Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century by George A. Proctor (review)

202 LETTERS IN CANADA 1980 integres. lei par exemple, l'examen de la reception critique n'est jamais confront" aux idees developpees dans la litterature contemporaine ou la philosophie telle qu'enseignee a Toronto au meme moment. Comme Ie suggere G. Stephen Vickers dans son avant-propos, I'ouvrage s'ouvre sur plusieurs problematiques, parmi les plus importantes celie des analyses stylistiques qui sont ici esquissees au plan technique et forme!' Une iconog1aphie et une iconologie des lieux depeints seraient a tracer. Les espaces representes reussirent-ils a nourrir les attentes d'un imaginaire collectif en train de se constituer? La question des rapports avec la photographie est maintenant mieux documentee mais il faudrait aller au-dela de l'identification des sources et des mises en page, communes avec la peinture, pour penetrer des aspects concernant la conception et la perception de l'espace en rapport avec Ie role de la couleur, par exemple. Les echanges (voyages, expositions) avec les Etats-Unis qui sont illustres a plusieurs reprises dans Ie texte de Reid meritent que l'on pousse plus avant l'etude de ces reseaux. Parce qu'il perpetue Ie 'mythe' du paysage canadien, sans analyser les fondements de cet a-priori et sans proposer I'examen des differentes conceptions du paysage, Ie livre de Reid achoppe dans sa demonstration. En ce qu'elle souleve de nombreuses questions et parce qu'elle fournira les prochaines decennies en informations, cette publication est appelee Ii jouer un role primordia!. (LAURIER LACROIX) George A. Proctor. Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century University of Toronto Press. xxvi, 297. $27.50 In '947 the CBC issued a Catalogue of Canadian Composers in which there were 238 names. In '952, when it was revised and enlarged by Helmut Kallmann to includecomposersfrom colonial times to the date ofissue, the catalogue contained the astonishing total of 356 names of composers, of whom about 80 per cent had been born after 1880 and were living in '950. Even allowing for the fact that the list included almost anyone who ever set pen to music paper, two things are obvious from the catalogue: the first is the sheer number of people who showed some interest in writing music and who had somehow managed to set it before a public; the second is how overwhelmingly has musical composition in Canada been an activity of the twentieth century. Very few people in that CBC catologue, however, would have thought ofthemselves first as composersas opposed to being, say, teachers or organists who composed; and very little of the music they wrote had much scope or substance, being mostly songs and ballads, anthems or piano pieces. Around 1950 both the self-image and the musical range of our composers changed. HUMANITIES 203 In 1951 the Canadian League of Composers was formed, and in 1959 the first office of the Canadian Music Centre opened in Toronto. When Contemporary Canadian Composers, a biographical dictionary edited by John Beckwith and Keith MacMillan, appeared in 1975 it listed 144 composers. The number was much smaIler than was the case with the earlier CBC catalogue, but almost all the composers in the 1975 dictionary were alive and flourishing and, most importantly, they were all serious composers, men and women with reputations for craft and originality, composers whose work would not be out of place in any contemporary concert haIl. Although the existence of composers in Canada is now a recognized fact and their work is studied and performed, the general level of awareness of their activity remains lamentably low even among musicians . One of the reasons for this is the lack of expert writing about music in Canada. Our newspapers treat music shabbilyand there is no magazine or journal in the country that gives music the slightest serious attention, least of all new music. Our composers need critics, chroniclers, and propagandists to help develop an informed and receptive society for their music. Now for the first time we have in George Proctor's book an authoritative survey of musical composition in Canada. The relatively sparse activity up to mid-century and the concentration of composers and music in the past three decades pose a problem of presentation of material...