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Helmut Kallmann and Canadian Music The past thirty years have witnessed an enormous growth in the volume of writings on Canadian music—thanks in no small measure to the influence of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (1981) / Encyclopédie de la musique au Canada (1983), which Helmut Kallmann co-edited—but there have not yet been many historiographical studies. The fundamental precepts and guiding ideas of Canadian music studies, the development of the field from its origins to the present day, the nature of its institutional frameworks and of its shifting preoccupations—all these topics and more remain to be explored in greater depth.1 When the measure of Canadian music studies in the twentieth century is taken, Kallmann will loom large as a pioneering figure and a predominating presence. His influence has been truly national in scope and has been exerted both through his publications (in the first order, his book A History of Music in Canada 1534– 1914, and the two editions of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada; see the Appendix for a complete list of his writings), and also via the institutions within which he worked and which he helped to create (notably the Music Division of the National Library of Canada, the Canadian Music Library Association, and the Canadian Musical Heritage Society).2 As an immigrant to the country, Kallmann brought an outsider’s curiosity and perspective to bear on his research into the musical life of Canada. He was part of a wave of mid-century émigré musicians who collectively exerted an enormous impact on the country’s musical life.3 If he was subjected to any prejudice, discrimination, or anti-Semitic invectives in the course of his education and professional career, he was silent on the matter . The markedly anglophile cast of musical life in English Canada gradually gave way during the 1940s to a more cosmopolitan outlook, one in which those who would have been viewed as “outsiders” previously were now free to exercise their career with fewer constraints. John Weinzweig, 18 Mapping Canada’s Music who was nine years older than Kallmann and a native-born Canadian, was the recipient of anti-Semitic slights on occasion, beginning in grade school and continuing into his university years in the 1930s and beyond.4 He was one of the first Jewish music students at the University of Toronto. By the time Kallmann enrolled in the undergraduate music program at the same university in the 1940s, there were more Jewish students, among them Jack Kane, Hans Gruber, and Victor Feldbrill, all of whom went on to distinguished careers in music. Jewish immigrant musicians, including Istvan Anhalt, Boris Berlin, Walter Homburger, Otto and Walter Joachim, Oskar Morawetz, John Newmark (see pages 125–35), Charles Reiner, and Heinz Unger, among many others, numbered among the leading figures in Canada’s postwar musical life. Kallmann was part of a distinguished and accomplished group of immigrant musicians whose contributions had a vital influence upon virtually every aspect of musical life in Canada. Kallmann’s native language was German, and on occasion he wrote about Canadian music for German-language publications, notably his work for the authoritative reference work Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The vast majority of his research, however, was published in his second language. He was fluent in English but remained somewhat self-conscious about his ability as a prose stylist and was grateful for the assistance of editors whose native language was English. He did not publish original research in French, though he read the language fluently and could converse in French to some degree. His entire career was spent in the employment of two leading national institutions, the CBC and the National Library of Canada, and notwithstanding his own trilingualism, he was attuned to the importance of bilingualism to Canada’s cultural and musical identity. He paid special attention to historical figures whose careers had taken place in Quebec—Joseph Quesnel (see pages 49–60), Theodore F. Molt, and Calixa Lavallée among them—and some of his most important work arose out of research that he conducted in various archival collections in Quebec. Nevertheless, his network of professional associations spread across the entire country. Kallmann’s work as a scholar and librarian was born out of a passionate attachment to music as sound. His primary instrument was the piano. A keen amateur performer, he loved nothing more than to explore the classical solo, duet, and chamber music repertoire at the keyboard...

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