Music and Canadian Studies

Reviews Music and Canadian Studies OUT OF CHARACTER: A MEMOIR. Maureen Forrester with Marci McDonald. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. 372 pp. LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ HIS MIND. Maynard Collins. Toronto: Deneau, 1988. 248pp. OSCAR PETERSON: THE WILL TO SWING. Gene Lees. Toronto:Lesterand Orpen Dennys, 1988. iii, 294 pp. GLENN GOULD: A LIFE AND VARIATIONS . Otto Friedrich. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989. xv, 330pp. THE SACKBUT BLUES: HUGH LE CAINE, PIONEER IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC. Gayle Young. Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989. xiv, 274 pp. The academic study of music in English Canada has been institutionalized, at least since the opening ofthe University of Toronto Music Faculty in 1919, in university music departments, conservatories and fine arts institutes; it has been nurtured, moreover, by an elaborate infrastructure of music libraries and composers' associations and, since World War II, by such advocacy organizations as the Canadian Music Centre and the Canadian Music Council. Apart from the relatively modest intrusion of folklore studies and ethnomusicology into this "musicological" tradition in Canada - by which is meant "the study of western art music"' - the academic study of musical culture in Canada, broadly defined, has enjoyed no such tradition or privilege. Popular music studies in Canada remain undernourished and undervalued, existing for the most part on the margins of the dominant musicological discourse in Canada, largely among students of sociology, communications and cultural 160 studies, and frequently as an area of secondary interest. As the British sociologist Simon Frith has observed in his important article, "Towards an Aesthetic ofPopular Music," scholars of popular music in the industrialized West find themselves hamstrung by an ambiguous but nonetheless persistent chauvinism common in serious music scholarship. This chauvinism, Frith argues, derives from the basic assumption that "serious music matters because it transcends social forces; popular music is aesthetically worthless because it is determined by them." That this claim is specious is, for Frith at least, easily demonstrated: Can it really be the case that my pleasure in a song by the group Abba carries the same aesthetic weight as someone else's pleasure in Mozart? Even to pose such a question is to invite ridicule - either I seek to reduce the "transcendent'' Mozart to Abba's commercially determined level, or else I elevate Abba's music beyond any significance it can carry. But even if the pleasures of serious and popular musics are different, it is not immediately obvious that the difference is that between artistic autonomy and social utility . Abba's value is no more (and no less) bound up with an experience of transcendence than Mozart's; the meaning ofMozart is no less (and no more) explicable in terms of social forces.2 For all of the forcefulness of Frith's commonsense argument against any artificial aesthetic demarcation between popular and serious forms of music , and for the open-mindedness some academics have shown toward popular music studies, much of the intellectual baggage of this historic chauvinism remains in evidence in Canada, as elsewhere. Most obviously , there is a perception among some scholars in the humanities and social sciences that music as a subject ofserious Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 25. No. 2 (Ete 1990 S11111111er) study is beyond the paleoftheir expertise. That this perception may be widespread in Canada is suggested by the limited extent to which music has been integrated into Canadian Studies programs (as well as the virtual absence of musical materials in Canadian Studies journals and periodicals ) .3 Lamenting the musically impoverished state ofCanadian Studies at a 1986 conference on the status of "new" serious music by Canadian composers, Catherine McClelland observed: There is a big market of thousands of students and professors of Canadian Studies around the world where some PR work could be done... . Maybe money could be found for a lecture-concert tour by a Canadian composeror educator. Perhaps a seminar on how to introduce the arts to Canadian Studies students could be given at any one of the many conferences that these [Canadian Studies] organizations seem to sponsor. It does not seem to be enough to donate materials and expect them to be used.4 Implicit in McClelland's observations is that teachers...