne remplacent pas la presse, le concert ou le théâtre, ils s’y ajoutent, multipliant l’offre à un point qu’on n’avait encore jamais vu. Cela révolutionne la vie chez soi où, en plus du journal et du magazine, dont les tirages explosent, le piano rencontre deux nouveaux concurrents, le gramophone et le récepteur radio. Sans être riche, on peut entendre des concerts, même de musique autochtone et de grandes vedettes, chez soi, on peut « swinger » sur le jazz chez soi. On peut aussi sortir, ce que facilite un urbanisme stimulé par les nouvelles gares. Les salles de cinéma, de danse, se multiplient. C’est là qu’on se laisse emporter par le jazz ou « Tico, tico ». On se plaint chaque année que le théâtre se meurt ? Ça n’empêche pas une rencontre entre Shakespeare et Alfred Pellan. Ou d’aller entendre un transethnique prêcher l’écologie. Et aussi de s’habiller à la mode pour aller skier sur la montagne. Ce bouleversement transforme le visage de la ville, comme nous le révèlent les peintres juifs, les radioromans, ou deux œuvres majeures du temps, Two solitudes et Bonheur d’occasion. On ne verra plus jamais Montréal avec les mêmes yeux, on n’entendra plus jamais Montréal avec les mêmes oreilles. Avec des textes de Marie Beaulieu, Justin Bur, Marc H. Choko, Marie-José des Rivières, Dominic Hardy, Lorne Huston, Germain Lacasse, Laurier Lacroix, Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre, Renée Legris, Jocelyne Mathieu, Sandria P. Bouliane, Adrien Rannaud, Peggy Roquigny, Lucie Robert, Mario Robert, Denis Saint-Jacques, Chantal Savoie, Esther Trépanier et Elspeth Tulloch.

One of my favorite compilation CDs of the last few years is Unclassics: Obscure Electronic Funk and Disco, 1975–1985, released in 2004 on the Environ label. The thirteen tracks on Unclassics were collected and remixed by house/techno artist Morgan Geist, who offers them as all-but-forgotten dance music gems from just outside an Anglo-American musical axis, from places like Spain and Italy. The style that ostensibly unites these tracks is “Eurodisco,” though, as we shall see, that label does not accurately subsume all of them. “Italo-disco” seems an even cruder reduction, but circulates among critics, fans, and collectors as a meaningful label for much of the music gathered here. While some of the cuts on Unclassics have long been the idiosyncratic favorites of DJs or dance music collectors, more is going on here than the resurrection of cultish or neglected treasures. Unclassics is one milestone within the significant rehabilitation of European and Italian disco that has unfolded over the last decade. Mixed Up in the Hague, Vol. 1, a compilation first released privately in 1999, was a key event in this rehabilitation; other collections, like I-Robots: Italo Electro Disco Underground Classics and Confuzed Disco: A Retrospective of Italian Records, have followed. Zyx, the Germany-based label that dominated the field in the 1980s and early 1990s, is actively marketing dozens of compilations of its own Italo-disco from that period. The garish red and green covers of Zyx’s Italo anthologies, which filled the discount cassette bins of European airport stores fifteen years ago, have been redesigned so that they now look authoritative and curatorial. Radio and DJ sets devoted to this music now abound on the Internet. Think Italy. Without claiming mind-reading powers, it’s a comfortable prediction you’ve already got tacky piano sample records and frenzied all-night clubbing in mind, a nation that when it isn’t knocking out club records by the cartload likes nothing more than to party all night on a hillside by the sea. Italian music has been in and out of style more often than the flares revival. There are enough piew-piew-piew zaps during these 55 minutes to wipe out a small nation of roller skaters. For almost two decades, tracks like those collected on Unclassics held the status of morbid symptoms, reminders of the decay and dispersion of dance music in the years between disco and house music. Even as they reclaim these tracks as lost gems, the liner notes to Unclassics embrace that morbidity, relishing the ways in which so many of these pieces are seen to have gotten things wrong. My favorite track on Unclassics is a Spanish cut from 1979, “Margherita,” whose guiltless dishing out of pleasures betrays the compilation’s broader sensibility. Piercing little synth notes alternate with thick, rolling movements that could drive an army forward. Mariachi horns interweave with tinny keyboard glissandos in rounding out sections. Changes come precisely when we want them; each gimmicky sound or flourish dutifully returns just as we start to miss it. As “Margherita” moves in unstoppable fashion around its wheel of styles and sections, it is easy to think that this is music trying too desperately to be liked. Dominant understandings of the European contribution to disco read its influence selectively, focusing on the robotic, synthesized sounds of Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder. These versions of Eurodisco’s history link such figures as Can, Patrick Cowley, Afrika Bambaataa, and Juan Atkins in a heroic story that sends disco to Europe so that it may return, reinvented, to an American underground able to realize its radical potential. When Eurodisco is remembered for its sleek mechanical control, however, what gets forgotten is the lush extravagance that seemed to mark so much of it. As early as 1977, North American critics had recourse to a well-entrenched moral geography in characterizing disco music from continental Europe as “florid,” given to flamboyant passion and bombastic overlays of effects.1 Arguably, the peculiarity of so much Eurodisco came from the ways in which its extravagant lushness often went hand in hand...

Towards an African Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance, is the first book to consoloidate the field of African Canadian Art History. In this book, Charmaine A. Nelson and her colleagues--a group of established and up-and-coming artists, scholars, and cultural critics--argue for an African Canadian Art History that can simultaneously examine the artistic contributions of black Canadian artists within their unique historical contexts, critique the colonial representation of black subjects by white artists, and contest the customary racial homogeneity of Canadian Art History. Challenging the traditional notions of artistic value, this groundbreaking book examines art, artists, and visual and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing "high," "low," and popular art across various media, with a focus to offer a new perspective on Canadian Art History--an African Canadian Art History

L’imaginaire campagnard associé à la chanson country-western masque une réalité méconnue. Entre 1942, année du premier enregistrement sur disque de Roland Lebrun, et 1958, année de la fondation de la première maison de disques indépendante spécialisée dans la production d’enregistrements country-western, le genre se structure en partie autour de pratiques artistiques et de réseaux urbains. Cet article propose une histoire culturelle de la chanson country-western par l’intermédiaire, notamment, de ses pratiques médiatiques. Au premier plan de cette analyse se trouve la radio, qui, en faisant une place inédite aux amateurs, permet aux premiers chanteurs country-western non seulement de se faire connaître et de se professionnaliser, mais aussi de développer une relation de grande proximité avec le public. Un bref portrait du rôle du studio d’enregistrement et des maisons de disques, qui offrent un revenu stable à ces artistes, révèle un genre largement apprécié. D’un studio à l’autre, Montréal, aux côtés de villes industrielles importantes (Drummondville et Trois-Rivières, par exemple), joue un rôle prédominant. , This paper examines a few aspects of the cultural history of country-western music in Quebec. The rural imagery of the songs, with their cowboys, their farms, their mountains, hides an important phenomenon; at its beginnings, the genre heavily relies on urban networks and urban cultural practices. This is especially important during the structuration of the genre, between 1942, when Roland Lebrun records his first songs, and 1958, when the genre finally has its own independent record companies. During these 16 years, among other strategies, country-western artists use the media to start and promote their careers. Here, the radio plays an important role; with its openness to amateurs, it allows these artists to become professionals and to develop an intimate relationship with their audience. Recording studios provide them with a regular income between touring seasons. From one studio to another, Montreal, as well as important industrial cities of the time (Drummondville, Trois-Rivières), is an important protagonist in the structuration and the dissemination of the new genre, which deeply relies on urbanity and modernity despite the traditional image it tries to project at the same time.

Un voyage à travers l'histoire et l'évolution du festival de musique Innu Nikamu, l'un des événements les plus importants des Premières Nations du Canada.

To measure Maryvonne Kendergi’s contributions to the smcq, it is necessary to revisit her career in Quebec, which was based on the solid academic and professional training she received at Parisian institutions from 1929 to 1952. Thereafter, in Montreal, she was hired by Radio-Canada for her exceptional voice, and in September 1956, she embarked on a brilliant radio career as a promoter of contemporary music. Kendergi gradually introduced the listening public to the arcana of the Montreal avant-garde. In this endeavour she was encouraged by Stockhausen’s arrival in Montreal in 1958, by composers’ efforts in organizing International Music Week in 1961, by the foundation of the smcq in 1966, and by the influence of the latter organization, particularly in its collaboration with the Université de Montréal in establishing the Musialogues in 1969. The role of Kendergi’s exceptional skills in broadening the influence of the smcq is explored in this article.

Quebec composer Linda Bouchard (born 1957) is an extremely prolific composer, particularly active on the new music scene in the u.s. where she has lived for lengthy periods since 1989. She has composed a rich and diverse catalogue of works, ranging from orchestral music to more intimist instrumentations, and also using multimedia or improvisation. In this interview, the composer reflects on the question of exile and identity in light of her own experience, thus reliving her own artistic path while also addressing some still burning questions about the place of music creators in the global culture.

Cet article porte sur les rôles que les femmes ont joué dans le développement d’une scène jazz à Montréal. Les archives témoignent de l’importance des pianistes Vera Guilaroff et Ilene Bourne, de l’enseignante de piano Daisy Peterson Sweeney, des enseignantes de danse Olga Spencer Foderingham et Ethel Bruneau, ainsi que des danseuses de variétés dans le développement de la plus grande scène jazz du Canada au cours de la première moitié du xxe siècle. Cet article contextualise la présence des femmes dans ces espaces performantiels précis (le piano, l’enseignement, la danse) et explore les processus historiographiques liés à leur exclusion des récits historiques.