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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.

Cette analyse aborde le cas singulier de la circulation de la chanson J’attendrai dans la culture des années 1940, dont l’analyse des variantes permet de cerner les rapports mouvants d’une chanson aux genres chansonniers et musicaux, aux goûts et aux pratiques du public, ainsi qu’à leur ancrage au sein des champs culturels nationaux. Elle permet même, parfois, de sonder les modalités de l’évolution des modèles des rapports sociaux entre les sexes présents dans différentes versions. Ce sont ainsi autant les enjeux artistiques, culturels, sociaux et intimes à l’oeuvre qui guident notre analyse de ce cas de transfert culturel, que le repérage de vecteurs permettant de formuler une équation de la circulation culturelle des chansons à succès. , This article deals with the singular case of the circulation of the song J’attendrai in the 1940s. The analysis of the different versions of the song allows us to reveal the changing relationship between these versions and musical genres, the tastes and practices of the public, and the way they fit into national cultures. This analysis also allows us, in places, to explore the evolution of social relationships between genders as presented in the different versions of the song. This way, our analysis of this case of cultural transfer is guided as much by the artistic, cultural, social and intimate aspects of the song, as by a search for the vectors explaining the cultural circulation of a successful song.

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.

During its 25 years of activities, the nem has played 635 works by 374 composers at local concerts, public workshops or world tours. Collectively, these works cover most of the aesthetic tendencies of the music of the 20th century. However, it is possible to define the repertoire of the ensemble along two main axes: on one hand, works that have become “classics” of contemporary music, and, on the other hand, new works engaged in musical innovation. Thus, the policy for disseminating works through concerts established by Lorraine Vaillancourt introduces a new culture within the world of musical creation, based on the development of a repertoire of works from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Un article de la revue Magazine Gaspésie, diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

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.

Cet article examine l’expérience des auditeurs chiliens exilés à Montréal, se concentrant spécifiquement sur leurs écoutes pendant la dictature militaire (1973-1989). Issus d’une méthodologie mixte qui combine l’histoire orale et l’analyse musicale, les résultats de cette recherche musicologique révèlent la place primordiale que l’audition musicale eut chez les exilés dans la reconstruction d’un lien avec leur pays d’origine, ainsi que dans le développement du mouvement de solidarité avec le peuple chilien. L’article explique, d’abord, le déploiement des goûts musicaux et identifie les répertoires canoniques qui demeurent au centre des écoutes. Ensuite, il aborde le rôle de l’usage des enregistrements en vinyle et cassette, et de la radio dans la diffusion des musiques. Enfin, les deux dernières sections explorent les significations associées aux pièces musicales ‘Gracias a la Vida’ et ‘Vuelvo’, mettant en relief la complexité de la réception en ce qui concerne la construction des identités culturelles, le récit des histoires personnelles et communautaires.

Cet article s’intéresse à “Étoile des aînés”, un concours de musique réservé aux citoyens canadiens de 65 ans. Organisé et commandité par Chartwell, le plus gros réseau de résidences pour personnes âgées au Canada, ce concours vise à « célébrer le talent des retraités ». Fruit d’un projet pilote réalisé sous le mode d’une ethnographie multi-sites, l’étude explore comment “Étoile des aînés”, en tant qu’événement sis à l’intersection de la musique, des médias et du marché en pleine expansion de l’habitation pour aînés, met en évidence des articulations particulières du “bien vieillir” au Québec. Nous proposons qu’ “Étoile des aînés” agit comme une médiation du “vieillissement réussi”, comme une forme distincte du “bien vieillir”, en insistant sur les enjeux que pose la mise à l’épreuve publique du vieillissement. Nous y examinons deux modalités qui confèrent au vieillissement réussi un caractère collectif : l’expérience publique et l’engagement partagé. Ce concours-spectacle est un terrain privilégié pour comprendre les manières dont le vieillissement actif se déploie hors des domaines de la santé et de la sécurité.

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.

Even if women artists are wishing for recognition of their work, independently from their gender, language and belonging to a cultural group, their practices conditions are sometimes linked to these statuses. Through a sociodemographic study of French Canadian artists, we will analyze more specifically the data on women artists. We will show that, even if they have a higher education than man, women artists usually are considerably less paid for their services. We will also try to understand if minorization processes of women from professional artistic francophone communities can explain some gender inequalities and how the production of identity discourses (women, francophonie, linguistic minority) reinforce tensions between art and the identity perspective.

Dans le contexte de travaux plus larges portant sur l’histoire de la chanson à succès par l’analyse des préférences musicales des lectrices du Bulletin des agriculteurs dans les années 1940, nous nous intéressons ici aux éléments qui permettent de comprendre les modalités par lesquelles les goûts musicaux témoignent de l’émergence d’une modernité culturelle au Québec dans les années 1940. Deux postulats orientent notre perspective. Le premier consiste à supposer l’existence d’une modernité culturelle « populaire » qui transite par la forme, les supports et la technologie. Le second sonde la façon dont les thèmes intimes et la focalisation sur l’expression du sentiment amoureux marquent une transformation des valeurs et, surtout, explore les marques formelles et discursives qui portent ces valeurs dans la chanson à succès. , As part of a larger research project on the history of popular song, which analyzes the musical preferences of the female readers of the Bulletin des agriculteurs in the 1940s, this article focuses on those elements that allow for an understanding of the modalities by which these women’s musical tastes reflected the emergence of a cultural modernity in Quebec during that decade. Two basic premises orient my perspective on the subject. The first presupposes the existence of a “popular” cultural modernity based on form, equipment, and technology. The second explores both the way in which intimate themes and the importance given to expressions of love reflected a shift in values, as well as the formal and discursive markers that transmitted these values in popular song.

Kim Sawchuk is a feminist media studies scholar and a founding member of Studio XX, a feminist-run new media arts collective based in Montreal. A professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, she is the former editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication and co-editor of wi: journal of mobile media. Sawchuk’s work encompasses the roles of women in science and technology, as well as issues surrounding media technology access and use by women, elders, and immigrant communities. Her more recent research involves the use of mobile devices by older adults. During a Skype interview with guest editor Stephanie Tripp on March 22, 2013, Sawchuk discussed her collaboration in Studio XX, her research on women and technology, her work on mobile communications technologies, and her outlook on issues facing women working in new media today.

The music of Rufus Wainwright has been afforded much critical acclaim thanks to the singer-songwriter’s understanding of Queer cultural history, and the candor with which he explores (homo)sexuality in his music. This case study seeks to examine his use of opera in particular, and how Wainwright uses the historical trope of the opera queen to incorporate his own queerness into music, thus asserting an authority of difference and challenging the dominant (hetero)norm constructions of masculinity in popular music. Wainwright disregards any cultural framework imposed by heternormativism, and reclaims the Orphic figure of operatic authority as one of queer power through this absence. By drawing on his own relationship with opera, Wainwright exploits the right this gives him by reinterpreting cultural history, and revising the pejorative stereotype that is an opera queen.

Fiddle music and dancing have formed a major component of the social lives of the Algonquian First Nations Cree population living in the James Bay region of Ontario and Québec since the instrument and its associated repertoire were introduced to the region by British (and most notably Scottish) employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company who travelled across the Atlantic on ships from the late 17th to the 20th century. Based on archival research and ongoing fieldwork in the region since 2011, this article aims to explore this transatlantic musical migration from the British Isles to James Bay and the reshaping of Scottish fiddle music and dance through indigenization and incorporation into the Cree cultural milieu. By examining this area of cultural flow, the article seeks to engage with current themes in ethnomusicology on the subject and add to the growing body of knowledge surrounding them.