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  • The Transnational History of Settler Colonialism and the Music of the Urban West:Resituating a Local Music History
  • David Gramit (bio)

What role did music play in the settlement of Edmonton, Alberta, and why should anyone who lives outside that city care? The present essay developed as I realized that the second of these questions would almost inevitably arise as I pursued the first, and it became more pressing as I encountered the work of my predecessors in this area. There were indeed earlier studies of musical life in Edmonton, to which I remain indebted, but they were largely and justifiably concerned with documenting the local rather than with linking it to external historiographical issues.1 This came as no great surprise; there was no particular reason to expect that the local history of a single city should have become the object of such reflection. More surprising, however, was that this phenomenon seemed to be widely replicated when I began looking for studies of other western Canadian or US cities that might be comparable. Again, studies of the early musical life of individual western cities certainly exist, but despite their often considerable level of accomplishment, they seemed curiously segregated from the academic field of American music studies. Articles were more likely to appear in local history publications than in national or international musicological publications (indeed, they have been almost entirely absent from recent decades of both American Music and the Journal of the Society for American Music) and longer studies were dominated by either dissertations or books by nonmusicologists.2 I make these observations not to [End Page 272] denigrate these works, but to suggest something about the dominant interests of American music studies as a field, however loosely constituted. With the exception of a few major metropolitan areas (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles most prominent among them), local urban histories, and especially histories of urban origins, have been largely peripheral to its agenda.

Reasons for this peripheral status were not hard to find. After all, I had not chosen to study Edmonton’s history because it had a reputation as a major cultural center, nor because its early history was associated with any well-known composers or crucial music-historical developments. It was simply where I lived, and I had no particular reason to expect that its history was inherently more significant than that of any number of comparable locations—and, presumably, neither did the authors of many of those other local studies. On the whole, the attention of music scholars, and thus the collective interest of the field, have gravitated instead toward the study of metropolitan areas known to have had vital musical cultures and institutions, which require a scale and resources that were most often unavailable on the frontiers of settlement. From the perspective of the field, I began to suspect, local histories still had associations not drastically different from those of Nietzsche’s time, the “antiquarian” history that he described as presenting “the trivial, circumscribed, decaying, and obsolete,” of interest only because “it spreads a simple feeling of pleasure and contentment over the modest, rude, even wretched conditions in which a man or nation lives.”3 Locals might take pride, but there was little apparent broader interest.

Admittedly, a brief overview of Edmonton’s early musical life would not suggest it as a particularly likely candidate to provide grounds for that broader interest. Built around a fur-trading outpost on the northern prairies, the town was incorporated in 1892 with a population of 700. It became the province’s capital in 1905, and by the beginning of the Great Depression it had grown to 74,298.4 During that period, Edmonton’s citizens took part in musical activities similar to those happening in thousands of communities, both larger and smaller, across North America: they played in bands; they sang in church choirs and choruses—some with ethnic identities, some dedicated to classical music; some of their children studied music formally, especially piano, voice, or violin; they organized musical theater performances, and orchestras that sometimes collapsed almost immediately and sometimes endured for surprising lengths of time; they danced (and skated) to music provided by...

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