Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education

One: The “Roots” of Canadian Music Education: Expanding Our Understanding

ON E The “Roots” of Canadian Music Education: Expanding our Understanding Betty Hanley Roots”? What’s in a word? I initially thought it would be relatively easy to identify the roots of Canadian music education: there would be French, English, and Aboriginal roots. Simple. Green and Vogan (1991) had already written a comprehensive history of Canadian music education from its inception until 1967, so I just needed to select the pertinent information and, voilà! Then I began to think about what the word “roots” encompasses: the source upon which something is supported or rests; the bottom or real basis; a discussion of one’s social, cultural, or ethnic origins or background. Alas, the topic was becoming more complex than I had first thought.1 Next, there was the little matter of what is meant by “music education.” Are we just talking about what happens in schools? Green and Vogan (1991) addressed this issue in the prologue to their authoritative book Music Education in Canada: A Historical Account. In the seventeenth century, Canadian music education occurred informally in homes, churches, and communities . Green and Vogan concluded that, even after the nineteenth-century emergence of formal music education in public schooling, “it would be remiss ...to represent a historical review that did not recognize the role “ 1 and contribution of private teachers, church organists, choir leaders, and other community musicians” (p. xv). That is, the phrase “music education” could then and can still now mean many things, from learning at your mother’s knee, to learning in private lessons, to learning in school classrooms . While I limit my discussion mainly to music education in public (formal) schooling, my conclusions might well apply to all forms of music education. There is also the question of when the roots of Canadian music education begin and when they end. The traditional starting place has been the sixteenth-century arrival of Europeans. The roots of the European heritage reach back, however, at least to ancient Greek civilization. Furthermore, Europeans were colonizers of an already inhabited country. How did our Aboriginal peoples contribute to the roots of Canadian music education? The same question could be asked about Canadians of non-European heritages who immigrated to Canada. Indeed, the word “roots” is a metaphor for an organic development in which the past, present, and future are interwoven. The historical nature of this chapter necessarily places the focus on the past, while both acknowledging the connection between the past, the present, and the future, and recognizing that new root systems grow over time. The most obvious place to seek the roots of Canadian music education would be in its early history. Have the roots already been identified? Before addressing this question it would be worthwhile to review how the history of music education in Canada has been told relative to a process that I see as consisting of three phases: • Phase 1: Individuals or organizations collect primary data about local or provincial events in archives, documents (cf. Buckley, 1988; Gardi, 1998), published books (Woodford, 1983; McIntosh, 1989), dissertations (Trowsdale, 1962; Brault, 1977), and journal articles. • Phase 2: Historians use this documentation to provide a more comprehensive picture of the events and people (Kallman, 1960; Green & Vogan, 1991; Bray, Green, & Vogan, 1992). • Phase 3: Other historians undertake inquiries and interpret the data to show how “education must reflect the civilization it represents” (Tellstrom, 1971, p. vii) or answer research questions (Rainbow & Froehlich, 1987). To date, most of the work in Canada has been in the first two phases, in data collection and in developing a narrative of events and important people. Although there are excellent examples of Phase 3 studies from other countries (Tellstrom, 1971; Rainbow, 1989; Pitts, 2000), little has 2 b e t t y h a n l e y been accomplished in this area in Canada.2 There is a vast richness of new understanding to be found in posing new questions about the past and in going beyond the traditional setting forth of “facts.” As Rainbow and Frohlich (1987) explained, “too often ...studies end up being mere stories of what happened, without providing any critical evaluation of the happenings ” (p. 118). Have the roots of Canadian music education already been uncovered? In my view, no. Rather than attempting to identify the roots of Canadian music education , with an incomplete understanding of what such a task might entail, this chapter begins by first reporting on Phase...