Colonization and the Institutionalization of Hierarchies of the Human through Music Education: Studies in the

Education of Feeling

by

Lise C. Vaugeois

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Music

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Lise C. Vaugeois, 2013  

ii

Colonization and the Institutionalization of Hierarchies of the Human through Music Education:

Studies in the Education of Feeling

Lise Vaugeois

Doctor of Philosophy in Music Education

Music Graduate Department University of Toronto

2013

Abstract

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different

sensibilities. Beginning with the founding of colonial musical institutions in the late nineteenth

century in Canada and ending with a consideration of the ideals and subjectivities embodied in a

2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, I take up the education of feeling as it is

rehearsed into being through various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with

actual material and social relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project

draws on spatial analysis, discourse analysis and historical contextualization.

The study is a genealogy of music education in Canada with music education referring to the

institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators are taught; public

school music programs; and public celebrations of national identity in which music is employed

with the goal of enjoining participants in particular historical/political narratives and emotional

responses. My concern is to track the production of Imperial subjects and the normalization of

hierarchies of the human, for example, rationalities of race, gender and class, as they become

embodied and normalized in colonial institutional structures and discourses of national identity. I

am particularly concerned with the ways that the displacement of Indigenous peoples, along with

narratives of white entitlement, are rationalized and rehearsed into being in musical contexts.

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I also take up the question of how the discipline of musical training might lead to increased

identification of classically- and university-trained musicians with the ruling order, and passivity

in “political terms of obedience”—a subjectivity Foucault refers to as “docile bodies.” I identify

this mode of being as “terminal naivety” in order to draw attention to personal and societal

effects, and costs, that result from positioning ourselves and our artistic endeavours as politically

disinterested.

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Acknowledgments

One of the pleasures of completing a dissertation is the opportunity to thank the many people

who not only made my PhD journey possible but also highly enjoyable. I would like to begin by

thanking my dissertation committee members Elizabeth Gould, Patricia Shand and Sherene

Razack.

Liz, you were enthusiastic, supportive and ready to talk about challenging issues from the very

beginning. Thank you for your amazingly fast turn-around times and your astute comments. And

thank you for continuing to identify as a feminist when there is such a strong tendency in our

field to dismiss the importance of feminist work. We can’t afford to forget our histories or

contemporary realities and I want to thank you for keeping the flame of feminism alive in the

field of Philosophy of Music Education.

Pat, you have been steadfast in your support I feel so lucky to have had the chance to work with

you. Your knowledge about the history of Canadian music and Canadian music education has

been invaluable to the development of my thinking. Thank you also for staying on my committee

after you had officially retired. Accepting my dissertation at your summer home was above and

beyond the call of duty!

Sherene, I was attracted to U of T because of your work and have been thrilled ever since to have

the opportunity to work with you. I arrived at my first course with an interest but without a sense

of what kind of research might make sense in the world of the professional musician. Your

questions and willingness to explore musical territory that is unfamiliar to you have been

inspiring. You have helped me to sharpen my analytical focus and have encouraged me to persist

in looking for pedagogies capable of bringing the effects of raced and gendered dividing

practices to light in a world where inequality is so thoroughly normalized.

I would also like to thank Jamie Magnusson and Anna Hoefnagels, my internal and external

examiners, for the care and attention they brought to my dissertation. Anna, I can’t thank you

enough for your detailed comments and editing notes. Your questions throughout my defense

were thought-provoking and have pointed the way to new considerations and challenges. Jamie,

you continue to inspire me with the way you are able to do theory and find creative ways to make

change “on the ground.” I loved your questions and look forward to pushing my thoughts and

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activism into new directions. Thank you also to Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez who read my

dissertation and was prepared to step in if needed.

I would also like the thank the wonderful staff at the Edward Johnson Building Library and the

University of Toronto Archives as well as the many people, in addition to my committee, with

whom I had the pleasure of working with while at U of T: Lori Dolloff, Lee Bartel, Christos

Hatzis, Sasha Rapoport, Doreen Rao, Gillian MacKay and Susan Ironside at the Faculty of

Music, and Kari Dehli, Rinaldo Walcott, and Kathleen Gallagher at the Ontario Institute for

Studies in Education.

Throughout this journey I also enjoyed many conversations with graduate students John Paul

Catungal, Shaista Patel, Roger Mantie, Michelle Pereira and Juliet Hess. In particular, I would

like to thank Juliet Hess for our many conversations about writing, composition, teaching and

life! I am so glad that we get to continue being real-time friends and colleagues via Skype.

My family has been a steadfast support throughout what turned out to be a much longer process

that any of us expected. My Mom, Yolanda Hall, continues to inspire me to live well and never

stop being active! Mom, I so enjoy our time together. Thanks to my sister too! Paula, you are the

best sister anyone could imagine. And you like cats!

I would also like to thank Ann Vaugeois, Sam Vaugeois, Xav Mesrobian, Chris and Heather

Vaugeois and all the kids for adding so much pleasure to my time in Toronto. Thank you so

much for the many fabulous dinners and family gatherings! Dad, I wish you could have been

here for the conclusion of this journey. Raj, you would have enjoyed celebrating the completion

of the PhD too. We miss you.

Jessie Brooks and Phillip Robbins: thank you for letting me make my home with your family

while I was in Toronto. Not only did I have great place to live but I got to play with Evan, Kate

and Andrew and watch them grow. How could it get any better!

Another of the pleasures of living in Toronto was having the chance to have many visits with my

friends Derek Conrod and Peter Shackleton. I can’t mention how long we have been friends

because we might start to worry about getting old! We always seem to manage to talk about

music, philosophy, politics and everything else while fitting in time for ice cream and long

walks. Thank you!

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I also want to offer a special thank you to another long-standing friend, Diem LaFortune,

previously known as D. Maria Marchand. Diem, you have always challenged me to take my

thinking further and to translate my concerns into activism. I hope you will see the results of our

many conversations in this work.

Lakehead University has been my professional home for many years. Thank you to my great

colleagues at the Faculty of Education for providing such fertile ground for research on social

justice issues in Education.

My Thunder Bay friends continue to teach me about community and friendship Kamland folks,

and paddling folks – you know who you are! Thank you for our many life-sustaining outings,

potlucks, gatherings to mourn and gatherings to celebrate. I want to especially thank my

Kamland family, Betsy, Ma-nee and Nellie for bringing so many smiles to my life. Betsy, in

addition to everything else, you are the best paddling buddy ever!

Finally, I want to thank my partner, Maureen Ford, who has been my anchor for so many years

I’ve lost count. Maureen, I am so glad to have you in my life. Thank you too for sharing your

mother, Jean, and the rest of your crazy family with me. As Liz so aptly noted after the defense,

we are wealthy in all the ways that matter.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... ii 

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................... iv 

Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... vii 

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ x 

Preface .......................................................................................................................................... xiii 

Prologue .......................................................................................................................................... 1 

Chapter One: The Dissertation Project ........................................................................................... 3 

Hypothesis, research question and goals of the study ......................................................... 6 

Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 7 

Rationale ........................................................................................................................... 12 

Contribution to the field .................................................................................................... 14 

Location of the study within the literature ........................................................................ 17 

Chapter Two: Key Concepts ......................................................................................................... 27 

Discourse ........................................................................................................................... 27 

Subjectivities ..................................................................................................................... 29 

The education of feeling ................................................................................................... 30 

Exaltation .......................................................................................................................... 35 

Performativity ................................................................................................................... 37 

Chapter Three: The Role of Culture in Colonial Conquest .......................................................... 41 

Western musicians, new ideals and new modes of being ................................................. 44 

Music, gender, and status .................................................................................................. 49 

Inventing the “aesthetic” ................................................................................................... 53 

Music of Empire ............................................................................................................... 57 

The Canadian context ....................................................................................................... 59 

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Chapter Four: The Arts and the Making of the (Canadian) Imperial Man .................................. 63 

Part I: O Canada ............................................................................................................... 64 

Part II: “Clubland” ............................................................................................................ 68 

Part III: Into the wilds: producing the man by “salvaging the Indian” ............................. 82 

Part IV: Making ourselves indigenous .............................................................................. 96 

Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 104 

Chapter Five: Bourgeois “Women of the Arts” .......................................................................... 105 

Part I: Women and space in colonial Canada ................................................................. 105 

Part II: Making women white ......................................................................................... 112 

Part III: Clubland - white women’s space ....................................................................... 124 

Part IV: Women making the nation through music ........................................................ 127 

Conclusions: Owning respectability ............................................................................... 134 

Chapter Six: Music, Identity and the Management of Populations ........................................... 137 

Part I: School music and the making of docile subjects ................................................. 138 

Schooling for “Others” ....................................................................................... 155 

Part II: Music festivals – competitions and the CPR Folk Festivals ............................... 159 

Part III: Public spectacle and the production of historical memory ................................ 163 

A Masque: Canada’s Welcome ........................................................................... 164 

1884 Toronto Semi-Centennial Celebration ....................................................... 167 

United to Serve ................................................................................................... 170 

Part IV: Popular music and reassuring identities ............................................................ 172 

Celebrating white deeds and white belonging (1): Patriotic songs ..................... 172 

Celebrating white deeds and white belonging (2): Colonial adventures ............ 175 

“Dressing up” as the imagined “Other” .............................................................. 185 

Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 194 

Chapter 7: The Contemporary Moment and its Genealogies ..................................................... 196 

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Rituals, reverence and hierarchy ..................................................................................... 196 

The concert as a moment of eventalisation ..................................................................... 198 

The performers and embodying the civilized ................................................................. 199 

Repertoire: ....................................................................................................................... 201 

England 203 

Keewaydin .......................................................................................................... 205 

Song for Canada .................................................................................................. 206 

Limit case ........................................................................................................................ 211 

Terminal naivety ............................................................................................................. 214 

Conclusions: What are the interests we protect through our ignorance? ........................ 217 

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 222 

Copyright Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... 255 

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 256 

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Emblem of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, designed by J. E. H. MacDonald in

1909 (Bridle 1945) .......................................................................................................................... 2 

Figure 2. From Princess Ida (Gilbert and Sullivan 1884) ............................................................ 53 

Figure 3. Text to Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1 (Benson 1902) ................ 59 

Figure 4. Emblem of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, designed by J. E. H. MacDonald in

1909 (Bridle 1945) ........................................................................................................................ 63 

Figure 5. “O Canada, an English Version.” Text and illustration by Augustus Bridle, 1908

LAMPSletter. (Bridle 1908) ......................................................................................................... 65 

Figure 6. “O Canada, an English Version.” Notation and text by Augustus Bridle, 1908

LAMPSletter (Bridle 1908) .......................................................................................................... 66 

Figure 7. Club members engaged in playful boundary-crossing. Note the costumes and the name

of the presenter: “Prankmeister,” i.e. “master of pranks.” (LAMPSletter 1911) ......................... 74 

Figure 8. A more formal photograph of club members, in this case, the Group of Seven artists,

expressing their identities as upright, masculine individuals. (LAMPSletter 1910) .................... 75 

Figure 9. The Thirst Dance (LAMPSletter 1910, 14). .................................................................. 78 

Figure 10. The Home webpage of the Savage Club as of April 20, 2013. (The Savage Club) .... 80 

Figure 11. The Onondaga Madonna, Duncan Campbell Scott, 1898 ........................................... 91 

Figure 12. The White Empire. Nov. 21, 1945. CBC Program Schedule, Prairie Region: 5. (The

White Empire Nov. 21, 1945) .................................................................................................... 100 

Figure 13. Text to O Canada by Augustus Bridle, 1908 LAMPSletter (Bridle 1908) ............... 102 

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Figure 14. From the Calendar of the Toronto Conservatory School of Elocution (Announcement

of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -

1900) ........................................................................................................................................... 117 

Figure 15. Excerpts from the Toronto Conservatory of Music Calendar, 1887-1888 (Music 1887-

8) ................................................................................................................................................. 119 

Figure 16. Song titles from The Canadian Music Course, 1888 (Cringan 1888) ....................... 143 

Figure 17. From The Canadian Singer, 1945 (Beattie et al. 1945) ............................................ 145 

Figure 18. From A Canadian Songbook (MacMillan 1929) ...................................................... 146 

Figure 19. Texts from A Canadian Songbook (MacMillan 1929); Sheet music cover, ca 1900,

(Emmett ca 1850) ........................................................................................................................ 147 

Figure 20. Words to Stephen Foster songs included in MacMillan’s 1929 school music book,

Music in Canada (MacMillan 1929) ........................................................................................... 148 

Figure 21. Mary Henderson Flett Dickson, first president of the Toronto Women’s Musical Club

and Anna Mueller Farini, Women’s Musical Club President, 1907-1908. (Elliott 1997, 36, 51)

..................................................................................................................................................... 160 

Figure 22. Students and teachers in front of an unnamed Indian Residential School in Canada

(Indian Residential School) ......................................................................................................... 161 

Figure 23. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 6) .......................... 165 

Figure 24. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 7) .......................... 166 

Figure 25. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 11) ........................ 166 

Figure 26. Excerpts from United to Serve (Ridout, Pratt, and MacMillan 1927, 21) ................. 171 

Figure 27. The Maple Leaf Forever, 1867 (Muir 1867) ............................................................. 173 

Figure 28. My Own Canadian Home (1890) (McLaughlin and Nelson 1931-34) ...................... 174 

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Figure 29. Land of Glad Tomorrows (ca 1826) (Thompson 1931-34 ) ...................................... 174 

Figure 30. Ceylon & Missionary Hymn (Burnham 1832, 163; 177) .......................................... 175 

Figure 31. Excerpt from Leo, the Royal Cadet (Telgmann and Cameron 1991, 8-9) ................ 177 

Figure 32. Excerpt from Leo, the Royal Cadet (1889) (Telgmann and Cameron 1991, 8-9) .... 178 

Figure 33. Drawing of battle between British troops and Zulu warriors. Canadian Illustrated

News, 1875, as reprinted in (Telgmann and Cameron 1991) ...................................................... 179 

Figure 34. No. 2 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca 1865)

..................................................................................................................................................... 183 

Figure 35. No. 7 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca 1865)

..................................................................................................................................................... 183 

Figure 36. NO. 22 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca

1865) ........................................................................................................................................... 184 

Figure 37. By the Waters of Minnetonka (Thurlow 1917) .......................................................... 187 

Figure 38. Illustration for Thurlow Lieurance’s By the Waters of Minnetonka, first published in

1917 ............................................................................................................................................. 187 

Figure 39. Sheet music cover page for The Indian Chief’s Dance, composed by Boris Berlin and

published in 1950 in Toronto. ..................................................................................................... 190 

Figure 40. Nigger, Nigger Never Die by William Osborne and Nellie Sylvester. (Sylvester and

Osborne 1897) ............................................................................................................................. 192 

Figure 41. Cover pages of Minstrelsy pieces found in Toronto collections of sheet music. ...... 193 

Figure 42. From England (Swinburne 1890) .............................................................................. 204 

Figure 43. Song for Canada (Halley 1989) ................................................................................ 207 

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Preface

The following dissertation is an interrogation of the formation of “Imperial Subjects” through

formally sanctioned, musical practices in Canada. I am very much of the world of classical

music1 in Canada. Throughout the course of my research, I have discovered how closely related

my own educational and professional passages are to those first established in the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries in Canada. I have studied or worked with the musical children and

grandchildren, and sometimes the actual grandchildren, of people discussed in this dissertation. I

have also had direct experience with all of the major classical music institutions that were

envisioned and established during those years.

I fell in love with classical music and the symphonic and chamber music repertoire while in High

School. Friends and I went to every classical concert taking place in our region. We stayed

behind to speak to performers and made a habit of sneaking backstage to explore the workings of

various concert venues. Unlike many of the spaces in our High School, we felt like we belonged

in this world. We loved the visceral experiences of listening to music and we loved the

intellectual challenges of the repertoire. By Grade Eleven my identity was deeply tied up with

achieving success as a musician and, somewhere along the way, I came to believe that being a

virtuoso would make me a special and worthy human being doing work of the utmost

importance. I also came to believe that the classical music repertoire stood above all other forms

of music and that people performing popular forms of music were not “real” musicians. People

who were not passionate about classical music simply didn’t exist on the same plane of reality—

they weren’t quite as human.

I still enjoy listening to and performing the classical repertoire; however, I have come to question

many of my own assumptions as well as many assumptions and practices associated with music

education at both school and professional levels. The following analysis of subjectivities and the

“education of feeling” is thus as much an interrogation of my own subjectivity as a more general

examination of the construction of Canadian identities through music education.

1 I use the term “classical music” in its contemporary sense to refer to music performed today as part of the Western

musical canon.

1

Prologue

It’s a starry winter’s evening in Toronto. The air is crisp. City lights cast a glow on the streets

and the very coldness of the air brings a promise of magic. The destination is 14 Elm Street—

home of Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club and the occasion is a concert by the top tier choir of the

University of Toronto, the MacMillan Singers. A concert is being held to mark the occasion of

the 100th anniversary of the Club and the goal is to honour, and link, the values and efforts of

earlier artistic pioneers with contemporary cultural and educational institutions in Toronto and,

more generally, in Canada (LAMPSletter January, 2008, 7).2

An invitation to the MacMillan Singers to perform is especially appropriate for this occasion.

The choir is named after Sir Ernest MacMillan, a former president of the Arts and Letters Club—

a man much revered for his contributions to the development of Canadian music and music

education institutions, including the Mendelssohn Choir, the Royal Conservatory of Music, the

Toronto Symphony, and the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. The setting for this

evening’s celebratory concert is the Club’s Great Hall, a grand space adorned with art work by

some of the most famous white artists in Canada’s history. The club proudly boasts of its role as

a colonial gathering place of great significance to the development of cultural forms and

institutions in English Canada. Evidence of a proud history of engagement with the British

colonial enterprise is reflected in the long record of club members awarded the Order of Canada

(McBurney 2007, 178).

This is a setting that, rightly, can be called “white settler space”—a space in which the material

and symbolic come together to naturalize the logic of colonial and contemporary hierarchies of

belonging. Perusing photographs of the club’s past and present members makes this identity

palpable,3 even while racially defined terms of membership do not appear in any version of the

club’s charter (McBurney 2007, xiv).

2 The “LAMPSletter” is the name of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto’s newsletter. The first newsletter was

published in 1908. All archival and current club newsletters are available online: http://www.artsandlettersclub.ca/index.cfm?pagepath=For_Members/Club_LAMPSletters&id=47530 3 Photographs of the club are present in McBurney’s history of the club (2007) as well as on the club’s website:

http://www.artsandlettersclub.ca.

2

The insignia for the club, a “Viking ship with sails full spread before the rising sun” was created

by artist J.E. H. MacDonald in 1909, “to remind us of the open sea and the great adventure."

(McBurney 2007, frontice piece).

Figure 1. Emblem of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, designed by J. E. H. MacDonald in 1909 (Bridle 1945)

But what exactly is this “Great Adventure” and what notions of history, identity, morality and

belonging are embodied in the 2008 concert in honour of the Arts and Letters Club?

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Chapter One: The Dissertation Project Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there is always a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. (Saïd 1978, xxi)

In museums and historical sites presenting early Canadian history, the colonization of Canada is

a charming and often quaint story of intrepid explorers, hardy settlers, fur traders, military

heroes, brilliant politicians and visionary artists, who, out of a harsh and unforgiving wilderness,

built Canada into the “fair and prosperous” country it is today. “Indians”,4 occasionally, and

racialized immigrants, more rarely, have minor roles in these historical portrayals. The main

story is about white colonizers, their struggles, and their roles in carving a new civilization out of

an unforgiving wilderness, a new nation on “virgin” ground.5 These historical sites are places

where particular interpretations of history are evoked along with “hoped for” emotional

identifications with the Canadian State presented as a noble and fundamentally moral political

formation. The portrayal of political innocence associated with such depictions is so

commonplace that Canada’s current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was able to claim in front

of an international audience, that “Canada has no history of colonialism” (Ljunggren

2009),(Walia September 29, 2009). With this statement, our current Prime Minister drew on a

long-standing narrative that Canada was not created through the subjugation or displacement of

original populations as happened in other colonial settings but was, much more romantically,

born out of the co-mingling of European enterprise and the virgin snows of the north. Harper,

like a number of Canadian historians, makes the claim that “unlike their American neighbours,

4

I use the term “Indian” to draw on colonial evocations of the “Other” as not European, not fully human and not deserving or capable of adult agency. When referring to the various peoples living on the land prior to colonization, in the context of political resistance and assertion of rights and entitlements, I use the terms “Indigenous,” “First Nations,” and “First Peoples.” I occasionally use the terms “Aboriginal” and native, as they are still part of common discourse amongst some Indigenous communities. For example, Lakehead University’s required course for teaching students is called “Aboriginal Education.” These two terms are dropping out of use amongst Indigenous activists however, because of associations with government decreed designations of who is and is not “legitimately” entitled to be called “Aboriginal” or “Native.” “Indigenous,” and “Indigenous Peoples,” are terms of choice used by Indigenous activists and by international and global organizations. See, for example, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2008).

5 I take up the theme of the imaginary of Canada as “virgin ground” in Chapter 4.

4

[Canadians] had no wrongs against native people for which to atone" (Trigger as cited in Mackey

2002, 25). Harper’s claim is particularly ironic given his government’s formal apology in 1908

to Canadian “Indian Residential School” survivors and their families (Harper June, 2008).

In the epigram to this chapter, Edward Saïd points to the contradictions between claims of moral

righteousness and the harsh realities experienced by people on the receiving end of

colonizing/civilizing projects. Quaint historical portrayals and claims of innocence

notwithstanding, the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada evoke stories that profoundly

contradict celebrated narratives of national innocence. From the perspective of Indigenous

peoples,6 Canada is a settler/invader state based on notions of white supremacy and built on

practices of appropriation, exploitation and oppression similar to those experienced, for example,

by peoples in Africa, India, and the East and West Indies, subjugated in the course of Imperial

expansion and capitalist accumulation.7 Colonisation, and contemporary neo-colonialism are

violent processes of enclosure and dispossession—processes in which the land and resources

and, wherever possible, the labour of original inhabitants is appropriated by newcomers—

newcomers with strong beliefs in their natural superiority, their right to possess all that is before

them, their right to rule over others, and the ultimate benevolence, inevitability and necessity of

their civilizing, modernizing projects. Disease, oppression, deceit, continual loss of land, broken

agreements, environmental poisoning, stolen children, high numbers of Indigenous populations

in prisons, forced relocations, despoliation of land, deliberate destruction of language, social and

familial relations, the imposition of capitalist economies and European patriarchal political

structures—these are amongst the legacies of colonialism for Indigenous peoples in Canada and

the structures upon which the nation of Canada has been built. At the very least, these legacies

suggest a profound disconnect between national narratives of innocence and the experiences of

people differently located in relation to the nation.

I cite the opening passage by Edward Saïd as a provocation and means to introduce the unsettling

idea that colonization, by its nature, is a violent encounter between colonizers and the colonized,

and, further, that the civilizing capacities attributed to historical and contemporary educational

6 The colonization of Canada is storied quite differently by Indigenous commentators. See for example, King 2003, 2012; Neu and Therrien 2003; Monture-Angus 1995; Dickason 1992; Stevenson 1999; Lawrence 2002, 2003; Obamsawin 1984, 1990, 1993; 1995; 1997; 2000, 2002. 7 See: Memmi 1965; Stoler 1995; Bannerji 1997; Lawrence 2004; Gordon 2010; Fanon 1963.

5

practices, specifically, music education practices, cannot be assumed to be politically innocent

either in intent or effect. However, in the world of formal music education, where performers,

conductors, composers and music educators receive their professional training and education, the

notion that politics, and the violence of colonization might have a bearing on our musical ideals,

practices, and how we engage with the world, is rarely considered. As university-trained,

professional musicians, we imagine ourselves to be pursuing an art that, by definition, lies

outside of the realm of the political; rather, it is the universal site of the soul. Music, however, is

remarkable as a human endeavour in which divisions of class, race and gender are often highly

visible. Music-making is an engagement with sound, movement and representation, produced by

and through the body. As has been argued for some time by music education and musicology

scholars such as Gould, Koza, Radano and Bohlman, Leppert, Small and McClary,8 the

association of particular musics9 and musical roles with raced and gendered bodies, while neither

fixed nor reducible to essentialist identities, is socially, politically and economically significant.

Race, class and gender, three of the most pervasive markers of access to power since the

Enlightenment, influence where various kinds of musics are learned, who teaches and performs

them, where different kinds of performance take place, who is in the audience, and how different

musics are signified in public discourse. While there is some fluidity in how these divisions are

experienced, historical and contemporary divisions continue to be visible in the raced, classed

and gendered bodies present in each type of performance event and performance space—in spite

of changing national demographics and high profile performances by non-white, non-western

virtuoso musicians in Western concert music halls.

This project brings critical race theory, spatial theory, Foucaultian genealogy and the lens of

feminist post-colonial analysis to the history of ideas and practices pertaining to music education

in Canada in order to track and understand inks between relations of power and past and present

music education projects and the normalization of hierarchical dividing practices in a political

and economic system that proclaims itself to be democratic and egalitarian,. By “music

education” I mean the institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators

8 See: Gould and Matthews 1999; Gould 2004, 2007a, 2008; Koza 1994, 2003, 2008; Bohlman and Radano 2000;

Leppert 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993; Small 1996, 1997, 1998, 2011; McClary 1987, 1989, 1991. 9 My use of the word “musics,” to indicate a plurality of styles and traditions is consistent with contemporary usage

in Ethnomusicology, Sociology of Music and Philosophy of Music Education writing. See, for example, (Rose 1994).

6

are taught; school music programs (in the context of compulsory education); and, as well, public

celebrations of national identity in which music is employed with the goal of enjoining

participants in particular historical/political narratives and emotional responses.10

Hypothesis, research question and goals of the study

My project is based on the assumption that race, class and gender divisions, as manifested in

colonizing practices, colonialist philosophical perspectives, and Imperialist identities, have

shaped social relations in Canada and, more specifically, that such dividing practices and

perspectives have shaped music education, its goals, objectives, repertoires and structures. I

argue that these practices are part of an “education of feeling” through which people come to

understand themselves and their locations within the Canadian body politic. My study is framed,

temporally, by the founding of colonial musical institutions during the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, and expressions of Canadian identity as expressed in the 2008 Arts and

Letters Club Centenary Concert given by the University of Toronto’s MacMillan Singers. I use

the 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club as a point of departure for a study of music

education in Canada because it can be taken up as a moment of eventalisation, that is, a moment

in which normalized relations of power, no longer easily recognizable in the present as “power

relations,” can be made visible through an exploration of both dominant and subjugated

narratives in relation to this particular contemporary event (Foucault 1988c, 78; 1991a, 76).

The study is also anchored in a specific site: the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. Other Toronto

and more distant sites with connections to Club activities are also explored; however, events that

take place in the Arts and Letters Club provide the conceptual, spatial and temporal frames for

the study.11 The questions I have used to guide my research are as follows: In the context of

musical practices, how do hierarchies of the human, for example, rationalities of race, gender and

class, become embodied and institutionally normalized and what discourses and conditions

sustain the reproduction of these hierarchies? I contend that our understandings of “who we are

and what we do” continue to be profoundly shaped by structures and ideals intended to bring

10

It can be argued that music is always constructed with the intention to evoke particular emotional responses. In this paper, however, I do not take up this general argument; rather, I take up instances in which the emotional qualities of particular musical expressions are consciously exploited in aid of establishing particular social relations. 11

Toronto offers a particularly important site for investigation as it not only dominated “its southern Ontario hinterlands economically and politically” but because “Toronto churches and their national offices (also located in Toronto) played a large part in supporting Indian residential schools in the west” (Freeman 2009, 245n61).

7

about and make “rational,” hierarchies of race, class and gender within a larger project of capital

accumulation, via colonial domination. As a genealogy, the goal of this project is not to criticize

people of the past—a project of dubious political value—but to shatter certainties about the

inevitability of the present; to create the awareness that what appears to be monolithic and

natural is actually contingent and in play. Cultural practices—especially when combined with

educational practices—powerfully reflect and shape social and political relations. In line with

goals of decolonization, my project maps institutional and pedagogical practices that replicate

limiting hierarchies. By tracking the on-going effects of these practices, I hope to encourage a

shift from ideals, both conscious and unconscious, of racial superiority, competition and

domination, as driving forces of human relations, to a culture of sharing and respect in which

equal access to the means of life is psychically and materially possible. Equally important to my

project is showing that relations of power are always already present in social relations, in the

construction of knowledge, in educational practices, in expressions of “culture,” and in what is

taken as truth in any given time and place. Thus, I do not seek to replace one truth with another

but seek, rather, to notice the role of relations of power in constructing what stands as “truth” at

any given moment. Finally, I explore the question of how the discipline of musical training

might lead to increased identification of classically- and university-trained musicians with the

ruling order, and passivity in “political terms of obedience”—a subjectivity Foucault refers to as

“docile bodies” (Foucault 1977, 138). I refer to this mode of being as “terminal naivety.”

Through the use of this term I draw attention to places where political naivety is produced

through common-place attitudes and practices in contemporary sites of music education. The

purpose of noting investments in political naivety is to highlight personal and societal effects,

and potential costs, that result from positioning ourselves and our artistic endeavours as

politically disinterested.

Methodology

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different

sensibilities; the making of identities along with correspondingly different entitlements to

belonging and the means of life. It is an interrogation of the production of Imperial subjects

through the pleasures of music-making. Beginning with the late-nineteenth century and ending

with a fuller consideration of ideals and subjectivities embodied in the 2008 Arts and Letters

Club Centenary concert, I take up the education of feeling as it is rehearsed into being through

8

various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with actual material and social

relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project requires the use of spatial

analysis as well as discourse analysis and historical contextualization.

For theoretical underpinnings of spatial analysis, I draw on the work of Henri Lefevbre, Sherene

Razack, David Goldberg, Derek Hook, Eugene McCann, and Edward Saïd, who show the

significance of the relationships between materially constituted spaces and social orderings.12

Spaces do not simply evolve through chance factors, innocent of material and social relations;

rather, “the material and symbolic work through each other to constitute a space” (Razack 2002,

8). Space does certain kinds of work in shaping subjectivities because of the actions and bodies

that either belong to or are prohibited from any designated space; however, spatial significations

are not reducible to descriptions of the intentionality of their designers. Rather, there is a

“dialectical relationship between spaces and bodies” (Razack 2002, 8). Derek Hook argues that

subjectivities are produced within spaces through “affective, bodily, lived experiences.” He

argues that there are also psychic, “uncanny”13 investments in space that are further constituted

through the repetition of rituals and “fantasmic” investments in their significations (Hook 2005,

693-695). By “uncanny” and “fantasmic” Hook is referring to investments in imaginative force

beyond the material forms associated with space which, in turn, relate to our notions of self. He

cites Edward Saïd’s discussion of the emotional and psychic power of space in the following

passage:

The objective space of a house...is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with...a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel...Space acquires emotional value we can name and feel...Space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process...[I]maginative geography...help[s] the mind to intensify its own sense of itself.... (Said as cited in Hook 2006, 694)

The idea of repetition and ritual as part of what invokes “the uncanny” can also be applied

beyond spaces, to objects and events, including musical events, highly invested with notions of

identity. For example, to honour a national flag is to call upon significations beyond the

symbolism of a specially coloured piece of cloth. Likewise, to stand, or refuse to stand, during a

12

See: Goonewardena 2008; McCann 1999; Hook 2005; Saïd 1993; Razack 2002; Goldberg 1993. 13 Uncanny: a) seeming to have a supernatural character or origin: eerie, mysterious; b) being beyond what is normal or expected: suggesting superhuman or supernatural powers (Uncanny).

9

performance of a national anthem is, again, to invoke psychic associations beyond actual musical

sounds (Hook 2005, 702).

The study itself forms a genealogy, or “history of the present,” of musical and educational values

embodied in a specific contemporary event (Foucault 1977, 30-31). A genealogical approach to

contemporary events is based on the premise that social relations are the result of specific

struggles over power as well as larger chance historical occurrences (such as epidemics or

natural disasters) rather than a teleological notion of the present as a “history whose perspective

on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development” (Foucault 1984, 87).

Genealogical research is based on identifying strategies of power as they become visible in

particular historical moments and through particular “instruments” of power such as institutions,

laws, naming, dividing and disciplining practices, the production of knowledges, and other

structural means of organization (Foucault 1984).

As a genealogist, my tasks include analyzing the trajectory of discourses and institutional

practices that contribute to our taken-for-granted assumptions about “who we are and what we

do.” By “we,” here, I mean university-educated musicians and music educators; who “we”

understand ourselves to be as professionals engaged with “classical” music; and, within this

category, who we understand ourselves to be as “Canadians.”14 Through an analysis of

documentary records, I consider how the subject positions of classically-trained musicians are

constructed, located spatially and historically, and how these subject positions connect to the past

and present form and content of music education in schools, university music faculties, and

public celebrations. In particular, I analyze instances where music education intersects with

nation building projects as well as notions of who constitutes the national subject and who is fit

to rule. Documentary evidence includes concert programs, musical scores, newspaper and

magazine articles, films, speeches, mandates, course offerings, admission standards,

compositions, financial allocations, the physical location of institutions and institutional rules.

14

Narrowing my focus to a specific geographical and political location is important. It is difficult to track power in general terms and is important to note the specifics of strategies and their effects. Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand share a history as Anglo-dominated, white settler colonies and many tactics employed in the Canadian context will be familiar to people working on genealogies in other settings. The importance of this particular study, however, is in tracking events specific to Canada and the formation of Canadian identities.

10

Genealogy analyzes issues in their lived context—in the context of competing interests and

ideals—in order to consider what was once possible, what ceased to be possible as structures

were put in place, and what might be possible given shifting relations of power in the present.

Genealogical research is a means to notice what we do not notice; to make strange what is

currently taken-for-granted. While the rich resources of extant histories of music education

document a developmental, or teleological, view of music education in Canada, I take up the

study of Canadian musical institutions from a critical recognition of Canada as a “white settler

society,” that is, a racially structured society built on lands deemed to be largely uninhabited

(Razack 2002, 2). From this vantage point, I look not only at the developments that led to

contemporary music education institutions, but at battles over cultural expression, funding, and

subsequent structures put in place to manage populations in the hope of producing particular

kinds of societal outcomes. In other words, I track relations of power and strategies employed in

attempts to establish and solidify particular relations of domination and subjection and track how

categories of identity come into being in the first place.

It is important to note that, according to Foucault’s analyses, “relations of power” per se, are

neither positive nor negative; rather, the point of analyzing “power” is to identify where and how

institutional structures function to hold asymmetrical relations of power in place:

Relations of power are not in themselves forms of repression. But what happens is that, in society, in most societies, organizations are created to freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a certain number of persons get an advantage, socially, economically, politically, institutionally, etc. And this totally freezes the situation. That's what one calls power in the strict sense of the term: it's a specific type of power relations that has been institutionalized, frozen, immobilized, to the profit of some and to the detriment of others. (Foucault 1988d, 3)

Although noting the winners and losers in various struggles to assert domination is important, the

primary goal of such investigations is not to point fingers or discredit individuals (although de-

valorizing individuals and institutions can be a powerful by-product of such studies), rather, the

goals is to notice techniques of power; to notice forms of power as power in relations and

institutions that appear to be natural and given. By noticing the existence of relations of power as

well as the means by which they are sustained, it becomes possible to imagine other possibilities

for living, and other social arrangements, that are less dependent on rationalizing and sustaining

hierarchical relationships lived out in tangled material relations of privilege and oppression. I

suggest that, like other institutions, Canadian music education institutions have been structured

11

in order to sustain particular kinds of social relations—relations that are remarkably similar

today to those sought when these institutions were first established during the nineteenth century.

These relations, and the identities associated with them, are generally described in music

historiographies as part of a moral project to produce moral national subjects.15 I suggest,

however, that there is nothing intrinsically “moral” about these projects; rather, their identities as

moral projects derive from the power to assert one’s position as moral (Mbembe 2001, 25-26).

Key questions in any study of relations of power are “what” and “how; that is, what are the

material relations reflected in social relations and how have strategies, techniques and tactics, in

games of power, been employed to institutionalize particular relations. By exploring the “what

and how” of different social locations, it becomes possible to understand why particular

subjectivities become associated with differently embodied people(s). Thus, my concern is also

to identify material effects and track how these effects have been produced. Foucault’s focus on

what and how in regard to the formation of subjectivities, as effects of relations of power, opens

space to understand how we are located politically—as individuals and as members of

identifiable groups.

It is important to note that power is never fixed, forever, in one place or with one group of

people. Power circulates throughout societies and is constantly in play. A key strategy to make

power visible is to track forms of resistance. Genealogical research consists of looking for

struggles that have taken place in the past in order to notice what tactics and strategies came into

play in the process of normalizing relations and significations taken for granted in the present.

Bringing moments forward in which contests for domination are made visible disrupts notions of

the unity of a society, and of the assumed rightness and rationalities of the moment. Thus, one

strategy of genealogical research is to look for sites of resistance; to trace the antagonism of

strategies and to seek the contingencies, no longer apparent, in relations that have become

normalized (Foucault 1982, 211).

In counterpoint to explorations of institutionally sanctioned musical histories, I bring forward

what Foucault refers to as “subjugated knowledges” or forgotten histories in order to illuminate

struggles over power and disrupt the notion that history marks a teleological progression towards

ever greater progress and advancement (Foucault 1980a, 82). To practice freedom, to be a moral 15

See, for example Tippett 1990, Chapter 2; MacMillan 1955, 9; Schabas 2005.

12

subject, is not to establish a final truth but to “unveil the technologies of power” of the

contemporary moment in order to discover and act upon whatever constitutes the “current

danger” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 231-232).

It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. (Foucault 1994b, 133)

By locating ourselves in history and in relation to the material effects of political actions, it

becomes possible to practice freedom; to step outside of possible reactions of anger, blame,

defensiveness and guilt to imagine other possibilities and consider what strategies might open

space for other modes of being (Foucault 1988d, 1).

Rationale

My interest in studying the intersection of colonizing projects and conceptions and practices of

music education has arisen from my experiences teaching in Thunder Bay, Ontario16 where I

have come to recognize the vast difference in social location between Canadians of European

heritage, and racialized immigrants and First Nations peoples.17

The contrast between my own experiences and expectations and those, in particular, of First

Nations students, colleagues and friends, have brought me to ask 1) how current relations have

come to be as they are, and 2) what historical events, in combination with political, legal and

other structures, have led to different entitlements to belonging and consequent gaps in life and

work expectations of differently located people living within Canada.

As suggested by the narrative that opens this chapter, explanations for the political structures and

distribution of power in Canada are rarely articulated as a function of force or conquest; rather,

16

I moved to Thunder Bay in 1992, began doing music projects in schools in 1994 and began teaching at the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in 2000. 17 I use the term “racialized” to denote an active political process in which difference from a norm, understood, both actively and passively, as “whiteness,” is assigned to people based on their morphology, marked as deviations from this constructed “norm.” To “racialize” is to make racially significant. More than a descriptive term regarding appearance or place of origin, to be racialized is to be defined as less than fully rational and locked in an evolutionary stage of pre-modernity. The notion of whiteness as the norm against which all other embodiments are a deviation is sometimes stated explicitly; however, whiteness also becomes an assumed norm which maintains its normalizing force without having to be named. Thus, to be “racialized” is to be marked as “not white,” not advanced in terms of the capacity to use reason, and not of the group embodying characteristics defined as the basis for being perceived as fully human (Goldberg 1993, Chapters 1 & 2).

13

they are presented both as a meritocracy and as the successful enactment of a moral project

moving towards ever-greater “progress.”

As Governor General Earl Grey told an audience of Canadian school children in 1909, 'Empire Day ... is the festival on which every British subject should reverently remember that the British Empire stands out before the whole world as the fearless champion of freedom, fair play, and equal rights; that its watchwords are responsibility, duty, sympathy and self-sacrifice; and that a special responsibility rests with you individually to be true to the traditions and to the mission of your race.' (Earl Grey as cited in Coleman 2006, 19)

In Earl Grey’s view, and the view of many subsequent writers, colonization, as a mission of the

superior British “race,” was a benevolent project undertaken for the good of all humanity.18

Voices of the original people of this land, and many others who contributed to the labour of the

nation, however, bear witness to very different experiences and very different results. Indigenous

peoples and significant numbers of racialized Canadians are dramatically underrepresented in

places of leadership and overrepresented in places of poverty. Racialized women are particularly

marginalized both materially and socially.19 A key question that predates the formation of my

dissertation questions, then, is how the uneven distribution of entitlements to belonging has come

to be normalized, in spite of, or perhaps in tandem with, the Canadian narrative that frames the

formation of Canada as a fundamentally moral project.

Over the course of many years of noticing “who is here and who is not here” in different musical

and educational settings, I have come to ask what role music education and the promotion of

particular cultural values has played in normalizing unequal relations. We know from the extant

literature that education has been important to modern nation building projects strongly shaped

by notions of race, class and gender. Indeed, a great deal of literature demonstrates that education

has been an important site for the conceptualization, rehearsal and enactment of hierarchical

concepts about the place and role of different people within the nation.20 Edward Saïd, in his

1993 book, Culture and Imperialism, demonstrates the important role of cultural expressions,

such as novels, in providing imaginative and emotional sites of identification that helped to

sustain Imperial projects, with racial supremacy and the duty to bring civilization to the “darker 18

MacMillan’s setting of Swinburne’s poem, England, gives a strong representation of these ideals (MacMillan 1918). Jeffrey Richards book, Imperial and Music, gives an extensive account of representations of imperialism and colonialism as moral enterprises (Richards 2001). 19

See: Bannerji 1993; Carty and Brand 1993; Razack 1998, 2007; Lawrence 2003; Ng 1993. 20

See: Prentice 1984; Curtis 1988, 1992; Bannerji 1993; Bannerji 1997, 2000; Lesko 2001; Razack 2002.

14

corners” of the earth as a foundational narrative; however, these connections are rarely made in

discussions about the role and place of Western artistic expressions. Saïd makes the case that

most professional humanists…are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other. (Saïd 1993, xiii)

Following Saïd, a number of scholars focused on the Canadian colonial project, have examined

the role of various forms of cultural production in proliferating seductive narratives of belonging

for certain members of the Canadian body politic, rehearsing notions of those fit to rule and

those destined, for their own good, to be ruled. 21 While work has been done in branches of

sociology and musicology to analyze the construction of categories of music, such as civilized

versus degenerate, and classical versus popular, as means to delineate class identities and thus

rationalize differential entitlements,22 what has yet to be analyzed, are specific tactics, developed

within the context of the Canadian colonial project, to create national identities—those who

belong and do not belong—through music.

Contribution to the field

This study focuses almost exclusively on the Canadian context, and, more specifically, events

connected in some way with Toronto-based musicians; however, it is my hope that educators,

scholars and activists, particularly those working within white-dominated countries with histories

of colonialism, will find this study useful regardless of their geographical location.23 Canadians

describe themselves as tolerant and fair-minded, particularly in relation to the United States

which is often described as a site of far greater racial oppression than Canada.24 For this reason,

amongst others, I have chosen to focus the study in a Canadian context in order to show how

deeply entrenched race, class and gender relations are to the structures of Canadian society in

spite of oft-repeated narratives of Canadian “tolerance,” “benevolence” and “generosity.”25

There are many parallels in Canada to American practices of slavery, the imposition of head

taxes, the incarceration of racialized immigrants, the confining of Indigenous peoples to 21

See: Coleman 2006; Mackey 2002; Francis 1992; Berger 1966. 22

See: Bourdieu 1984; Haughton 1984; Potter 1998; Ley 2003; Gustafson 2009; Levine 1988. 23

For example, Great Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. 24

See: Francis 1992, 69; Razack 1998, 89; Mackey 2002, 23ff. 25 See: Mackey 2002, 38-39; Razack 1998, 11, 60; Thobani 2007, 4.

15

reservations, the repeated exploitation of migrant labourers, and so on; 26 however, the specifics

of Canadian history have shaped relations in ways that are different from the United States. Thus

I believe it is imperative to look closely, not only at attitudes and rationales for raced, classed

and gendered hierarchies within Canada but, most importantly, at how our particular institutional

structures have developed within local contexts.

In addition to actual differences between Canada and the United States, there is a long-standing

trope of Canadian identity that has been an important political device since the American

Revolution (Mackey 2002, 31; King 2012, 80) and that is the belief that Canadians, along with

their political system, are morally superior to Americans. Anti-Americanism is a floating

signifier27 that can be evoked for vastly different political purposes because it is a trope with

tremendous emotional salience for many Canadians. The prevalence of this narrative of moral

superiority, combined with the place-specific ways that structures of race, class and gender have

evolved in the United States, often make it difficult to recognize that similar processes have been

significant to the shaping of Canadian social relations. As a colonial, settler state, built to support

capitalist economic structures, the lives of both newcomers and Indigenous peoples have been

shaped by similar economic imperatives and political battles. Canada’s loyalty to the British

Crown, however, resulted in the establishment of different institutions—often affixed with the

word “royal” as a means to show that Canada is different from the United States. Thus, in

Canada, the discourses sustaining and contesting the institutionalization of social relations have

also been place-specific. A goal in this dissertation then, is to draw attention to the particular

discourses and procedures that have led to the development of Canadian music education

institutions as we know them today and disrupt narratives of innocence. A moral posture of

superiority to all things American, a posture strongly encouraged by Canadian governments

during and after the American War of Independence and still maintained across the political

spectrum, often keeps Canadians from looking critically at our own histories and political

structures. My contention is that, as a nation built through colonization, hierarchies of the human

26

For histories of slavery in Canada, see (Bolaria and Li 1985; Cooper 2006). There is a vast literature documenting and analyzing histories of state supported racism in Canada. The following are only a representative sample of works offering broad accounts: (Bolaria and Li 1985; Thobani 2007; Kazimi 2011). See also: (History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008) 27

The term, “floating signifier,” comes originally from the work of (Lévi-Strauss 1987, 63-64) and denotes signifiers that don’t point to any actual object or agreed upon meaning.

16

are every bit as central to the structure of Canadian institutions and Canadian identities as in any

country, including the United States. They are merely expressed differently.

The contributions I hope to make to the profession through this study include:1) the recovery of

memory; or in Foucaultian terms, the recovery of subjugated knowledges as a means to notice

that the practices we have arrived at today do not reflect a trajectory of “progress” but rather,

reflect the ascendancy of particular discourses and strategies that have evolved within particular

historical circumstances; 2) a means to notice power in continual struggles over meaning; 3) a

means to identify shared concerns across calcified relations of privilege and oppression and thus

facilitate the recognition of shared human needs and shared political goals; 4) a means to open

space for alterity, pluralism, equity and cooperation in the distribution of power, authority and

resources within the field of music education; 5) a means to identify strategies to contest

discursive and material manifestations of limiting concepts of what constitutes culture and the

human; 6) a wedge against the risks of “terminal naivety” and, 7) a means to enact a practice

freedom through “refusal, curiosity, [and] innovation” (Foucault 1988d, 1).

It is my hope, that the analysis that follows, constructed from my perspective as a female, white,

middle class, classically-trained28 musician who still performs and loves the classical repertoire,

can make visible, to my peers, the disconnect between understandings of ourselves as musicians,

and understandings of ourselves as political subjects educated to maintain a docile, childlike

relationship to relations of power. In this particular political moment, my hope is that classically-

trained musicians come to recognize our roles as “imperial subjects” who, both consciously and

unconsciously, continue to support the subjugation of others. Although we often see ourselves as

beleaguered in the face of a “lack of appreciation for the importance of what we do,” we are, in

fact, beneficiaries of a system of dispossession and accumulation. My hope is that by recognizing

our embeddedness in relations of power, we will become capable of engaging in critical analyses

of political relations and recognize our shared interests with those we have learned to see as

strange, unworthy, and therefore, the source of their own oppression. In spite of being recipients

of an education that encourages us, naively and enthusiastically, to sustain relations of rule, I

28

Estelle Jorgensen describes a number of different terms and concepts such as “schooling,” “training,” “eduction,” “enculturation” and “acculturation,” to describe various ways of teaching and learning music (Jorgensen 1997). I use the word “training” deliberately to emphasize the degree of drill, repetition, and adherence to traditions of interpretation involved in the formal education of classical musicians.

17

hope to show that it is in our interest to move beyond naive notions of our roles as upholders of

“high art” and recognize the political structures of which we are a part—structures that, in any

given time or place, will always demand scrutiny and contestation as a practice of “adult”

political agency. Rather than seeking to attain freedom, one enacts a practice of freedom through

continual engagements with politics and philosophy.

We must enact freedom, not seek it; that means we must discover and invent our own paths and strategies, not adopt somebody else's principles and deduce our actions from them. (McWhorter 2010, 63)

Location of the study within the literature

Although many discussions and debates have taken place within the relatively new field of

philosophy of music education,29 three interrelated areas of contestation that have a bearing on

my own concerns stand out in my research of the literature. These are: 1) debates over the

efficacy of articulating music education philosophy in terms of advocacy for the profession; 2)

the debate between David Elliott and Bennett Reimer over whether music teaching and learning

should be understood according to Reimer’s longstanding aesthetic model or Elliott’s “new

praxial” model30 and 3) debates, particularly between feminist-identified philosophers and those

who claim universal truths and abstract reason as the foundation of their philosophies over

whether or not the “political,” that is, manifestations of power, can be understood as part of

music and music educational practices.

Regarding the first issue, as Elizabeth Gould writes, the use of philosophy of music education as

advocacy “to justify the necessity of teaching music in the public schools” (Gould 2005b, 90) has

functioned to encourage a perceived need for a unified philosophy of music education at the

expense of more fluid and situational approaches to music teaching. In my view, the need for

advocacy, as I have argued elsewhere, has also functioned to keep the gaze of musicians and

29

Bennett Reimer’s publication of A Philosophy of Education (Reimer 1970) marks a beginning to Philosophy of Music Education as a professional discipline. Reimer’s ideas are built on the work of other thinkers about music such as Susanne Langer and Leonard Meyer. Reimer’s theories of “Aesthetic Education as Music Education” dominated the field of philosophy of music education from the publication of his first book in 1970 until the mid-1990s when a number of challenges to his theories gained wide circulation (Koza 1994; Gould 2004; Elliott 1995) (Jorgensen 1997). 30

Philip Alperson was, in fact, the first music education philosopher to use the term “praxial” in regard to music education (Alperson 2002); however, most of the ferocious debate about the validity of “aesthetic” versus “praxial” education was on the basis of writings by David Elliott and Bennett Reimer. The following represent a small sampling of the literature generated by this debate: (Elliott 1995; Regelski 2005, 1997, 1998; Reimer 1996; Elliott 1997; Spychinger 1997; Koopman 2004).

18

music educators inward, resulting in universal claims of the benefits of (Western-conceived)

music and music education that are primarily based on the particular experiences of musicians

and teachers who have been educated at faculties of music and teach within conservatory,

university or school systems (Vaugeois 2007). This inward looking gaze has limited the kind of

issues under consideration and led to strategies based largely on developing arguments for

maintaining and enhancing the professional position of music educators. This is not a surprising

reaction to the pressures created by government-mandated cuts to school music and arts

programs; however, the focus on advocacy constrains discussion to terms that support the

previous status quo and therefore leave out consideration of issues that might open space to

consider larger questions about where we fit, as university-trained musicians, in larger social and

economic contexts.

While the debates surrounding philosophies expressed in Reimer’s “Aesthetic Education as

Music Education” and Elliott’s “Praxial Education as Music Education” are based on truth

claims about the nature of music and music learning, these philosophies are also grounded in

concerns to produce compelling advocacy arguments in favour of school music education. The

positions articulated by both Bennett Reimer and David Elliott are based on the idea that music is

a particular form of knowledge (Reimer 2003, 11,28,80; Elliott 1995, 14). Both argue that music,

as taught through their systems, makes an essential contribution to “the good life,” in the

Aristotelian sense, for all people, that is, they are making the claim that music education is

essential to our “humanization” and “full development” (Reimer 1989, 84; Elliott 1995, 1, 14,

125). Both arguments are consistent with the liberal arts tradition of educational philosophers

such as R. S. Peters (Peters 1965) and both are located within modernist discourse. Where they

differ is that Reimer advocates teaching students to appreciate the classical repertoire

“aesthetically,” as autonomous works of art and a means to refine and educate one’s feelings.

Elliott, on the other hand, draws upon Phillips Alperson and Christopher Small to argue that

music is not a “thing” with an autonomous existence but a “doing” embedded in specific

traditions of practice. These debates dominated discussions in journals and Philosophy of Music

Education conferences for a number of years; however, while neither Elliott nor Reimer has

conceded to the other, the debate is no longer a major focus of scholarly attention. This may well

be because, as Maria Spychinger argues, neither position fundamentally displaces the other; both

arguments fall at different points on the same semiotic circle and thus do little to question the

19

underlying framework of music education studies (Spychinger 1997). They attribute a basic

“goodness” to music education, conceived as a moral and politically neutral endeavour.31 These

limitations notwithstanding, Elliott’s work does open up space for my own research by

contesting the notion that Western music, as an “autonomous art form of universal value,” exists

in a realm outside of the social and the particular. Elliott undertakes a process of historicizing the

“aestheticization” of music in the nineteenth century and, citing a number of music sociologists,

argues that music, including Western music, is socially and culturally located. In view of the

ubiquitous use of Reimer’s Philosophy of Music Education in university music departments up

until 199532 and the general acceptance within schools of music that we should analyze “the

music itself” outside of social, economic and practical considerations, Elliott’s frontal assault on

this reifying concept has been important to unsettling a key assumption about the nature of

Western classical music. Unfortunately, even as Elliott challenges the music education status

quo, his “new philosophy,” in part due to its location within a liberal framework, does not have

the scope to address power relations; nor can it account for the political histories that have

shaped the form and goals of both school and professional forms of music education. For

example, Elliott’s faith in multiculturalism as a means to eliminate social conflict reveals the

shortcomings of ignoring power relations in his analysis (Elliott 1995, 293). In the years

preceding the publication of his book, extensive public debates and critical publications on the

function of state-mandated multiculturalism—as a device to reinforce rather than contest racial

hierarchies—were widely available but not taken into account in his work. Elliott’s endorsement

of the role of music education to bring about the ideals of multiculturalism is based on an

ahistorical and uncritical acceptance of a state-generated ideology, and an assumption that

“differences” per se are the cause of social conflict, rather than the political uses to which

categories of “difference” are put. He sees conflict within a modernist, liberal framework33 in

which individual agency is the focus of analysis, displacing the possibility of analyzing systemic

structures and group relations. As a result, Elliott’s “praxial” philosophy of music education is no

31

The inability of these philosophical approaches to locate music education within political relations is taken up as part of my Master’s Thesis: Where politics and music meet: Why developing critical consciousness is important to the education of professional musicians (Vaugeois 2004). 32

David Elliott’s book (Music Matters) was first published in 1995. It is written as a critique of Reimer’s advocacy of “Aesthetic Education as Music Education.” 33

The term “liberal” here should not be confused with the ideologies of particular Canadian political parties or with the liberal/conservative divide as expressed in contemporary American politics. Liberal in the sense that I use here refers to a very specific philosophical tradition associated with modernity. See (Boyd 2004).

20

more able to account for music education in relation to larger political and historical contexts

than is the aesthetic philosophy of Bennett Reimer.

The “invisibility” of the political in these two philosophical approaches brings me to the third

area of debate in philosophy of music education, that is, whether or not relations of power are

relevant to understanding music and music education practices. In contrast to the work of the

above authors, feminist and queer philosophers, educators and musicologists have brought a

sharply critical lens to the long accepted notion that music lies outside of the political. This work

has reflected the much broader research developed since the 1970s into the politics of gender,

race and class in local, national and international contexts and, like other disciplines exploring

social and cultural relations, has moved through a number of different analytical approaches,

including essentialist, historical materialist, modernist and post-modernist over the now more

than thirty years of work in this area. While the conclusions and analytical approaches of these

writers have varied, what has unified their work is a concern for social justice and a commitment

to revealing and contesting oppressive relations of power. Amongst philosophers of music

education, these writers include Julia Koza, Elizabeth Gould, Roberta Lamb, Charlene Morton,

Patti O’Toole, Vicki Eaklor and Deborah Bradley.34 Writers who have contributed to critiques

and understandings of social relations as reflected in musical practices also include musicologists

such as Susan McClary, Philip Brett, Wayne Koestenbaum and Elizabeth Wood, cultural

theorists such as Richard Leppert and sociologists of music such as Christopher Small, John

Shepherd, Rinaldo Walcott, Ruth Solie, Tia DeNora, Beverley Diamond and Pirkko Moisala.35

Running through the work of all the authors cited above is an acknowledgement that hierarchies

of race, class and gender organize social relations to the betterment or detriment of identifiable

groups of people as well as individuals located within these groups. Also central are challenges

to the Western concept of universality and neutrality as well as work identifying sites and effects

of power manifested in musical practices—particularly regarding gender. Notably, both Elliott

and Reimer virtually ignore the work of feminist philosophers in their conceptualizations of

34

See: Koza 1988, 1994, 2003, 2003, 2008; Gould 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007a; Gould 2007b; Gould 2008, 2012; Gould et al. 2009 ; Lamb 1993, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2004; Morton 1994, 1996, 2004; O'Toole 2002, 2005; Eaklor 1985; Bradley 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010. 35

See: McClary 1985; Leppert and McClary 1987; McClary 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993; Brett, Wood, and Thomas 1994; Leppert 1986, 1987; Leppert and McClary 1987; Leppert 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993; Small 1996, 1997, 1998, 2011; Solie 1993; Shepherd 1986, 1991, 1993; Shepherd and Wicke 1997; DeNora 1995, 2000; Walcott 1996, 1997, 2001, 2005; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Diamond and Witmer 1994.

21

music education until directly challenged by writers such as Koza, Gould, and O’Toole. Their

positions, initially implied but later stated directly (particularly by Bennett Reimer and another

liberal music philosopher, Paul Woodford) eschew feminist analyses precisely because feminist

observations point to the political and particular—two concepts that are incompatible with

universalizing claims about music education. While a number of philosophy of music education

writers have taken up the issues raised by feminist music education philosophers (Jorgensen,

Allsup, Schmidt and Benedict amongst others),36 other writers have either ignored much of this

work (Elliott) or have vilified it as irrational and extremist (Reimer 2003, 52-59; Woodford

2005, Chapter 3). For example, both Reimer and Woodford have argued vociferously that the

ideas of feminist and post-modernist writers represent a dangerous political agenda arguing, at

the same time, that their own work, located in liberal and Enlightenment traditions, is moderate

and politically neutral. While acknowledging, to some extent, the cultural specificity of different

musics, both Reimer and Woodford rearticulate “truth claims” about the universality of Western

music and its place outside of the political. Thus while both writers describe feminist and post-

modernist writers as radicals pursuing an extremist political agenda, existing power relations are

asserted to be fair and in the best interest of all. Woodford, in particular, suggests that while

oppression may have existed in the past, it should not be brought into discussions about

contemporary relations (Woodford 2005, 49). Notably, Reimer states that political relations are

reflected in popular and “ethnic” musics while maintaining that Western classical music, because

of its intrinsic universality, lies outside the political (Reimer 2003, 195). As Koza points out,

however, “Reimer’s flights from overt discussion of politics and his reliance on a myth of neutral

philosophical transcendence are themselves political acts” (Koza 1994, 76). Gould also offers a

compelling analysis of the inherent contradictions between claims of political neutrality and

positioning oneself in the “normative” centre (Gould 2004, 76-77).

The positions taken by Reimer and Woodford are based on the claim that arguing in favour of

the status quo, or their particular musical and pedagogical ideals, represents a politically neutral

stance. Both writers have invested a great deal of intellectual energy denying the possibility that

political relations may have a bearing on the construction of musical forms, pieces, aesthetic

sensibilities and so on. These arguments are consistent with the long tradition of liberalism that

36

See: Jorgensen 1996; Jorgensen 1997, 2003; Allsup 2001, 2007; Benedict and Schmidt 2007; Benedict 2010; Schmidt 2007; Elliott 1995, 1997; Bowman 1998, 2001.

22

has dominated Western discourses since the Enlightenment, a time frame and mode of thinking,

as already noted, that is also coincident with the advent of world-wide colonization and trans-

Atlantic slavery. Many feminist and critical race theorists argue that liberal philosophy, because

of its insistence on naming the Western subject as universal and the “Other” as particular, masks

inherent forms of violence upon which liberal political and philosophical structures are

contingent.37 The nineteenth century investment in the idea of aesthetics and music as an

autonomous art form without any connection to social context lines up closely with aspirations of

the bourgeoisie to establish themselves as “natural” rulers, defining themselves as a universal

subject, both rational and moral and destined to rule over Others38 (Saïd 1978, xiii; Stoler 1995,

8 ). The practice of reframing the violences of colonialism as the moral work of rationally

superior beings engaged in the project of bringing civilization to lesser Others melds comfortably

with evolving notions of Western cultural expressions as autonomous works existing outside of

bodily need, the local, contingent or political.

Social justice has become a theme at music education conferences in the last few years39 with the

appearance of politically significant tensions between views of what constitutes social justice.

Those who locate themselves within a liberal tradition see social justice as a matter of helping

others to “lift themselves up” to the level of the “developed” West, suggesting practices

grounded in notions of charity, political neutrality, and a position of Western “innocence”

(Razack 1998, 9). In contrast to this position are those who argue that political relations shape

social relations, noting the importance not only of locating ourselves within political frames but

the importance of identifying and addressing political causes of poverty and injustice (Gould et

al. 2009 ). My own work is informed by those writers such as Gould, Koza, Lamb, Eaklor and

37

See: Gilroy 2000, 58-63; Goldberg 1993, 5; Razack 1998, 23. 38 I use the term “Other” as it has come into common usage in psychoanalytic and post-colonial theory.

In psychoanalytic theory, for Lacan, the illusory wholeness of the self in the mirror phase; when capitalized, the lack…. In other psychoanalytic discourse, that which is repressed within the self….In postcolonialism, for Saïd, the projection by Western cultures onto ‘orientals’ of qualities opposite and inferior to those which they ascribe to themselves: labelling them irrational, uncivilized, and so on (orientalism); part of a discourse of power enabling control of the colonized subject. This ideological process has been called othering (Chandler and Munday 2011).

39 Three international conferences have taken place on the topic of social justice to promote discussion and advance

research: International Conference on Music Education, Equity, and Social Justice, October 6–8, 2006, at Teachers College Columbia University; musica ficta/ Lived Realities: A Conference on Exclusions and Engagements in Music, Education and the Arts, January 24–27, 2008, at the University of Toronto; and Race, Erasure, and Equity in Music Education Conference, October 20–23, 2010, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

23

O’Toole who consider that musical practices are shaped by social and political exigencies.

Drawing, also, on the work of Razack, Thobani and Foucaultian concepts of subjectivity, I

contend that musical practices produce subjectivities that locate us as raced, gendered and

classed in very particular ways. I also draw on the work of scholars who identify and analyze

specific practices and repertoires used to articulate and celebrate ideas about what it means to

belong to a “civilized” nation.40

Postcolonial theories, particularly as articulated by writers such as Razack, Bannerji, Thobani,

Goldberg, McClintock, Mackey and Stoler look specifically at the interlocking functions of race

and gender identities to produce colonizers as superior to racialized “Others.”41 Post-colonial

theory traces when and how the body becomes the means to identify who is entitled to rule.

Addressing racism has always been part of the agenda of feminist philosophers of music

education, however, feminist post-colonial theories cast light on relations of power difficult to

pinpoint in other analytical frameworks. Within the field of music education Gloria Ladson-

Billings, Julia Koza (2008), Ruth Gustafson (2005),Deborah Bradley (2006) and Rinaldo

Walcott draw on post-colonial theory to bring forward questions of race and racism. Newer

scholars, such as Angela Wellman and Juliet Hess are also focusing their work on the

intersection of race and music education.42

Ruth Gustafson’s 2005 dissertation “Merry throngs and street gangs: The fabrication of

whiteness and the worthy citizen in early vocal instruction and music appreciation, 1830-1930”

is an archeology of the discourse of “comportment” as expressed in school music collections

which draws “a picture of the historical scaffold for Whiteness that has been a normalizing

center for bona fide participation in many public school programs” (243). Gustafson’s research

shows that race, as a category used to identify those worthy or unworthy of citizenship, has been

a factor in the development of American music education programs since their inception in the

nineteenth century. In a contemporary context, Julia Koza (2008) analyses the effects of

admission procedures in American university music education programs that accomplish “de

facto racial discrimination” even while maintaining that auditions are “color blind” (Koza 2008,

40

See: Tippett 1990; Campbell 2000; Reese 2000; Richards 2001; Olwage 2004, 2005; Gustafson 2005, 2009. 41

See: Razack 2007, 1998, 2008, 2007, 2004; Thobani 2007; Bannerji 1993; Bannerji 2000, 1997; Goldberg 1993; McClintock 1995; Mackey 2002; Stoler 1989; Cooper and Stoler 1989c; Stoler 2006, 2006, 1995, 1989b. 42

See; Ladson-Billings 1998; Koza 2008; Hess 2013; Hess 2010; Wellman 2010.

24

149, 151). Both of these pieces offer analyses of how constructions of race, manifested both in

discourse (Gustafson) and technologies of power (Koza), have been present throughout the

development of school music education in the United States since its beginnings in the

nineteenth century and continue to have effects in the contemporary moment. As will become

evident later in this study, these constructions have also had parallel expressions throughout the

development of Canadian music education.

Beyond feminist and post-colonial writers on music education, a significant source of research

that can support my own project is found in ethnomusicology and musicology—fields that have

been engaging with the issues raised in postcolonial theories for a number of years. Three

collections indicate the range and breadth of the work undertaken in these areas. Music and the

Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman contains a set of

multidisciplinary papers exploring the intersection of racism and music in locations on every

continent, in historical and contemporary contexts (Bohlman and Radano 2000). Drawing on

extant work in cultural theory, Radano and Bohlman’s introduction provides a historical

accounting of theorizing on race as it intersects with musical practice, calling particular attention

to racism, as a continuously denied but persistently powerful factor in contemporary social

relations, expressed in and through cultural practices. In Western Music and Its Others, editors

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh provide a survey and critique of analytical approaches

to race and concepts of “difference” and argue for the importance of bringing postcolonial

analysis to these fields (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000) . The papers in this collection draw on

critiques of liberalism and set many contemporary musical practices in a number of site-specific

political and economic contexts. A more recent collection, Western Music and Race edited by

Julie Brown, looks at race and racism in Western classical music (Brown 2007). The writers in

all of these collections owe much of their theorizing force to the earlier work on culture and

imperialism of Edward Saïd (1993); however, this most recent collection, with its focus on

Western musical works, is a direct heir to Saïd’s analytical approach. In Culture and

Imperialism, for example, Saïd, while continuing to respect and admire the Western works he

critiques, shows how Orientalism, coupled with colonization and the building of Empire,

permeates the imaginary spaces created by Western writers such as Jane Austin, E. M. Forster,

George Elliott, Joseph Conrad and others. Similarly, the authors represented in Brown’s

collection bring a postcolonial lens to Western classical music. The empirical evidence

25

assembled in these three texts alone offers abundant examples of how music is historically,

politically and materially situated. These are examples that, I hope, can finally unsettle the idea

that the canon of Western music exists on a plane immune to historical, philosophical and

political contingency. Other writers that analyze the intersection of music and power include,

Susan McClary, Marcia Citron, Lucy Green and Suzanne Cusick.43

Richard Leppert’s work on music and representation in the formation of class identities is an

invaluable source of historical materials showing the uses of visual art and music in asserting

“ethnoclass”44 dominance in metropolitan and colonial settings. The collection Canadian Music:

Issues of Hegemony and Identity, edited by Beverley Diamond predates, to some extent, the

insights made available through postcolonial theory but offers an important window on how

“difference” and coloniality have been perceived at different times amongst musicians and music

scholars. The same is also true of the collection Musicology and Difference: Gender and

Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie and published in 1993.

Another area of analytical interest is cultural geography as it relates to the spatial organization of

raced, classed and gendered bodies. This field is explored in music in the book The Place of

Music, edited by Leyshon, Matless and Revill, and in papers by Susan J. Smith and others.

Jacques Attali’s iconoclastic contribution to the discussion of music and politics, Noise, first

published in 1977 and translated into English in 1985, offers an account of music, beginning in

the Middle Ages and moving into contemporary times, as presaging changes in political

organization (Attali 1985, 11). In addition to the interesting conceptual case made by Attali, his

work provides a number of references to changes in musical organization during the

Enlightenment that are of immediate concern to my studies on the intersection of Enlightenment,

musical, and colonial rationalities. Work done in fields outside of, but relevant to, musical

studies includes the work of sociologist Howard Becker (Becker 1963) and Pierre Bourdieu

(Bourdieu 1993, 1984). Bourdieu, in particular, writes about the concept of “cultural capital” and

the function of music, art and education to produce, rationalize and sustain social distinctions.

43

See: McClary 1985, 1987, 1991; Citron 1993; Green 1997; Cusick 1994, 1994. 44

Leppert does not use this term but I borrow it from Sylvia Wynter’s, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being, because it so aptly links class identity with racial identity (Wynter 2003, 1-2).

26

Literature pertaining to music that celebrates imperialism and the British Empire (Richards 2001;

Bailey 2002) and literature about the various movements and historical processes involved in the

establishment of a Western musical canon has also been helpful to my project (Weber 1992;

Citron 1993). The Jeffrey Richards’ book, Imperialism and music: Britain, 1876-1953 has

proven to be especially interesting because of its specific references to visits by British musicians

to Canada, including details about repertoire, the imperial occasions for these tours, and speeches

made during the public events associated with these performances.

Richards also writes at length about the debates that took place in the nineteenth century

continue to be reflected in the twenty-first century, about whether or not music has the capacity

to express “anything at all”; however, as he points out throughout his study, this debate has not

stopped politicians, social scientists, educators, advertisers, or numerous performers and

composers from calling upon music in attempts to create emotional associations with particular

beliefs, political projects, and identities. Although Empire is no longer the publically identified

trope that binds white settler colonies together, it was rehearsed in those embodied moments of

listening, singing and playing instruments in ways that helped to create emotional identifications

with particular ideologies and associated ideas of identity. “Empire was all around us…part of

the fabric of our lives. We were all imperialists then” (Richards, 2).

27

Chapter Two: Key Concepts

A number of concepts underpin the study that follows: Foucaultian understandings of power,

discourse and interrelationships of power and knowledge; Foucaultian understandings of the

“subject” and “subjectivities;” the notion that feelings can be “educated” through music and

culture; Sunera Thobani’s concept of “exaltation” as a specific tactic of power with widespread

use in the construction of Canadian identities and, Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity”

and the particular ways that “performativity” shape the subjectivities of musicians.

Discourse

Foucault uses the term discourse to refer to a group of statements which provide a conceptual

framework for thinking and talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment.

Foucault identifies the sixteenth century as a period during which the “function of accounts of

history” changes. Accounts of history—as competing discourses of truth--become political

weapons, that is, tools used to sustain the validity of “truth claims” in order to assert the

necessity of particular political arrangements (Foucault 2003, 189). In Foucault’s view,

constructions of history become tactical weapons used to assert the “rightness” of a desired

political order; a means to construct the past in order to assert the legitimacy of a desired present.

For example, in the eighteenth century, sovereign power, with the King as the figure to whom

one owes allegiance and from whence all law and right descend, has been the dominant form of

governance—based on victory in war. Within this framework, the reality of relationships of

domination is hidden in a language of legitimate rights (Foucault 2003, 227). By way of contrast,

bourgeois writers assert that, in contradistinction to the right of the sovereign, the modes of

governance for which they are arguing are not based on conquest through domination but on

rationally established meritocracies (Foucault 2003, 242). Discourse, as linked to particular

interpretations of the past and present, becomes a necessary field of struggle, in which the ability

to define what constitutes “truth” is a key function of power. Foucault argues that

indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. (Foucault 1979, 100)

28

Words and concepts can be turned to different purposes in different contexts. For example, the

concept of “taxation” can be used to argue in favour of shared services and the preservation of

“the common good” but it can equally well be used to argue against a common interest that

removes from individuals the “right to choose.” In music, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” may be

asserted to have a fixed meaning and significance in a discourse based on the universality of the

Western canon; however, it has proven equally useful for selling milk45 and portraying the

sinister in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971). Thus, as Foucault argues,

discourses are not stable entities with stable meanings; rather, discourses can be harnessed to suit

the needs of different political projects in different moments. Discourses are thus fields of battle

through which competing elements attempt to establish truths about the “rightness” of any given

order (Foucault 1980a, 93).

A dispositif goes beyond the conceptual framework of a discourse to include related institutional

structures which, together, constitute a cluster of power relations, that is, a

heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative erasures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid….The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault 1980c, 194-195)

The dispositive, apparatus or “regime of practice” 46 explored in this dissertation is the cluster of

power relations connected with the institutionalization of race, class and gender identities

through various forms of music practice in schools, conservatories, university faculties, clubs

and public performance spaces. In particular, I trace discussions, strategies and tactics used to

establish particular concepts and experiences of national identity through musical practices and

the formation of musical institutions. My task is not only to recognize the presence of various

discourses and ideals, but to explore how competing discourses come into play in the actual

doing of things, that is, “how” particular relationships are brought into being.

45

“Drink Milk, Love Life” was the theme for a series of long-running commercials for milk, all of which used versions of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” A few versions are available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF6cgZDdQvo. 46

Mitchell Dean use of the term “regime of practice” closely parallels Foucault’s idea of the dispositif (Dean 1999, 40)

29

Subjectivities

Foucault argues that relations of power shape the kinds of subjectivities possible in different

historical moments. Each of us is a subject of history but we are also subjected to history. Thus,

in contrast to the modernist notion of the autonomous individual or “self” that has an essential

nature prior to historical circumstance, Foucault’s notion of the “subject,” or the “individual,”

suggests that external conditions and sites of power are a significant part of how we come to

understand ‘the truth’ about who we are and our place in the world.

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. (Foucault 1980b, 98)

Subjectivities are located in history and cannot exist outside of the historical forces through

which their existence becomes possible. Foucault’s mode of analysis does not suggest that

subjectivities are simply the result of projects of social engineering nor that our understandings

of ourselves are based on the “false consciousness” some scholars ascribe to Marxist-derived

theories; rather, subjectivities are produced through discourse, institutional structures and

practices experienced as everyday occurrences. Subjectivities rest on taken-for-granted

assumptions and suggest a range of shared experiences that have been normalized for particular

groups of people. For example, prior to the nineteenth century, the vocation of “school teacher”

does not exist as a distinct profession requiring the successful completion of a teacher-training

program and commitments to constrain one’s behaviour according to authorized standards. The

authority of the position of “teacher” and methods employed within the profession are

established through new areas that emerge out of the need to create ‘rational understandings’ for

the structures and constraints that are to be imposed. Sciences such as pedagogy, philosophy,

political science, public health emerge as new sites of inquiry, new sites in which ‘natural order’

can be deduced and then acted upon through structures that form in response to the concerns

identified in different disciplines. Those who take up the work of these disciplines become

“doctors, researchers, public health scientists, educational experts” and so on, that is, they

become subject to new understandings while also becoming ‘subjects’ with identities, with ways

of conceiving the self, ways of framing the moral and good that only become possible through

the historical conditions of their possibility.

30

Subjectivities emerge out of institutional formations that are produced in order to deal with

particular problems. Linked with practical needs that mark their origins, the rationalizations that

produce institutional structures in the first place, however, may not be apparent to those

functioning within their parameters. For example, young people might not be aware that life for

people of their age has not always involved compulsory schooling. They are also not likely to

understand themselves as members of a particular population being disciplined in order to fulfill

the needs of a particular society; rather, they are more likely to frame their worlds within the

context of the possibilities visible within the school itself. The world of the school creates its

own frame of reference that, in its “every day” aspects of repeatability, comes to be understood

and experienced as normal. How we come to understand ourselves within the structure of

schooling is normalized through repetition, discourse, forms of evaluation, timetables, restriction

of mobility, systems of reward and punishment, and other disciplining practices.

Subjectivities, then, are the result of sets of experiences and assumptions that differently located

people experience as ‘normal’ “according to which power produces the real through the

processes of normalization that it adopts and the regimes of truth it institutes” (Braidotti as cited

in Tamboukou 1999, 213). Individual choices, ways of being in the world, and notions of

selfhood, are shaped and constrained by the discursive and institutional regimes particular to

one’s social and historical location. In this study, I scrutinize institutional structures and their

sustaining discourses in order to notice the subjectivities made possible through dominant forms

of music education in Canada. Tracking what has become “self-evident” and how discourses and

institutional structures have produced the “self-evident” is thus a central task of this study.

The education of feeling

My use of the term, “the education of feeling,” draws on two different sources. The first is

Raymond Williams’ term “structures of feeling” as an analytical focus for understanding artistic

forms in any particular time or place. “Structures of feeling”

are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt….We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought… (Williams 1977, 132)

Williams uses the term “feeling” to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of

“world-view” or “ideology” (O'Connor 2006, 79). He denotes structures of feeling as analyzable

31

elements in works of art that are significant to understanding “culture” as it is experienced. He

argues that the significance of works of art do not lie in their assigned canonical value, separated

from political life, but are part of lived and felt experience with sociological significance. I draw

on Williams’ acknowledgement of works of art as sources of “feeling,” worthy of analysis for

their reflection of, and contribution to, the construction of consciousness and elements of

relationships in particular historical moments.

The second source for my use of the term, “the education of feeling” evokes the claim made by

music education philosopher, Bennett Reimer, that the function of music education, particularly

a pedagogical approach he calls “Music Education as Aesthetic Education,” is the “education of

feeling” (Reimer 1989, 32, 65ff; 2003, 89ff). By this Reimer means that music of the Western

classical tradition, as taught in North American university faculties of music, conservatories, and

in public schools, has the capacity to produce moral citizens; to enhance and offer insights into

the “feelingfulness” of human beings (Reimer 1989, 39). For Reimer, Western classical music

represents universal values, is innocent of political relations, and offers aesthetic experiences that

embody the beautiful, and thus, the moral (Reimer 1989, 224). The education of feeling,

according to Reimer, is a process of aesthetic distancing that brings out the best of human

thought and emotion while abstracting these elements from the specificity of lived experience.

Unlike William’s notion of “structures of feeling” as emerging out of specific historical

conditions, Reimer’s notion draws on a belief in the universality of feelings expressed in the

Western musical canon.

In my use of the “education of feeling” I take up Reimer’s phrase but strip it of its political

innocence by locating the musics of “music education” within political projects of colonialism,

that is, his claims to universality notwithstanding, I locate his project within a specific historical

context. In my project, I note where educational projects focus on the “education of feeling” in

order to mold loyalties to the nation and compliant populations within particular hierarchical,

raced, classed and gendered structures, while also producing colonial “dynamics of [both]

possession and innocence” (Pratt 1992, 6). The forms of music given public support, as well as

certain forms of music chosen by individuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

show evidence of the use of particular emotional narratives that correspond to particular political

objectives. In my use of the phrase, “the education of feeling,” I draw on Reimer’s claim that

feelings can and ought to be educated but reframe his project by drawing on Williams’ notion

32

that “structures of feeling” are relevant to understanding the how social relations are structured

and experienced in particular historical contexts.

The idea that feelings can be shaped through exposure to sound, and, more specifically, through

music, is not new. Plato’s concern that music, uncontrolled, was a danger to the city state is but

one of many articulations about the power of music to affect emotions (Bowman 1998, 30ff). In

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, composers of film, advertisers, psychologists,

politicians, military tacticians, educators and many others have made a science of understanding

and manipulating music, precisely with the goal of evoking particular emotional responses and

corresponding actions.47 Tia DeNora’s study, Music in Everyday Life provides an analysis of

relationships to music very different from aesthetic distancing (2000). DeNora’s study tracks

how people, with a wide range of musical loyalties, choose music in order to put themselves into

particular emotional states. With the availability of recorded music, people have the means to

reinforce or provide antidotes to particular feelings through their own musical choices,

demonstrating that music is a tool often used to “educate,” or influence, one’s own feelings. In

military contexts, music is used to evoke particular emotional and physiological responses. On

the field it is used to inspire aggression and a willingness to die in battle. In torture chambers, it

is used as a means to break the spirit of those being interrogated even while the music chosen for

this violence might well be considered “good” music in other settings (Neustadt 2004; Cusick

2006).

Within dominant discourses of Western music educators, performers, scholars and broadcasters,

however, Western classical music continues to be identified by many as an expression of

universal values and universal human experiences that is intrinsically apolitical (Wolff 1987).

The practice of aesthetic distancing, argued for by Reimer and so many nineteenth and twentieth

century writers is intended to maintain a clear distinction between rational, noble responses

evoked by the canon of “great works” and overtly emotional and physical responses associated

with, and generally welcomed in, forms of popular music. In Reimer’s view, the goal of music

education is to evoke aesthetic experiences of “feelingful reactions” understood as “intrinsic,

47

In addition to commercial recordings that promise to create appropriate “moods” through carefully chosen musical selections, there are numerous branches of scholarship that approach music as a means to influence behaviour and mood (Juslin and Sloboda 2001). These include studies in advertising (e.g. Huron 1989), film music composition (Cohen 2000) and therapeutic uses of music in a variety of clinical settings. See, for example Habilitation: Music Therapy Research and Evidence-Based Practice Support (Association).

33

disinterested, distanced” responses to the form and content of different musics (Reimer 1989,

103). Thus, while some forms of music have functional objectives, for example, patriotic pieces

that consciously seek to evoke pride, they are noteworthy within “autonomous art” discourses

only insofar as their forms can be separated from their social function and explored for their

aesthetic merits (Reimer 1989, 37). Writers such as Reimer and Woodford make a distinction

between acknowledging the power of sound to evoke emotions associated with social and

political objectives, and the feelings evoked by Western classical music. It is a distinction

associated with a divide between civilized/uncivilized music evident in the writing of Hubert

Parry in his 1930 The Evolution of the Art of Music. The premise of Parry’s thesis is that music

has evolved from the primitive evocation of emotions by “primitive peoples” through simple

sound structures, to sophisticated renderings of “civilized feeling” expressed in Western high art

music (Parry 1930, 61).

Foucault argues that relations of power are in a perpetual state of contestation played out in

struggles over what stands as “truth” in any social, political, economic context. For Parry, the

truth of ‘good’ music is that it evokes worthy feelings and is as distant as possible from more

‘primitive’ and ‘lower class’ forms of music that evoke more direct emotional responses. Reimer

assumes that the project to educate feelings may be related to social ideals but is entirely separate

from political goals and relationships. The ideals of both of these writers are evident in the

conceptualization of music education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an education

towards the internalization of particular feelings and particular identities—identities that, I will

demonstrate, maintain the legitimacy of the “civilizing projects” of colonial dispossession and

domination.

Claims of distinctions between musics that evoke apolitical, aesthetic feelings and musics that

evoke more direct emotional responses notwithstanding, the musicians and music educators I

explore in this dissertation understand music to have the power to shape identity, invoke

emotional responses, help or hinder the development of “good” citizens, and even create national

unity and national loyalty. These musicians believe that the “right” music can bring about the

“right” outcomes and, likewise, that the “wrong” music can support rebellious or degenerate

behaviours (Tippett 1990, 69; Gustafson 2009, 69ff). In contests over rights to land, resources,

and belonging, music and music education, in fact, prove to be sites of battle for dominance

(Troutman 2009, 108). Struggles over the place of different musics are struggles over whose

34

notions of order and civilization should prevail.48 Jacques Attali argues that musics that are

perceived as “noise,” are musics that disrupt a desired social order (Attali 1985, 19-20). Offering

a somewhat different though related viewpoint, Christopher Small argues that loyalties to

different musical styles and contexts brings

into existence relationships that are thought desirable by those taking part, and in doing so it not only reflects those ideal relationships but also shapes them. It teaches and inculcates those ideal relationships. (Small 2011, xi)

Each of these viewpoints, from the aesthetic distancing asserted by Reimer and the suggestion

that music is closely related to desired/contested social relations begs the question of whether

there are in fact elements of social engineering in the structures of Western forms of music

education. In much Western writing, the notion that music can be used as tool of social

engineering is associated with twentieth century Russian attempts to dictate the style of music

created by composers and heard by their populations (Taruskin 2009). “Social engineering” is a

term of disapprobation often used by Western commentators to distinguish Western from

Communist forms of governance based on the assumption that social engineering has only ever

been pursued under Communism. It is a term of disapprobation that has also been used to shut

down debate about the social and political significance of various aspects of Western classical

music. Paul Woodford, for example, suggests that feminist music philosophers must be

advocates of social engineering, (a threat presumably absent from extant forms of music

education), because of their efforts to locate expressions of gender and related social and

political hierarchies in Western art music (Woodford 2005, Chapter 3).49 I suggest, however, that

the distinction made between what is acknowledged as political and what is asserted to be

politically neutral in these arguments masks the work that is being done to generate particular

truth claims without acknowledging the political and social structures that sustain claims of

neutrality.

When particular forms of music are promoted in order to bring about particular notions of the

social good, it is worth considering whether differences between “the education of feeling” and

“social engineering” may be in terms of degree rather than kind. As a tool to shape people’s 48

See; Saïd 1993; McClary 1993; Attali 1985; Barthes 1972; Smith 1997; Frith 1996; Gustafson 2005, 2009; Small 1997, 1998; Tippett 1990. 49

Reimer is equally disdainful of efforts to locate social and political relations in Western classical music practices—especially those efforts undertaken by self-identified feminist writers—which he reduces to simplistic and narrow projects of “message-seeking.” (Reimer 2003, 57)

35

responses and identifications, the education of feeling, through musical disciplines and musical

events, can be seen as a tactic, or a technology of power, that seeks to shape emotional responses

and how people come to identify themselves and others.

When “good” music is identified as one particular kind of music—an identity established

through government mandated curricula in schools and taught in sanctioned sites of music

education, i.e., conservatories and universities, then a large-scale project to “educate feeling” is

underway—a project that, I suggest, can reasonably be considered as a project of social

engineering. Thus, as I explore different musical enterprises, I draw attention to the uses and

effects of music on differently situated social groups and draw attention to the political uses of

music in the context of the Canadian colonial state. This includes analyzing the formation of

subjectivities through different relationships with musics engaged in by differently located

people including those who do not see themselves reflected in the Western canon as well as those

who love and identify with the Western canon as an embodiment of ideal relationships.

In the analyses that follow, I do not attempt to quantify the extent to which such uses of music

are successful in evoking particular emotional responses; rather, my project sets out to track

places where cultural actors, for example, musical leaders, politicians, educators and social

reformers, engage with music and the institutionalization of musical projects with particular

social goals in mind—goals which, through concerted attempts to “educate feeling” on the scale

of entire populations, and, in spite of claims of political neutrality, are always already political,

always already implicated in relations of power.

Exaltation

“Exaltation” is a term important to my analysis of the making of different identities. Sunera

Thobani, in her 2007 book, Exalted subjects. Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada

analyzes the many uses of “exaltation” as a tactic of power exploited in order to invoke particular

identifications with the Canadian nation state. Synonyms for the word “exalt” include praise,

acclaim, applaud, pay tribute to, bless, worship, magnify, glorify, uplift, raise, elevate, ennoble

and aggrandize (Exalt 2002). In other words, to exalt the self is to raise one’s status to

something special, something particularly worthy. Thobani argues that the use of exaltation to

denote the Canadian character is a strategy employed to invoke identification with the colonial

project and the race, class and gender hierarchies intrinsic to this project. I quote Thobani at

36

length below because I will refer often to her concept of exaltation throughout my analysis of the

construction of various musical subjectivities.

In the case of Canada, the historical exaltation of the national subject has ennobled this subject's humanity and sanctioned the elevation of its rights over and above that of the Aboriginal and the immigrant. The inscription of specific 'national' characteristics into these subjects as elements of their innate humanity elevates such traits from the realm of 'natural' human existence and writes them into the body politic, thereby catapulting them into the sociocultural realm of the national symbolic. Even as exaltation ennobles and elevates the national community, it simultaneously 'naturalizes' these qualities as the essential possessions of the individual subjects who form this community, as being intrinsic to - and reflective of - the superior order of their humanity, arising organically from their natural, individual moral goodness. (Thobani 2007, 9)

Thobani’s analysis of exaltation as a technique of power focuses on its use to create an emotional

identification with the State. It is associated with pride, personal identity and what Helen Lenskyj

calls “the goose bump effect,” i.e. the physical and emotional thrill that one can experience

during carefully orchestrated occasions of pride – national or otherwise (Lenskyj in Abbs,

Frampton, and Peart 2010, 142). The effects of these identifications are both symbolic and

material. The exaltation of particular subjects creates identifications between those who belong

and can claim to share in the achievements and goals of the exalted group and likewise creates a

foil to these identities: those who are outside the group; those who deserve a lower place; even a

place of abjection.50 Techniques of exaltation build emotional relationships between personal

identity, the nation, and, in today’s global marketplace, corporations and their products. In this

study, however, my interest is in the evocation of pride in relation to the colonial nation state and

the artistic institutions developed through colonial enterprise. I look closely at the ways exalted

identities are invoked and rehearsed into being through education projects, as well as public uses

of music in nation-building projects. Drawing on Thobani’s analysis, I consider the use of

50

The term “abjection” comes into wide usage based on the work of Julia Kristeva. In her psychoanalytical work, Kristeva expands the meaning of the word beyond "the state of being cast off" (Abjection 1995, 1) to an inescapable relationship between the self and that which is cast from the self. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. (Kristeva 1982, 4) The "unconscious" contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established - one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. (Kristeva 1982, 7)

37

notions of exaltation, performed into being through music, as “technologies of the self,” that is,

as processes used to invoke understandings of “who one is” in relation to others.51

Performativity

In line with Foucault’s concept of how subjectivities are formed within specific historical and

political contexts, Judith Butler, in describing her concept of performativity, argues that gender

identities, something generally taken up as innate, are constructed through “doing” rather than

“being,” arguing that that there is no “natural body” that pre-exists cultural inscription (Salih

2002, 62). Butler’s idea of performativity is developed in the context of exploring the

constructedness of gender identities; however, her concept is equally useful when thinking about

musical identities and the challenge of separating our understanding of the formation of those

identities from our emotional investments in notions of the self believed to be both innate and

individualistic. Concerning the production of gender identities, Butler writes that

gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender. (Butler 1993, 25)

There are several concepts in this passage relevant to the production of musical subjectivities:

repeated stylization of the body (learning the “correct” way to use the body in order to play or

sing, depending on the musical tradition one is learning), repeated acts within a regulatory frame

resulting in a naturalization of ways of being (becoming so accomplished at repeating particular

actions that they appear to be “natural”); and the need to account for and locate acts within

compulsory frames set by forces that police social appearances (interpreting music according to

the dictates of particular musical styles, as well as conforming to expectations in terms of dress,

demeanor and performance rituals, depending on the musical context).

51 Foucault’s describes “technologies of the self” as

how humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific “truth games” related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves. (Foucault 1988c, 18)

In other words, it is how individuals come to know themselves in relation to others; in relation to governmental, institutional, social and administrative structures of power and knowledge.

38

Performativity, as a term to describe the “doing” that is internalized as the “being” of

subjectivities, is a mode of becoming, of understanding the self that may seem quite familiar to

musicians. 52 Butler does not mean performativity to be the equivalent of “performance”;

however, I suggest that the work of musicians embodies a unique kind of “performativity” that is

particularly powerful in shaping subjectivities because of the repetitions involved in musical

work and the constant engagement with sound and its effects on the body and emotion.53

Musicians undertake the work of practicing—over many years, and rehearsing—over many days,

weeks or months, in order to physically, emotionally and psychically internalize “the music”—in

a sense—to become the music – or, at least, the conduit of whatever we believe to be the essence

of the music. The more musicians internalize the music on all these levels and perform within

certain kinds of performance spaces, the more they appear to perform these tasks “naturally”; to

be part of this music and to “belong” in these places. We strive to make what we do look natural

and effortless, belying the many years of repetition and learning that go into accomplished

musical performances.

Performance spaces also become associated with particular kinds of music and particular bodies.

In each performance space, regardless of musical genre, ritualized personages, acts,

comportments and repertoires are enacted at the same time that other personages, acts,

comportments and repertoires, cannot be enacted, at least, not without shattering naturalized

identities brought into being through years of ritually repeated significations. The coloratura

soprano does not sing Mozart in a rap concert; the rap artist does not perform on a chamber

music series—unless a shattering of spaces and their significations is intended by the

performance. A carefully prepared musical performance, inclusive of genre, style, tradition, is a

highly ritualized act associated with pleasure that references tightly circumscribed social, aural

and psychic affiliations.54 Musicians rehearse themselves into the beings required by the contexts

52

This notion of “becoming” is different from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of “becoming” as transformative potential (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). 53

In addition to commercial recordings that promise to create appropriate “moods” through carefully chosen musical selections, there are numerous branches of scholarship that approach music as a means to influence behaviour and mood (Juslin and Sloboda 2001). These include studies in advertising (e.g. Huron 1989), film music composition (Cohen 2000) and therapeutic uses of music in a variety of clinical settings. See for example (Association). 54

I use the word “psychic” here to include intellectual, spiritual and physical engagements with sounds (produced by musicians) as they interact with the visual and acoustic characteristics of performance spaces.

39

in which they perform and express themselves as being, at least for the duration of the

performance, the identities so carefully rehearsed.

To be clear, I am not making the claim that musicians are devoid of individual agency or that

they are a sonata, a hip hop piece or any form of musical expression; rather, my purpose is to

draw attention to the function of rehearsal, repetition, and ritual to produce recognizable

subjectivities that contribute powerfully to who musicians understand themselves to be, to how

they represent themselves to others, to how they are able to express themselves through sounds

and to how they are taken up by others.

Roland Barthes suggests that “music is a bodily relation concerned with desire, pleasure, and

other emotive experiences” (Barthes 1972, 179-189). Simon Frith argues that "making music

isn't a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them" (Frith 1996, 111). Building on both

Barthes and Frith, Susan J. Smith argues for the importance of “experiencing music as

performance—a performance of power (enacted by music-makers and by listeners) that is

creative; that brings spaces, peoples, places 'into form'” (Smith 2000, 618) [my italics]. Social

significations are enacted into being through performance and, although identifications with

musical significations are not absolute or unbreakable, they are powerfully grounded in the

pleasure, or pain, individuals experience in the hearing or performing of different musics. There

are strong emotional links created in the course of assembling a life-time of musical experiences.

I suggest that these emotional bonds, associated with the disciplines of whatever musical world

one lives within, make it very difficult to step back from the pleasures of one’s associations to

ask questions about the relations of power both reflected and enacted into being through musical

presentations. Powerful emotional relationships are created between the pleasures of performing

certain kinds of music, the applause that follows, and notions that one’s performance might

contribute in some way to producing desired social outcomes. The identities that we associate

with different musics strongly impact “who we imagine ourselves to be.”

I use the idea of performativity in this expanded sense as a means to notice the identities invoked

through ritual participations in different kinds of music but also in the sense of the construction

of emotional identifications through repeated listening to particular sounds, and, for musicians

themselves, the internalization, over years, of sounds and bodily gestures ordered in very

particular ways. In my study of the uses of different musics in processes of colonization and

40

national identity formation, performativity offers an important framework to think through the

construction of subjectivities; that is, how we understand the role of musical experiences in who

we imagine ourselves, and others, to be.

41

Chapter Three: The Role of Culture in Colonial Conquest Culture was imbricated both in the means and the ends of colonial conquest, and culture was invented in relationship to a variety of internal colonialisms....Culture became fundamental to the formation of a class society, and to developing discourses of race, biology, and nationality. (Dirks 1992, 4)

Raymond Williams notes that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the

meaning of “culture” shifted from an association with the cultivation of crops or animals to an

association with the concept of “civilization” and the idea of a trajectory of human development

(Williams 1983, 89). In this use of “culture” as “civilization,” Europe is identified as the sole

location of “Culture.” Other populations might have forms of cultural expression in various

states of evolutionary development; however, no other group of people was acknowledged to

have achieved a sufficient level of advancement to produce “Culture” on the same level as

Europeans. 55

In the eighteenth century, Johann Herder (1776) protested the use of this idea of the superiority

of European culture to justify “European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the

globe.”

Men of all quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. (Herder as cited in Williams 1983, 89)

Herder’s critique led to an acceptance of the notion that there were multiple cultures throughout

the world, a shift in thinking that resulted in the idea of folk cultures and cultural histories as a

source of pride and a means to bind “peoples” together in a nation. The shift to notions of culture

in the plural, however, did not replace the practice of negatively measuring the “culture” of non-

55 David Goldberg discusses this below:

Kant, citing with approval David Hume’s likening of learning by ‘negroes’ to that of parrots, insisted upon the natural stupidity of blacks. John Stuart Mill, like his father, presupposed nonwhite nations to be uncivilized and so historically incapable of self-government. Benjamin Disraeli captured the sensibility of the mid-nineteenth century by declaring the only truth to be that ‘all is race’ (Goldberg 1993, 5).

As Hume argued, “Only whites had produced anything notable and ingenious in the arts or sciences, and even the most lowly of white peoples (ancient Germans, present Tartars) he thought had something to commend them. ‘Negroes', even those living in Europe, had no accomplishments they could cite (Goldberg 1993, 31).

42

white “races” against notions of the superiority of European civilization.56 Rather, assertions of

white supremacy were modified only to the extent of replacing notions of biological inferiority

with notions of cultural inferiority (Gilroy 2000, 33; Razack 1998, 19).

Dirks argues that “the anthropological concept of culture might never have been invented

without a colonial theatre that both necessitated the knowledge of culture (for the purposes of

control and regulation) and provided a colonized constituency that was particularly amenable to

‘culture’" (Dirks 1992, 3). Culture works similarly to “race” as a means to divide and categorize

people in terms of their place in colonial projects.

In certain important ways, culture was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in newly classified "traditional" societies were reconstructed and transformed by and through colonial technologies of conquest and rule, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East, even male and female. (Dirks 1992, 2).

As colonizing forces looked to expand their territories and their access to the labour of

subjugated peoples, they sought to understand the thinking, i.e. the culture, of different peoples,

in order to control them. The disciplines of anthropology, ethnography and, later,

ethnomusicology as well as subject areas such as “oriental studies,” grew directly out of the

colonial desire to understand and manage colonized peoples.57 Culture, as both a marker and

maker of subjectivities, distinguished the identities of colonizers from those they were

colonizing. The linkage of culture with notions of civilizational advancement also functioned as

an ideology and a powerful incentive for artists and educators to enter “wild” spaces in order to

bring “culture” to the “less civilized.” Like missionaries bringing Christianity to Heathen,

cultural workers, in bringing European civilization to “savages” and other “less evolved” groups,

produced themselves as noble participants in a noble project to “improve” lesser kinds of beings.

Colonized subjects thus became targets for improvement and objects to be worked upon. The

idea of culture as advancement worked primarily to assert the superiority of the dominant group

by creating categories of the “meritorious” versus the “unevolved” while reinforcing colonial

claims of entitlement.

56

In the nineteenth century, not all European people were considered to be “white”. For example, the Irish were seen as a lower, “black” race and working class British people were also designated as belonging to lower races similar in development to non-white races encountered in Imperial projects (McClintock 1995, 52-56). See also (McNally 2011, 84) for an interesting discussion of the political rationales for “racialising” the Irish. 57

See: Saïd 1993; Dirks 1992; Goldberg 1993.

43

Racial identities were intimately linked with notions of culture. Ann Laura Stoler describes race

as

the organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity, the civilizing mission and the “measure of man” were framed. And with it, “culture” was harnessed to do more specific political work; not only to mark difference, but to rationalize the hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the labour regimes of expanding capitalism, to provide the psychological scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule. (Stoler 1995, 27)

The creation of cultural institutions created physical spaces in which particular cultural practices

could be enacted, marking space for being white and European and, in Upper Canada, for being

white and Anglo-Canadian. Indeed, the notion of ‘British culture’ evolves out of the need to

create a distinctive identity in colonial contexts (Coleman 2006, 80). As resources were invested

in concert halls, conservatories, museums and galleries, the dominance of the colonizing group

was asserted through the creation of exalted and exalting spaces and the production of historical

narratives that ennobled the accomplishments of colonizing forces. As Mbembe so clearly

articulates, however, successful domination, is both the means and the rationalization to

transform the “fact of domination” into the equivalent of “moral righteousness” and “legitimacy”

(Saïd 1993, 291) (Mbembe 2001, 25). The establishment of cultural institutions and cultural

supports became the means to create “founding narratives” that asserted the moral righteousness

of the colonizing project and described the colonizing forces as bringing gifts for which

colonized subjects should be grateful (Razack 2004, 10). Saïd argues that

the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. (Saïd 1993, xiii)

Thus, contrary to notions that culture is somehow divorced from the everyday world or from the

world of politics, establishing cultural dominance has always been a key strategy in projects of

Imperialism.

Cultural projects do not supplant the violence of colonialism but represent an “expanded domain

of violence” (Dirks 1992, 4), that functions both as a rationalization for plunder and an

obfuscation of plunder and violence. The trope of civility is brought into the service of

aggression and exploitation, with “domination” rebranded as helping “lesser beings” progress.

Thus, the work of artists in colonial settings, as public meaning-makers, represents an important

technology of power; an important means to define and form subjectivities, and a means to

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assign and rationalize corresponding social locations. Cultural and civilizational ranking serve to

distinguish European modes of expression from those of colonial Others and distinguish products

of the educated classes from those of the informally educated lower classes (Williams 1983, 89).

The mission of colonial cultural workers was to valorize and sustain enthusiasm for colonial,

imperialist projects, reflected in the words of British Parliamentarian, William Macaulay:

There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. [Its] triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws. (Macaulay 1833 as cited in Leppert 1993, 115)

The evolving middle classes attained their dominance through the opportunities made available

in imperialist, colonial projects, raising themselves above those faced with the violence of

colonial appropriation and domination. In these contexts, colonization was articulated as the

inevitable advance of civilization expressed through the domination of “less advanced” races.

And, while notions of equality and ‘advancement through merit’ were propagated during this

period, the concept of equality, as David Goldberg meticulously documents, is woven through

with categorizations, exceptions and exclusions so naturalized that the binary relationships

established in such classifications as male/female, civilized/savage, white/racialized are taken up

as truth claims reflecting “natural order,” rather than social constructions serving particular

relations of power (Goldberg 1993, 28,39).

Western musicians, new ideals and new modes of being

Within the context of imperial expansion, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and growing political

investments in notions of nationalist identities, the function of the musician underwent

significant change. As in earlier systems of political organization, different musics were

associated with class and/or religious contexts. As sites of power shifted to new locations, new

forms of music were developed that reflected and supported the new political order. Jacques

Attali describes this political and cultural transition as follows:

Thus in the eighteenth century, reason replaced natural order and appropriated harmony as a tool for power, as proof of the link between well-being and science. To those who availed themselves of it, music made harmony audible. It made people believe in the legitimacy of the existing order: how could an order that brought such wonderful music into the world not be the one desired by God and required by science? The two harmonies, the divine and the scientific, combine in the image of a universe governed by a law both mathematical and musical. (Attali 1985, 61)

45

Musicians continued to have value as a means to establish status but the music itself and how it

was presented came to articulate the newer philosophical and political ideals of rationality (Attali

1985; Leppert 1993). For example, the development of the symphony orchestra during the

eighteenth century, and its evolution into the symbol of rationally-determined hierarchies,

affected what kind of music was produced, what kind of musicians were needed to produce it

and what kind of schooling was required to produce such musicians (Attali 1985, 63). The sonata

form and other structures developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries soon became

symbols of rational order (McClary 1991).

The education of musicians underwent significant change during this time. No longer primarily

the domain of religious institutions, the training of musicians moved into a new, secular,

educational institution: the conservatory—an institution with the additional brief to enhance the

status and identity of the nation state through musical distinctiveness and technical

accomplishment (Weber et al. 2007).58 The notion of the body as something to be trained,

modified, and developed through disciplining practices was apparent in the curricula of the new

conservatories and was consistent with practices being developed in military, and other

institutional and educational settings (Foucault 1977, 135ff). Foucault describes the evolution of

“disciplinary practices” as a consequence of the development of concerns about maximizing the

use-value of members of definable populations, combined with notions of the “art of the human

body.”

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. (Foucault 1977, 137)

The notion of disciplining the self per se was not new. Foucault notes concepts of discipline in

Greek writings as well as the monastic type of discipline, “whose function was to obtain

renunciations rather than increases in utility” (Foucault 1977, 137). In contrast to these earlier

concepts of discipline, however, the disciplines of modernity entailed attention to the body that is

to be “manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its

forces” (Foucault 1977, 136). Discipline, in its new manifestation, is “not about law” but about

58

The Paris Conservatoire was established in 1795 (Paris Conservatoire de Musique 2011). The Toronto Conservatory of Music was founded in 1886 (Green and Wardrop 2011) and the first university degree awarded at the University of Toronto was in 1846 (Green and Spier 2011).

46

“normalization” (Foucault 1977, 106). It is about using “reason” to determine truths about the

nature of human beings in their relationships to each other and to the non-human (“natural”)

world. Through disciplining practices, and the proliferation of classificatory scientific projects,

all is discovered to be “relational.”

Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations. (Foucault 1977, 146)

While discipline increases the “forces of the body,” leading to different levels of skill mastery,

Foucault argues that the development of various disciplining procedures also comes to embody

new relations of power. Domination is achieved, not necessarily through overt uses of force but

through disciplining procedures that produce “subjected and practiced bodies, 'docile' bodies”

(Foucault 1977, 138).

Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces in political terms of obedience. (Foucault 1977, 138)

In modernist thinking, the markers of privilege and affiliation that once indicated status

are increasingly replaced – or at least supplemented – by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership in a homogenous social body but also playing a part in the classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. (Foucault 1977, 184)

In the new conservatories, institutional procedures reflect Foucault’s concept of “docile bodies”

as the focus on mastery of specialist disciplines magnifies specific skill levels, while diminishing

the role and political agency of the individual (Foucault 1977, 137). Jacques Attali describes the

development of conservatory-based music education as a process of “normalization.”

Making people believe in something so contrary to the contradictory reality of society, making musicians who came from the common people into the spokesmen for a harmonic order—this required a fantastically efficient process of normalization, a training process, a marking of the creator and listener alike….The normalization of music meant first of all the normalization of musicians, performers, and composers, who up to that time had remained undifferentiated. In fact, at the beginning of this period, surveillance and training was very rigorous and very efficient. (Attali 1985, 63)

We can see changes in thinking about the roles of musicians in the way the symphony orchestra

evolves into an ensemble based on fixed hierarchies. Within the symphony orchestra, each player

is called upon to fulfill a specific function and can be replaced by another player trained to

perform the same tasks. Attali describes this institutionalization of particular values and

structures as follows:

47

The constitution of the orchestra and its organization are also figures of power in the industrial economy. The musicians—who are anonymous and hierarchically ranked, and in general salaried, productive workers—execute an external algorithm, a "score", partition, which does what its name implies: it allocates their parts. Some among them have a certain degree of freedom, a certain number of escape routes from anonymity. They are the image of programmed labor in our society. Each of them produces only a part of the whole having no value in itself. (Attali 1985, 66)

The shifts Attali describes are evident when one compares earlier musical practices to those of

the nineteenth century. For example, Renaissance and Baroque ensembles were more fluid and

ad hoc in terms of instrumentation with musicians often able to switch between different

instruments and different musical roles (Bailey 1980, 29; Improvisation, II: Western art music.

2013; Small 1998, 110ff). During the nineteenth century, however, this flexibility was gradually

replaced with the requirement to become a “specialist” in a particular branch of musical

production. Opportunities to improvise were replaced with the requirement to follow detailed

notation.59 At the same time the personae of the conductor began to acquire an extraordinarily

high status (Bailey 1980, 30; Attali 1985, 66-67). For performers, the new ideal of rationality and

hierarchical order became codified in practice and in educational institutions, supplanting the

freedom to interpret with new forms of authority (Leppert 1993, 133; Attali 1985, 61; Citron

1993, 15-43).60 The role of the instrumentalist shifted to “interpreter” and away from creator and

the different categories of soloist, chamber musician and “rank and file” symphony-member

emerged as different categories of merit. 61 Within the conservatory model, musicians are trained

to repeat particular physical actions without error or hesitation, to reproduce musical repertoire

59

Derek Bailey, a writer on histories and practices of improvisation offers an account of attitudes that led to a gradual loss of the freedom to improvise in the classical music tradition:

But, as the creation of music came to be considered as more and more the specialised prerogative of one man, and as all other musical functions became strictly subservient to his designs, other participants not so much musical collaborators as musical courtiers, the undesirability of something as unpredictable as improvisation became apparent. Gradually improvisation was confined to carefully segregated areas, usually the cadenza, and then....it was banned altogether.(Bailey 1980, 30)

60 The ascendancy of the authority of the text and the conductor over the creativity of the performer is evident in the growing inability of European players to extemporize or even add ornamentation without written direction from the composer over the course of the eighteenth century. For example, in the music of Mozart and Beethoven, improvisation within ensembles is confined to specific moments, i.e. cadenzas in solo concertos. Soon thereafter, the opportunity to extemporize within a piece of European music disappears altogether—until the advent of twentieth century aleatoric music—an entirely different notion of musical freedom. Jazz, a form of music produced by “degenerate Others” was considered anathema by respectable white society and conservatory-trained musicians until well after WWII (Radano 2000). 61

The association with military terminology highlights the links between disciplines and notions of hierarchy. ‘Rank and file’ is in common use in musicians’ union contract language (American Federation of Musicians).

48

according to particular codes of practice, to subjugate their will to the will of a composer

stipulated through text and to further subjugate their will to that of a musical overseer, that is, a

conductor—male by definition and assigned great artistic and social authority (Schonberg 1967;

Small 1998, 75-86).62

The model of the Panopticon, an architectural design for prisons in which an overseer can see all

inmates from one central position and therefore subject their behaviour to discipline and control

also becomes the model for other settings, including schools and musical institutions such as the

symphony orchestra. Foucault suggests that the major effect of the Panopticon is “to induce in

the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of

power” (Foucault 1977, 201). Here Foucault is describing the internalization of the gaze; the

internalization of a sense that one may be observed and evaluated at all times. In his section

entitled “The means of correct training,” from his work Discipline and Punish (1977), the role of

the conductor is also recognizable:

The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned. (Foucault 1977, 173)

The conductor possesses the authorized gaze;63 and classically-trained musicians learn to

internalize that gaze in order to impose their own disciplines and corrections. It is important to

note that discipline, per se, is not a negative force, rather, it

arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. (Foucault 1977, 154)

Thus, discipline is enormously productive of certain kinds of results; however, it also eliminates

other possibilities and normalizes docility in “political terms of obedience” (Foucault 1977, 138).

62 Here too begins the battle for autonomy by musicians, hostility towards all-powerful music directors, and the development of musicians’ unions. (Seltzer 1989, 16). 63

The conductor, in turn, is subjected to the gaze of the musicians who do not, however, have the ability to remove a conductor except through prolonged, collective action to convince Boards of Directors not to renew a conductor’s contract.

49

Music, gender, and status

For the male head of households, having music in the home was a mark of status that linked the

standing of noble households, sustained by “old money” to the more newly wealthy, nouveau

riche households of the bourgeoisie.64 Within bourgeois households, a woman’s ability to

display musical competence was a sign of good breeding and social standing. Learning an

instrument signified having both the leisure time and the money to study music and was a means

to display the level of cultivation of one’s household; however, in terms of musical credibility,

the music-making of European women in the home was of low status.

White women had higher status than working class or racialized men; however, within

Enlightenment discourse, they ranked decidedly lower than educated white men on the scale of

human development. As women, even highly educated women, they were argued to be closer to

their base, physical natures, driven by emotion and, like colonial subjects, susceptible to the

dangerous irrational. Thus, even though a great deal of employment was generated by the female

amateur market and many male musicians and composers earned a significant income by

teaching and composing for the wives and daughters of members of the bourgeoisie, this

occupation and the ensuing repertoire was tainted with femininity because of its association with

women, unruly emotions and the amateur status of these performers (Leppert 1993, 63-89).

Notably, the success of so many middle class households was predicated on successful

investments in imperial and colonial enterprises (Leppert 1993, 99-118). Richard Leppert’s work

analysing paintings with musical subject matter suggests that the containment and control of

music expressed in so many of the commissioned paintings of the period functioned to portray

the desired order of family and government with a rational white male as Master, able to contain

the excesses of “emotional” females, “untrustworthy” servants and “childlike” colonial Others

(Leppert 1987, 63-104).

Where there is a need to demonstrate dominance, however, one can assume that there is a

corrolary fear of not being fully in control. In his analyses of eighteenth and nineteenth century

paintings with musical representations, Leppert notes associations of female music-making with

64

In Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme we see the cultural aspirations of the nouveau riche, i.e. the bourgeoisie, ridiculed in what are effectively cultural weapons, launched in favour of the previous social order (Moliere 1670).

50

the emotional, the dangers of barely repressed sexuality, and dangerous intimacies that threaten

to take place between pupils and their music masters (Leppert 1993, 63-90; 1988, 28-51). There

is a lurking feminine, sexual threat associated with music in the home, thus, it is all the more

powerful when the male head of household can demonstrate his capacity to house, control and

contain that which is so luxuriously dangerous (Leppert 1993, 119-152).

Artists are called upon to assert the “cultural superiority” of their sponsors but, relative to those

who contribute to industrial production or governance, artists, themselves, are lower status

workers, associated with the devalued feminine through their dependency on the generosity of

men of means. Indeed, the work of artists, in general, and musicians, in particular, offers an

imaginary foil against which white, propertied men are able to define themselves as productive

and truly masculine (Leppert 1987, 63-104).65

Gustave le Bon writes in 1879 that females and poets also belong to a degenerate race:

All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. (Le Bon as cited in McClintock 1995, 54)

Given the association of masculinity with higher status, it is not surprising then that the lower,

feminized status of music and musicians is energetically contested by male musicians and

theoreticians. During the period of colonial encounters, the project to catalogue a canon of

“great” works of Western music coincided with other intellectual projects asserting the

supremacy of Western (male) cultural accomplishments over the accomplishments of all other

“races” (Citron 1993, 22). In keeping with the scientific pursuit to establish taxonomies of merit,

within the field of art music itself, distinctions of greater or lesser merit also proliferated. Music

performed by male musicians was more worthy than music written for amateur female

performers. Music composed by men was inherently superior to music composed by women

(Tick 1987, 334).66 Music conceived according to formal considerations is more worthy than

music with programmatic elements (i.e., “absolute” versus “program” music) (Scruton 2007).

Instrumental music is loftier than vocal music because there are no programmatic texts involved,

65

I discuss the role of wealthy women as patrons in Chapter 5. 66

One must remember, of course, that women, even where virtuosic skills were evident, were discouraged from performing outside the home or participating in any form of public life (Elliott 1997; Citron 1990; Blair 1994).

51

nor, it should be noted, are female performers required to perform music that is not sung.67

Musicians can distinguish themselves from mere “rank and file” members of symphony

orchestras by becoming soloists and/or conductors thereby distancing themselves from the

obedience to authority expected of “rank and file” musicians (Kingsbury 1988; Small 1998, 31).

Symphonic music, particularly the music of the rational, “classical” composers, is the most

elevated of public musical forms.68 Symphonic music with its greater length, and the need to

engage a large number of musicians, is a medium that is said to demonstrate the highest levels of

compositional mastery (Citron 1990, 109). As a further demonstration of its superiority, the

symphonic form also requires the firm hand of a master conductor to perform.

Indeed, the evolution of the conductor from musical facilitator to “Maestro”, as an embodiment

of white masculine authority, becomes a means to assert patriarchal authority in a field

struggling to prove it is truly masculine and thus deserving of high status. The Great Maestro,

leading his disciplined forces of men in the interpretation of works of “divine” greatness, is said

to embody the highest patriarchal principles of order.

Above all, he is a leader of men. His subjects look to him for guidance. He is at once a father image, the great provider, the fount of inspiration, the Teacher who knows all. To call him a great moral force might not be an overstatement. Perhaps he is half divine; certainly he works under the shadow of divinity (or so a certain school of romantic idealism would have us believe). He has to be a strong man; and the stronger he is, the more dictatorial he is called by those he governs. He has but to stretch out his hand and he is obeyed. He tolerates no opposition. His will, his word, his very glance, are law. (Schonberg 1967, 15)

The symphony orchestra also took on the complementary function of modeling the importance of

accepting one’s place under the guidance of a superior intelligence—a key rationale for the

domination of owners over workers and colonizers over those being colonized (Attali 1985, 65-

67). With the need to assert an identification between masculinity and music, it is equally

unsurprising, then, that female musicians were banished from what becomes the ultimate

expression of rational order, the symphony orchestra—an exclusive site, even in some

67

The practice of using castrati to render female characters dies out by the mid-nineteenth century. “The last premiere of an opera to feature a castrato was in 1824 - and the last performance of a castrato in London was in 1844. By 1870, the Italian government had banned such castration in the cause of art” (Coughlan 2006). 68

The Chamber music repertoire has an even higher status than the symphonic repertoire because it is written to be performed by and for the musically elite (Elliott 1997, 27).

52

contemporary settings, for male musicians.69 A great deal of energy was also invested in arguing

that women were incapable of the intellectual development required to compose anything other

than trifling pieces of music (Citron 1990, 109; Carol Matthews in Gould 2007b, 204). Within

professional musical institutions, white women were accepted to a certain degree as performers,

particularly as singers and pianists70 but not as personages of authority, that is, not as conductors,

composers, or even as rank and file members of symphony orchestras.

Middle and upper class women did not simply acquiesce to these imposed limitations but their

creative work was inevitably treated with disdain. If they composed music using strong motifs

they were accused of being unnaturally masculine and if they used more gentle motifs their

music was deemed weak and feminine and therefore flawed (Citron 1990, 109). Ridiculing the

ambitions of middle and upper class women also made its way onto the stage in the popular

Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Princess Ida. In this work, still performed today, a group of women

are mocked for pursuing intellectual growth, a university education and independence from men.

The story ends with the women acknowledging their foolishness (How will the species propagate

if women leave men behind?), accepting the wisdom of their fathers, and following their

uncontrollable lust for good-looking marriage partners.

69

The banishment of female instrumentalists varies from place to place and time period. For example, the Toronto Symphony had eleven women musicians in 1909 but only a single woman (the harp player) in 1926-27. In 1990 twenty-three of one hundred and one musicians were women (Beckwith and Ford). In European orchestras, debates over whether the presence of female musicians might destroy the artistic character and quality achieved by men-only ensembles rage on to this day (Osborne 1999, 69). During WWII, a lack of men created opportunities for female instrumentalists but after the war, as men became available again, women were deliberately excluded through actions of the Musicians Union. This eventually led to the formation of women’s orchestras in the United States and in Montreal. See (Kivi 1992; Noriega 2010; Bowers and Tick 1987). 70

Clara Schumann’s international career as a concert pianist comes immediately to mind as well as the singing career of her daughter’s female partner (Rieger 2002).

53

King Hildebrand: But prey you reflect — If you enlist all women in your cause, And make them all abjure tyrannic Man, The obvious question then arises, "How is this Posterity to be provided?" Princess: I never thought of that! My Lady Blanche, How do you solve the riddle? Blanche: Don't ask me — Abstract Philosophy won’t answer it. Take him—he is your Shall. Give in to Fate!

Figure 2. From Princess Ida (Gilbert and Sullivan 1884)

This operetta serves as a reminder that “art” rarely resides outside of contestations over relations

of power. Both Hubert Parry, writing in 1930, and Bennett Reimer, writing in 2003, agree that

the political is often apparent in “popular” art forms while insisting that the higher forms of

music reside above and beyond the political. As I argue in the following section, however, the

distinctions made between popular and high art, and the sacralization of “high art” (Levine 1988)

serve the purpose of normalizing class hierarchies while keeping from view the political

mechanisms sustaining these hierarchies.

Inventing the “aesthetic”

In feudal societies, the church and the nobility offered primary sites of employment as well as

regular wages for musicians. It was a sign of power and wealth to employ enough musicians to

form an orchestra or present an opera with one’s own musical staff. As power and money shifted

from the nobility to the new bourgeois classes, however, those with new wealth were not

necessarily linked with the musical institutions of feudal society, nor were they necessarily

interested in maintaining their own musical staff. Artists gained a degree of independence as

self-employed entrepreneurs but this artistic independence was, and continues to be, financially

precarious.

By the nineteenth century, it was apparent that the “arts,” even though associated with the

highest levels of society, were poor cousins to activities that generated profit or contributed in

more obvious ways to new concepts of human “progress.” An association with the most labour-

intensive forms of musical production offered significant cultural capital (Bourdieu 1993, 7);

54

however, art music did not offer sufficient return in terms of utility, or the generation of profit.

Musicians became dependent upon largesse different from aristocratic support because support,

through subscriptions, needed to be continually justified and raised anew. There were limited

systems in place to support any kind of regular employment for artists and this was particularly

true in colonial settings (Seltzer 1989; Tippett 1990). Thus, as much as an association with “the

arts” became a mark of status for members of the bourgeoisie, artists themselves occupied a

vulnerable position—one described by Pierre Bourdieu as a subordinated class within the

dominant class (Bourdieu 1984, 315; 1993, 15).

With only tenuous relationships to the wealth provided by new means of production, white male

musicians needed to prove the value of the work they produced on other terms, through other

means of distinction. Women, also, needed a means to elevate their engagements with music to a

higher status. The mode of distinction that became common place over the nineteenth century

was the association of “high art forms” with the spiritual, the sublime and the universal,

separated from the mundane, material and bodily.

Whether developed in response to the precarious status of artists themselves or to raise the status

of high art connoisseurs, the nineteenth century assignment of the term “aesthetic” to certain

forms of art offered a means to claim greater status.

The aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world...which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world. (Bourdieu 1984, 14, 54)

As Bourdieu points out, the aesthetic disposition can only be achieved by having the financial

freedom to spend time in contemplation—away from the necessities of life. The “distinction”

conferred on the work aestheticized for contemplation likewise confers distinction on the

bourgeois art lover by “rejecting the 'human'”, that is “rejecting what is generic, i.e., common,

'easy' and immediately accessible” (Bourdieu 1984, 31). Sociologist Raymond Williams cites Sir

William Hamilton’s 1859 definition of the term “aesthetic” as “the Philosophy of Taste, the

theory of the Fine Arts, [and] the Science of the Beautiful.” Williams continues by suggesting

that the term reflects a modern consciousness that divides art from society, contrasting “aesthetic

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considerations” with “practical or utilitarian considerations” (Williams 1983, 32). The term

“aesthetic” suggests a distancing of high art from the mundane and the physical—a special value

available for works recognized as especially detached from material exigencies. This mirrors the

adoption, in Enlightenment philosophical thinking, of the “autonomous individual,” that is, the

isolated atomized, and ahistorical unit of modern “man” whose choices reside on a plane beyond

social and political relations (Goldberg 1993, 39; Boyd 2002). It is also mirrored in the

masculine ideal of a cultivated indifference to suffering—separating the self from the means

through which this “self” is produced (Stoler 1995, 128-9).

As aesthetic “objects” of universal value, musical pieces became marketable as “works,” but

they also became entities worthy of study within the new scientific disciplines of musicology,

aesthetics, theory, and music history. Sound, the control of sound, the authority to determine

what constitutes worthy and unworthy sound (music versus noise) became the domain of new

categories of experts: music theorists, musicologists, music historians and, for the musics of

colonial Others, ethnomusicologists.71 Musical “scientists” thus became new personages of

“authority.” These intellectuals codified musical practices, ranked composers and compositions,

wrote histories of “great composers,” demarcated and formalized a canon of “great works,”

collected and edited “complete works” catalogues of the “great composers,” and went into the

field to record and collect music of the “folk” and colonial “Others.”72 The study and ranking of

Others, similar to the newly invented field of anthropology, was also a major pre-occupation of a

field that has had a significant role in defining what counts as “culture,” what is defined as

representing the lower classes, for example, popular and folk music, and what is defined, in the

case of colonial Others, as embodying various stages of primitivism.73 These disciplines align

with Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self” and “how humans develop knowledge about

themselves through various scientific disciplines such as economics, biology, psychiatry,

medicine, and penology. Through knowledge derived from scientific “disciplines” as well as

through specific engagements in “disciplining the self,” individuals come to know themselves in

71

The field was known in the nineteenth century as “comparative musicology” (Diamond and Robbins 2012). 72

Early collectors of Indigenous musics in Canada include Marius Barbeau, A.T. Cringan, Helen Creighton and Kenneth Peacock (Diamond and Robbins 2012). 73

Hubert Parry uses the word “primitive” to describe music other than Western art music throughout his 1930 treatise The Evolution of the Art of Music (Parry 1930). Edward Said’s iconoclastic book Orientalism provides a detailed account and analysis of the association of “primitiveness” with non-Western peoples (Saïd 1978).

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relation to others; in relation to governmental, institutional, and social administrative structures

of power and knowledge (Foucault 1988a, 18). Foucault argues, however, that the new scientific

disciplines should not be taken at face value but as very specific “‘truth games’ related to

specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves” (Foucault 1988a, 18). For

example, in her study of the relationship between Victorian musicology and propaganda in

support of the British Empire, Sharon Hamilton notes a clear divide between notions of emotion

and reason, masculinity and femininity, western culture and primitive cultural expressions, and

notes that many early studies were devoted to establishing a measurable link between degrees of

emotion and music. For example, several authors drew on Darwin’s claim that the “emotional

impact of music resulted from man’s most primal instincts” (Hamilton 1998).

Proof of this primal link between music and emotion was thought to be found by observing "primitive people," who, it was believed, were closer in evolutionary terms to primitive man. By the time Richard Wallaschek wrote Primitive Music in 1893, he was able to sum up half a century of this type of theorizing in the aphorism: "Among savages the influence of music is far more distinctly noticeable than among people in a higher state of civilisation.” (Wallaschek as cited inHamilton 1998, 163)

Primitive musics were linked to emotion; however, civilized music was argued to be of an

entirely different order. Educated feeling, that is, aesthetic feeling, distanced the self from the

immediate and material, the overtly emotional, the feminine and the physical, thus asserting, for

the holder of aesthetic understanding, a closer relationship to the rational, sophisticated and

civilized.

Indeed, artistic expressions arising from informal sites of learning, identified as “popular art,”

were associated, in these scientific discourses about art and civilization, with the base, physical,

facile, and primitive (Bourdieu 1984, 7). Immanuel Kant, for example, distinguished between the

high arts that “please” and popular arts that merely “gratify” (Kant 2007, 32).

Connections between relations of power, desire and the production of knowledge are also evident

in the associations constructed between Western “high arts” and the spiritual, or sublime.

Bourdieu’s sociological studies, for example, affirm the use of the “spirituality” of the fine arts,

and music in particular, as a key means to mark class identity and class authority. Further

distinctions are created based on an inverse relationship between what is popular, has a large

audience and can thus generate income, and what is rare, has a small but discerning audience,

and, therefore, has the highest worth in terms of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1993, 29ff; 1993,

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29ff). Based on empirical studies of class associations with various forms of music and art,

Bourdieu concludes that

nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music. This is of course because, by virtue of the rarity of the conditions for acquiring the corresponding dispositions, there is no more 'classificatory' practice than concert-going or playing a 'noble' instrument….Music is the most 'spiritual' of the arts of the spirit and a love of music is a guarantee of 'spirituality.' (Bourdieu 1984, 18)

Through all of these means, the status of Western “high art” is asserted to represent the epitome

of “mankind’s” cultural achievements. “High art” musicians were also bestowed with higher

status through their roles as conduits to the sublime, aesthetically exalted canon of Western

musical works. For the professional musician, there was an association with the highest levels of

“cultural capital,” even if that association did not translate to high levels of financial capital. The

association of the “spiritual” with the “high arts” was thus a means of asserting claims to social

status via the possession of cultural capital; however, it should also be noted that an association

with the “spiritual”—that is, the not physical (in spite of the fact that acoustic music is produced

entirely through the body)—also brought a potential weakness, in terms of status, because the

spiritual continued to be associated with the emotional and the feminine—neither of which had

status in a utilitarian, patriarchally-structured economy.

Music of Empire

During the expansion of the British Empire, the celebration and exaltation of Empire became an

important tactic of power used to encourage loyalty to the British Crown and to its many projects

of imperialist expansion, with the twin goals of generating both solidarity and monetary

support.74 As a result of the development of mass markets and commercialized leisure industries,

belief and pride in Empire were steadily inculcated throughout the second half of the nineteenth

century.75 This development coincided with the growth of a specific narrative about the

benevolence of British imperialism (Richards 2001, 14). Through musical celebrations of

imperialism, whether aimed at a mass market or middle class music connoisseurs, seductively

joyful emotional and psychic associations were sought between people and the political projects

74

“By 1914…Europe held a grand total of roughly 85% of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths” (Saïd 1993, 8). 75

“Empire was all around us…part of the fabric of our lives. We were all imperialists then” (J. J. Norwich in Richards 2001, 2).

58

for which their support was needed. In the case of the British Empire, “there was a veritable

ocean of imperial music from the classical to the popular during the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries” (3). The enthusiastic trumpeting of racial supremacy offered people at all social levels

within the Empire the ability to claim membership on a winning team engaged in what was

presented as a “great moral crusade.” Amidst all of this celebratory material it’s important to

remember that the proliferation of so much music inciting emotional identifications with Empire

also suggests that the project of Empire was not secure; it required constant encouragement of

belief in its merits. In each imperial setting there were on-going struggles, not only in the form of

resistance by Indigenous populations, but between labourers, land owners and amongst members

of the ruling classes. The use of race as an organizing principle had enormous importance

precisely because it was a means to produce cross-class loyalties to ruling structures amongst

Europeans (Stoler 1995, 95). Laws against miscegenation, against offering education or other

rights to mixed-raced children, restricting movement and the possibilities of ownership

depending on one’s racial identity, all helped to add force and consequence to the function of

race as a dividing practice. The conflation of individual health, the health of populations and the

strength of nations, combined with discourses of racial pollution and racial degeneration, helped

to rationalize racial orderings; however, celebrations of Empire, as a “carrot” to the stick of legal

proscription and biological threats, offered exalted and exalting moments in which identification

with the ruling order gained emotional force through musically induced pleasures. In

celebrations of Empire, lauding economic accumulation, since it was so unevenly shared, was of

limited use; however, articulating the goals of Empire as a mission to improve the world, offered

a very attractive way to imagine the self and one’s possibilities as a participant in a noble project.

Richards suggests that

altruistic imperialism played a very small part in the first phase of Empire, but with the need to develop a doctrine to justify the acquisition of Empire, it took on a major importance. The missionary impulse, the desire to bring the 'heathen' to the light of God, and the leadership principle, the idea that the British being the greatest race in the world had a duty to provide government and justice for 'inferior races', intertwined to create a continuing theme in imperial writing: the idea that the British ran their Empire not for their own benefit but for the benefit of those they ruled. (Richards 2001, 14)

Imperial music, in its myriad class-based and cross-class forms, provided a form of emotional

glue to link people’s notions of self with moments of public exaltation, public exhilaration. To

enjoin the self in this music was to identify oneself as a member of a special race with a special

duty to humankind. The many forms of music of empire enjoyed across classes included hymns,

59

ballads, Gilbert and Sullivan and other operettas, marches and operatic arias (Richards 2001, 9).

The lyrics to Edward Elgar’s ever popular76 Land of Hope and Glory are typical of those found

in music of Empire:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee? Wider still, and wider, shall they bounds be set; Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet, God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

Truth and Right and Freedom, each a holy gem, Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem. Tho' thy way be darkened, still in splendour drest, As the star that trembles o'er the liquid West. Throned amid the billows, throned inviolate, Thou hast reigned victorious, thou has smiled at fate. Land of Hope and Glory, fortress of the Free, How may we extol thee, praise thee, honour thee? Hark, a mighty nation maketh glad reply; Lo, our lips are thankful, lo, our hearts are high! Hearts in hope uplifted, loyal lips that sing; Strong in faith and freedom, we have crowned our King!

Figure 3. Text to Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1 (Benson 1902)

The Canadian context

Imperial musical material was widely disseminated in Canada, as it was throughout the British

Empire, with musical events offering particularly rich moments for emotional identification with

the goals and accomplishments of Empire. All of these forms of music were widely circulated

and popular in colonial Canada. Particularly powerful were performances by mass choirs during

moments of civic or national celebration (Careless 1984) and by the many military bands

stationed across the country.77 Bands were on-hand for celebrations of the British Empire with

Canadian- and British-based bands strengthening bonds between the countries by touring and

performing on both sides of the ocean (Richards 2001, 450-468). Such events contributed to a

76

The piece is often described as England’s national anthem (Benson 1902, fn1) . 77

Military bands were the source of many of the first music teachers in the colony (Kallman 1960, 45; Green and Vogan 1991, 45).

60

sense of belonging for people not only living far away from their places of origin, but in places

where their presence, as colonizers, was precarious and not necessarily welcomed.

The celebration of Empire in Canada was quite successful in creating shared identifications

amongst British populations; however, as more people arrived from non-British countries, the

appeal to Empire fell short as a means to bind new Canadians together. With the vastness of the

land between the east and west coasts of what later became the Dominion of Canada, Britain was

not able to import sufficient numbers of British immigrants. The solution was to solicit

immigrants from other countries, including Germany, Finland, the Ukraine, Italy, and Ireland, in

order to establish control over lands that might otherwise be lost to American interests or remain

in the possession of Aboriginal groups (Lawrence 2004, 46ff).

European settlers, particularly those who did not arrive as members of the ruling classes, had

numerous reasons for immigrating to the “New World.” All hoped to have materially better lives

than they had available to them in their home countries; however, many discovered that the

opportunities in Canada were “not as advertised” (Zinn 1980, 43). Life could be harsh and

lonely for those uprooted from their European homes and work, especially for labourers, was

often seasonal and dangerous (Kazimi 2011, 73). Many European immigrants were escaping the

effects of dispossession and forced migration into urban centres in their home countries (Hall

2011, 171) with some bringing militant ideas about labour rebellion with them (Kazimi 2011, 83;

Tippett 1990, 29). Some immigrants resented discovering similar class relations in the so-called

New World; some were fiercely independent and resisted the imposition of centralized control;

some engaged in social and sexual relations with Aboriginal and non-white people; and some

were attracted to Indigenous values and ways of life. Notions of republicanism growing in the

American colonies were also a threat to British rule (Newman 1988).

A problem of governance, then, was the existence of competing interests amongst various

population groups that had the potential to threaten dominant Canadian interests. There were no

failsafe rationales that could guarantee loyalty to the Crown or the economic project of capitalist

accumulation. Individuals and populations drawn into the colonial project arrived with their own

goals and aspirations and thus needed to be “taught” to find common ground and shared

identities or what Eva Mackey calls “pedagogies of patriotism” (Mackey 2002, 73). Narratives of

national unity and corresponding narratives defining “threats to the nation” helped to create the

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“imagined communities” Benedict Anderson (Anderson 2006) describes in his analysis of nation

states. Circulating such narratives thus became an important enterprise, a vital tactic of power, in

the construction of the nation (Mackey 2002, 32). Dependent as it was on the dispossession of

Indigenous peoples and the importation of cheap labour, however, the Canadian project was

inherently unstable and required campaigns to maintain distinctions between deserving and

undeserving populations. By defining the project of colonization and membership in the nation

as the noble project of a particular race, and threats to the nation as originating in visible forms

of “Otherness,” useful sites were created to absorb class tensions while maintaining existing

relations of power.

Beliefs about the supremacy of Western “culture,” as the only form of expression deserving to be

called “culture,” are brought to Canada by immigrants from the educated classes; however, it is

not until the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of projects to establish a “Canadian

cultural identity” that European cultural practices are fully wielded as tools of colonial

domination. Formal institutions of music education are founded in Toronto around the same time

as other public institutions of schooling are established in Upper Canada78 (also known as

Canada West79). These institutions, modeled on European conservatories, are established by

members of the local elite80 who seek the pleasures of hearing music with which they were

familiar, as a means to establish class identities, and a means to assert ownership and entitlement

in the Canadian colonial project. In fact, the Toronto Conservatory of Music quickly became the

largest conservatory in the British Empire (Friedland 2002, 314). Over time, the role of the

conservatory was expanded to train teachers who could be sent across the country to establish

national musical standards, thus asserting the pre-eminence of Imperial culture (Horwood 1936;

Schabas 2005; Tippett 1990, 35-62). In the project to build the culture of a “new nation,” formal

music education became a significant and effective means to assert possession and naturalize

dispossession. Following World War II, long-standing lobbying for state support to produce

78

1841, public schooling is established in Canada. 1842, the formation of industrial schools for Indians is recommended. 1846 Ryerson recommends the inclusion of music in the curriculum. 1846 the first music degree is granted from what later becomes the University of Toronto. The Toronto Conservatory of Music is founded in 1886. (Encyclopedia of Music in Canada). 79

Canada West, also called Upper Canada in Canadian history is the region in Canada now known as Ontario. From 1791 to 1841 the region was known as Upper Canada and from 1841 to 1867 as Canada West though the two names continued to be employed interchangeably” (Canada West 2013). 80

For lists of original shareholders and later Boards of Directors of the original Toronto Conservatory of Music see (Music, 1936). Many of the names listed are judges and members of parliament.

62

unique “Canadian” cultural institutions finally succeeds with the establishment of institutions

such as CBC radio and television, the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the National

Youth Orchestra of Canada, amongst many others (MacMillan 1968, 288-318; Tippett 1990, 63-

91). These institutions take on the role of establishing what will constitute “Canadian” culture,

who will be defined as a legitimate member of the nation and who will be defined as an outsider.

As institutions are established, newly minted music historians began a process of indigenization

through the absence of stories about dispossession and a narrative of new beginnings that defined

history as beginning with the arrival of white Europeans, and cultural “progress” as the result of

the work of white men. In Beverley Diamonds’ analysis of Canadian music history texts,

Narratives in Canadian Music History, she notes the consistent use of narratives of history as a

“process of growth” (Diamond 1985, 298). The dominant narrative in Canadian music history

texts describes Canada as a “youthful country” that has needed time for cultural seeds to grow

and mature. Hindered by deep insecurities, a lack of widespread cultural sophistication (e.g., too

many rural communities), and the burden of being dominated by British and American cultural

influences, Canada has needed to struggle in order to mature into a nation that can be proud of its

unique (though still underappreciated) culture (Diamond 1985, 293; MacMillan 1997, 77ff). This

is consistent with other colonial narratives that present history as a teleology towards ever greater

progress and Canadian cultural history as beginning and ending with an account of the needs of

disconnected and “beleaguered” white newcomers to validate themselves and establish a sense of

belonging.

In the following chapter, I take up the beleaguered identities of Imperial men of music in Canada.

Relationships of mutuality that existed to varying degrees during the fur trade (Van Kirk 1980,

2006; Morrison 2001) change dramatically when the political objective of French and British

powers becomes one of extracting resources, through controlling as much land as possible—a

project that could be fulfilled by inviting people from Europe to colonize the “new” world. This

is when the project of creating “Canadian culture” becomes a critical strategy in the project to

dominate the lands and control the many diverse populations living on what becomes Canada.

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Chapter Four: The Arts and the Making of the (Canadian) Imperial Man

Figure 4. Emblem of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, designed by J. E. H. MacDonald in 1909 (Bridle 1945)

As we saw in the opening chapter, the insignia of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto was a

“Viking ship with sails full spread before the rising sun…to remind members of the open sea and

the great adventure” (C. W. Jeffreys 1911 as cited in McBurney 2007, frontispage). The “Great

Adventure” is, in fact, the adventure of colonization—one taken up with great enthusiasm by

members of the all-male Arts and Letters Club. This is an adventure premised on notions of

furthering the progress of “the race” and developing an identity for “the nation”—an identity

intended to legitimate the larger imperial project and sustain the dominance of white settler

society.

In this chapter, I explore the subjectivities of white men engaged in the creation of Canadian

cultural identities through music. The chapter begins with an analysis of a visual and textual

rendition of the song O Canada, as published in one of the first newsletters of the Toronto Arts

and Letters Club. Following this, I explore identities embraced by members of the club

(“Clubland”), the work of club members in the larger Canadian cultural landscape (“Into the

Wilds”), and the roles of Club members (and other artistic peers) in producing and consolidating

particular national imaginaries (“Making Ourselves Indigenous”).

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Part I: O Canada

Empire provided the fertile terrain on which bourgeois notions of manliness and virility could be honed and put to patriotic test. (Stoler 1995, 128-129)

The following version of O Canada, by Augustus Bridle,81 appears in 1908, in the first ever

newsletter of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. The drawing and lyrics of this early version of

what eventually becomes the Canadian national anthem,82 illustrate the symbolic imaginary that

underpins the work undertaken by members of the Arts and Letters Club to establish a Canadian

national identity. For the members of the club, this is a joyous mission; however, the need to

construct a national identity is not a neutral task that takes place on a blank canvas; rather, it is a

task that requires the constant reassertion of subject positions, and the creation of boundaried

spaces. As will become evident in the analysis that follows, these are objectives that require

symbolic iterations of domination as well as active strategies of dispossession.

81

Bridle was one of the founding members of the club and, later, its first archivist and historian (McBurney 2007, 1; Bridle 1945) 82

Bridle’s words are not used in the version of O Canada that became the national anthem. O Canada was composed by Calixa Lavallée, originally, as a French-Canadian anthem on the occasion of the "Congrès national des Canadiens-Français", organized to coincide with St. Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations in 1880. French lyrics to accompany the music were written by Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The song was likely introduced to English Canada in 1901 after which a number of people created English lyrics; however, it did not become the official Canadian national anthem until a hundred years later, in 1980 (Canada). The version on which the official English lyrics are based was written in 1908 by Mr. Justice Robert Stanley Weir.

65

Figure 5. “O Canada, an English Version.” Text and illustration by Augustus Bridle, 1908 LAMPSletter. (Bridle 1908)

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Figure 6. “O Canada, an English Version.” Notation and text by Augustus Bridle, 1908 LAMPSletter (Bridle 1908)

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The lyrics and imagery of this version of O Canada reveal a great deal about the imaginative that

inspires white men of the arts to identify with the colonial project. By dint of their noble

character and an inheritance passing from father to son, the “new” land belongs to the white men,

that is, the Seamen, the Northmen, who are morally entitled to “this glorious land, wher’er [they]

may roam.” Calixa Lavallée’s music, a rousing military march, is accompanied by the illustration

of a European man of great physical stature (presumably, Samuel de Champlain) standing on

wind-swept rocks claiming ownership of the land by staking a massive Fleurs-de-lis. In the

background, two Iroquois men in a canoe are in the process of making themselves “absent” by

anxiously paddling out of the picture. Here the artist produces the Iroquois as ghosts vanishing

before a superior being—a recasting of history within white imaginative space that denies and

represses any memories that might contradict the narrative.

In this representation of O Canada, a thoroughly seductive sense of patriarchal adventure,

masculine entitlement and moral righteousness is expressed. The entire history of learning to

survive via the many First Nations groups that welcomed Europeans to their lands, the over two

centuries of the fur trade and the role of First Nations in helping the British defeat the Americans

in the War of 1812—all of this disappears in this historical representation. Thus, the freedom

evoked in the lyrics does not apply to the fleeing Indian; rather, the Indian is a fleeting presence,

an endpoint that, according to the narrative expressed in the drawing and lyrics, marks the

inevitable fading of the ‘primitive’ to be replaced by the bold Euro-Canadian civilizer.

According to this worldview, taking over the land of the Indian is a noble project as is confining

the racial Other to “no-longer-visible” space. The work of the educated European man, now that

a ‘new’ country has been established on ‘virgin’ land, is to help Canada achieve “its rank among

civilized nations” (Tippett 1990, 36), that is, its rank amongst the white nations engaged in

overseas imperial adventures.

The images, the new words, and the rousing singing of this song invite an emotional

identification with a particular narrative, a particular notion of the self, and a particular

landscape. The construction of national identities, the most pervasive cultural/political project of

the nineteenth century, is facilitated by the creation of links between the self and geographies

expressed as unique and character-defining (Mohanram 1999, 5). Bridle’s text to O Canada links

the idea of stalwart masculine adventurers together with a rugged and unpeopled landscape. The

song is an example of performing exalted selves into being through the repetition of a particular

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musical experience—one that strives, through an embodied experience, to produce psychic and

emotional affiliations highly invested in particular relations of power, understandings of history,

and social relations. This is not a neutral undertaking for, in order to identify with the emotions

and words of the song O Canada and the accompanying drawing, club members need to dismiss

any rights belonging to Aboriginal peoples and consign their existence to a place of abjection.

Like photographic negatives, Aboriginal peoples are necessary to the production of the visible

image, but are never in view. Also left out of the national narrative expressed in O Canada are

racialized groups of people such as the Chinese workers brought in to build the railroad but not

allowed to immigrate,83 or the black settlers promised land in exchange for fighting on the side

of the British during the war of 1812 that was then denied to them (Bolaria and Li 1985, 167-8).

While offering an exalted portrayal of the colonializing project, the text and art work of O

Canada also express ideal identities of club members, ideal members of the nation and a fantasy

of non-violent colonial ascendancy. The song’s images of hardy Northmen sallying forth across a

rugged, unpeopled landscape are imaginative tropes that appear often in Canadian literature and

political discourse, as well as in many musical projects in which particular social relations and

particular historical narratives are promoted. The image of the “True North Strong and Free”

provides a mythological space of empty land (terra nullius) through which white settlers undergo

“rites of passage,” that is, encounters with the wilderness—real or imagined—that affirm the

settler as truly “Canadian” (Shields 1991, 194).84

Part II: “Clubland” 85

Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club was formed in 190886 to provide a space where educated white

men, particularly those of British extraction, could make themselves as artistic pioneers and

artistic leaders. Living in Canada meant relative social and cultural privation for settlers of the

educated classes; however, Canada offered boundless opportunities for those who saw

themselves as cultural pioneers, tasked with the goal of creating national identities and 83

History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008; Anderson 1991. 84

Sheilds elaborates on contemporary uses of the trope “the true North strong and free” to mask “and even promote regional exploitation” and the “enforced genocidal poverty of northern inhabitants” (Shields 1991, 195). 85

The word, “Clubland” is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of Bohemian and nineteenth century men’s clubs (Sedgwick 1990, 189). 86

A few other male musical clubs preceded the formation of the Arts and Letters Club: the Toronto Male Chorus Club, 1893 and the Toronto Clef Club, 1895. Mixed gender clubs included the Toronto Vocal Science Club, 1897, and Toronto Singers’ Club, 1899 (Elliott 1997, 26).

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facilitating the development of modes of being for people of the “new” nation. The claim that the

land was effectively empty87 and that the “new” man, the “man of reason,” had a mission and

right to create a “civilized society” where only “savagery” existed before, was an oft repeated

rallying cry for members of the artistic classes and one, as we have seen, that was reflected in the

insignia of the Club and the imaginative of O Canada. Like the rallying cry for Christian

missionaries to share the gospel and save the souls of heathen (Mackenzie 1897),88 the idea of

having a “mission” proved to be a powerful means to give direction and a sense of purpose to the

lives of artists who saw themselves as both beleaguered and noble.

Affiliated with such overseas colonial clubs such as London’s Savage Club (McBurney 2007, 85;

LAMPSletter 1911, 3), the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto was founded by a group of men

“with the avowed purpose…to be a rendezvous where people of diverse interests might meet for

mutual fellowship and artistic creativity… a comradely haven for kindred souls" (Some

interesting club history 2010). Past members included famous musicians such as A. S. Vogt,

Healey Willan and Sir Ernest MacMillan, as well as other significant figures such as Vincent

Massey (later to become Canada's first native-born Governor-General89), Sir Edmund Walker,

Robertson Davies, Marshall McLuhan, Mavor Moore, and the entire Group of Seven painters.90

Political figures were often guests at the Club and strategies for the development of many of

Canada’s key cultural institutions were developed within its walls. In later years, the club and its

members were also closely associated with the CBC, the University of Toronto’s men-only Hart

House, the Canada Council and other major arts institutions (McBurney 2007). Unabashedly

87

See: Razack 2002, 12; Thobani 2007, 50. 88

The same kind of missionary sentiments are often found in music education discourses. The film, Music of the Heart (Craven 1999), offers an example from popular culture. Notably, the film was sponsored by the National Association for Music Education (MENC). (MENC has recently changed its name to NAfME, i.e. National Association for Music Education.) See (Koza 2003) for a full discussion of the film’s affiliations. 89

The Massey family funded the Toronto’s first major performance space, Massey Hall (Wardrope 2012).Vincent Massey was behind the building of the first student centre, Hart House, at the University of Toronto (Hart House). Vincent Massey also led the Royal Commission on National Development in the arts, letters and sciences. His report in 1951 recommended the formation of a Canada Council (est. 1957) (Granatstein 2012). 90

“The Group of Seven was founded in 1920 as an organization of self-proclaimed modern artists. The original members - Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and F.H. Varley - befriended each other in Toronto between 1911 and 1913. All except Harris, who was independently wealthy, made their living as commercial artists, and several of them even worked together in the same shop. Tom Thomson, another commercial artist, was included in this circle of friends, but since he died in 1917 he never became a member of the Group” (Varley 2011). The work of the Group of Seven established Canadian iconography that continues to be used as a means to identify the Canadian landscape and character.

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patriarchal and loyal to the British Empire, the club was a place to foment ideas about what the

culture of the “new” country of Canada should become.

The Arts and Letters Club was one of a number of gentlemen’s clubs operating in Toronto in the

early twentieth century. Gentlemen’s Clubs were exalted, separated spaces in which a great deal

of business concerning both politics and commerce took place. The clubs provided a space in

which a kind of “homo-normativity”91 was produced—homo-social, homo-racial, and homo-

gendered—a mode of being in which the white, educated male was the normative centre; the site

of rational authority and, thus, the site of political, economic and cultural authority. Servants

were necessary to the club, functioning as “absent presences,”92 while other bodies with other

interests, other points of view and other social rankings, were not permitted in the spaces.

Servants were also visible markers and “proof” of the men’s superior class status. White

bourgeois men experienced themselves in these spaces as uncontested personages of authority.

Membership in gentlemen’s clubs was by invitation only and thus, to belong to a gentlemen’s

club was a mark of distinction that identified the self as belonging to the dominant class, the

dominant race, and the dominant gender. All clubs did not have equal status however. Social

standing was also reflected in the architecture, furnishings and services provided by various

clubs and, of course, the exclusiveness of membership criteria. The Arts and Letters Club came

out of this tradition of gentlemen’s clubs, however, it offered a space that celebrated slightly

different values from most men-only clubs. The non-commercial and feminized domain of the

arts was not something that could be comfortably explored within the confines of a typical men’s

club. Within the walls of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, however, unlike the business clubs

of “consumingly commercial Toronto” (Kipling in Bridle 1945, 1), men could gather to talk

about the arts without censure or embarrassment. Members of the Arts and Letters Club saw

themselves as a “special” breed of men. They identified strongly with the goals of the British

91

I use the prefix “homo” to emphasis the singularity of identities sanctioned in the space. Homo-normativity, here, refers to the normalization of male hegemony. In contemporary anti-neoliberal political discourse, homonormativity refers to the neoliberal push to shift sexual liberation movements away from contestations of “normality” to a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” (Duggan 2003, 50) 92

Himani Bannerji writes about the concept of the “absent presence:” An absence, then, as much as a presence….And when any situation is replete with both—where a pervasive absence signifies an absent presence, and a fleeting presence itself signals to a hidden imperative of invisibility, then that is precisely where work of inquiry and description must begin. (Bannerji 1993, xiii)

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Empire and the Great Adventure of colonization but had an uneasy relationship with the profit

motive, seeing themselves as both distinct from and morally superior to “philistines” of the

business classes (LAMPSletter 1908, 6; McBurney 2007, 1). This idea of being separate from

business interests, allies closely with what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “anti-conquest man,”

a Utopian image of a European bourgeois subject simultaneously innocent and imperial, asserting a harmless hegemonic vision that installs no apparatus of domination. (Pratt 1992, 33)

As already noted, however, this psychic and physical separation from the business world was

fraught with contradictions for, as much as artists believed their work to exist on a plane above,

and outside of, mundane considerations, being an artist in the colonies was only possible because

of aggressive acts of imperialism and mercantile expansion (Pratt 1992, 34) and, as we will see,

the artistic endeavours of members of the Arts and Letters Club, did, in fact, contribute

powerfully to colonial domination.

In common with other clubs for men, the Arts and Letters Club shared an ethos of what Susan

Bird calls “hegemonic masculinity” (Bird 1996, 3). Drawing on the work of several feminists

(Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982; Johnson 1988), Bird defines hegemonic masculinity as

(1) emotional detachment, a meaning constructed through relationships within families whereby young men detach themselves from mothers and develop gender identities in relation to that which they are not…; (2) competitiveness, a meaning constructed and maintained through relationships with other men whereby simple individuality becomes competitive individuality…; and (3) sexual objectification of women, a meaning constructed and maintained through relationships with other men whereby male individuality is conceptualized as not only different than but better than female…. (Bird 1996, 3)

The Arts and Letters Club distinguished itself from more commercially or politically focused

sites of hegemonic masculinity, however, by eschewing the commercial and embracing the

romantic ideal of bohemianism. Members reveled in the idea that the club was a place of

“bohemian democracy” in which playfulness and flirtations with boundary crossings were as

highly valued as serious discussions about art (Bridle 1945, 12). Initially housed in a modest

space located above a police station, the first quarters of the club did, indeed, reflect the romance

of Puccini’s La Bohème. The Club’s entrance was on a back alley behind a police station where

prostitutes might be seen, that is, women embodying the role of an exciting but lesser and

“degenerate Other.” Entering the club required a long climb to the third floor and the need to

carry a piece of firewood on each trip in order to stave off the cold (Bridle 1945, 1-6). It is worth

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considering here the significations associated with Bohemian identities. In Sylvia Wynter’s view,

Bohemia marks the outer limits of bourgeois masculine identities and creates spaces for non-

conformist masculinities without seriously threatening the social or economic framework of

society.

Bohemia as a site of experimentation and suspected degeneracy was as necessary to the new world order as the avowed capitalist. It was the place where rebellion could be contained and channeled into an identity of difference and spirituality without leading to any corresponding political rebellion. The bohemian was “the licensed heretic allowed to dabble in the non-real things of the world” but as a site that could “draw energy away from …productive goal[s], creativity was also stigmatized at the same time as it was “spiritualized.” (Wynter 1979, 155)

Eve Sedgwick describes Bohemia as a “sort of reserve labour force and a semiporous, liminal

space for vocational sorting and social rising and falling.”

Bohemia could seemingly be entered from any social level; but, at least in…literary versions, it served best for cultural needs, for the fantasy needs, and the needs for positive and negative self-definition of an anxious and conflicted bourgeoisie. (Sedgwick 1990, 193)

Augustus Bridle’s chronicle of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club offers several illustrations of

Bohemian identities based in part on fantasy, room to experiment, and an imagined

outlaw/outsider status.

Daily discoveries: the thrill of new men in the Club . . . hearing the exuberant din of critics joshing about the arts. Plays were perennial. Mitchell rigged up a workshop above the staircase landing; things he and his cohorts made there were a marvel. Bob Flaherty of Mackenzie and Mann Co. came down from Ungava way with a pack of Eskimo reliques, costumes, tools, hunting gear. For weeks the Club was a small Eskimo museum. Best of all was his first Eskimo movie ever made, which he showed at the Club. That film was the parent of Nanook of the North. Bob was made a roving non-resident. Years later we had an emergency exhibit of his Moana Film from the South Seas: that was at Elm St. In the fall of 1911 we had the Club’s first Minstrel Show; burnt-cork end-men Ruthven McDonald, Bob Defries, Curtis Williamson, Arthur Beemer; interlocutor Gene Beaupre; most fascinated spectator Sir Edmund Walker, best-informed bank president in America on all the arts, who dangled his boots from the fireplace cordwood-pile to hear a smart chorus, conducted by G.D. Atkinson, incomparable end-men and the jokes… (Bridle 1945, 6)

Bridle’s description gives a strong sense of how the club space itself is invested with an identity

of adventure, with club members experiencing themselves and the pleasures of boundary-

crossing associated with Bohemia in ways that would not have been possible within the confines

of business men’s clubs. That, in the early days of the club, men were bringing in old furniture

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and dragging it up several flights of stairs added to the Bohemian romanticism that distinguished

this club from clubs catering to white business men. Indeed, it contributed to the pleasure of

knowing the self as a special person capable of crossing back and forth across liminal spaces—a

pleasure that provided both titillation and reassurance of dominant positionality.93

In contemporary discourse, Bridle’s “thrill of new men” might be interpreted to suggest the

boundary-crossing of homosexuality—something that might well make sense in contemporary

artistic settings in which homosexual men have achieved a measure of dominance, respectability

and safety.94 According to Eve Sedgwick, however, at the time that Bridle wrote the above

passage, there was no sharp distinction between sexual and nonsexual relationships between

men, that is, prior to the "homosocial schism" that emerged around the end of the nineteenth

century (Sedgwick 1985, 201). Rather, the homosociality of men’s clubs embodied patriarchy

and hegemonic masculinity:

[R]elations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women. (Hartman as cited in Sedgwick 1985, 3)

Whether boundary-crossing in sexual relations took place in the Club is not known, however, it

is clear that men of the club reveled in race and gender boundary-crossings. Through the

performance of plays—putting on blackface, getting close-up views of distant peoples and their

“costumes,” showing themselves to be non-prudish through their appreciation of Robert

Flaherty’s Moana (banned from public viewing because the Polynesian women of the film are

shown bare-breasted), and even the thrill of having a visiting “Bank President” share in the

enjoyment of the lower-class, racial parody of minstrelsy—members of the Club show that what

happens in this Club is different from what can take place in other settings. The space allowed

these men to play at being women and colonized Others in theatrical productions, to play at

being something other than staid and upright bourgeois men, and to show themselves as superior

people through their open mindedness vis à vis other contemporaries, that is, vis à vis “prudes”

93

Sherene Razack identifies the ability of white men to move back and forth between respectable and degenerate spaces as “an adventure that confirms that they are indeed white men in control who can survive a dangerous encounter with the racial Other and who have an unquestioned right to go anywhere and do anything” (Razack 2002, 121-156). 94

For an analysis of the complex intersection of homosexual desire, the lower status of women, and the feminized status of artists see (Sedgwick 1985).

74

and “philistines.” As Bourdieu writes, to show one’s “open mindedness” is a means to claim

cultural superiority to those of classes that might be better situated in material terms.

Thus the easiest, and so the most frequent and most spectacular way to 'shock' (épater) the bourgeois by proving the extent of one's power to confer aesthetic status is to transgress ever more radically the ethical censorships (e.g., in matters of sex) which the other classes accept even within the area which the dominant disposition defines as aesthetic. (Bourdieu 1984, 47)

Through their identification with boundary-crossing and the spiritual realm of the arts, men of

the Club are able to claim identities for themselves distinct from, and superior to, their social

peers in the business classes, while, at the same time, marking themselves as distinct from, and

superior to, women and racialized peoples (peoples who wear costumes, not “clothes”). Women

and racialized Others are objects of study or objects of amusement but not people with full

agency or subject positions of their own—the necessary corollaries to the men’s understandings

of themselves. Club members were also able to engage in boundary-crossing adventures without

any risk to their status as upright colonial men.

Figure 7. Club members engaged in playful boundary-crossing. Note the costumes and the name of the presenter: “Prankmeister,” i.e. “master of pranks.” (LAMPSletter 1911)

75

Figure 8. A more formal photograph of club members, in this case, the Group of Seven artists, expressing their identities as upright, masculine individuals. (LAMPSletter 1910)

These divisions between particular notions of the self and Others are facilitated through the

establishment of boundaries that rely on specific membership criteria in order to define who may

be present and in what capacity. Club boundaries are an attempt to establish and maintain the

purity of certain identities and to keep “non-entitled” people from having any influence over

what takes place or is discussed within club walls. For powerful men of the colony, clubs

were where the prominent and successful business elite met to conduct their affairs discreetly and effectively, and, to quote a British aphorism, "to escape their wives, their mistresses, and their creditors.” (McBurney 2007, xiv)

Club spaces provided a means to keep race, gender, sexual and class concerns from entering this

special world. Clubs were also places where the status of one’s identity was visible by who was

present coupled with the alternating invisibility or objectification of all others. Attempts to

maintain fixed boundaries, however, are rarely one hundred percent successful and the places

where boundaries are breached offer opportunities to notice where and how club boundaries

intersected with broader social hierarchies. During the life of the Arts and Letters Club, the

precariousness of psychic and physical boundaries at the club is revealed with the unexpected

appearance of a bourgeois-class, female singer.

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Bourgeois women were not welcome in the Arts and Letters Club except on special occasions;

however, lower class women were present in the club on a daily basis to provide services such as

cooking and cleaning without which the club could not function. The married women doing this

work in 1910, Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Hall, (Bridle 1945), were necessarily female as the club had

limited financial means and wages for women were substantially lower than those paid to men

doing similar work. In other words, a more prestigious club would have had male service staff.

The “absent presence” of women cooks reflects a relationship of power so naturalized that their

roles pass with barely a mention in the chronicles of the club (Bridle 1945, 2). The female staff

members were not seen as transgressing the club’s men-only rules because they are not actually

“women” in the same sense as “ladies” belonging to the men’s own class. What is related in

great detail, however, is the first time a bourgeois woman, a “lady,” appeared as an uninvited

guest. Members of the Arts and Letters Club issued an invitation to the conductor, and troupe, of

a visiting opera company to dine at the club after their evening performance of Bizet’s Carmen.

The conductor accepted the invitation and brought many of the male performers with him;

however, club members were shocked when the female star also arrived with her “coterie” of

female attendants. As Augustus Bridle describes it, club members were quite surprised and taken

aback by the unexpected appearance of a woman of their class. The men solved the problem by

relegating the opera’s star and her female attendants to their own company—at a table near the

library. The star of Carmen was thus “the first lady ever to be entertained at a dinner of the Club”

(Bridle 1945, 14-15). Bridle’s statement draws attention to several naturalized relations of

power: The lower class women of the star’s coterie, like the female workers of the club, have no

subject positions. They are unremarkable except as attendants to a woman of “class.” Completely

overlooked by the men in their enthusiasm to invite the artists of the troupe to their club is also

the fact that Carmen is an opera about a woman. It is “unthinkable,” literally, to either include

the female members of the company, or explicitly exclude them, because the inclusion and

exclusion of different bodies is completely naturalized in the space of the Club.95 Likewise,

lower class women are “unthinkable” as women; rather, they are an absent presence in the club,

not only necessary to its functioning but necessary as foils against which members produce their

own identities.

95

For a discussion of Foucault’s notion of the “unthinkable” see (Foucault 1970, xv.)

77

Boundaried spaces function to naturalize the presence and interests of some while also

naturalizing the invisibility, and non-status of those excluded. Those with the power to enforce

boundaries around their spaces and make decisions about the entitlements of Others are

positioned very differently from those at risk of being found “out of place,” for example, the

unwelcome opera singer, women found walking on the streets alone at night or Status Indians

found off-reserve without a pass from their Indian Agent.96 Relations of power produce

conditions that allow some to be oblivious to the lives of others while those with less power must

necessarily be aware of their position in relation to others for their own survival.97 Foucault

writes that subjectivities are constituted “gradually, progressively, really and materially” through

“a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, [and] thoughts” (Foucault

1980a, 97), that is, through the constraints and possibilities of lives in their material and social

locations. The example of the female intrusion at the Club illustrates how relations of power are

located in the body, in how people come to know themselves, and in their available modes of

interaction with others. The disruptive moment of the appearance of the “lady” at the Club

functions as a moment of radical contestation that brings into relief absences as well as “absent

presences.” This is a context in which relations of power have been normalized to such an extent

that the usual arrangements appear to be natural and inevitable, beneath notice or comment.

Boundary-crossings, in the form of intrusions into sanctified space by outsiders, were clearly not

desirable in the club, except through special invitation; however, boundary-crossings, from

within the club to the “outside,” were taken up with great pleasure. Here, the men constructed

their identities by transgressing boundaries and seeking encounters with their fantasies of the

Other. We have already seen the enthusiasm with which the men embraced Robert Flaherty’s

films and his adventures with “costumed,” “primitive” peoples living in the “wilderness.” The

Arts and Letters Club, however, was also well-known for its theatrical performances in which

members had great fun playing the roles of women and exotic, racialized Others. One example of

96

The situation up until 1951 (Gordon 2010, 76) 97

Drawing on Marx, Bannerji writes that all relations of ruling become more visible where they converge most fully: for example, in the structures of the daily lives of non-white women, particularly if they are working class, and I would add, lesbian. It is from the theorized experience of the most oppressed, as Marx would have said, that the possibility of most knowledge arises. This does not mean endowing each non-white woman individually with a preternatural and spontaneous insight into social reality, but rather, that the social relations which structure her locality and her experience hold clues to the entire society's organization, and that her experiences offer critical entry points into it. (Bannerji 1993, xix)

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playing at being “Indians” and “Squaws” is the “Thirst Dance Lodge” excerpted below, but there

were many others (LAMPSletter 1910). In this piece, the “Squat of Squaws” and “”squatters and

singers and tom-tommers there in the great tabernacle” depict nameless strange beings engaging

in a primitive ceremony in an ancient dwelling place, i.e. a “tabernacle.”

Figure 9. The Thirst Dance (LAMPSletter 1910, 14).

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Such forms of play-acting, like other forms of boundary-crossing by members of the club, offer

moments of eventalisation that reveal the privileged position of those playing at being members

of other groups, while revealing the fragility and social constructedness of the dividing lines

separating men from women, racialized people from whites, the lower classed from the

bourgeoisie. That the men can control the means of transgression and return all the more heroic

for having transgressed is the source of the pleasure and reveals the relations of power sustaining

the activities for, while boundary-crossing identifies the men as “courageous and daring,” it is

the ability to return home to the site of power that completes the journey towards manhood

(Razack 2002, 121-156).

The exercise of transgressing boundaries recalls Richard Phillips’ analysis of adventure stories in

which European boys achieve manhood by conquering the colonial wilderness and returning to

civilization as a mature European man able to rule “wisely and fairly” over unruly Others

(Phillips 1997, 51-59). Thus, flirting with danger when one has the unquestioned right to return

to an exalted station was one of the key ways that male colonizers asserted their identities as

manly adventurers. Playing at being a degenerate Other or, even better, being in close contact

with “real live” degenerate Others was a means to attain a special kind of masculine status

(Razack 2002, 136; Fellows and Razack 1998). The Savage Club of London founded in 1837, as

a “Bohemian Gentlemen’s Club,” has, even today, the head of an Indian Chief in full regalia as

its main insignia (The Savage Club).

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Figure 10. The Home webpage of the Savage Club as of April 20, 2013. (The Savage Club)

Here the identification with the warrior chief offers a sentimental identification with a “heroic”

outsider at the same time as it valorizes the colonial project and the replacement of the “savage”

with “civilized men.” Savage Club members produce themselves as heroic adventurers through

the contrast between themselves and the absent-presence and lower status of actual Indians. By

playing at being the savage they have sought to destroy, they are able to valorize themselves as

adventurers, as men able to take on the wilderness while “marking the boundary between

themselves and degenerate Others” (Razack 2002, 126). The white men of the Savage Club

transform themselves into a fantasy of a fierce yet noble Savage—making themselves

“indigenous”, that is, entitled to possession of lands through identification as “original”

inhabitants, in the process. The absence of actual indigenous peoples, however, is the pre-

requisite for both the fantasy and pleasure of this “savage” identification. Like the Arts and

Letters Club insignia of the Great Adventure or the drawings, text, and music of Bridle’s version

of O Canada, Indigenous peoples are the absent presence necessary to the production of this

adventurer identity.

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The fascination that white men have with playing women, Indians, blacks, and other racialized

people is taken up by Eric Lott in his analysis of the engagements of working class and

bourgeois men with blackface and minstrelsy. Lott suggests that playing at being the Other

allowed white men to assuage their fears of retribution by using ridicule to make the people they

dominated seem less potent, less threatening (Lott 1993, 3). He also suggests, however, that the

fascination with the Other expresses a desire to step away from the confines of the proper self to

something that might be more free (Lott 1993, 64). The attraction to the so-called primitive also

provided a means to connect with what colonizers believed might be a “more natural” world—a

connection Europeans feared had been lost through industrial, capitalist modes of production

(Lott 1993, 195). Lott’s book is aptly titled Love and Theft. The two words highlight the

contradictory emotions evidenced by the fascination with black bodies and the need to dominate

or eliminate this fearsome “Other.” The “love of the natural world” versus a need to “dominate

the natural world” is mirrored in the engagement with racialized Others, those, who, according to

European thinking, are closest to “nature”—a sentimental view that becomes more common as

Indigenous peoples are removed from view (Francis 1992, 154).98

Sylvia Wynter argues that hierarchically-structured societies generate pressures and justifications

to assert one’s place as above some other category of human. No matter where one is in the

pecking order, there is always the risk of being pushed lower on the hierarchy of humanity.

Crossing over boundaries thus allowed members of the Arts and Letters Club to “taste forbidden

fruits” without the risk of losing their status, or their “toehold of respectability” (Fellows and

Razack 1998, 336).99

In this section, Clubland, I have highlighted the identifications made possible through the

investments in the characteristics of the club space itself, the effects of technologies of power,

together with technologies of the self that illuminate the relatively high yet somewhat precarious

98

In the United States, because of removals and reservations; in Canada, because of relocations and the reservation system (King 2012, 62,72; Francis 2007, 123). 99

Razack writes problematizes the notion of attaining “respectability” below: [T]he goal of any antisubordination strategy cannot be the pursuit of respectability. Respectability is a claim for membership in the dominant group; attaining it, even one aspect of it, requires the subordination of Others. Moreover, because subordinate groups that gain a measure of respectability do not by definition possess all of the attributes of respectability, they are in an inherently unstable position. Those attributes that remain classified as degenerate will always threaten their toeholds on respectability. (Fellows and Razack 1998, 352)

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social position held by white bourgeois men involved with the Arts and Letters Club. The desire

to put on plays, talk about the arts or explore the boundaries of social decorum is not possible

within the confines of higher status business clubs; however, within the confines of their own

Club, men with interests in the feminized domain of the arts are able undertake their journeys

into personhood and assert their power by setting external boundaries around who can be present

in the Club and in what capacity. The absent presence of women and men of lower and racialized

classes are the necessary foils through and against which men of the Club constitute the character

of the club and the masculine identities of its members.

Part III: Into the wilds: producing the man by “salvaging the Indian”

As the world was shaped for Europe through cartography...so also it became peopled by classificational logics of metonymy and exclusion, recognition and opposition. Marking land and marking bodies were related activities; not only did land seem to determine much of a putatively biological nature, bodies themselves could be colonized, they had to be marked as "foreign," as "other," as "colonizable." (Dirks 1992, 6)

In nineteenth-century Canada, projects undertaken in order to establish an identity—a cultural

topography for the new nation—took on great significance. Governments and wealthy members

of the ruling classes invested in projects intended to shape identities (Tippett 1990, 35ff) while

also positioning peoples differently, symbolically and materially, in relation to political rights

and entitlements to land and resources.

Amongst many projects to create notions of national identity were acquisitions of Canadian-

produced art, the establishment of sites for “cultural” education, the creation of national galleries

and museums, and the collection of Aboriginal artifacts meant to produce a historical narrative of

progress and succession—all understood to be necessary steps “for helping the nation mature”

(Tippett 1990, 37). The work to define the character, rightful ownership and rightful social order

of Canada undertaken by artists associated with the Arts and Letters Club was extensive and took

on many forms. The project I analyze here belongs to a particular category of culture making—

that of salvaging Aboriginal artifacts and producing “knowledge” about Aboriginal peoples. In

1927, Marius Barbeau invited Ernest MacMillan to travel with him to the West coast to collect

and transcribe music of the “Nass River Indians.” Duncan Campbell Scott was later invited to

provide English lyrics for the set of songs published as Three West Coast Songs: Recorded from

singers of Nass River Tribes, Canada (MacMillan and Scott 1928).

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The salvaging of “Indian artifacts” was promoted as a means to create an imaginative ancestry

for the country (Crosby 1991, 269). During the early part of the nineteenth century, members of

the Arts and Letters Club (as well as a few non-member male and female artists) were

commissioned to travel the country collecting Indian artifacts with the goal of creating a

Canadian historical patrimony—a history and set of identities that could point to a past

connection with the land and a sense of ancestry (Tippett 1990, 77). These projects were

undoubtedly exciting and remunerative for white artists and ethnographers. Government

patronage was available and the work offered opportunities for career development, public

visibility, and adventure (Tippett 1990, 75).100 Indeed, the connections between artists and

government bureaucrats was so close that artists were often invited to travel with government

negotiators during the Treaty signing process (Francis 1992, 26).

“Salvaging projects” are projects in which enlightened Westerners save aspects of a dying race

for posterity while establishing credentials as boundary-crossing, fearless, wilderness

adventurers (Crosby 1991, 270). Artists and ethnographers collected cultural items from peoples

who were, however, in most cases, very much alive and struggling to maintain their familial and

cultural connections as well as their ability to govern themselves. That Indigenous peoples were

alive and resisting colonization was not particularly inhibiting for the Western collectors

however because, in colonial thinking, Indigenous peoples belonged to “anachronistic space”

and

did not inhabit history proper but exist[ed] in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency—the living embodiment of archaic “primitive.” (McClintock 1995, 30)

Thus, to collect materials, whether or not the bearers of a particular culture still existed, was in

aid of supporting the premise that the people themselves were objects of pre-history, of value

primarily to “modern man” as signifiers of his own ascendancy. The rationale for collection was

that, even if these peoples had not yet fully disappeared in the moment, their disappearance was

inevitable in the face of the “advance of civilization.”

100

Kenneth Peacock chronicles the large number of funded collection projects of “ethnic music, including Indian and Eskimo” music supported by the National Film Board, the National Museum and university research grants. He also refers to “our various aboriginal musical cultures” in Canada (Peacock 1969).

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The appropriation of native imagery and artifacts was, in fact, part of the larger colonial project

to politically and materially destroy Aboriginal peoples. As Marcia Crosby points out in relation

to the concept of “imaginary Indians:”

Ironically, the scientific documentation of the last of "authentic" Indian culture evolved almost simultaneously with the formation of the Indian Act, whose mandate was to "get rid of the Indian problem...[and] to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” (Crosby 1991, 273)101

Collecting native “ghosts” provided the material means, in the form of artifacts, for a national

history built on the fantasy of innocent interactions with the Indian—noble, primitive, tragically

and unaccountably lost—but forever preserved in the imaginary of the nation. Collection projects

were also part of a process to make the white settler “indigenous” to the land. The collection of

“Indian” artifacts paralleled the European interest in creating catalogues and taxonomies of

“natural history,” in which every living and non-living thing was assigned a place in a hierarchy

proceeding downwards from the northern European male. To collect artifacts was a way to

possess and assert dominance by naming and cataloguing the “objects” under study (Pratt 1992,

38ff).

The massive photographic project undertaken by Edmund S. Curtis to chronicle all the “Indian

tribes” in the United States and Canada is particularly illustrative of links between political

actions intended to remove and dispossess Indigenous peoples, and projects to catalogue

“disappearing” peoples. A major portion of Curtis’s work was funded by one of America’s most

powerful capitalists, J. P. Morgan who, together with Franklin D. Roosevelt and other “tycoons,”

subsidized Curtis’ project to record the lives of American Indians while directly and aggressively

removing them from their lands and destroying their land-based economies. An irony, not lost on

people photographed by Curtis, was that they were being paid to do things, for example, perform

ceremonies, sing traditional songs and speak their languages, for which they were otherwise at

risk of imprisonment (Makepeace 2000). In a number of instances, people were hired to dress up

and perform activities that had nothing to do with their lives but that Curtis believed might

generate income to further his project by tapping into popular fantasies about the “Indian.”

Whatever Curtis’ motives, and they were clearly conflicted, the photo documentary project was

not innocent of the projects of dispossession more obviously engaged in by his backers and

101

The statement Crosby references was made by Duncan Campbell Scott. It is probably the most cited statement in literature addressing the consequences of Canadian government policy towards Aboriginal peoples.

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fellow settlers. The project ceased to be of interest to Curtis’ financial backers as their economic

interests shifted elsewhere; however, for his backers, collecting these records was undoubtedly a

form of trophy hunting that provided a record of successful domination. Trophy hunting is an apt

analogy and reflection of other practices as well: In California during the 1950s and 60s, it was a

popular outdoor sport for white Californians to hunt down and kill Indians (Makepeace 2000).

Meanwhile, Curtis’ professional and personal identity as the creator of the “famous Curtis

Indian,” was produced through his project to chronicle the lives of “dying Indians.” Thomas

King (2012) in his wryly humorous account, The Inconvenient Indian, cites the tremendous

fascination whites have with fantasies of Indians—as long as they are safely “dead.” These are

fantasies that King describes as a simulacrum or “something that represents something that never

existed…in other words, the only truth of the thing is the lie itself” (King 2012, 54).

I include King’s citation of Theodore Roosevelt below, to underscore the link between

Roosevelt’s desire to catalogue “dying Indians” while actively supporting their slaughter:

I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. (Roosevelt, 1886, as cited in King 2012, 55)

King is pointing out that the pleasure of drawing on imagined “Indian” characters, as props in a

play about Canadian and American identities, co-exists with the determination to eliminate

indigenous peoples as living beings with political subjectivities of their own.

The documentation of Indians before they “disappeared from memory” was also vigorously

pursued in Canada by a number of painters, ultimately with the support of major government

institutions. These artists included Paul Kane, Arthur Verner, Edmund Morris and Emily Carr,

amongst others (Francis 1992). It was important for these artists that their images represented the

“Indian” in his “authentic” native habitat. Curtis, for example, removed any evidence of contact

with “white culture” from his images and this practice was followed by other artists, both

amateur and professional, in their portrayals of “Real Indians (Francis 1992, 41-43).

The project to collect songs from the Nass River people on the West coast of Canada offers a

representative Canadian musical example of the close links between the collection of artifacts

and political projects of dispossession. It also illustrates “how” technologies of power are

interwoven with material conditions that also sustain the “how” and “why” of identity

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construction. Funded through the National Museum of Canada,102 the songs were recorded in the

field by National Museum ethnographer Marius Barbeau, transcribed and arranged by musician,

Sir Ernest MacMillan, and set to English words by poet and Assistant Superintendent of Indian

Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott. Each man was engaged in different forms of managing

populations on behalf of governments: Barbeau, as an analyst and government advisor on French

and Aboriginal cultures, MacMillan as a creator of educational materials and director of

educational institutions, and Scott as an administrator with the power to force Aboriginal

communities to accept limitations on their mobility, access to food, and family structure.103 The

collaboration between these three cultural workers illuminates intersections of desire, arrogant

perception,104 entitlement and political force evident in the overall project of collecting Indian

artifacts.

The project had its origins in a meeting between Ernest MacMillan and Marius Barbeau at the

Arts and Letters Club in 1927. MacMillan had recently reviewed a collection of French Canadian

folk songs co-edited by Barbeau. A musical event at the Arts and Letters Club, devoted to a

performance of these songs, provided an opportunity for MacMillan and Barbeau to meet in

102

The Geological Survey of Canada, established in 1842, was commissioned in 1856 to establish a geological museum in Montreal. The mandate of the museum gradually expanded until it was designated the National Museum of Canada in 1927. Barbeau worked for the organization under all of these incarnations (Landry 2012). See also (Francis 2007, 103). 103

Scott determined which treaty annuities would be paid ( Neu and Therrien 2003). Scott ignored the terrible living conditions at many residential schools that were the cause of health problems for many children. In 1904, Dr. P .H. Bryce was appointed as medical inspector for the Department of Interior. From 1907 until 1909, he investigated the health of children in the residential schools in the Prairie Provinces. He had made recommendations to Duncan Campbell Scott, the Minister of Indian Affairs at that time, to ensure that health problems were dealt with. Although some inexpensive recommendations were followed, health problems still existed. Scott ended Dr. Bryce's services in 1913 and abolished the services of a medical inspector altogether in 1918 (Rights 2002, 23). Bryce published a harsh critique of government policy in 1922 entitled The story of a national crime: Being an appeal for justice for the Indians of Canada (Bryce 1922). He alleges in his book that the high death rate of Aboriginal children is deliberate because healthy children had been exposed to diseases such as tuberculosis. As evidence of the shared social stations of men working on behalf of national institutions it is noteworthy that Bryce was also lecturer on Physiology and Anatomy of the Vocal Organs at the Toronto Conservatory of Music in 1887-1888 (Music 1887-8). 104 “Arrogant perception” as used by Maureen Ford, refers to the “unconscious, daily-life-constituting, frame of reference of a subject so at ease with her place in ‘her world’ as literally to ignore, render invisible, stereotype, and leave untouched, the others upon whom her perceptions of the world does not depend.” (Ford 2009, 52).

Arrogant perception is not always a matter of bigotry. Indeed, more often it can be a matter of the worlds into which we are trained, raised to adopt subject position and, with them, frames of reference within which some people in certain social locations are not visible, even while they/we are in our/their midst. (Ford 2009, 54)

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person (McBurney 2007, 58). MacMillan was a great believer in the moral character of the

British Empire. He established exams and festivals across the country as a means to encourage

playing “the right music in the right way,” “giving the student a sense of proportion [and]

showing him [sic] where he stood in relation to others” (MacMillan as cited in Tippett 1990, 56);

however, in his review of Barbeau’s collection of songs, he wrote that “we have been too much

concerned with teaching the new arrivals our own ways and too little in discovering the

contributions they are capable of making to our national life” (Schabas 1994, 85). In this

statement, MacMillan’s patronizing perspective as an entitled owner of the land is clear enough:

British immigrants, represented by the term “our ways,” are assumed to have the power and

authority to make space for “newcomers” and determine what part “newcomers” should have in

the identity of the nation. MacMillan argued that drawing on the “folk” music of non-British

peoples could provide a means to establish a particularly Canadian identity. As a result of the

initial meeting between Barbeau and MacMillan, the two men also became engaged in a

collaboration with John Murray Gibbon of the Canadian Pacific Railroad to produce the first

“Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival” held in Quebec City in 1927.105 Shortly after the

completion of this first festival project, Barbeau invited MacMillan to travel with him to the

West coast to collect and transcribe music of the Nass River Indians (Schabas 1994, 86).

It is useful here to consider the backgrounds and material locations of the principal actors in this

project who can be described “anti-conquest men”—that is, men who imagine themselves to be

artists and scholars separate from colonial violence and constructed as a “noninterventionist

European presence” (Pratt 1992, 78). Marius Barbeau was the government’s pre-eminent

collector of French, English and Aboriginal songs and was also known as an “expert” on the

Huron-Wendat people resident in Quebec. As an anthropologist and ethnologist working for the

Museum branch of the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, renamed the National Museum

in 1927, his task was to collect, analyze and study materials pertaining to those identified as

Other (Schabas 1994, 84). Consistent with the projects of anthropologists in other colonial

settings, Barbeau’s work was not just about creating knowledge, it was directly related to

learning about Others in order to subjugate and manage these populations (Neu and Therrien

2003, 28; Saïd 1993, xix). Barbeau had many extended contacts with different First Nations

groups over his lifetime; however, for Barbeau, Indians were only “Indians”—and entitled to

105

I return to the subject of the CPR concerts in Chapter Six.

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treaty rights—if they still lived as they had at the time of early European encounters (Nurse

2001, 433). When called upon as an expert during a claim to Aboriginal treaty rights made by the

Huron-Wendat people of Montreal, Barbeau stated that they were too “modern” to be considered

Indians—an interpretation that was used to justify extinguishing their treaty rights and a

decidedly political effect of his work (Nurse 2001, 454ff). Barbeau also brought filmmakers and

a bevy of assistants along on the trip to the Nass River resulting in an “ethnographic

documentary,” Nass River Indians, documenting the process of Barbeau recording the songs with

members of the Nass River Tribes (Barbeau and Watson 1928; Wakeham 2004). The film’s

visual and aural narrative works to construct Barbeau’s native informants as childlike creatures

of nature; of the past, while the anthropologist, Barbeau, is portrayed as the bringer of

technological magic showing the path to the future. “Indians” are the objects of study while

Barbeau and his technicians are subjects of history—agents of progress (Wakeham 2004, 58). In

this incarnation, the cultural worker does not embody the beleaguered and lesser subjectivity of

the artist vis à vis the businessman or politician; rather, the artist, in this setting, embodies the

highest status, the observer, governed by reason, collecting the artifacts of objectified,

“primitive” peoples.

While the goal of collecting the songs was, ostensibly, to save cultural artifacts of “dying

Indians” for posterity, in the moment of collection, Aboriginal peoples were most certainly

alive—though under siege. Their territories were shrinking dramatically as their lands were

expropriated and sold, leading to an incredible accumulation of wealth by prominent

settler/citizens. For example, by 1913 the Canadian Pacific Railway (later to host “folk” festivals

across the country) had already amassed 25 million acres; much of it expropriated from First

Nations groups (Neu and Therrien 2003, 43; 82).106 Ongoing practices of dispossession

notwithstanding, the Nass River Indians, however, as many other Aboriginal peoples, never gave

up their struggle to survive as a self-governing entity. In 1887, Nisga’a and Tsimishian chiefs

attempted to negotiate treaty rights and self-rule for the Aboriginal peoples living in the Nass

River watershed and, one hundred and thirteen years later, in 2001, a treaty was ratified with the

Nisga’a people recognizing claim to approximately 2000 square miles (Neu and Therrien 2003,

172). Far from neutral then, the narrative of the inevitable succession of “primitive” to modern

106

The CPR later produces folk festivals across the country that sometimes include performances by Aboriginal groups—an irony that I take up further in Chapter VI.

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expressed in Barbeau’s film as the “inevitable decline” of the “Indian,” offered a justification for

dispossession and the vast transfer of wealth from the colonized to the colonizer while

representing the process as both innocent and morally righteous.

By the time of their first meeting at the Arts and Letters Club, Ernest MacMillan had already

established himself as a prominent figure in the development of national musical standards. For

example, he helped to establish examinations, festivals and music clubs across the country. He

published collections and arrangements of French Canadian and Aboriginal songs and a book of

music for use in public schools containing folk songs, hymns, and patriotic songs of Empire from

the British Isles (Schabas 1994; MacMillan 1929). Through his Deanship at the University of

Toronto’s Faculty of Music (1927-1952), and his position as Principal of the Royal Conservatory

of Music (1926-1942), he had a profound influence over the development of music education

curricula at both amateur and professional levels(). He participated in Canadian Pacific Railway

folk festivals and prepared music for major celebrations such as the United to Serve pageant107

(Ridout, Pratt, and MacMillan 1927) and “tended to see cultural activity as geared to some such

purpose as nation-building or assimilation of immigrants or moral improvement” (Tippett 1990,

62).

MacMillan,108 who also makes an appearance in Barbeau’s ethnographic documentary

(Wakeham 2004, 62), found the music of the Nass River Tribe to be complex and intriguing,

equating the singing of members of the Nass River group to “the voice of nature crying out.” In

regard to the Indians, he claimed to regret their decline but saw Indians “as if, indeed, [their

songs]…were an essential part of Nature yet not part of humanity” (Schabas 1994, 88). African

theorist, Achille Mbembe describes the incapacity of colonizers to see colonial peoples as fully

human as a failing of Western thinking that continues to this day:

107

United to Serve was written in honour of the merger of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, The Methodist Church, and the Congregational Churches of Canada. The merged denominations become the The United Church of Canada in 1925 (Canada 2013). 108

Kallman writes that, MacMillan had met the ethnologist Marius Barbeau at the first festival, and with characteristic energy he set off with him that summer (1927) to hear, record, and notate music of the native peoples in the Nass River area of northern British Columbia. MacMillan's 70-odd transcriptions were published in The Tsimshian, Their Arts and Music (by V. Garfield, P. Wingert, and M. Barbeau, New York 1951). He also arranged some of the songs for concert use, as did Leo Smith following his example. In 1929 he completed the anthology A Book of Songs (published in Canada as A Canadian Song Book), widely used in Canadian schools in the 1930s and 1940s. (Kallmann 2012a)

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The theoretical and practical recognition of the body and flesh of "the stranger" as flesh and body just like mine, the idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others, long posed, and still poses, a problem for Western consciousness. (Mbembe 2001, 2)

As colonizers, neither Barbeau nor MacMillan appear to have been capable of imagining the

First Nations people who lived on the Nass River as human beings who were the subjects of their

own lives, rather than objects of study and self-making for Westerners.109

The third member of the artistic team, Duncan Campbell Scott, an out-of-town member of the

Arts and Letters Club (McBurney 2007, 13), was a man with the authority to call into being

multiple forms of repression inflicted upon First Nations groups. Scott, a well-known poet and

Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932 instituted the forced attendance of native

children at residential schools beginning in 1920 (Brant Castellano, Archibald, and DeGagne

2008, 64).110 The strategy deployed was to remove children as far as possible from their families

so that they would no longer know themselves as “Indians.”111 The material and political

problems that government bureaucrats were addressing through these forcible removals—a tactic

also used in the United States, colonial Australia and New Zealand (Wadden 2008; King 2012,

87)—was in response to the refusal of many Aboriginals to accept European systems, built on

private property and wage labour, and to give up their rights to self-determination (Neu and

Therrien 2003, 32ff). In addition, because “Indians” had treaty rights and thus claims to land,

governments were constrained in their efforts to fully control the land and resources of the

territory they sought to dominate—something they were best able to do by increasing the number

of colonial settlements, thus gaining a means to force Aboriginal peoples off their territories

while also creating more citizens with obligations to the Crown. Aboriginal peoples—then as

now—were standing in the way of the complete commodification and control of land and

resources as well as more complete political control over resident populations.

109

Barbeau recounts this collection project in an academic paper entitled “Songs of the Northwest” (Barbeau 1933). 110

Shannon Thunderbird writes of the experience of having their children forcibly removed: A mother told me, ‘It was every parent's nightmare. My children were taken away as little ones. I couldn't hold them until they were teenagers.’ Even when children were reunited with their families, they were divided by language and culture, the schools having forbidden all things Indian. All, over 160,000 helpless Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes put into this grotesque attempt at cultural engineering through assimilation. (Thunderbird)

111 Strategies to eliminate Indigenous populations also included forced sterilizations, for example, Alberta’s 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act which allowed for the sterilization of any Residential School inmate. (History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008)

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Duncan Campbell Scott, in addition to his role with the residential schools, was responsible for

organizing annual treaty payments to various Indian bands. His objective was to use accounting

techniques to reduce costs to Indian Affairs by reducing the numbers of Indians that “counted.”

At the same time as he implemented these strategies against the well-being of Aboriginal

peoples, however, Scott, as an avid adventurer, sought out “wilderness” encounters with

Aboriginal people and received government commissions to lead parties of artists to accompany

Treaty Commissions (Tippett 1990, 74).112 Through his life as an outdoorsman, poet and

bureaucrat, Scott expressed the place that native peoples were to take up in the Canadian psyche:

The poet romanticized the whole 'noble savage' theme, but the bureaucrat lamented our inability to become civilized. In other words, he disdained ‘living’ Natives but "extolled the freedom of the savages." (Neu and Therrien 2003, 89)

Scott’s love and fear of the Indian is expressed in his poem The Onondaga Madonna, however,

the poem also functions to proliferate a narrative of the “ inevitable decline” of the Indian—a

prediction that does more to reflect his political role in undermining social cohesion than any

“natural” inevitability.

The Onondaga Madonna She stands full-throated and with careless pose, This woman of a weird and waning race, The tragic savage lurking in her face, Where all her pagan passion burns and glows; Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes, And thrills with war and wildness in her veins; Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains Of feuds and forays and her father's woes. And closer in the shawl about her breast, The latest promise of her nation's doom, Paler than she her baby clings and lies, The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes; He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom, He draws his heavy brows and will not rest

Figure 11. The Onondaga Madonna, Duncan Campbell Scott, 1898

112

Evidence has recently emerged to indicate that the written texts of Treaty 9, negotiated by Duncan Campbell Scott, and the verbal promises made during negotiations differ significantly, suggesting that promises made during the treaty process were acts of deception (Moore 2011; Long 2010).

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While the project to collect songs from the Nass River Indians did not physically dispossess

Aboriginal peoples of their lands, it appropriated cultural artifacts for redefinition under colonial

terms and contributed to a discourse that claimed that the decline of Aboriginal peoples was

inevitable—a claim that dovetailed with aggressive legal tactics to extinguish Aboriginal rights

and modes of being. As Edward Said has argued, “nations themselves are narrations. The power

to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging” is one of the main

connections between culture and Imperialism (Saïd 1993, xiii).

It is important to remember that before and during the time of the active collection of Aboriginal

songs and the development of so many English Canadian musical institutions, a number of

important Indigenous ceremonies, along with the music integral to them, were banned.113

Banning ceremonies was a key means to break down Aboriginal modes of being and sites of

resistance to colonial rule (Dickason 1992, 477n42). While Aboriginal music was worthy of

collection and reinterpretation for “civilized” uses, it was also an indicator of Indian people’s

refusal to quietly disappear and thus required systematic repression. The power at stake in the

contested terrain of culture is evident with the desire of whites to own Aboriginal music

mirroring the desire to own and control Aboriginal bodies, culture and lands. It is also significant

that in 1927, during the same year that Barbeau and MacMillan travelled out west to collect the

songs of “dying Indians,” Scott, in his role as Superintendent of the Indian Department, made a

further amendment to the Indian Act making it illegal to hire lawyers or advisors to help them in

their claims against the government (Francis 1992, 211). In the meantime, museum collectors,

both amateur and professional, were avidly collecting Indigenous artifacts, raiding burial sites

and communities in a competition amongst countries to have the “largest, best collections”

(Francis 1992, 104).

Like contemporary uses of Indigenous art work to represent Canada today, the “idea” of the

Indian stands in for a romantic and unique national identity while the active political and bodily

extinguishment of Indigenous peoples is “disappeared” from view. Identity-making projects

based on “salvaging the Indian” function to produce white indigeneity, white belonging and a

sense of the inevitability of white dominance. The project of collecting and publishing songs

113

The 1879 amendment to the Indian Act, “Incitement of Indians to Riot” provided for two to six months of imprisonment for celebration of the Potlatch (Neu and Therrien 2003, 85). These laws were not repealed until the revised Indian Act of 1951 (Dickason 1992, 304).

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from the Nass River people shows the elision of political power with “moral right” and the

implicatedness of cultural projects with colonial oppression. Achille Mbembe writes that the

distinctive feature of colonial sovereignty was to “act as both authority and morality.” “Right

was on one side” and it was “seized in the very act of occurring.”

Anything that did not recognize this violence as authority, that contested its protocols, was savage and outlaw….This is why the colonial state, in putting projects into effect, did not rule out either the exercise of naked force against the native or the destruction of the forms of social organization that existed prior to its arrival. (Mbembe 2001, 26)

Whereas MacMillan’s work is not directly focused on consolidating colonial control of land and

crushing Aboriginal independence per se, his work is implicated in the process. In this context,

the opposite of “innocence” is not so much “guilt” but “complicity”—a complicity that reflects

the “arrogant perception” of those who assume that their privileged positions, and the profits

they have gained through their colonial/cultural enterprises are just and moral, overlooking the

fact that their innocence has been obtained through the degradation, dispossession,

objectification, and oppression of others. In this project, MacMillan literally captures the voice of

the peoples from whom the music was collected and turns it to into an exemplar of colonial

domination. The act of appropriation fulfills the function of asserting domination through

controlling the use of sound (Attali 1985, 89). The work of Barbeau and Scott, while more

directly linked with overt political oppression, draws upon the same civilizing tropes that define

the work of artists like MacMillan and other members of the Arts and Letters Club. By

separating cultural production from political histories, physical sites of artistic production from

sites of cultural contestation, and the bodies that produce “legitimate” culture from those who

embody Otherness, the position of innocence asserted by artists and attributed to cultural projects

is produced. Likewise, the act of venturing into and returning from the wilderness, for these

three cultural workers, functioned to establish “heroic” masculine identities available, uniquely,

to white colonial men.

In this moment of knowledge production, MacMillan, Barbeau and Scott construct themselves as

“subjects” of history while defining the colonized Other as “objects” of study. As Mbembe

argues, the means to define one’s actions as moral are not separate from relations of power; from

the power to authorize authorities (Mbembe 2001, 25). Foucault describes the link between

power and claims of moral ascendancy as the “politics of truth;” “the mechanisms and instances

which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, [and] the means by which each is

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sanctioned” (Foucault 1972a, 131). Cultural work is shown here to be a handmaiden to

government policy. Stories about the birth and character of the nation are produced with a

passion and zeal that, in the case of Ernest MacMillan, resulted in a Knighthood for his service to

the British Crown (Schabas 1994, 130). While these cultural projects were taking place,

however, a long and relentless series of laws, political moves, and state-sanctioned depredations,

including white settler incursions onto Indigenous lands (squatting) and grave robbing, mark the

persistent projects of individuals and governments to extinguish Indigenous peoples’ abilities to

maintain their land-based economies and their claims to land (Francis 1992, 103; Blair 2008).

The collection of artifacts is one practice of appropriating Aboriginal voices; however, a

variation on this practice is found in the Indianist Movement that first began in Canada in the

1850s, “burst forth” as a major cultural focus in the 1920s, and has continued to be “vital” today

(Keillor 1985, 203). Through this movement, demonstrations of “Indianness” became popular as

did the inclusion of “Indian sounds” in movies and musical compositions.114 Keillor has

catalogued circa 200 compositions from 1859 – 1993 that are based on “Amerindian/Inuit

material” (Keillor 1985, 215). This is material that, with varying degrees of accuracy, draws on

Aboriginal music for the “raw materials” of formal compositions. Here, as in the salvaging

projects referred to above, the colonial artist is in search of a history that will produce the

colonial settler as indigenous to the land. The link between these projects is stated clearly in a

letter written by Ernest Gagnon to Marius Barbeau in 1911:

It has always been my belief that the ‘discovery’ of our roots would help establish a sense of national identity. With particular reference to music, I intended my work on our folksongs and the music of our native Indians to lay a foundation for a musical language based on these repertoires. Perhaps you will continue to encourage Canadian composers to seek out these sources in their musical works. (Gagnon as cited in Keillor 1985, 185)

The use of the term “our Indians” should be noted.115 It is a term still in use today that reflects an

internalization of the degrading notion that Indigenous peoples are the property of “Canadians,”

of interest for whatever cultural significations can be appropriated for white use but, otherwise,

culturally, intellectually and materially childlike.

114

For a discussion of stereotypical musical themes invented to represent the “Indian,” see (Gorbman 2000) 115

Barbeau uses the same phrase in his article “Our Indians – Their Disappearance” in 1931 (Barbeau 1931).

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The collection of songs and their transcription for use in formal compositions was also taken up

in the United States, for example, the photographer Edward S. Curtis recorded over 1000 songs

while doing his photographic work. His description of this music also clearly asserts possession,

belief in Western cultural superiority, and the infantalization of Indigenous culture:

It is more than likely that the Indian is somewhat blindly groping for the diatonic intervals which form the basis of civilized music … All the rhythmic schemes which have come under my observation seem to be very simple, and the complexities which have arisen seem to me to have been purely accidental. (Curtis as cited in Keillor 1985, 165)

These descriptions serve to underscore not only the objectification of the Other made “useful”

through colonial processes of appropriation and “improvement,” but the “racial journeys into

personhood” that are the basis of self-making for the Canadian national subject as

conceptualized and lived by the white “men of the arts” leading the charge to create a unique

Canadian identity (Razack 2002).

One of the most fascinating elements of the discourse associated with preserving the “memory of

Indians” is the expression of regret about their “disappearance,” sometimes coupled with

critiques of modern civilization. Daniel Francis describes this as “indulging a guilty conscience

while feeling there [is] nothing they [can do] about it” (Francis 1992, 57). Here he is describing

the “guilty pleasure” of reflecting on loss and while denying connections to oneself and ignoring

on-going political struggles of Indigenous peoples who have quite inconveniently—in terms of

the fantasy of the lost Indian—refused to disappear. Sherene Razack describes this form of

psychological self-indulgence as a process of shifting the focus to oneself, to an imagined pain

felt by the onlooker looking in horror at someone else’s pain. The injustice inflicted on the Other

does not remain the focus, rather it is the imagined pain of the onlooker that is used to valorize

the onlooker’s humanity. This transference, however, is only possible through the obliteration of

the personhood of the Other, obscuring one’s complicity in political processes that have provided

the sensitive onlooker with an abjected Other upon which to gaze. In this way, the onlooker, the

person expressing their regrets, is produced as good and innocent, experiencing a kind of

pleasure in pain, without any compulsion to address the privileges gained through the suffering

of this Other being (Razack 2007). The feelings of “helplessness” and “regret” replace any need

to take responsibility for what must be changed to eliminate the sources of injustice. Marius

Barbeau wrote with regret about the demise of the Indian seeing their contact with “the white

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man” as a kind of death sentence (Francis 1992, 55-57). As we have seen in this section,

however, Barbeau believed that unless they fit into the fantasy version of the Indian, locked in

“anachronistic space and time” (McClintock 1995, 30), they did not deserve to exist in legal

terms. Flesh and blood Indigenous peoples, still living and still resisting colonial domination,

remained jarring, inconvenient, and all the more blameworthy for, instead of accepting

“feelingful” responses as proof of the “goodness” of empathetic colonizers, they continued to

demand legal recognition and actual changes to social and political relations.

Part IV: Making ourselves indigenous

As we have seen above, the appropriation of “Native” identities was one strand in attempts to

create a unique Canadian identity. This strand does not deny the existence of Aboriginal peoples

but is dependent on an innocent portrayal of their “inevitable disappearance.” Other strands of

thought devoted to creating a cultural identity for Canada also depend on the disappearance of

Aboriginal peoples but from a somewhat different orientation.

Following Confederation in 1867, there was great interest amongst members of English speaking

arts and letters groups to generate notions of identity that could be considered uniquely Canadian

(Osborne 1992, 28). Group of Seven artist, Lawren Harris, amongst a number of artists,

politicians and intellectuals, was a member of the Canada First movement—a movement,

devoted to the “consolidation of the British Empire as … an instrument to protect and advance

"superior" Anglo-Saxon values and institutions and a vehicle for the definition and assertion of

Canadian nationhood” (Vigod 2012). Harris expresses his notion of a raced and gendered ideal

Canadian national as he describes his hopes and ideals as a “Canadian” artist:

[I]t is only through the deep and vital experience of its total environment that a people identifies itself with its land and gradually a deep and satisfying awareness develops. We were aware that no virile people could remain subservient to, and dependent upon the creations in art of other peoples...To us there was also the strange brooding sense of another nature fostering a new race and a new age. (Harris as cited in Mackey 2002, 40)

The defining idea adopted by the Canada First Movement, Group of Seven artists, members of

the Arts and Letters Club and other like-minded artists, was the idea of the “North,” “as

expression and mirror, essence and root of the Canadian character” (Mackey 2002, 40).

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The “northern” imaginary developed by white Canadian artists established several interrelated

notions of Canada and Canadian identity: 1) the Canadian “north” as a vast, rugged and empty

landscape; 2) the northern wilderness as a space in which white men prove their mettle by

overcoming a harsh and savage wilderness; 3) Canadians, as members of a northern, Anglo-

Saxon race, as physically, psychically and morally superior to those living in southern latitudes,

including those living in the United States (Mackey 2002, 42); and, 4) the purity of the snow-

covered landscape as an allegory for the purity and apparent non-violence of the Canadian

colonial project.116 These images were consciously chosen by artists to distinguish Canadians

from Britons and Americans, create a historical narrative portraying the Canadian colonial

project as noble, and designating as heroic those credited with furthering the nationalist project.

The contrast between the identities constructed to reflect distinctively British and Canadian

identities is apparent when contrasting the art that becomes iconic of Canadian identity and

British paintings of the same period. In Canada, the members of the “Ontario Group of Seven”

were encouraged to develop a national school of painting based on “nature and wilderness,

which, it was beginning to be argued, defined the national character” (Tippett 1990, 84). While

British paintings of the same period contain images of a “cultivated natural world” that has been

subdued through civilizing processes, Group of Seven paintings focus entirely on untamed

landscapes. Many British nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings consist of family

portraits, with husbands, wives, children and servants shown in their appropriate places. The

images show the male head of household dominating a cultivated environment, and often include

“paintings within paintings,” with cultivated colonial landscapes in the background. In British

paintings of the period, wealth, status and entitlement are demonstrated through distinctions of

dress, physical placement, and masculine domination over foreign bodies and landscapes

(Leppert 1993, 91-118). Representing wealth and status through portraiture was also common in

Canada;117 however, the Group of Seven, in the landscape paintings they created to represent

Canadian identity, depict the Canadian landscape as empty of people. Conceived as female and

virginal, Group of Seven landscapes represent a rugged wilderness awaiting the special racial

qualities of adventurous Anglo-Saxon “Northmen” to bring these landscapes to life reflecting the

116

See: Berger 1966; Mackey 2002, 30; Coleman 2006, 137. 117

Photographs of the Grandes Dames of the Toronto Women’s Musical Club offer evidence of the investment in portraiture amongst well-to-do families (Elliott 1997).

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“the long Western dream of colonial conquest as an erotics of ravishment” (McClintock 1995,

364).

The same imagery abounds in literature intended to excite British and Canadian boys and men

about the adventurous possibilities for achieving manhood in Canada.118 Carl Berger offers a

long list of phrases found in Canadian literature that link northern imagery with seductive

portrayals of raced and gendered authority and belonging:

Canada was the "Britain of the North", "this northern Kingdom", the "True North" in Tennyson's phrase, the "Lady of the Snows" in Kipling's. "Canada is a young, fair, stalwart maiden of the north." "The very atmosphere of her northern latitude, the breath of life that rose from lake and forest, prairie and mountain, was fast developing a race of men with bodies enduring as iron and minds as highly tempered as steel." Canada was the "Young giant nation of the "North", the Young scion of the northern zone": her people, "Our hardy northern race"; her location, those "Stern latitudes"....The result of life in the northern latitudes was the creation and sustenance of self-reliance, strength, hardiness—in short, all the attributes of a dominant race. "Northern nations always excel in energy and stamina, which accounts for their prevailing power." In the north, "the race is compelled by nature to maintain its robust attributes, mental and physical, whereas in more sunny countries like Africa and Australia the tendency of the climate is toward degeneration. (Berger 1966, 4)

Berger’s citations paint a compelling picture of what has become the dominant narrative of

Canada as a vigorous, youthful country built by manly, white-skinned northerners. The absent-

presence of the “Indian” in this imagery is part of the wilderness that is to be tamed by male

Europeans. The silence over the existence and human agency of Indigenous peoples reveals the

discursive and psychological work being done by imagined empty spaces. One of the many

ironies of the absence of the “Indian” and the iconography of a cold and empty land, for

example, is that the pure, cold and rugged northern landscape that is supposed to produce Britons

and other northern Europeans as self-reliant, hardy and entitled does not apply to the peoples

who thrived in this same landscape for millennia. On the contrary, when Aboriginal histories or

images are drawn upon in Canadian identity projects, they are appropriated to enhance the

subjectivities of setter-artists and to provide a history that can stand in as an innocent, “new

world” heritage for European immigrants. The story is always about the European settler.

118

Richard Phillips, Daniel Coleman , Carl Berger, Eva Mackey offer detailed analyses of the particular raced and gendered images that dominate nineteenth century literature written for British and Canadian audiences (Phillips 1997; Coleman 2006; Berger 1966; Mackey 2002).

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The images used by writers and visual artists are also mirrored in music intended to reflect

Canadian identities. Patriotic music is particularly emblematic of national imaginings however

particular narratives of “Canadianness” are found in all genres of Canadian-produced music. For

example, the following is a small sampling of “art music” pieces that draw on the trope of the

pure, northern wilderness: The Men of the North by H.H. Godfrey (1897); Hail Canada!

Dominion of the North by James Murray (Murray 1925); North Country by Harry Somers

(Somers 1960); The Idea of North by Glenn Gould (Gould 1971); North/White by R. Murray

Schafer (Schafer 1980); Songs of the North, Violet Archer; (Archer and Harbo 1998); Due North

by Stephen Chapman (Chapman 1988) and a 2000 recording by a Toronto-based group, the True

North Brass Quintet, entitled Strong and Free (Brass 2000).119 The use of northern imagery in

music to assert unique Canadian identities is discussed at length by Grace and Haag in their

paper, “From Landscape to Soundscape: The Northern Arts of Canada” (Grace and Haag 1998).

In addition, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, in an article entitled “Winter Themes in

Music,” lists numerous pieces of folk and popular music that reference Canadian identity through

encounters with the snowy northern wilderness (Plouffe). Finally, references to the north as a

particular source of Canadian identity abound in the annals of CBC radio productions. There

were close ties between members of the Arts and Letters Club and CBC radio.120 Most of the

hosts, composers and producers were white Anglo-Saxon men presenting the same raced and

gendered embodiments and outlook as already discussed in this chapter. One particularly striking

example however is a 13-episode series entitled “The White Empire.” The text was written by

Toronto writer and broadcaster, Alan King and the music was written by Toronto composer,

John Weinzweig for broadcast in 1945 (The White Empire Nov. 21, 1945). The play on words in

the title is emblematic of the colonial cultural project. In this piece Weinzweig draws on

“Eskimo” music to add authenticity to his aural depiction of a story that is about the white

explorer, Martin Frobisher, appropriating what is useful, in this case, from Inuit culture, to add

dramatic tension, exoticism, and a sense of conquering the wilderness. In this particular narrative

of the Canadian colonial project, the protagonist is, again, a heroic white male explorer

119

All works cited, from 1960 onwards, are found at the (Canadian Music Centre 2011). A search of the Canadian Music Centre holdings (compositions and recordings) using the word “north” resulted in 364 “hits” with a large number of these using “north,” iconically, as a title. N.B.: The Canadian Music Centre only includes works by composers registered with them. There are many other Canadian composers not registered with the CMC. 120

The role of CBC radio in producing particular notions of Canadian identity is worthy of its own independent study.

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encountering a vast, snow-covered wilderness with the voices of Inuit people serving as stage

props in the white man’s story. The list of male, Anglo-Saxon names contributing to this

production are typical of the people working at the CBC during the post-war era.121

Figure 12. The White Empire. Nov. 21, 1945. CBC Program Schedule, Prairie Region: 5. (The White Empire Nov. 21, 1945)

It is, of course, not simply the use of terms such as “north” or “snow” or “wilderness,” per se,

that is noteworthy in all of these depictions of Canadian identity but the development of

identities based on a landscape represented as “empty” when European settlers arrived. Together

with notions of Canada as an empty, virginal northland brought to life through the penetration of

virile white men, the conquest of this daunting empty landscape serves to shift entitlements of

indigeneity away from First Nations and Inuit peoples, to white, male, Anglo-Saxon colonizers.

Indigenous peoples serve as the foils against which European men produce their own identities

as rational and heroic. Artistic works thus become important signifiers marking the boundaries

121 I have drawn this conclusion from looking at the following sources: (Eaman and Yusufali 2012; Bonikowsky

2012; The White Empire Nov. 21, 1945).

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between worthy masculine colonizers and categories of lesser worth: women, heathen, fearsome

and/or childlike Indians, avaricious Americans, blacks, strangely exotic “Chinamen” and others

“unfit for the climate and therefore unsuitable as immigrants” (Berger 1966, 4).

I have suggested previously that the embodied nature of musical experiences makes music a

particularly powerful tool to establish emotional associations between narratives of the nation,

notions of belonging, and identities of inclusion and exclusion. Patriotic songs serve an

important role in the creation of racial identities, emotional associations with narratives of the

past and the present, and associations between landscapes and the character of “a people”

(Mohanram 1999, 4-7). National anthems are perhaps the quintessential vehicle for internalizing

exalted notions of identity and uncritical identifications of the self with the nation state. The

ritual singing of national anthems at sports events and other public occasions provides an

internalization of notions of history and identity that is “performed into being” through the

repetition of embodied engagements with both sound and text. This is an “education of feeling”

on the grand scale of social engineering and a project to which many musicians have been

devoted.122 The “pleasure of pride” is the association sought through the singing of patriotic

songs: the pride of claiming a noble identity, of having a land to call home, of being willing to

“serve” one’s country, and of being identified with putative “greatness.” The particular exalted

characteristics that come to define Canadian identity are readily apparent in Augustus Bridle’s

early version of O Canada, where we can now recognize variations on tropes identified by the

Canada First Movement and the images in so much Canadian art and literature:

122

Many well-known musicians have written arrangements of O Canada (Canada). The version I grew up with was written by music educator Kenneth Bray (Kenneth Bray 2012).

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O Canada! Thy voice goes o’er the sea, Home of the brave, and land of liberty; In their barques of old, by the fog and foam, Thy sea-men crossed the wave; On crest and crag they flung the flag For the right, and the free, and the brave. From shore to sea, by field and foam, This glorious land be ours where’er we may roam; O land of liberty, the sea-man’s home! O Canada! By camp and smoke and tree, Stern voyageurs went forth for love of thee; Thy rivers bold they tracked of old Thro’ forest, flood and foam; O’er seas of land, by mountains grand, They reared the North-man’s home. From shore to sea, by field and foam, God save this land! We pray Where’er we may roam; O land of liberty, the Northman’s home!

Figure 13. Text to O Canada by Augustus Bridle, 1908 LAMPSletter (Bridle 1908)

Here the Canadian “North” is a vast, rugged and empty landscape and a proving ground for

Anglo-Saxon manhood. The role of the morally superior Northman is to make Canada a “land of

freedom” with the colonial project understand to be a moral imperative while, significantly, also

being both good-natured and innocent. In Bridle’s story of Canada, there is no violence and no

oppression. The Indian simply “disappears” before the “march of civilization” of his own

volition. The image of the “North”—as the site of the Great Adventure of Canadian

colonization—is one of magnificent purity and nobility. The Northman acts out of love as he

brings “liberty” to the land. In the imaginary of the song, it is as if the land has been waiting for

the appearance of the Northman to liberate it, and bring it to life and, although it is not clear from

what the country is being liberated, presumably, the two Iroquois men hastily leaving the picture

is one element of this liberation fable (See figure 5).

Like the wilderness images of the Group of Seven, Bridle’s text to O Canada presents an artistic

rendition of the legal term, terra nullius, or empty land. Terra nullius is a term that was used

strategically to support European claims that they were not violating European law or Christian

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principles by colonizing the “new” world.123 When the presence of Indigenous peoples is

acknowledged in art works by colonial men, it is not our encounters as colonizers that is taken up

but the inevitable disappearance of the “primitive Other.” The images by Edmund S. Curtis

depicting “Indians” with their backs to the camera as they fade into the distance, the paintings of

Emily Carr in which evidence of Indigenous peoples is depicted as fading back into an

undifferentiated “state of nature” and Bridle’s vanishing Indians are all variations on this fantasy.

Aboriginal identities are called upon to function as the negative space of the ‘positive’ force of colonialist hegemony….they are inscribed to stand as the West’s opposite, imaged and constructed so as to stress their great need to be saved through colonization and civilization.” (Crosby 1991, 269)

Before closing this chapter, I draw attention to the irony, for artists, of positioning themselves as

the newly “indigenous” subjects of a “brand new” land. With the imposition of the Indian Act in

1876, Indigenous peoples were made wards of the state and assigned the legal status of children;

however, built into the positionality of artists of a new, youthful nation, is also an infantalization

of the colonial artist. In his address to the graduating class at Prince of Wales College

(Charlottetown, P.E.I) in 1956, Sir Ernest MacMillan suggests that Canadian artists must

struggle to be appreciated because, unlike European artists, Canadian artists have no cultural

history of their own upon which to draw (MacMillan 1956).124 Canadian history, by definition,

begins with the arrival of the white man. Artists attempt to appropriate Aboriginal and Inuit

artifacts and legends to provide an imagined history; however, it is an attempt at identity

construction that is only moderately successful—perhaps because the actual engagement of

European artists with Indigenous peoples is based on fantasies of innocence and not on actual

relationships with other human beings with their own subjectivities; their own personhoods.

With the political relationship between European settlers and Indigenous peoples as one of

displacement, dishonesty, and domination, it is little wonder then that attempts to claim a mature

artistic identity through appropriation do not succeed, leaving the Canadian artist, like the

indigenous subject, mired in a state of perpetual adolescence. The battle for artistic adulthood is

123

“In the age of discovery, because most lands had inhabitants, and the traditional legal doctrine hindered expansion, the term ‘terra nullius’ changed to mean lands that were uncultivated according to European standards i.e., where the inhabitants had no fixed residences but roamed the territory like ‘wild beasts in a forest.’ “(Canada 2001). “In the case of British colonialism, already inhabited nations were simply legally deemed to be uninhabited if the people were not Christian, not agricultural, not commercial, not ‘sufficiently evolved’ or simply in the way.” (Culhane as cited in Razack 2002, 3) 124

Also reprinted in (MacMillan 1997).

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fought on the grounds of wanting to be not-European and not-American while remaining

invested in notions of innocence and purity. Romanticizing the Noble Savage and generating a

romantic, folk past reflects one means of addressing the need for a history but it just as clearly

reflects the deep need to ignore living Indians and their on-going political struggles.

The Canadian artist is thus the not-yet-mature subject of a not-yet-mature nation. R. Murray

Schafer, an anti-establishment artist in many other respects, is one of many artists to have railed

against the colonial relationship in which Canadian artists find themselves vis à vis Europe and

the United States (Schafer 1994); however, like most other Canadian artists he rejects the sense

of being colonized without recognizing the relationship between his sense of entitlement, as a

white male artist, and his positionality as a white, male colonizer.

Conclusions

Like the trajectory of adventure narratives through which adolescent males achieve adulthood

through encounters with the primitive wilderness, the story of culture in Canada is built on a

narrative in which a “youthful” Canada achieves cultural maturity through encounters with that

which is defined as wild and primitive. The work of colonial men of the arts to constitute both

their individual identities and a Canadian national identity is revealed to be a raced and gendered

journey into personhood; a journey wholly dependent on the successful subjugation of women

and the successful subjugation of the Colonial Other. These masculine subjectivities are built on

notions of furthering the progress of the race and the progress of the nation. Their projects bring

art and music into the service of Imperial accumulation—even while asserting innocent “anti-

conquest” identities. In a continual process of making and remaking the self as Imperial,

masculine, and entitled, the Other is made strange as a means to secure the positionality of white

men as the normative centre. Through these cultural projects, actual histories of dispossession

are supplanted by idealized accounts of generous white fathers celebrated as builders of the

country and natural owners of the land—eminently suited to rule. These projects are based on

more than psychic distancing however. Each of these cultural projects is sustained through legal

and administrative structures that work towards the “triumphant emergence” of a desired

narrative and a desired set of hierarchical colonial relations rationalized on the basis of

hierarchies of human development.

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Chapter Five: Bourgeois “Women of the Arts”

As stated at the outset of this study, my goal is to trace where, how, and in what form hierarchies

of the human have become normalized through music education practices. My project seeks to

track the intersection of musical practices with relations of power as reflected in ideologies,

curricula objectives, institutional formations, and constructions of the self. The place of women

in colonial society offers a particularly rich area of inquiry as the possibilities available to, and

limitations on, differently situated women reveal a great deal about how relations of power

produce subject positions, that is, life possibilities and corresponding understandings of self. In

this chapter I consider the subject formation of Toronto-based, Anglo-Saxon women, involved in

the proliferation of classical music in Canada. The chapter is divided into four sections. In Part I,

I take up the positioning of women, in general, in colonial Canada, particularly in light of spatial

confinements and the relative positioning of white settler women vis à vis Aboriginal women

(“Women and space in colonial Canada”). In Part II, I explore processes by which settler women

are educated (and educate themselves) in order to produce themselves as white and middle class

(“Making women white”). In Part III, I analyze the space of Women’s Musical Clubs as places in

which white women use the agency available to them to produce themselves as “conservers of

culture” (“Clubland - white women’s space”). Finally, in Part IV, I explore the role of white

women as makers of the nation through their volunteer work to sustain and develop cultural

institutions, including their educational work to “elevate” the general population and establish

cultural hegemony (“Women making the nation through music”).

Part I: Women and space in colonial Canada

[T]he majority of European women who left for the colonies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries confronted profoundly rigid restrictions on their domestic, economic and political options, more limiting than those of metropolitan Europe at the time and sharply contrasting the opportunities open to colonial men. (Stoler 1989, 634)

The specific needs of the “white settler state” account for the rigid restrictions on the lives of

women in colonial Canada. The colonial project was one of domestication – a mission of

Imperial conquest marketed to Europeans as a mission to civilize; a mission to bring

“improvements” to all parts of the world—domesticating the wild in order to control and contain

all, according to notions of “natural” order (McClintock 1995, 17; Mohanram 1999, 149-174). In

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projects of domestication, however, whether it is the subordination of women to their husbands

or the subordination of colonized peoples to those attempting to dominate them, there is,

inevitably, resistance. To impose and maintain unequal relations of power requires both

constraints and enticements. If women are to remain subservient to men, there must be rationales

and laws to make stepping out of line costly. If colonized peoples are to be displaced from their

lands and legally designated as “children,” strategies—military, legal and economic—must be

put in place to enforce obedience to these terms. As Foucault writes, however, power is not only

manifested in acts of repression; it is a

total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. (Foucault 1982, 220)

If Foucault’s suggestion that seduction is as important to power as direct force, then in order to

understand the intersection of relations of power with the subjectivities of women involved in the

proliferation of classical music, it is important to look at both the constraints and enticements

that animated their engagements and identifications with the white settler state later known as

Canada. The centrality of race and gender to the colonial project can be seen by noting the

conditions imposed on the lives of Aboriginal women and the different conditions imposed on

white settler women as well as the social and legal changes that took place within the colony

when white women arrived as permanent settlers.

During the years of the fur trade, marriages took place between First Nations women and French

and Scottish men that facilitated trade relations and resulted in children of mixed heritage (Van

Kirk 1980; Lawrence 2004, 47). Aboriginal women fulfilled important roles that served both

European and Aboriginal interests during these years. They guided trapped, cleaned skins,

bartered and acted as diplomatic liaisons between white and Aboriginal communities and thus

enjoyed a degree of status and respect.125 When the goal of colonial powers shifted from

amassing wealth through the fur trade to gaining wealth by controlling land and other types of

resources, however, populating the land with subjects loyal to the British crown—both leaders

and labourers—became of utmost importance. At this time, interracial marriages ceased to be

desirable. Racial mixing, like class mixing, undermined rationales for a society premised on

125

See: Bailey and Johnston 1986; Van Kirk 2006, 1980; Brant 1994; Brown 1980.

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inequality. Thus, as the primary strategy of Imperial accumulation became domination through

population growth and population management, white men were encouraged to replace their

“country wives” with white European wives (Bailey and Johnston 1986; Lawrence 2004, 46-

50).126

A white man wanting to move into a marriage more socially advantageous needed only to

undertake a church marriage with a white woman to be absolved of any obligation to his Cree,

Ojibwa, Mohawk or other tribally-affiliated wife and children (Backhouse 1991, 9). Many

Indigenous women and their children were left destitute as a result of their change in status.

Some Aboriginal women contested their loss of standing in the courts but, within a short time

after permanent settlement began, legal precedents had been established that effectively annulled

marriages undertaken “according to the custom of the country.”127 Thus, the arrival of white

women as settlers, and the exalted status conferred on them as custodians of a distinct racial,

cultural and moral community (Stoler 1989, 149), came at the immediate cost to the status and

life possibilities of Aboriginal and Métis women (Van Kirk 1980, 40). Codes of conduct,

enforced through social censure and the imposition of gender and race-based laws, functioned to

discipline populations and encourage adherence to the “natural” order necessary for successful

imperial domination. The risk of blurring the rationales of rule was a constant source of anxiety

for colonial powers however. Preserving the privileged status of whiteness depended on

maintaining the purity of white women, a status protected by according “whiteness” obvious

privileges as well as by fanning fears of the dire consequences of “racial pollution” (Stoler 1995,

102). Thus, it was important at all times to “protect” white women from exposure to racialized

and lower class people except those “absent presences,” denied full personhood, in the form of

household servants.

In order to justify eradicating the inherent rights of peoples already occupying the land,

Indigenous peoples, previously valued as military allies and trading partners, were systematically

portrayed as dirty, savage, dangerous, childlike, and culturally primitive. As in other colonial

settings, race, class, and gender provided visible markers that determined a person’s relationship

126

“Country wives” are the Aboriginal or Métis wives of white men living in Canada whose marriages had been consecrated according to Aboriginal custom, known as “à la façon du pays” or “according to the custom of the country” (Van Kirk 1980, 116). 127

See: Sangster 2006; Backhouse 1991, 25; Lawrence 2004, 49.

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to property and the law.128 The tactic of imposing patriarchal structures onto Indigenous

communities, one also used in other colonial settings, was employed in order to undermine

traditional social and political relations within Indigenous communities (Smith 2005, 23). The

Indian Act of 1876 redefined Indigenous peoples from over 600 recognized nations into one

legal category, that of the Indian (King 2012, 65). Indigenous women were made the property of

men; Indigenous communities were made subservient to Indian Agents; Aboriginal status was

removed from native women who married white men; and all “certified Indians” were made

wards of the State (Fiske 2006; Lawrence 2003). These political moves were attempts to address

a number of concerns. For the colonizing forces, the obligation to make treaties, and the

determination of First Peoples to remain self-governing, were barriers to complete access to the

land and its resources (Gordon 2010, 66ff; Lawrence 2003, 25ff). Capitalist interests also hoped

that Aboriginal peoples could be disciplined into becoming a reserve labour force—something

they hoped to accomplish by destroying traditional economies as well as family and social

structures (Gordon 2010, 79).

As the need for population growth expanded beyond the availability of Anglo-Saxon immigrants,

non-Anglo-Saxon workers were brought into the country; however, the influx of non-white

workers and potential immigrants resulted in laws that distinguished white people from native,

white people from Chinese, black Loyalists from white Loyalists, upper class white people from

white labourers, British subjects from Francophone or Canadian-born mixed-breed subjects, and

respectable women from women tarnished by association with physical labour.129 Both the fear

of falling lower on the scale of humanity and the hope of improving one’s access to greater status

and privilege were mobilized in racialized public discourses of aspiration and, with each

classificatory practice, the seduction of believing oneself to be better than someone lower in the

hierarchy proved to be compelling.

Not all women accepted the constraints of colonial order, however, in spite of constant

admonitions. Even with threats of loss of honour, racial degeneracy and impoverishment as

inducements to ally themselves with dominant forces, some white women were attracted to the

alternative forms of social organization evident in Aboriginal and Metis populations. The ability

128

See: Barman 2006; Sangster 2006; Fiske 2006; Van Kirk 2006. 129

See: Backhouse 1999, 15; Sangster 2006, 301; Fiske 2006, 339.

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to live off the land, the important political roles held by Indigenous women in their communities,

the ability to travel and move across space, and the freedom to end marriages and choose new

sexual partners—possibilities that were commonplace for Indigenous women prior to the advent

of settler colonialism—all these elements were potentially attractive to white women living

under the constraints of Victorian attitudes towards women. These possibilities posed grave

threats to the racial and patriarchal order colonial leaders sought to establish, because they

offered alternatives to social relations and the very real possibility of racial mixing (Barman

2006, ”275). Not only did the existence of alternative modes of living threaten to blur the lines

between racial categories, they demonstrated alternatives to colonial, capitalist economic

relations (Neu and Therrien 2003, 22; Gordon 2010, 88ff). One response to the threat of “going

native” emerged in the popular literary form known as the “Captivity Narrative”—a genre of

cautionary and titillating tales aimed, in particular, at European women. Captivity Narratives told

fearsome tales of the subjection of white women to torture and depravity upon capture by Native

men (Smith 2005, 21-27). In fact, Marius Barbeau, the ethnologist who worked so closely with

Ernest MacMillan and Duncan Campbell Scott, also authored a Captivity Narrative, entitled,

Indian Captivities (Barbeau 1950). The patriarchal controls imposed on Indigenous women

functioned to undermine pre-existing forms of Indigenous social cohesion; however, they also

functioned to shut down alternative ways of life for European women—a

re-assertion of patriarchal order, if captivity narratives, such as that written by Barbeau are to be

believed, undertaken in the ‘best interests’ of white women.130

In the colonial setting, it was indeed the case that white middle and upper class women were

effectively incarcerated in their homes based on the premise that their enclosure was in the best

interests of women themselves, the family, the race, and the nation (Mohanram 1999, 171).

Within the colonial hierarchy, white women did not have adult agency. Their gender determined

their social and legal subordination to their fathers and husbands, and, effectively, to all boys and

men of their own class. Where there was room for women to gain agency, however, was as

racial subjects. Through their racial identities, a white women could embody a type of

personhood that placed her above colonized Others and allowed her to establish herself as a

civilizing agent with the duty and right to nurture the new nation (Mohanram 1999, 165). As

130

According to Andrea Smith, “between 1675 and 1763, almost 40 percent of women who were taken captive by Native people in New England chose to remain with their captors” (Smith 2005, 20).

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mothers and homemakers, it was the task of white women to make the home a space of civilized

order that would “make natural” the presence of colonial outsiders in a foreign place (Mohanram

1999, 168). Through her race, European women were no longer “immigrants” uprooted from

their homes and planted in an unfamiliar land; they became, here, in their colonial incarnation,

white woman, English woman—important personages as the bearers and keepers of civilized

values with the duty and power to coerce, correct and improve lesser Others.

The period of intense engagement in cultural activities of Euro-Canadian women working

collectively, as women, begins in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By this time, Toronto

was dominated by British immigrants131 and Aboriginal people, while not entirely absent, were

not a significant part of the Toronto city-scape. The Mississauga purchase had forced those

living in the area to leave.132 There were a few Indigenous people who had received university

educations and taken up places of relative prominence in Toronto society such as Dr. Peter

Martin133 (Freeman 2009, 244n58); however, the majority of Mississauga people previously

living in the area had been forced to move west and north of the city (Freeman 2010, 24).134

Throughout the province, the treaty process was underway with Aboriginal communities more

and more confined to reservations, far apart from each other, far from concentrations of white

settlers, and kept “in place” by Indian Agents (Gordon 2010, 75). Although “Indian” girls and

boys were being trained in industrial and residential schools to take up subordinate positions in

white homes, there was not the daily contact between colonized men and women working as

servants and labourers that was the case in other colonial settings on other continents such as

Africa and India (Cooper and Stoler 1989c). This was a consequence, in part, of diseases brought

131

92% of citizens in Toronto in 1901 were of British extraction (Elliott 1997, 17). 132

Other Indigenous groups had been present in the area that later became Toronto; however, by the eighteenth century, the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, Huron-Wendat and Petun were not resident in the area (Freeman 2009, 11-14). 133

Also known as Oronhyatekha. 134

Following the forced departure of the Mississauga, Indigenous people became invisible to Torontonians except as exotic visitors such as performers in Wild West and other shows or as sellers of crafts at the Ontario Industrial Exhibition. A few high-profile individuals remained visible in the city, but most remaining Indigenous residents were banished from the consciousness of Torontonians, who, like other Canadians, increasingly conceptualized “Indians” as living in the North or West, far from urbanized spaces. Increasing racism and the rejection of intermarriage also led to the shunning of Native relatives and the concealment of Native ancestry. (Freeman 2009, 220)

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to North America that reduced Indigenous populations but—it was also due to the physical

removal of Indigenous peoples from spaces inhabited by white society.135

White women had contact with servants and staff of lower classes, and lower classes were

routinely described as belonging to lower racial orders;136 however, unlike colonial settings such

as India, the people indigenous to Canada were no longer obviously in view; rather, they had

been pushed beyond the sightlines of Toronto’s bourgeois women. Nevertheless, even without

large numbers of Indigenous and other racialized peoples in close proximity, racialized

discourses were never absent from public and private conversations. Concerns about maintaining

the purity of the white race were evident in discourses of comportment, health, cleanliness,

eugenics and overtly racist immigration and settlement policies. 137 There were also active

chapters of the Ku Klux Klan throughout Ontario, some with very close ties to municipal

officials who were prepared to take action if a racialized person got too close to any white

woman (Backhouse 1999).138

In order to maintain their status as respectable members of the bourgeoisie, white women were

obliged to remain within the confines of authorized spaces: the home, the church, and the lofty

spaces of high society social events. Within these constraints, however, European women had

important gender and race specific roles to play as “agents of imperial culture.” Stoler writes that

women were seen as crucial to civil society not as participatory citizens in the public sphere, but as those who would insure the marriage, sexual morality, and family provided the natural foundations for civil life. (Stoler 1995, 131)

The markers of gender, race and class worn on the body were the source of one’s place in this

hierarchy. The body was therefore a primary site of battle, of possible improvement, and the

marker of privileges claimed to be intrinsically deserved according to one’s “nature.” It is not

surprising, then, that “cultivating the self” was a preoccupation for women of the middle and

135

Distant was never distant enough, however, to be final. Peggy Blair’s analysis of the Williams Treaties of Southern Ontario offers account after account of encroachments and pressures from government agents to give up more and more land in exchange for “protection” from settlers—protection that never came (Blair 2008, 34). According to Freeman, Torontonians were “at the forefront of calls for the annexation of northern Ontario” known to have a significant Aboriginal population (Freeman 2009, n61). 136

See: McClintock 1995, 52-56. 137

See: Bolaria and Li 1985; McLaren 1990; Thobani 2007, 33ff; History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008. 138

Chapters of the Ku Klux Klan are first recorded in Ontario in the early 1920s (Backhouse 1999, 187).

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upper classes with the goal of creating further distinctions between themselves and those, lower

on the scale of evolution, with fewer privileges, rights and protections.

Part II: Making women white

Colonial authority was constructed on two powerful, but false, premises. The first was the notion that Europeans in the colonies made up an easily identifiable and discrete biological and social entity; a “natural” community of common class interests, racial attributes, political affinities and superior culture. The second was the related notion that the boundaries separating colonizer from colonized were thus self-evident and easily drawn. (Stoler 1997, 345)

As Stoler observes, “natural” distinctions between races, classes and gender roles were far from

stable. Physiology was a vital determinant of class membership; however, neither the physiology

one was born with, nor “notoriously unstable bank balances” were sufficient markers of race and

class identity (Stoler 1997, 345). With such unstable categories, making oneself appear to be

“naturally” superior required a constant cultivation and policing of difference and the cultivation

of identifiable “norms.” Thus, the education of children of middle and upper class white

immigrants reflected a particular urgency to project a racially pure identity, shored up through

the production of distinguishable, exalted identities. This education took place in geographically

spacious, walled-in locations far from possible exposure to lower class children and with

considerable attention devoted to cultivating distinctive modes of being (Prentice and Houston

1975, 196). Dress, manners, comportment and knowledge of “high culture” were important

means to display the advanced status of the white race, assert class identity, display a superior

relationship to “reason” and thus justify special rights and privileges (Prentice and Houston

1975, 37; Prentice 1984, 68). Recapitulation theory, based on the notion that the maturation of

young people followed the trajectory of racial evolution, reflected fears about what might happen

to “white civilization” if young white men were not educated beyond their “natural” state of

savagery and young women were not protected from contamination (Lesko 2001, 33).

Grammar schools were created for the education of middle and upper class boys and supported

through government funding as well as private tuition. Boys who attended grammar schools were

expected to attend university and take up leadership positions in the new society—as bankers,

politicians, business leaders—if they had the means and connections and, as civil servants—if

they had talent and breeding, but limited means. For young white middle class men, education

was the key to a career, an income (if needed), future professional and political contacts, and

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social advancement. By learning “civilized” comportment, speech, dress and manners, recipients

of such an education were immediately identifiable to others with similar class backgrounds.

The education of white middle class women shared some of the characteristics of education for

men; however, it also differed significantly. While a number of families with the financial means

attempted to send their daughters to grammar schools, this option was foreclosed when the

government of Upper Canada (now Ontario) refused to provide funding for female students—an

issue that was brought before parliament several time in the late nineteenth century (Prentice and

Houston 1975, 252; Stamp 1984, 11). Private Ladies Schools thus became the primary source of

education for well-off young white women from the mid-nineteenth century to well into the

twentieth century and, while a few of these schools based their reputations on rigorous academic

studies, the education offered at Ladies Schools generally conformed to the desired place for

women, under patriarchy, by preparing them to take up their places in home and social settings

(Blair 1994, 22).

By the 1840s in Canada, music lessons were offered in many Ladies Schools and promoted as an

important asset for young women of standing—something that distinguished the education of

young women from young men (Green and Vogan 1991, 67). In addition to displaying civilized

comportment, manners and attire, having musical skills, knowledge of the Western musical

canon and being seen at musical events, offered recognizable means to be identified as

cultivated, the member of a prosperous family, and a desirable marriage partner. In such schools,

white women learned to perform whiteness as a class identity with knowledge of classical music

as an important marker of class membership. Art music required a particular education to

appreciate and thus, knowing this language also demonstrated one’s membership in an elite class

(Leppert 1992, 106). Thus, while the education of women might not lead to independent

economic capital, women could acquire “cultural capital” at these schools (Bourdieu 1993, 29).

Here women learned that their special role in the “modern world of rationality” was to uphold

the “civilizing” project of Empire. Women were not encouraged to attain professional-level

performance skills however. Indeed, too much practicing was considered selfish and a

distraction from womanly duties in the home. Thus, the feminine ideal was to have cultural skills

and knowledge but no more than necessary to enhance home life and demonstrate one’s class

credentials (Blair 1994, 3). In contrast to the imperative to display one’s musical skills as a sign

of gendered accomplishment and social status, classically-trained female musicians attempting to

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succeed professionally as composers, conductors, or performers on “complex” or “large”

instruments, were strongly discouraged by being excluded from opportunities and by public

denunciations describing their musical ambitions as degenerate and unnatural (Citron 1990, 109;

Green 1997, 58).

As discussed in the previous chapter, bourgeois men engaged with the arts saw themselves as

having interests different from, and superior to, those of businessmen. In the tension between a

love of the “high” arts, its financial precariousness under capitalism, and the assumed vulgarity

of mass-produced art, “high” art became inversely valued according to its ability to earn money

(Levine 1988, 163).The more popular a piece of music, the more banal and degraded the music,

and its listeners, were presumed to be. In contrast to economic capital, artistic worth was to be

assessed according to aesthetic qualities, understood as the distance between a work of art and

the immediate, practical or commercial.

The aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world...which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world. (Bourdieu 1984, 54)

As Bourdieu points out, however, the aesthetic disposition can only be achieved by having the

financial freedom to spend time in contemplation—away from the necessities of life. The

“distinction” conferred on the work aestheticized for contemplation likewise confers distinction

on the bourgeois art lover by “rejecting the 'human,'” that is “rejecting what is generic, common,

'easy' and immediately accessible” (Bourdieu 1984, 31). Lawrence Levine also demonstrates that

distinctions between high and low culture had distinctly racial connotations. In his book,

Highbrow, lowbrow , Levine (1988) notes that “lowbrow” and “highbrow” are used to literally

contrast the forehead size of a white male “genius” (highbrow) with the much differently

shaped, i.e. “lowbrow” skull of “a Cannibal New Zealand Chief - Deficient in [the size of the

forehead] and all the Intellectual Organs” (Levine 1988, 222).

For white women, associating the self with aesthetic modes of expression was a means to

construct an identity of rationality and rationally channelled passion. If white women could not

have the status or leadership roles available to men of their class, they could assert their status

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and maximize their claim to privilege by displaying their high degree of cultivation. These

attributes were bred into the body as visible markers of class and race identity with dress,

comportment, vocal tone, accent and knowledge of the Western music and literary canons as

evidence of the merit assumed to attach to fine breeding.

Attaining a higher level of civilization meant separating the self from the physical and the

material. Music, conceptually separated from the physicality of its production, became a means

to discipline the self but also a means to reach heights of spirituality. The irony here is that

playing an instrument is an intensely physical undertaking. Making physical engagement with an

instrument conform to ideals of physical constraint and disembodiment thus became another way

to distinguish the classical music performer from the popular performer or performer other kinds

of music. 139

The nineteenth-century concern with disciplining the body and deepening one’s spiritual

appreciation of art is evident in the calendars of two associated schools in the City of Toronto,

The Toronto Conservatory of Music, founded in 1886, and the Toronto Conservatory School of

Literature and Expression, founded in 1891 (Horwood 1936; Announcement of Courses of

Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900). 140 Both of

these schools were run as businesses (with the approval of the provincial legislature) and offered

arts- and humanities-focused educational programs that drew upon the canons of Western

classical music and Western literature. Courses such as Evolution of Expression, Oratory, Voice

Culture, Physical Culture, Physiology and Hygiene, Psychology and Pedagogy and special

139 The repertoire and comportment taught during these early years are surprisingly similar to conservatory and Faculty of Music programs offered today—reflecting a faithful adherence to the notion of “conserving” European culture against the threats of colonial distance, racial pollution, and lower class disinterest. It is true that playing a classical instrument requires a tremendous economy of movement; however, the distinction between classical musicians and popular musicians, apart from repertoire, is often in the kinds of physicality welcomed or rejected in different musical settings. Classical performers who cross over into popular music forms express a great deal of physicality usually not accepted in classical settings. The exceptions today are classical soloists, marketed on the basis not only of their skill but their individuality, who often play with a great deal more movement and expression than allowed in orchestral or choral settings. 140

This School was originally called the “School of Elocution” and then later renamed the “Toronto Conservatory School of Literature and Expression” in 1901(Schabas 2005, 32; Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900). In both incarnations, the school was effectively a division of the Toronto Conservatory of Music. I have not been able to ascertain how long the school continued to exist as a somewhat separate institution with its own board of directors.

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lectures on Mental Philosophy (and other topics), emphasized the need to discipline the mind and

body and to educate the emotions.

The Toronto Conservatory School of Elocution (renamed the Toronto Conservatory School of

Literature and Expression a year after its formation), had the following goals:

The specific work of the School will consist of a process of development for the expressional powers of the voice and body to the end of artistic rendition of masterpieces of literature, and to the further end of high thinking and living. (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900)

The school was open to both men and women, however, based on student lists and the language

of the syllabus, it catered largely to the daughters of members of the middle classes

(Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of

Elocution 1899 -1900). For example, under the heading “Academic Department” it is stated that

individual students will be prepared to “enter the regular course without loss of time” promising

that “no student is pushed beyond her present receptive power” and no student who can afford to

attend is turned away (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The

Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900) [my italics]. This statement identifies women as the

client base of the school but also highlights the individual attention offered to students in contrast

to conditions in compulsory schooling for members of the lower classes where grade leveling

was the norm and classes could contain as many as 100 students (Prentice 1984, 101). Thus the

flexibility for young women of the middle and upper classes to make their own programs and

receive individual tutoring, along with the lack of coercion, was significantly different from the

discipline, ranking and coercion imposed on students in public schools. Students in public

schools were to learn basic literacy and numeracy and prepare to take up places as farmers and

industrial workers. Students at private schools such as the School of Elocution or the TCM,

however, were to be educated to embody a higher class of people. Members of this class were to

benefit from the most advanced ideas in pedagogy and concern themselves with “the most

profound problems of the human soul” by studying the canon of English literature and Western

classical music (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: Toronto

Conservatory School of Literature and Expression 1891-1892).

The concern to educate feeling towards an appreciation of the spirituality of “great works of art”

and a separation of one’s thoughts from mundane, practical concerns is clearly articulated in

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several course descriptions of the 1899 calendar of the Toronto Conservatory School of

Expression.

Evolution of Expression

[1] This course will consist of a study of the progressive and graded steps in the Evolution of Expression, arranged in obedience to the fundamental laws by which the mind naturally unfolds, by Dr. Charles Wesley Emerson, President of the Emerson College of Oratory, Boston. The mind is a unit, but successively manifests itself through its attributes, the sensibility, the will, and the intellect. The plan of the “Evolution of Expression” accords with the relationship which these attributes bear to one another. It necessarily obeys the law of whole and part.

[2] The first step demands the interest of the student in a selection as a whole; the next step carries this interest to the point where it controls the will, and the surrender to the life-essence of the literature in question is complete; then comes a literary analysis of the parts of the selection, and an observance of their relation to the whole and to one another.

[3] It will be readily seen that the value of this teaching rests on the selection of real literature for study. Literature deals with the most profound problems of the human soul, conveyed through a vehicle of beauty, and the surrender to an interest in these problems, necessitates an openness of mind that leads to the broadest culture. In order to adequately render a great poem, one must not only understand it, he must temporarily at least live it. To live it he must assimilate spiritually its thought and feeling, which is to say he must recreate it. This involves something more than the intellectual faculties. The continual endeavour in this work is to quicken the spiritual perceptions and to invite the expression of the richest feeling.

[4] Practice in this course affords an excellent vocal drill, for the voice, in the constant endeavour to express healthy sentiments, will gradually borrow color from the thought, especially when there is daily physical drill to remove material obstruction and develop form.

[5] Educational tendency points to the time when the teacher of Expression will rank as a teacher of Metaphysics, whose work is as necessary for a practical education as is the mastery of Chemistry or Mathematics. [My italics]

Figure 14. From the Calendar of the Toronto Conservatory School of Elocution (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900)

In Paragraph One, for example, graded steps in the “Evolution of Expression” are “arranged in

obedience to fundamental laws by which the mind unfolds”—a claim that elides concepts of the

“natural” with “obedience” and “law”—conflating conclusions about “natural order,” as did so

many other scientific claims, with political goals of placing the self at the top of an evolutionary

hierarchy. Paragraph Two argues that students must learn to surrender their will “to the life-

essence of the literature in question,” suggesting a disciplining of the self to accept the lessons of

canonic literature without question. Paragraph Three makes clear that only some literature is

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“real” and that to appreciate its value, one must “surrender” the will and “assimilate spiritually

its thought and feeling” in order to “quicken spiritual perceptions and invite the expression of the

richest feeling.” Paragraphs Two and Four recall Foucault’s notion of the docile subject: one

who is knowledgeable about a field but otherwise docile, having learned to be subservient to the

wisdom of the “greats.” Paragraph Four promotes the goal of limiting expression to “healthy

sentiments” by cultivating the use of the voice through daily drill and, finally, in paragraph Five,

the project of the teacher of Expression is identified as one of Metaphysics, in this case, most

likely a study of the “natural” order of life and “right” living.141

Each of these paragraphs addresses a means to produce a class of people devoted to disciplining

the self in order to embody spiritual refinement—a quest that results in people who embody,

through their dress, gesture, vocal tone, comportment and knowledge of English literature and

Western music, a class of people free of the need to deal with daily survival. With the display of

mastery of these disciplines, one is able to perform “civilization” and take up one’s place in the

exalted, “civilizing” mission of Empire.

An examination of the course calendar for the Toronto Conservatory of Music also reveals the

goal to stylize the body and learn to embody “higher,” “spiritual” concerns. This was the

education directed, in particular, at middle class women for whom the terrain of “spirituality”

was one which allowed them a space to express emotion but in a manner defined as qualitatively

different from emotions experienced by lower classed people. To study music and literature was

to engage with the “most profound problems of the human soul, conveyed through a vehicle of

beauty” (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto

School of Elocution 1899 -1900).

141

Definitions of the term “metaphysics” are vague and have changed over time (van Inwagen 2012). My suggestion is based on the values demonstrated throughout the Conservatory calendar

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Elementary or Preparatory Instruction: Pianoforte Department The Voice Organ Department Violin, Orchestral and Military Band Instruments Sight Singing and Chorus Practice Music in Public Schools Church Music and Oratorio Harmony, Counterpoint, Composition and Instrumentation Elocution and Dramatic Action Languages [Italian, German, French and Spanish] Musical History and Biography Pianoforte and Organ Tuning Miscellaneous … 

Elocution and Dramatic Action: 

VOICE: Quantity, Pitch, Articulation, Accent, Inflection, Emphasis ACTION: Carriage, Gesture, Grace of Manner, Freedom and Ease of Posture and Attitude, Facial Expression. … 

FREE ADVANTAGES 

All students of the Conservatory will have, in addition to their regular lessons, certain FREE ADVANTAGES which could not be obtained in any other way than by the Conservatory system. Among these are pupil’s recitals, classical concerts by visiting artists and the Conservatory Faculty; instruction in rudimentary musical theory; lectures of musical subjects, historic, biographical, scientific and aesthetic; lectures by distinguished members of the medical profession on the physiology and anatomy of the vocal organs, vocal hygiene, health principles, and other relevant subjects. Arrangements have been made with the University of Toronto whereby pupils may attend a series of lectures to be delivered in University College, by Mr. W. J. Loudon, lecturer in Physics, on the principles of Musical Acoustics. These lectures will be fully illustrated by the acoustic apparatus in possession of the University, and will treat of the following subjects: Sound, its origin, nature and mode of propagation; Pitch; Intensity; Quality; Simple and Compound Tones; Harmonics; Overtones; Vibrations of Strings; Vibrations of air in wind instruments; Interference of Sound; Study of Beats; Concord and Discord; Scales, intonation and temperament. 

A course of lectures will also be delivered by Mr. T. M. Logie, B.A., on Mental Philosophy. In a preliminary lecture there will be given a brief statement of the relation of philosophy to the sciences, its problem, and, in way of solution, the fundamental conditions of the possibility of knowledge. The remaining lectures will treat of psychological subjects of special interest to the musician, such as association of ideas and habit, the senses in general, sensation of sound in particular, etc. 

These lectures will prove highly instructive and enjoyable, and will form an intellectual background of inestimable value to all who wish to acquire with their practical studies an intelligent and comprehensive view of musical art. Provision will be made for board and residence confident that they will be provided with a safe and comfortable home. 

Figure 15. Excerpts from the Toronto Conservatory of Music Calendar, 1887-1888 (Music 1887-8)

From these calendar excerpts, it is apparent that a conservatory education taught middle class

women (and men engaged with the arts) to link their identities to the notion that their

engagements with problems of the “human soul,” through art, represented the highest and most

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noble form of human development. To be concerned with the mundane problems of daily living

would reveal a lack of cultivation and a lower class background. Given that white women and

artists of either gender had a precarious status within capitalist economies, the question arises as

to whether an engagement with the “spiritual” offered a form of compensation for a lack of

political power and economic independence. Certainly, the framing of engagements with the arts

as the spiritual work to build the nation offered an enticing means to give purpose and meaning

to one’s life while exalting the self as a noble doer of noble deeds. Mundane issues were the

realm (and burden) of members of the lower classes. Through this ideology, the daily drills,

attendance at refined social events and concerts, and the physical and psychic separation of

students from daily concerns, the possibilities were created for people to believe that their

emotional lives and ways of being in the world were entirely different from, and superior to,

those experienced both by lower classed people and ‘unenlightened’ members of the business

classes. Through such schooling, and the practice of so many disciplines of the mind and body,

women engaged with the arts learned that they belonged to an exalted group of raced and classed

people who inhabited the highest realm of humanity. The performance of art-related activities in

exalted spaces also guaranteed that contamination through the presence of lower classed people

could not take place. Those providing lower-classed mundane and materially-based services in

these spaces could easily be identified through their requirement to wear livery (uniforms) thus

protecting the bourgeois self from inadvertent contamination.142

Other elements of this elite kind of education also contributed to the notion that middle class

women were exalted and that separation from exposure to mundane concerns or lower class

people was necessary not only for their safety but in order to “conserve” the psychic and physical

purity of their being. The discourse of “professionalization” used in the syllabus of the School of

Literature and Expression, for example, offered another means to create psychic distance

between students of the school from members of the lower classes. Under the category

“Domestic Arts,” a distinction is made between hand work performed by educated women,

“requiring brain, skill and creative ability” and the same work if performed by working class

women.

142

Of course, a woman choosing to have a relationship with a racialized man would have met immediate social ruin (Stoler 1995, 115).

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Those who work in these departments need be no longer artisans, but artists. The result is to-day that we find abroad, women of culture and refinement, who have taken up this work with an earnestness and sincerity that characterize success. (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900) [my italics]

Here, middle class women are encouraged to think of themselves as “artists” rather than

“artisans,” that is, lower class women who cook and sew out of necessity rather than as a

pleasant or “artistically fulfilling” occupation.

The schools and their associated self-contained and separate performance spaces also meant that

most learning and socializing takes place within a closed community. Spatial boundaries are also

reflected in the boarding arrangements available at each school. At the Toronto Conservatory of

Music, the section of the Calendar that refers to “Boarding Services” reads,

As it is proper and necessary that parents should have the fullest assurance that their children will not be led into undesirable company, satisfactory references will be required from applicants for admission to the institutions who live out of Toronto, and who desire to stay at the Conservatory Residence…. The Conservatory Residence and everything pertaining is a private institution directly responsible to and in connection with the Conservatory, and where ladies only are taken. (Music 1887-8) [my italics]

The need for references for students coming from outside of Toronto articulates the importance

of limiting attendance to students from reputable families. The demand accomplishes several

tasks: it acknowledges the fear of contamination through contact with “unworthy” people while

also inciting that fear and it adds to the cachet of the school by identifying itself as a place of

exclusivity; something to be desired and sought after.

Like the Toronto Conservatory of Music, the School of Literature and Expression also had a

women’s residence attached to it, functioning as a gilded place of spatial containment, keeping

young women away from dangers of the city and the risk of coming into contact with people of

lower classes and races. The protection of the honour of white women was of utmost political

importance in a white settler colony in order to establish the paternity of children, and to

maintain the predominance of white settlers loyal to Britain.

[A]s white women were made custodians of a distinct cultural and moral community, the protection of their honor became an issue with which all European men could agree and affirm their unity rather than their differences....any attempted or perceived infringement of white female honor came to be seen as an assault on white supremacy and European rule. (Stoler 1989, 149)

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The norm of policing women’s behaviour must have made the possibility of transgression

alternately terrifying and thrilling for young women living away from home. Some inhibition

was provided by the rules of the boarding school and by the presence of “house mothers;”

however, there were also seductive reasons offered for accepting the constraints placed on

boarding students’ lives. In the rules set out for admission to the residence, for example,

ennobling ideas are expressed about the internal characteristics of bourgeois women. Discipline,

at the Agnes Smith Residence, for example, was “almost entirely in the hands of the students”

with the students signing on to a constitution and by-laws that began with the following

statement:

We, the members of the Agnes-Smith Residence, conscious that true growth of womanhood is attained through self-discipline in the service of a high ideal, do consider it our privilege to assume the responsibility of fixing a high standard for our family life by committing ourselves to a prayerful endeavour to attain individually self-knowledge, self-reverence and self-control. (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900)

In this statement, students come to know themselves as entitled (self-reverence), ennobled (with

high ideals), capable of self-discipline (self-control), and responsible for the moral standards of

their future families. Unlike students in public, industrial, or residential schools, middle class

students of the Conservatory schools are largely entrusted with disciplining themselves. To be

the mistress of oneself was a mark of leadership and a means to distinguish the middle class

woman from someone of lower rank who was the target of considerable institutional coercion

(Curtis 1988, 366ff). Here, again, the use of exaltation is evident as a strategy of power used to

elicit class loyalty and enjoinment in the project of Imperial domination.

Whatever knowledge women gained from their private schooling, the education offered at these

schools was not intended to place women in competition with men either as artists or in other

professions. The places women were expected to take up is made clear in students’ required

participation in a club organized as a course at the School of Literature and Expression entitled

“Original Work.” This club was to be

organized and controlled by the students, and directed by the Principal, will be instituted with a view of offering opportunity for the executive and original powers of the students. It will be required of all who desire a Teacher’s Certificate that they do active and original work in this club, wither as executive officers, as lecturers, as debaters or as readers of their own writings. Here may be tested and nourished those powers which the School is essentially intended to develop. This club will also familiarize the students with the usages of Parliamentary Law, and equip them to officiate in organizations in church

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or community. (Announcement of Courses of Instruction and Methods of Teaching: The Toronto School of Elocution 1899 -1900)

A Conservatory school prepared young women primarily to become wives and mothers and

sometimes teachers (Prentice 1984, 108ff) with club work, more specifically, preparing young

women to take up highly skilled volunteer roles as social and community organizers. The

knowledge of parliamentary law was learned, not in order for women to become politicians but,

in order to run meetings in an orderly, “rational,” fashion. The status of white women was lower

than that of white men, but the volunteer work available to bourgeois women offered a way to

realize leadership ambitions while making important, if ‘secondary’ contributions to society. The

training offered in schools such as the Toronto School of Literature and Expression and the

Toronto Conservatory of Music, prepared white women to provide the organizational skills and

volunteer labour needed to support the arts organizations established and led by bourgeois men

while distinguishing themselves from lower class and/or racialized women. By running arts

organizations on a volunteer basis, bourgeois women could produce themselves as noble, as

spiritual, and as leaders in the colonial project to “advance civilization.”

The schooling offered to young women through Ladies Schools offered an education

disconnected from material concerns that likely also left its graduates ill-prepared for hard

realities of survival—if the need to become self-supporting arose. As subjectivities, women

educated in such settings embodied a kind of “exalted naivety.” They were taught to see

themselves as special, as having been initiated into the most sublime of artistic experiences,

while being kept separate from the knowledge of people of other races and classes—except as

negative examples of what they should not become. They were encouraged to see themselves as

having an important role in shaping and upholding the values of “civilization.” They knew

themselves as belonging to the top of the racial hierarchy and were tantalizingly close to the top

of the human hierarchy; however, they were not intended to see themselves as eligible or able to

do the same things as men. Conforming meant social status and security—at least in theory.

Moving away from expected roles and behaviours meant risking a great deal—not only in terms

of status but in terms of physical survival. The material, social and legal inducements to identify

as a uniquely deserving member of the higher classes were thus as seductive as the loss of class

membership was terrifying.

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Part III: Clubland - white women’s space

In the mid-nineteenth century, women began to establish clubs where they could come together

with other women for social interaction and to work on particular “social” issues considered

suitable for women. The clubs offered a means to escape the confines of their homes and to

engage in concerns of personal and societal improvement (Whitesitt 1997). By 1899, when the

Women’s Musical Club of Toronto was established, women’s musical clubs had been flourishing

throughout North America for nearly thirty years (Elliott 1997, 22). Women’s musical clubs

arose in the larger context of the Women’s Study Club movement which, in turn was part of a

larger Women’s Club Movement organized around projects of social betterment (Elliott 1997,

22).143 Clubs provided places where women could take on leadership roles and flourish in spaces

outside the home and away from male interference.

To those stepping outside the home for the first time they provided the security that went with being associated with like-minded women….Through these clubs many Canadian women learned the skills of organization, public speaking, and social investigation, and this may have been of more importance than the aims for which the women had allegedly come together. (Elliott 1997, 23)

There were eight musical clubs for white women in Toronto by the end of the nineteenth century

and no shortage of women seeking to become involved (Elliott 1997, 26). Robin Elliott writes

that while men dominated the public arena of professional music making in Toronto, there was

an extensive and flourishing arena for music in the home led by women. Women also dominated

the world of day-to-day teaching in various conservatories and schools of music in the city. For

example, in 1900, over 65% of registered music teachers in Toronto were women (Elliott 1997,

21).144 Many Toronto, middle and upper class women had indeed attained a very high level of

performance standard having received advanced training in musical centres such as New York,

Leipzig and Vienna (Elliott 1997, 21).

143

Racialized women were not admitted to these clubs; however an enormous and highly influential network of clubs and associations run by black women also proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Blair 1994, 3n10). I do not chronicle this movement however as my goal is to track the subjectivities of those who considered themselves makers of the nation—as white settler space. 144

Karen Blair suggests that American women club members were not accomplished enough to be music teachers or perform at a high level. It is beyond the scope of this study to determine whether Toronto, with its large number of female music teachers, was atypical; however, both Canadian and American clubs offered different categories of membership for those who wished to perform and those who wished to participate as listeners and sustainers (Blair 1994, 3; Elliott 1997, 47).

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The Toronto Women’s Musical Club was originally formed as a way to provide performance

opportunities for highly-skilled professional and semi-professional female musicians and as a

means to host solo and chamber music recitals of visiting artists (Elliott 1997, 26ff). Club

activities were designed to offer musical and intellectual “improvement” and provide

performance opportunities for women for whom it was not proper to perform in public venues.

The level of musical education reflected in the membership of the club was remarkable. Many of

the original members were on the teaching staff of Toronto’s dominant music schools, i.e., the

Conservatory of Music, the College of Music and the Metropolitan School of Music (Elliott

1997, 19), and most had impressive musical pedigrees including extensive professional study in

Europe with well-known musical masters. We know about these studies in part because of the

unbroken practice of publicly tracing one’s artistic pedigree in concert biographies. Such

biographies acknowledge the importance of one’s teachers; however, they also function as a

display of pedigree, much like the custom of proclaiming one’s blood lines in an aristocratic

dynasty.

Toronto music critic, Emma Stanton Dymond (1900) draws a portrait of the cultural milieu as

well as the values embraced by the women’s musical club movement:

The dawn of a new century finds the position of Canadian women in Music firmly established, elevated and hopeful. Bearing in mind the youth of our country, the rapid growth of interest in music, the number of those engaged in music—both as an Art and as a Profession—are all alike amazing….[W]e find an army of enthusiastic young women, born, trained and taught in Canada, winning places in the front ranks of teachers, pianists, vocalists and the music professional generally….Music has, indeed, been a plant of rapid growth in our midst….The educational value also of women’s music clubs for study of different composers’ lives and works cannot be too highly estimated. These have sprung up almost everywhere within the past ten years. (Dymond as cited in Elliott 1997, 22)

In this passage we see the notion of improvement (“elevated” women) as the source of hope in a

country which white immigrants conceive of as “new” and on a journey of “progress.” The goal

of improvement is further reflected in the project to study the work and lives of composers—the

source of textual, and, almost exclusively male authority in the world of classical music. The

goals for women involved in musical clubs were to advance their skills and understandings as

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musicians, music connoisseurs, and purveyors of “civilized” culture—reflecting a lack they

perceived within themselves as well as a lack they perceived in the surrounding society.145

The Toronto Women’s Musical Club offered experiences quite different from those offered at

the all-male Arts and Letters Club. First, the Women’s Musical Club did not have its own

“clubhouse;” rather, most meetings took place in member’s homes. Second, the clubs were

formed, originally, to provide performance spaces for its female members—a problem not faced

by men who could perform in public without risk of censure. Third, while the men’s Arts and

Letters Club was a space for boundary-crossing, for role playing and for exploring the risqué146

women’s clubs were not places of play or boundary crossing; rather, they were social gathering

places that focused on personal betterment and/or the moral and intellectual betterment of lesser

“Others.”

Women’s clubs were places where bourgeois women could produce themselves as intelligent,

competent and productive—all aspects of themselves they were not otherwise welcome to

express in the public sphere. In a world that devalued women’s intelligence and required

evidence of breeding in order to claim a respectable status, playing at being Bohemian had no

place in the club life of bourgeois women. For women, of any class, the likelihood of not being

taken seriously was far too great to play at being anything other than upright and respectable.

While significant numbers of male artists embraced their lower social status by embracing a

Bohemian identity, this type of identity was far too precarious for women who would be laying

themselves open to suggestions of sexual wantonness. Thus, bohemianism was unwelcome in

female club settings—a further reflection of the lower status of women, even these highly

privileged women, and their precarious positions under patriarchy.

The use of space to define who could be present and who must be absent was central to all

aspects of life for bourgeois women. In the space of their clubs women could control who came

into their social circles. They could also protect themselves from exposure to people and their

concerns, outside of their class, with, of course, the exception of their servants. Clubs provided

145

Of course, as women, it was a given, rehearsed in every educational and social setting, that they can never improve themselves enough to become equal to men. The discourse of “improvement” is necessarily based on notions of insufficiency and constructions of desire. 146

“Mature” masculinity was performed in formal photos; however, there was no inhibition about taking photographs or making drawings of these men “at play” (McBurney 2007).

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socially sanctioned space in which women could move outside the confines of their homes,

develop friendships with other propertied women and develop and share their skills as

organizers. They were safe from the male gaze, but in the interests of propriety, maintaining the

respectable status of clubs invited self-policing. Similar to the men’s Arts and Letters Club,

spatial boundaries were thus an important part of what club events had to offer and maintaining

exclusive membership criteria was a key strategy to protect these boundaries. In contrast to lower

class musical venues, such as vaudeville or minstrelsy stages which could be attended by

members of any class, club concerts took place in settings that could not easily be permeated by

lower class bodies or concerns. Keeping people out illustrates how psychic separations are

created and maintained. If concerns outside one’s social circles are not visible, it is easy to

imagine that they do not exist. The separation of material concerns from concert venues also

mirrors the determination to treat the music itself as residing on a spiritual plane above and

beyond bodily or material concerns

The enhanced freedom of movement made available to white women through their club spaces

must also have provided physical and psychic space, for at least some members, to challenge

their political and economic status and participate in battles for women’s suffrage and status as

“persons” (Blair 1994, 6). As the history of the first and second waves of the women’s

movement has demonstrated, however, many upper and middle class white women were aware

of what they were lacking vis à vis middle and upper class white men but far fewer were

concerned about, or perhaps even aware of, the relationship between their own class and race

privilege and the oppressive conditions facing lower class, racialized women and men.147

Part IV: Women making the nation through music

In contrast to the struggles white women faced pursuing a professional education, for example, in

science, math or medicine or as a conductor or composer, middle and upper class women were

very much encouraged to take up the volunteer roles of social convener, patron of the arts, arts

attendee, and organizer of charitable projects. Having the leisure time available to undertake

volunteer work was an indication of the financial prosperity of one’s husband and another

147

Significant insights towards understandings of systemic oppression have come from “women of colour” activists challenging the frameworks of First and Second Wave feminists. Authors include: Lorde 1984; hooks 1982, 1990, 1992; Davis 1981, 1998; Williams 1991; Ng 1993; Hill Collins 1998, 2006; Razack 1998, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008; Bannerji 1993; Bannerji 1995, 1997, 2000.

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marker of race and class identity. According to Marjory MacMurchy, there were 250,000 women

engaged in some form of club work in 1916.

The typical member…is married, not single. She is middle-aged. She is a woman with household occupations and yet with some leisure. Her children are wholly or half-way grownup and she is able to undertake some work outside….She also has sufficient initiative and energy to make other occupation necessary. She must have social intercourse. Few things are more unhealthy mentally than for a woman whose work is keeping house to remain indoors alone, all day, every day. The need of this middle-aged, married woman for work and social co-operation, her impulse to help outside, are the forces which have created women’s organisations. (MacMurchy as cited in Elliott 1997, 23)

Women volunteers were thus well-off and with time on their hands. The reference, here, to

mental health also suggests an effort to strengthen the justification for women-only spaces away

from their households and the oversight of their husbands, by tapping into the widely

disseminated literature on health and hygiene—important, especially for women who were

responsible for “creating a strong and healthy race” (Danylewycz 1991, 137).

The work undertaken by women to sustain arts organizations was considerable; however, the

volunteer nature of the work, and the fact that it was “women’s” work meant that it was

presumed to have less value than the artistic work undertaken by men. At the same time it had

more value than similar work when performed by women of lower classes. Lower class women

had to sustain their own families by, at the very least, cooking, cleaning, making clothing, and

raising their own children. In their own homes, this was unpaid labour but was not volunteer

labour. Many lower class women also provided similar kinds of work, as paid servants, in middle

and upper class households. Thus, when club members undertook fundraising projects requiring

all kinds of domestic, organizational and administrative labour, their ability to do these tasks, as

volunteers, also marked these women of as members of a higher class.

The need for a female volunteer labour force for artistic and social welfare projects was an

indication both of the precarious status of artistic endeavours under capitalism and the social

instability caused by a system dependent on class inequality. Two different discourses emerge to

explain these recurring crises. The first is the discourse that explains persistent poverty as a

function of “merit.” Poverty was blamed on those experiencing it. Being born to a “savage state,”

lacking in “good taste” and good decision-making abilities and having an insufficient

commitment to self-improvement, were argued to be “personal,” “class,” racial and gendered

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characteristics and the principal barriers preventing lower class people from attaining better lives

(Curtis 1988, 145ff). In other words, poverty was self-induced and different entitlements were

the result of merit, not of political and economic structures or the biases sustaining them. Quite

different from this, however, was the discourse explaining the persistent lack of financial

resources to sustain bourgeois arts activities. Here, the financial challenges facing artists were

due, not to a lack of merit, but a lack of sophistication on the part of business and government

men, as well as those of the lower/racialized classes whose “insensitivity” to great art was proof

of their base natures.

For a bourgeois world which conceived its relation to the populace in terms of the relationship of the soul to the body, 'insensitivity to [classical] music' doubtless represents a particularly unavowable form of materialist coarseness. (Bourdieu 1984, 19)

The inverse relationship between popularity and cultural value, together with the belief that the

lower classes were spiritually unevolved and dangerously undisciplined, provided the impetus

for crusades by both men and women of the arts to bring art to the “masses”(Levine 1988,

172ff).148 In projects to instill “an identity of tastes and aspirations” (Tippett 1990, 35ff) both

discourses merge as middle class cultural crusaders seek to provide moral improvement to the

lower classes by exposing them to classical music.

Women with access to wealth prove to be vital to the establishment and maintenance of artistic

institutions throughout North America. The work the Toronto Women’s Musical Club revolved

around organizing concert series and supporting the careers of professional and upcoming artists

by providing them with paid performance venues. This work was largely directed inwards, for

the enjoyment of members of their own class. The work of the Women’s Committee of the

Toronto Symphony Orchestra, however, was different in that it required stepping out into the

larger public domain to raise money for ensembles that performed in public settings and to

educate audiences from a broader public (Whitesitt 1997, 66). Like the Women’s Musical Club,

committee members were drawn from the elite and wealthy of Toronto society and, in fact, there

148

The “masses” as a term to identify an amorphous, dangerous group of people, arises in the context of industrial production and wage labour. Here artisans, farmers or skilled workers in other areas lose even a trace of individual agency, at least in public discourse, as mass production of goods also becomes the norm. Workers, having lost the ability to provide for themselves, except as wage earners, are painted more and more as “the unruly” mob throughout the nineteenth century, drawing on fears of the mob violence of the French revolution and fears of worker uprisings in crowded urban centres (Curtis 1988, 145; Levine 1988, 176).

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was a great deal of overlap in the membership of the two organizations.149 As with the musical

clubs, membership was tightly controlled so there was never any risk of having to mingle with

people outside one’s class except in a didactic role.

The Toronto Symphony Women’s Committee was formed in 1923, shortly after the post-WWI

reincarnation of the Toronto Symphony, in order to raise money for the operation of the

orchestra and to pay the salaries of the music director and musicians (Alexander 1984, 1). Two

kinds of activities became the focus for symphony women’s committees: raising money to

support their orchestras and creating educational programs in order to elevate the taste of the

general public and thus create future audiences (Whitesitt 1997).

The lower status of female volunteers is apparent in a number of areas. Women committee

members were identified according to their husbands’ first and last names with their own first

names printed afterwards in brackets, the manner of documenting committee memberships up

until 1983 (Alexander 1984). Major management decisions were made by the prominent men

who sat on the Symphony’s Board of Directors with no formal requirement to take into account

suggestions made by women’s committee members. Artistic decisions were made by male music

directors. Apparently it was not uncommon for conflicts of will to take place between women’s

committee members and music directors. Likewise, the work of “committee ladies” was

frequently ridiculed by male board members (Locke and Barr 1997, 40; Whitesitt 1997, 77, 74).

Indeed, women had little formal power in the symphony organization. In spite of lack of access

to power, however, it was these women who provided the fundraising skills and volunteer labour

that allowed management and artistic decisions to come to fruition. According to historian, Linda

Whitesitt nearly all symphony orchestras in North America were established and sustained

through the support of women volunteers and women benefactors (Whitesitt 1997, 73).150

As stated throughout this dissertation, my interest is not to chronicle cultural projects for their

own sake but to track the subject positions available to and taken up by different cultural actors

and notice how and where hierarchies of the human are institutionalized and normalized as

149

For example, Mrs. A. W. Austin, Mrs. George Dickson were on the executives of both the Women’s Musical Club and the Toronto Symphony Women’s Committee (Elliott 1997, 227; Alexander 1984, 1). 150

Within this milieu, there were women with tremendous financial resources and male artists with none. (Locke and Barr 1997).Wealthy women were often patrons of specific artists in which case, the woman clearly had higher social standing, during her lifetime, than the male artist who may have had talent but no financial or social standing.

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effects of their activities. The primary places of agency for middle and upper class white settler

women were as reproducers of the race, through their biological and nurturing functions as

mothers, and as reproducers of colonial hierarchical value systems. While the work of white

women in supporting cultural projects was impressive, we cannot afford to forget that making

culture in North America took place in the context of establishing white settlers as “naturally”

and “deservedly” dominant. These were the strategic tasks of asserting pre-eminence in an alien

environment and against the interests of those resisting colonial domination. These were

missions to “improve” but were also missions based on the assumption that the very presence of

white settler colonies in North America was, in itself, an act of “improvement.” There was

nothing neutral about these missions. They were assertions of dominance that were successfully

implemented because of the strategic use of force. Throughout the colonized world, the

imposition of “culture” has been a device used to break down social structures and impose forms

of discipline in order to make populations easier to rule. It has not been a gift but a weapon.

Karen Blair refers to women in their roles as supporters of the arts as “torchbearers,” that is, as

women who took on the task of “leading others to the highest ideals” (Blair 1994, 7). I suggest

that is the female version of “The Great Adventure” expressed in the Arts and Letters Club’s

insignia. Women involved in the work of sustaining symphony orchestras “were convinced of

the power of music to uplift and saw the symphony orchestra as a vehicle for social betterment”

(Whitesitt 1997, 77). The mission to elevate the masses through exposure to high art music was

based on a perceived “lack” that needed to be corrected; a perceived crisis that women, as “self-

appointed guardians of the arts” had a moral imperative to address (Tippett 1990, 50). The

corollary personages to those in need of correction are “benefactors”; that is, those who “know

best” and are in a position to impose their ideas on others. Cultural education proves to be one of

the particular domains available to white women and they take on this role as a mission to

introduce standards of repertoire, decorum, comportment, emotional and musical expression, and

concert behaviour—valorizing a hierarchical view of the world while denouncing other modes of

expression and other modes of being. These are also the ideals women have learned in the

process of being educated to become white and respectable women and these are the standards

that are first brought to and then policed in student and general audiences of classical music.

Lawrence Levine documents that in the early part of the nineteenth century, musical genres of all

sorts were part of public entertainments accessible to all class levels. Over the course of the

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nineteenth century, however, efforts to sacralize the “classical” repertoire were undertaken to

create distinctions between “great works” that educate the soul, and forms of music that “simply

entertain.” Where mixed-class audiences had previously felt entitled to engage with performers

and their materials, this interaction was made unwelcome through various disciplining

procedures, with critics applauding conductors who refused any attempt

to win the applause of the multitude by concessions to vulgar prejudice or meretricious tastes….the way to deal with the “average Philistine” was to say firmly: “This masterpiece deserves your attention…for it has the power to raise you to a higher spiritual level. If you do not like it now, pray that you may learn to like it, for the defect is yours.” (Levine 1988, 189)

Levine presents considerable evidence that symphonic music and other forms of entertainment,

musical or otherwise, were not segregated in public performance events in the early part of the

nineteenth century (Levine 1988). Over the course of the nineteenth century in North America,

however, we move from heterogeneous and sometimes raucous audiences enjoying Bellini to

Shakespeare and expressing pleasure or displeasure quite openly, to highly selective, elitist

audiences for whom only the purest renditions of the classical repertoire would suffice and only

polite applause was allowed. The reinforcement of class associations with particular repertoires

was undertaken by conductors, composers, educators, musicians and critics, all of whom were

attempting to impose forms of discipline on what they perceived to be crude and unruly

populations. By the time the Toronto Symphony Women’s Committee was founded, the

sacralization of the classical repertoire had been effectively normalized in North America, with

clear delineations of race and class membership, as well as evolutionary development, associated

with different forms of music (Levine 1988, 235). In some respects, the work of various

symphonic women’s committees lessened the effects of these class dividing practices through

their extensive educational work. There was a democratic element in making the classical and

symphonic repertoire available to all children (Blair 1994, 9) and, indeed, members of the

Toronto Symphony Women’s Committee took on an inordinate number of projects in order to

provide educational concerts for the “masses” (Alexander 1984). That being said, the notion that

education concerts are teaching children to appreciate “good,” music, in opposition to what was

designated as popular, folk or degenerate music, was also core to this tradition of education, the

construction of class hierarchies, class-based notions of merit and learning reverence for one’s

social and musical “betters.”

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During the early twentieth century, one of the effects of this educational work was the sense that

developed amongst a music-playing public that only the highest performance standards of the

loftiest music were worth hearing. As a result, music in the home started to dwindle as the

“higher value” of professional music-making was promoted (Whitesitt 1997, 73).151 Another

effect was the production of passive audiences no longer comfortable interacting with

performers. As well, the role of women in fundraising for symphony orchestras wrested control

from musicians and cooperative forms of organization (Whitesitt 1997, 73). Finally, the

separation of popular from “high art” music was made rigid thus producing the difficulty of

attracting sufficient audience numbers. Ralph Locke poses an interesting question about the work

of Women’s Committees:

However gratifying [the activity of musical patronage ] may have been to her, was music essentially serving as one more element in the domestication, the confinement of the potentially powerful, threatening, independent female? (Locke and Barr 1997, 92)

Domestication and disciplining are certainly amongst lessons experienced by the female

“torchbearers” of “serious” music; however, middle and upper class women also sought to

impose a form of domestication onto racial and lower class Others. In this role, middle and upper

class women understood themselves to be bearers of cultural merit and thus bearers of relative

power. While allowing their own energies to be domesticated and channeled towards supporting

the hierarchical structures sought for patriarchal, colonial governance, middle and upper class

women “worked on” lower class persons in order to lead them to desire and attain “self-

improvement.” As volunteer social campaigners, they could produce themselves as noble and

generous through their work to influence the tastes and behaviours of lower class persons—

helping to “lift them up”—without having to consider how their own privileged class positions

were being reaffirmed and sustained through these projects to “educate the feelings of Others.”

The Toronto Symphony Women’s Committee operated continuously with only one or two breaks

from 1923 up until 1995 when the name was changed to the Toronto Symphony Volunteer

Committee—reflecting the new reality that bourgeois women, many of whom now have careers,

can no longer provide all the volunteer labour necessary to run an arts organization. What has

remained the same, however, is the dependence of the orchestra organization on volunteer

151

The availability of recorded music also reduced the impetus for music-making in the home (Locke and Barr 1997, 28)

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labour, the enhanced social status of “generous” donors, and enhanced class identities offered to

volunteers through such affiliations.

Historical and recent fundraising events of the Toronto Symphony Women’s and now Volunteer

Committee are noteworthy for their lavishness, giving volunteers and donors social experiences

akin to those offered in aristocratic circles. Being a volunteer for the Toronto Symphony is to be

a member of an elite circle of middle and upper class patrons.152 A recent fundraising event, for

example, included a grand opening party featuring rare and magnificent pieces of Fabergé, with

the Russian Ambassador as a guest, and lavish gourmet meal featuring over 46 chefs, 40 service

staff and lilacs flown in from France (Toronto Symphony Volunteer Committee). Indeed, the

association of notions of social betterment and “naturally” being led by those proclaimed to be

our social, intellectual and moral “betters,” remains unchallenged.

Christopher Small argues that forms of music and the social networks that surround them are

representations of what adherents experience as “ideal” social relationships (Small 2011, xi). In

symphony concerts, the one personage allowed to gesticulate, grunt, move freely about the stage

and embody the emotional and expressive dimensions of the music, is the male conductor. All

others are commanded to be still until given permission to perform or to respond to a

performance. There is a great deal of theatre involved here, but it is theatre that has emerged out

of cultural projects intended to establish particular notions of ideal relationships—in this case,

relationships dominated by an all-knowing male priest-figure interpreting the musical gospel to

lesser publics.

Conclusions: Owning respectability

The sphere of the arts, as a site of “spiritual ennoblement” and race and class identity provided

ideal opportunities for bourgeois women to embody propriety while attaining a level of semi-

public authority. Professional male musicians created and ran schools, universities, choirs and

orchestras in the public sphere; however, none of these male-led activities could have thrived

152

This is based on published materials that cover the period up until 1985. Current requirements for membership include filling out an online application with details about one’s professional standing and skill sets. An annual membership fee is also required (Toronto Symphony Volunteer Committee).

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without the thousands of hours of skilled volunteer labour provided by women’s groups.153 The

women who become patrons and defenders of the musical “high arts” had access to private

education, the economic means to study music, and time available to donate to the production of

cultural events. They had a great deal invested in establishing their position of privilege in the

colonial world; however, under patriarchy, their lives were also precarious—not at all to the

same degree as Aboriginal, working class women or other racialized women, but in ways that

were significant nevertheless. In a pyramid structure built on notions of rationality and

hierarchies of the human descending from white rational men to ever more degenerate categories

of human worth, for the bourgeois woman, possessing characteristics of respectability, civility,

grace, chastity and purity were important, not only for the status they conferred but, because a

lack of these characteristics could place one’s survival in jeopardy. Maintaining their respectable

status was facilitated by spatial and psychic separations. Thus, what was normalized for

bourgeois women involved with the proliferation of classical music was a cloistered and precious

world, shared with other women and men “of distinction.” The pleasure-filled facets of their club

lives functioned to reaffirm the superiority of their race and class identities. Through their

“volunteer” work, their secondary status vis à vis middle and upper class men was repeatedly

enacted but, at the same time, this enactment placed them above everyone else. Where bourgeois

women engaged with members of lower classes, it was as ‘givers of charity’ or ‘bringers of high

culture’—roles which did not challenge class structures or disparities in wealth. Superior in

every sense except gender and separated from real life exposure to the realities of lower class

lives, white bourgeois women had many reasons to understand themselves as exalted and

innocent subjects. There is no political innocence here though.

Women, as bearers of colonial culture, were the handmaidens of this system of “ideal relations”

mirrored in colonial systems of governance and, while these activities may seem relatively

benign, the establishment of class categories through this work was only one step removed from

the legal, military, and economic efforts undertaken to displace Indigenous peoples and keep

racialized Others in their assigned places. The second woman to become president of the

Women’s Musical Club of Toronto (in 1905), for example, was married to the chief land

commissioner of the Canadian Pacific Railway, L.A. Hamilton, in charge of CPR’s western

153

Some women also had successful careers running Ladies Schools (Elliott 1997, 37)and some wealthy women became extraordinarily successful as early symphony managers (Whitesitt 1997, 73ff).

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development (Elliott 1997, 56). Indeed, the CPR, with the support of the Government of Canada,

expropriated vast quantities of land that had been set aside, through the Treaty process, for

Indigenous peoples (Neu and Therrien 2003, 43). Through these expropriations, railway directors

became vastly wealthy while Indigenous peoples were disempowered and impoverished. In this

case, there are no degrees of separation between the wealth of Constance Bodington Hamilton,

her ability to take up the role of “cultural leader,” and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples

across the country. Mary Richmond Kerr Austin, the club’s president from 1910-13 had a

similarly close relationship to the interests of Imperial expansion. Her husband, Albert William

Austin succeeded his father as President of the Dominion Bank (Elliott 1997, 68). It is thus no

coincidence that the women who took on the role of sustaining the cultural work of male cultural

“adventurers” also had the most invested in establishing the legitimacy of the colonial project

and white bourgeois hegemony. Colonial cultural projects, in spite of their embrace of the

aesthetic and immaterial, were only one to two steps removed from the physical violence of

colonization. As we will see in the following chapter, music education was also directly

associated with producing relations of dominance and oppression in a number of educational

settings.

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Chapter Six: Music, Identity and the Management of Populations

In the previous two chapters, I have demonstrated how physical locatedness, spatial separation,

discourses of cultivation, civilization, race and class supremacy, and investments in the

separation of music from material realities, provide conditions for the subjectification of white

middle and upper class men and women, as Imperial subjects, for whom the classical music

repertoire, and the discourse of aesthetic distancing, are primary sources of shared sensibilities,

shared pleasures, and shared identities.

In this chapter I move away from elite musical undertakings and explore music, created for a

broad public, which is intended to generate loyalty to particular notions of Canadian identity,

history and belonging. As already discussed in Chapter Three, music devoted explicitly to

celebrations of the British Empire was widely performed in Canada throughout the nineteenth

century and well into the twentieth century. The music of Empire offered compelling moments

of pleasure in which notions of identity could be linked with notions of loyalty to the project of

Imperialism. These musics are easily recognized today as a form of propaganda that drew many

people into identifying with an idealized notion of Imperial benevolence;154 however, other

musical projects emerged out of the specific context of colonial Canada that were also intended

to domesticate populations and assert the moral primacy of the colonial project to establish a

white settler state. These musical projects included the development of public school music

programs, competitive music festivals, the CPR Folk Festivals, school, church and civic choirs

with a focus on particular kinds of repertoire, historical pageants, and music written for civic

celebrations.155 Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, countless musical projects had been taken

up with the goal of producing a unified cultural identity of “tastes and aspirations,” and a

population sentimentally attached to the idea of Canada as a “nation” (Tippett 1990, 35-62;

154

Victoria Day (May 24) used to be attached to another day called Empire Day. Dominion Day, (July 1) is now known as Canada Day (Parker Friday, May 18, 2012; Empire Day; Victoria Day). Many communities still offer special celebrations to mark the relationships between Canada and the British Empire (Events in Cumberland). 155

“Singing Schools” were also an important social meeting place for white immigrants to Canada; however, I have not come across any evidence that demonstrates a club-focus on notions of national identity. For information on Singing Schools, see: (Farquharson 1983; Kallmann).

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Mackey 2002, 73). Common to all of these projects were the goals of creating unified notions of

merit, obedience to authority, specific notions of national belonging, and patriotic loyalty.

This chapter is divided into four sections. The first three take up music in officially sanctioned,

public settings: schools, festivals and public spectacles: Part I: “School music and the making of

docile subjects;” Part II: “Music festivals – Competitions and the CPR Folk Festivals;” Part III:

“Public spectacle and the production of historical memory.” The final section, Part IV, “Popular

music and reassuring identities,” looks at how forms of popular music function to shore up

fragile notions of racial supremacy on an individual basis.

Part I: School music and the making of docile subjects

Nineteenth century debates about public education signaled the beginning of contestations over

the purpose of public education, what forms it should take, what knowledge should be imparted,

and whose interests’ education should serve. For religious and political leaders, educational

reform was understood to be inextricably linked to state formation. Education was the primary

site for state influence over the development of character with character formation understood as

both a moral and economic project, vital to the success of the “new” nation of Canada (Curtis

1988, 24-25).

As discussed in Chapters Four and Five, education for the men and women of the middle and

upper classes was intended to produce people able to take up gender-specific leadership roles.

The priorities for public education were quite different. The development of public education, as

a means to discipline and manage populations, was an outgrowth of studies to systematize the

management of criminal populations (prisons), the “insane” (asylums), and systems of public

health (hospitals) (Curtis 1988, 26; Foucault 1977). Basic numeracy and literacy were to be

taught but the priority of public education was to be moral education and the reproduction of a

desired social order amongst those with far less of a vested interest in the maintaining the status

quo. Students were to learn to internalize the desired social order by experiencing a hierarchy of

merit in their daily school lives. For example, white women were vital to the educational project,

as a source of low-waged teachers, men, only, were to be trained as administrators and

supervisors carrying disciplinary authority (Curtis 1992; 1988, 255). Within this model, children

were to be disciplined to obey authority, accept the truth of classificatory projects, take up roles

as workers in industrial society, and have a strong sense of patriotic loyalty to the nation (Curtis

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1988, 102). Formations of the self were to be achieved through the ever-expanding science of

pedagogy that included the study and standardization of buildings, tables and chairs, seating

arrangements, evaluation systems, regimented timetables and a separation of schools and

students from encounters with non-students and non-teachers—all according to notions of

scientific order (Prentice 1984, 27). Foucault describes the possibilities that emerge from the

seriation of spaces and people:

The organization of a serial space was one of the great technical mutations of elementary education. It made it possible to supersede the traditional system (a pupil working for a few minutes with the master, while the rest of the heterogeneous group remained idle and unattended). By assigning individual places it made possible the supervision of each individual and the simultaneous work of all. It organized a new economy of the time of apprenticeship. It made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding. (Foucault 1977, 147)

In the mid-nineteenth century, Egerton Ryerson took up the crusade to establish a centrally

controlled educational apparatus for the children of members of the lower classes as a means to

produce populations with shared experiences and values (Curtis 1988, 14). With the notion of

state controlled education, “learning” was conceptualized as an entirely new domain, separated

from other aspects of life. There was considerable resistance, from many parents and students, to

centralized control over education. Many people did not want to turn their children over to be

influenced by interests they did not recognize as their own. Parents, regardless of their familial or

divergent economic interests, feared they would no longer be able to decide what their children

should learn; rather, the state, and its authorized representatives, would gain the right to

determine what all children, at least, all lower class children, must learn. There was sufficient

resistance to forced schooling during the nineteenth century that new laws were created to punish

parents with imprisonment for failing to send their children to school (Curtis 1988, 183ff).156 As

in other settings, the resistance apparent here is an indicator that relations of power are in play:

forms of self-determination and social order are at stake.

Ryerson’s successful battle to achieve centralized control of education in Ontario established a

paternalistic relationship between the state and its citizens, removed a significant site of

democratic control from parents and local communities, and institutionalized the notion of a

156

This law was applied to individuals and also had a powerful effect on some religious communities. For example, Mennonite families faced considerable persecution for refusing to send their children to public schools—a persecution that is still part of contemporary memory in these communities (Kenna and Stawicki 1995, 43).

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multi-year regimen of discipline to which all young people would be subject (Curtis 1988, 22,

205). Whether in the form of elite education for the middle and upper classes or public education

for the “masses,” Ryerson, as other proponents of the educational state, understood education to

be a process of subjectification; a process based on the ‘subject-shaping’ management of action

(Thobani 2007, 8; Curtis 1988, 16). The more individualized education of middle and upper class

students in Grammar and Ladies schools prepared this group of people to take up leadership

roles. A public school education, on the other hand, was regimented and regulated based on

notions of managing populations through an understanding of group behaviours and group

identities. Bruce Curtis describes the social tensions that Ryerson hoped to ameliorate through

compulsory education:

Educational practice would resolve the contradiction between the formal equality of citizenship and the social subordination of the mass of the population demanded by bourgeois civilization. It would create social subjects who enjoyed and actively embraced their social subordination, who experienced subordination as equality and liberty. (Curtis 1988, 106)

Ryerson’s goals emerged in response to the difficulties of governing a colony with constant

influxes of new immigrants and resistant Aboriginal populations. The recent memory of the Riel

rebellions along with ongoing challenges from longer standing immigrant populations resistant

to class hierarchies was part of the instability Ryerson hoped to address through the tool of

public education (Curtis 1988, 38). Ryerson believed that parents did not have the competence to

appropriately educate their children and argued that a new class of experts was needed to prepare

children for their places in the economy of the new country (Prentice 1984, 61). Thus, the project

also included producing a new class of experts able to ascertain and deliver what was argued to

be in students’ and society’s best interests (Curtis 1988, 217ff; 1992, 174). Amongst Ryerson’s

biggest successes were the institutionalization of compulsory schooling, the standardization of

text books, and the standardized preparation of teachers in the “Normal” schools.157

Ryerson believed strongly that music had an important role to play in public education. Music

education historian George Trowsdale counts eighty-five references to the importance of music

education for “the masses” in Ryerson’s writings (Countryman 1981, 9). Curtis summarizes the

rationales for public school music education below:

157

“Normal schools” – a moniker noteworthy for all that it suggests about the project to ascertain and standardize concepts of normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural and worthy/unworthy as well as the management of people falling into these constructed categories.

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‘All men,’ wrote the American educational commentator Dr. Potter, ‘have been endowed with a susceptibility to the influence of music’. The state educational administrators of Britain were unanimous in their contention that vocal music ‘facilitates rather than impedes the pupils in their other studies.’ For Ryerson, vocal music was an important avenue to the faculties, since all students enjoyed it, and its enlistment in educational endeavours could connect morality with pleasure. In David Stow’s view, which Ryerson cited, vocal music would train students to ‘worship God in the family’ and in the ‘public sanctuary’, and by ‘furnishing the young people with interesting moral songs,’ the educator could ‘displace in their social amusements many of at least a questionable character.’ Vocal music would allow the transformation of the leisure of students into a period of instruction. Music could then ‘refine and humanize’ students. (Curtis 1988, 106)

The notion that an engagement in particular forms of music could contribute towards population

management was already well established by advocates such as Britain’s John Hullah who

worked tirelessly to bring “choralism” to the British working classes as a means to “initiate

pupils into principles of order,” contain worker dissent, and produce subjects loyal to the British

Empire (Olwage 2005, 27). Similar to the brass band movement established in British mining

towns, Hullah established choral programs and competitions as a means to focus energies away

from worker rebellion towards pursuits that, he hoped, would contain and redirect rebellious

energies (Olwage 2004, 26). Music was brought into the service of ‘taming the savage beast’158

and enjoining lower classes in bourgeois ideals (Campbell 2000, 274). This is not to say that

these musical institutions always succeeded in achieving these goals. In some cases, engaging in

music may well have drawn energy away from class resistance. In other cases, it may have

served to strengthen lower class solidarity in ways not foreseen by the architects of these

projects. The important point to note, here, is that these musical projects were developed in order

to address political projects, the origins of which, along with their rationalizations, have been lost

over time as these have become normalized, that is, a normal part of life in various communities.

By the mid-nineteenth century, music had a place in most sites of white education in Ontario.

Middle and upper class children were learning to perform and appreciate the music of the

“European Masters” while public school students were receiving, at least where music teachers

were available, an education based on music specially composed for them—a combination of

hymns, patriotic and bucolic songs intended both to teach desirable behaviour and provide relief

to an otherwise highly regimented and stationary day (Curtis 1988, 106). 158

This expression is often associated with the ability of music to “civilize.” I have not been able to trace the etymology of the expression; however, it is often associated with the Greek myth of the musician, Orpheus.

142

On paper, all public school students were to have music classes. In practice, however, the

delivery of music education was erratic and ad hoc (Fenwick 1951, 11-13) (Green and Vogan

1991, 54). While debates in the higher echelons of the education apparatus concerned whether or

not music was a valid school subject, debates within the field itself focused on whether students

should learn to read notation or whether rote learning was sufficient for the purposes of public

school students. Studies by Trowbridge, Countryman, Brault, Green and Vogan chronicle the

many debates that took place over pedagogical approaches and the lack of “Canadian” content in

music method and song books used in Ontario schools.159 Notably, however, these debates were

not relevant for middle and upper class students attending private schools. Here, if students chose

to study music, they would learn a classical music repertoire by learning western notation. Thus,

debates over the purpose and best methods to deploy with “children of the masses” reflected the

very different goals associated with music education within compulsory public schooling—goals

reflected in the type of music and thematic material developed for use in public schools. June

Countryman’s study of method and song books from 1846-1965 documents a range of themes

that includes nature, family, religion, seasons, virtuous living, the virtues of “work,” and patriotic

songs (Countryman 1981).160 Nature is bucolic, (white) families are happy unities, men and

women know their roles and are happy to abide by them. There is a careful exclusion of material

that suggests conflict or strife—with the exception of certain patriotic songs intended to valorize

war efforts and ennoble the idea of fighting for one’s country. Figure 16 shows song titles from

the official music text of the Toronto Board of Education in 1888 by Alexander T. Cringan.161

159

See: Brault 1977; Green and Vogan 1991; Countryman 1981; Trowsdale 1962; Trowsdale 1970. 160 Gustafson documents the same type of themes in American school music textbooks :

School songbooks’ romantic, literary character sharply differentiated them from the musical practices of the street and ordinary folk. Omitting the popular, including items that were transcribed from “Indian” and Negro music, school song collections purveyed a homogeneous image of countryside, people, and nation bound by mutual sentiments of love and admiration. The twin ideals of domestic tranquility and the pastoral fabricated the child’s future and, through reiterated performance, lent them solidity as the exemplary sentiments and physical charm of meritorious personhood. (Gustafson 2009, 15)

161 Cringan was also an early ethnomusicologist. He recorded and transcribed over 100 Iroquois songs, many of

which are now housed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Pincoe 2012).

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Charming Little Lily Now We Know Over Field and Meadow The Seasons What a Clatter Work While You Work Baby: (“His tiny hands are white and plump”…) Cheerful Labour: (“Let us dear brothers, Cheerfully toil; Never from labour, No never recoil; Rich is the treasure Now to be won; Toil in full measure Till time shall be done.”) Falling Asleep Lightly Our Footsteps Lovely May Morning and Evening One, Two, Three, Four Over the Snow Sea Shell’s Whisper See the Rain Softly ever Gently 

Still like Dew We love to Make British Grenadiers Catch the Sunshine Coral Insect Do the Right Evening Prayer Excelsior Exercise Song: (“Exercise bone and muscle; Exercise fast or slow; Exercise mind and body; Exercise if you’d grow.”) God Save the Queen Happy Ones Loving Hearts O, Father Scots, Wha Ha’e Wi’ Wallace Bled Sleigh Ride Some Folks With a light, cheerful Song 

 

Figure 16. Song titles from The Canadian Music Course, 1888 (Cringan 1888)

Music education textbooks and collections of songs were originally based on manuals from

Great Britain, adapted for use in Ontario schools. In 1876 the use of American music textbooks

began (Green and Vogan 1991, 58). These books were slightly modified by adding patriotic

songs from Canada and/or Britain by substituting songs written or chosen by Canadian editors

and by including additional melodies by “great composers” (Countryman 1981, 82, 91, 110).

Disputes in the field focused mainly on methodology (rote versus notation; singing first versus

theory) as opposed to the choice of song materials (Countryman 1981, 88, 110). In spite of the

fact that, by the 1960s, the music education publishing field was strongly dominated by

American publishers, a number of original Canadian music education texts were published

during this decade: New High Road of Song (ca 1960), Our Singing World Series (ca 1953-

1961), Songs for Today (1959-1969), Songtime (1963-1968), Basic Goals in Music (1959-1969)

and Music for Young Canada (1969) (Countryman 1981, 164). These textbooks now include

limited examples of “authentic folk music from all over the world” (Countryman 1981, 166);

however, thematically, the songs never deviate from the standards shown in Cringan’s 1888

textbook.

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The songs themselves keep closely to basic major and minor tonalities, scale sequences and

triads. Songs are found in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 and 6/8 and rhythmic patterns are restricted to dotted

quarters, dotted eighths and dotted sixteenths. Anything that does not meet these basic patterns,

for example blues scales or the syncopated rhythms of African Americans and African Canadian

music of the period are absent. As songbooks begin to acquire specifically “Canadian” content,

the narrative of the founding and “development” of Canada is expressed as beginning with the

arrival of Europeans and the heroic accomplishments of British settlers. The French are also

acknowledged as one of two founding peoples and the occasional French song is included in an

effort to strengthen the bonds between English and French communities.162

The special school repertoire suggests much about the hoped for subjectifications desired

through music education: innocence, obedience, pleasure in work, emotional constraint,

discipline, and the association of pleasure with moral lessons. The songs carefully nurture the

notion of “childhood”—an identity of dependence and innocence that emerges in contrast to the

independent attitudes and behaviours of young people during the early years of compulsory

schooling (Curtis 1988, 16).163 Amongst the rationales for containing children and adolescents,

recapitulation theory argued that the dangers inherent in childhood required educating “the

savage” out of children. If education failed to discipline the young, they might remain at a lower

level of civilizational development and undermine the “progress of the race” (Lesko 2001, 33).

The special repertoire of music for schools provided an embodied means to modify behaviours

according to bourgeois ideals of childhood. Compulsory schooling gave educators and the

educational state opportunities to influence thinking and behaviour from an early age towards an

ideal of childhood innocence and obedience—a social engineering project no longer obvious as

such because of its successful institutionalization.164

162

The project to weld the two races (English and French) together was pursued through a variety of cultural activities, beginning with projects initiated by Earl Grey (1907-1911) (Tippett 1990, 66) and succeeded by projects such as the CPR Folk Festivals (Tippett 1990, 115). The Canada First Movement, in particular drew on the notion that the French and English in Canada belonged to a Northern race making them distinct from and superior to the collection of “weaker races” in the United States (Mackey 2002, 31). 163

The truant officer was created in response to the enormous resistance young people had to being confined and told what they should or should not be learning (Curtis 1988, 160). 164

Ongoing battles over whether or not religious schools should receive public funding are reminders that education remains a highly contested process precisely because it is understood as a process of subjectification (MacLellan 2012).

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In school music books, whiteness is grounded as the identity that is ‘normal and human.’ The

people portrayed as “founders of the country,” and of the later “brotherhood of man” [sic]—i.e.,

other members of the British Empire, are assumed to be white—an assumption amply illustrated

by drawing of white boys and girls included in song books. The images reproduced in Figure 17,

are from a book still in use when I was an elementary student in the 1960s.165

Figure 17. From The Canadian Singer, 1945 (Beattie et al. 1945)

In these song and method books, the British Empire, the narrative of the nation as tolerant,

generous, good, kind, noble and triumphing over adversity, remains constant, as do the simple

structures of songs. Where there are songs about non-white people, they reinforce the centrality

of whiteness through their exceptionality and through caricatured representations of Others. In

the rare songs about “Indians” included in the later textbooks books, for example, they are

portrayed as belonging to a distant and primitive past.166 Where music about the lives of Black

165

A classroom set of these books were still housed in the music room at the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in 2013. It is not known when they were last in use. 166

In fact, there are very few songs in Canadian music education textbooks prior to 1985 that refer in any way to Indigenous peoples. Most English language texts recycle the same 3 or 4 “lullabies”; however, “Indians” also

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people is included, it is in the form of Minstrel songs. For example, Ernest MacMillan’s 1929

collection A Canadian Songbook contains the following pieces as representative “American”

songs:

Figure 18. From A Canadian Songbook (MacMillan 1929)167

Remarkably, four of the seven songs included are Minstrel songs, originally written to be

performed by white men in black face, for the entertainment of white people. Recalling Eric

Lott’s analysis of the conflicted feelings of “love and theft” expressed through Minstrelsy, we

can see several acts of distancing taking place (Lott 1993, 6). First, Canadian relationships with

slavery and black peoples are disappeared through the exclusive association of black stories with

American history. Second, black people are made less than human through the caricaturing that

takes place in the songs. For example, Marching Through Georgia refers to the “darkeys” in the

same paragraph as other farm products: turkeys and sweet potatoes. Third, whiteness is exalted

through the fantasy that black people long for the by-gone days of slavery and the comforts of

being under the guidance of a beloved white Master – what Lorraine Le Camp calls “The Happy

Slave Plantation Myth” (Le Camp 2005, 214). This is evident in the texts to Dixie, Old Folks at

Home and Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground (Figures 19 and 20). Given the presence of black

communities in Canada since well before the 19th century, it still strikes me as remarkable that

each of these songs was carefully chosen for use in Canadian schools and other community

settings by Sir Ernest MacMillan, Canada’s pre-eminent musician engaged in projects to create

unified notions of Canadian identity.

constitute an absent presence in songs such as “Indian Summer” and the “disappearing Indian” nursery rhyme, “Ten Little Indians,” set to music (Newman 1988). 167

New research suggests that the tune to Dixie was originally composed by two black American musicians, Ben and Lon Snowdon, and that Dan Emmett, the famous white minstrel singer credited with its composition, learned it from them (Sacks and Sacks 2003).

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“Dixie Land” by Dan Emmett168

, ca 1850 

I wish I was in the land of cotton, Old times they are not forgotten; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. In Dixie Land where I was born in, Early on one frosty mornin, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. 

Old Missus marry "Will‐de‐weaber," Willium was a gay deceaber; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. But when he put his arm around'er, He smiled as fierce as a forty‐pound'er,Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. 

Dar's buck‐wheat cakes an 'Ingen' batter, Makes you fat or a little fatter; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. Den hoe it down an scratch your grabble,To Dixie land I'm bound to trabble.Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.

 

“Marching Through Georgia,” by Henry C. Work, 1865 

Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song, Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along, Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong, While we were marching through Georgia  

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee. Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free, So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia.  

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound, How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,While we were marching through Georgia. 

Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears, When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years; Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers, While we were marching through Georgia. 

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!" So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host While we were marching through Georgia. 

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main; Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain While we were marching through Georgia. 

Figure 19. Texts from A Canadian Songbook (MacMillan 1929); Sheet music cover, ca 1900, (Emmett ca 1850)

168

Ben and Lew Snowdon claim that they wrote the original song and taught it to Dan Emmett. See: Wellman 2010.

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"Old Folks at Home," by Stephen Foster, 1851

Way down upon de Swanee Ribber, Far, far away, Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber, Dere's wha de old folks stay. All up and down de whole creation Sadly I roam, Still longing for de old plantation, And for de old folks at home.  Chorus All de world am sad and dreary, Ebrywhere I roam; Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home!  2nd verse All round de little farm I wandered When I was young, Den many happy days I squandered, Many de songs I sung. When I was playing wid my brudder Happy was I; Oh, take me to my kind old mudder! Dere let me live and die.  3rd Verse One little hut among de bushes, One dat I love Still sadly to my memory rushes, No matter where I rove. When will I see de bees a‐humming All round de comb? When will I hear de banjo strumming, Down in my good old home? 

 

“Massa’s in de cold, cold Ground,” by Stephen Foster, 1852  Round de meadows am a ringing De darkeys' mournful song. While de mockingbird am singing, Happy as de day am long. Where de ivy am a creeping O'er de grassy mound, Dare old massa am a sleeping, Sleeping in de cold, cold ground.  Chorus: Down in de corn‐field Hear dat mournful sound: All de darkeys am a weeping, Massa's in de cold, cold ground.  When de autumn leaves were falling, When de days were cold,  'Twas hard to hear old massa calling, Cayse he was so weak and old. Now de orange trees am blooming On de sandy shore,  Now de summer days are coming, Massa nebber calls no more.  [Chorus:]  Mass made de darkeys love him, Cayse he was so kind, now dey sadly weep above him, Mourning cayse he leave dem behind. I cannot work before tomorrow, Cayse de tear drops flow, I try to drive away my sorrow Pickin on de old banjo. 

[Chorus:] 

 

Figure 20. Words to Stephen Foster songs included in MacMillan’s 1929 school music book, Music in Canada (MacMillan 1929)

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In these songs, the black person exists in caricature as an American personage; however,

minstrelsy was not a uniquely American phenomenon. As Lorraine Le Camp has documented,

blackface minstrelsy was performed in churches and theatres, public and private schools, (e.g.,

Toronto’s elite Upper Canada College; in Indian Residential Schools and many others),

throughout Canada from 1844 until well into the 1960s.169 Contrary to the impression one might

have based on MacMillan’s decision to include American Minstrelsy songs as representations of

“negroes,” black people, as real people, had been living in Canada since the earliest years of

colonization. The first black slave was recorded in Lower Canada in 1628 and slavery continued

throughout Canada until the 1830s (Bolaria and Li 1985, 163ff). The Underground Railroad, the

piece of Canadian history most often taught in schools, took place between 1840 – 1860

(Underground Railroad); however, in spite of the willingness of some white groups170 to help

slaves escape into Canada, blacks were not made welcome here. During the early nineteen

hundreds, Canadian immigration policy explicitly tried to keep black people from immigrating to

Canada; residential segregation was enforced through racially restrictive covenants of deeds and

leases, and black people were refused service and separated in restaurants, theatres, and

recreational facilities (History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008).

TheOntario legislature also established segregated schools for Black people—a situation that

didn’t change until 1964(History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline

2008). In 1910, black Oklahoman farmers “developed an interest in moving to Canada to flee

increased racism at home;” however, in 1911 an order in council was drafted prohibiting the

landing of “any immigrant belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the

climate and requirements of Canada” (History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations

Timeline 2008). In the 1930s seventy-five Ku Klux Klan men, “clad in white gowns and hoods,”

arrived at the home of a young black man in Oakville to prevent his marriage to a young white

woman. The clansmen turned out to be prominent business men from Hamilton and their action

was met with widespread, public support in newspapers throughout Southern Ontario

(Backhouse 1999, 173). In 1939 The Supreme Court of Canada concluded that racial

discrimination was legally enforceable—in relation to a Montreal tavern refusing to serve a black

169

Le Camp also documents the numerous racist storybooks used in Canadian schools well into the 1980s (Le Camp 2005, 160). 170

Some Quaker and Mennonite communities on both sides of the border supported the Underground Railroad (Quakers; Law empowered slave catchers; Underground Railroad thrived March 29, 2011).

150

customer in 1931 and, in 1952 a new Immigration Act stated that potential immigrants could be

refused on the grounds of nationality, ethnic group, geographical area of origin, peculiar

customs, habits and modes of life, and unsuitability with regard to the climate, amongst other

restrictions (History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008). Hence –

the depiction that black people only existed as former slaves, longing for a return to the old

plantation, with no lives in Canada was false. The black people represented in these minstrel

songs thus constitute the “absent presence” that gave “whiteness” its saliency in MacMillan’s

“Canadian” songbook.

I have included these details of Canadian history to underscore the overt racism, official and

informal, prevalent in Canada but also to underscore the longstanding presence of black people

living in Canada. In black schools and black churches, black musics were performed. Jazz and

ragtime were also well-known.171 Neither black people nor black musics were anomalies in

Canada; their existence was simply not allowed to be conceived as any part of a truly Canadian

identity. The inclusion of blackface, together with the exclusion of the actual music of black

people living in Canada, presents clear notions of who belongs and has a subject position, and

who is an outsider with status as an object of curiosity and/or hatred. Black people are denied

agency and humanity through the exclusion of their own music and the inclusion of blackface

Minstrelsy; yet, here is Ernest MacMillan’s statement about the nature of music in national life:

In music, whatever our origins, we speak one language and share the expression of thoughts and feelings common to all mankind. In the world of commerce and politics, divergent interests may make for division; in the world of the Arts, the universality of human nature makes for union—the true Brotherhood of Man. Music, the most social of the arts, possesses supremely that unifying power which, given due support, will play a unique part in fostering and preserving the spirit of devotion that welds together a great nation. (MacMillan 1955, 9)

MacMillan identifies the nation as a noble endeavour, as is the Western classical music

MacMillan identifies as representing the “Brotherhood of Man;” however, this brotherhood,

while clearly excluding women, is also a view of humanity that clearly excludes non-white

peoples. This attitude amongst Canadian music education leaders had not changed much, even

171

Christensen’s Ragtime Review, 1914-1918 was a Chicago-based monthly publication supporting Christensen’s System of Ragtime Piano Playing. Students were predominantly white. The journal was also in circulation in Canada (Christensen’s Ragtime Review (Chicago, 1914-1918) ). Nathanial Dett, a gifted black musician, was church organist in Niagara Falls until he left to study music in the U.S. 1898-1903 (Barnwell 2012; 2012).

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by 1951, when G. Roy Fenwick172 wrote his book The Function of Music in Ontario. Here

Fenwick writes disparagingly of the interest people had in black musics popular at the time:

We have wilfully cast out of our souls the great masters who have been the familiar spirits of our forefathers; and while we have been wrapped in self-complacent admiration of the spiritual vacuum that we have created, a Tropical African spirit in music and dancing… has entered in to dwell in a house which it found swept and garnished. In repudiating our own Western tradition of art and thereby reducing our faculties to a state of inanition and sterility in which they seize upon the exotic and primitive art of Dahomy and Benin as though this were manna in the wilderness, we are confessing before all men that we have forfeited our spiritual birthright. Our abandonment of our traditional artistic technique is manifestly the consequence of some kind of spiritual breakdown in our Western Civilization. (Fenwick 1951, 58)173

The music he is referring to in this passage is Dahomy, "the first full-length musical written and

played by blacks to be performed at a major Broadway house" (Bordman 1978). “It tells the

story of a group of African Americans who, having found a pot of gold, move to Africa and

become rulers of Dahomy (present-day Benin)” (Kenrick 2008). Music that Fenwick considers to

be spiritually vacuous is not a permanent threat to developing good listening habits however:

Fortunately, nature has given us two ears, perhaps so that much that comes in one ear can go out the other. We cannot control what we hear, whether it be music or the spoken word, but we can control what we retain. Surely the schools should help our young people to develop some discrimination in selecting what is worthwhile! (Fenwick 1951, 58)

Those marked as “racially” different are not conceived as being part of the Canadian body

politic, or as creators of worthy forms of music. Blacks (and other racialized peoples) do not rank

high enough on the scale of humanity to be considered part of the “Brotherhood of Man.” Both

MacMillan and Fenwick provide easily seen examples of the abjection of the Other so necessary

to concepts of the “cultural good.” The importance of racial hierarchies to concepts of music

education and desirable subjectivities, however, goes much deeper.

During the nineteenth century, carefully constructed notions of an ideal of whiteness, based on

particular ideals of comportment and behaviour, become a specific project of music education

planners. Ruth Gustafson, in Race and Curriculum in Music Education, tracks the care taken in

172

Fenwick was an educator, writer, adjudicator, broadcaster, born in Hamilton (2012).

173 “Inanition” means: “the quality or state of being empty: a : the exhausted condition that results from lack of food and water; b : the absence or loss of social, moral, or intellectual vitality or vigor.” (Inanition)

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the United States to create identities through music education that are distinctly white (Gustafson

2009, 25). She documents the identification of desirable comportment, dress, ritual, vocal tone,

and thematic material chosen to represent white respectability, white conformity and white

respect for order and discipline—ideals that we have also seen expressed in the Calendars of the

two Toronto Conservatory Schools discussed in Chapter Five. These ideals are consciously built

in opposition to the gospel, ragtime, blues and jazz musics identified with Black people, 174 the

spiritual music of Aboriginal peoples, and rowdier forms of popular white music. Gavin James

Campbell chronicles the fear and opposition directed towards ragtime music by school music

promoters:

The supervisor of New Orleans public school music, for instance, warned ominously that ragtime could "break down in half a minute the careful teaching of years in church, Sunday-school and home." One reformer claimed that he could demonstrate a direct causal link between ragtime and moral dissipation. Ragtime's syncopated rhythms, he stated, "act upon the nervous system of the listener at unexpected and unnatural parts of the measure." As a result, "the entire being is thrown into a succession of jumps or musical contortions whose irregular character excites unhealthy immoral tendencies.” (Campbell 2000, 263)

The need to control and reject black musics was important for many reasons. Black musics were

marked as dangerous because they included so much physicality in their expressions of joy and

sadness but also because, in the case of blues and jazz, they made open reference to sexual

desire. Indeed, many white people were attracted to black musics and the danger of black and

white people mixing socially was addressed by “a wide range of licensing and zoning

laws…[that], restricted the places where jazz could be played and how it could be played” (Rose

1994, 133). Racial mixing was dangerous because it threatened to humanize black people while

blurring lines of distinction between the races—distinctions that were necessary to sustain an

economy made more profitable by keeping working class white people from allying themselves

with black people—a goal sustained by differential access to rights and privileges (McWhorter

2009, 63; Bolaria and Li 1985, 16).

174 Jazz was also much feared and hated by the music establishment.

Anne Shaw Faulkner, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, launched a vigorous attack claiming that jazz had no small role in the unprecedented "immoral conditions among our young people." Jazz, she asserted, was a "bolshevik element" that disorganized "all regular laws and order" and stimulated its listeners "to extreme deeds, [and] to a breaking away from all rules and conventions." Alberto Jonas, a New York City pianist and music teacher, concurred, branding jazz the embodiment of "lawlessness, corruption, and degeneracy. (Campbell 2000, 263)

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The division of human beings into hierarchies of human worth is reflected in the Cartesian

mind/body split. White superiority is displayed by demonstrating the capacity to rule the body

through the mind. Where the “lower races,” express themselves physically, white music must be

physically constrained. Where singing in black churches is physically expressive, musically

ecstatic and improvisatory, white singers must be carefully disciplined to constrain their physical

gestures and sing with a uniform tone colour (Olwage 2004, 2005) (Gustafson 2009, 45-47).

Where black singing draws on the chest voice and a wide dynamic range, and Aboriginal singing

projects over great distances, the singing prescribed for white school and community choirs must

distinguish itself by drawing almost entirely on the head voice with quiet singing and a “pure,

colourless sound” as the ideal (Olwage 2004, 2005). Where black musics draw on syncopated

rhythms and blues scales, white musics adhere to regular patterns of strong and weak beats and

major and minor scales. Where black musics might express anything from pain and anguish to

sexual excitement to political rebellion, and Aboriginal musics might strive to achieve a

heightened spiritual state of body and mind, white musics are carefully sanitized to express

“cultivated,” distanced relationships to the body, to emotion and to the politically contested.

Where popular musics of both whites and blacks might induce “unhealthy moral tendencies,” the

music for schools is designed to express happiness or sadness but within narrow boundaries.

Indeed, carefully crafted ideas about comportment, enunciation, tone colour, and thematic

content come to define the music used in public schools, accompanied with disdain for the other

modes of music—the necessary foils to these white musical ideals. All of these disciplined

expressions of culture were a means to distinguish the rational civilized white, gentile European

from the dangerously emotional, libidinous Other —a “contemptible Other” that was embodied

by ethnic or racialized musicians as well as lower class white musicians (Gustafson 2009, 46) .

The normalization of the “pure” singing tone, soft volume, cultivated comportment and

enunciation advanced in school music education helped to produce whiteness as the normative

centre. The absence and abjection of other sounds, and the bodies producing them, were the

exclusions that left the actual lives of Others invisible in the boundaried spaces of the school.

Children grew up internalizing whiteness as a “not ethnic” identity, unaware that their “non-

race” was the result of intense investments in identifying other people as “racial.” Other sounds

might be heard in places of “ill repute” like drinking establishments, minstrel performances,

Pentecostal churches, forbidden Aboriginal ceremonies or, during authorized and contained

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“celebrations of difference” such as the Canadian Pacific Railway Folk Festivals. These non-

school sounds, however, fell, not only outside the white centre, but outside the fully civilized and

fully human. Other forms of musical expression simply did not exist in the world of public music

education except as the exception—the red face or black face event or the special school musical

about “Indians” during which school children had the opportunity to play at being Indians or

Blacks by performing, (like the gentlemen of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto), in redface

and blackface (Keyes 2011; Le Camp 2005). Here, children, whatever their actual backgrounds,

learned to distinguish their “selves” from those they could play at being—alternative selves that

allowed authorized transgressions into the imagined domain of the Other while reinforcing the

centrality of the “normal” identities to which they returned after the performance. Aboriginal and

other “non-white” students who performed Otherness in school presentations in black and red

face necessarily internalized a cognitive dissonance with internalized norms of whiteness within

lives otherwise marked by racializing practices (Le Camp 2005, viii).

In these elementary school musics, particular ideas about correct behaviours, including gendered

behaviours, the “good” and the “normal” are represented in the sounds that are permissible and

the sounds that are forbidden; the gestures allowed and the gestures forbidden, the sounds

applauded and the sounds disparaged. The education of feeling is accomplished through what is

taken into the body through sound and repetition and by what, through lack of familiarity,

remains strange, foreign, and forbidden. The other musics and other bodies that produce them

may both attract and repel but they are understood to fall outside the category of the “normal”

the “good” and the “innocent.”

A process of indigenization is also set in motion through the absence of stories about

dispossession and a narrative of new beginnings that defined history as beginning with the arrival

of white Europeans, and “progress” as the result of the work of white men. The ideal “Canadian”

is constructed as a good person who is the member of a good nation—innocent of greed, desire,

bigotry, or practices of dispossession. Notions of the “normal” are experienced through

embodied engagements with carefully circumscribed sounds, rhythms, movements and emotions.

Some students may reject these normalizing school musics as uninteresting; some may not see

themselves reflected in the lyrics, melodies and stories but, they cannot escape the repetition of

what constitutes the “normal” and what their teachers have been taught in the Normal Schools as

“normal”—a category that exists only through notions of the abnormal and the abject. When

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looking for the ideas, for the thought behind the regime of practices that constitute long-standing

repertoires, traditions and attitudes in public school music education, we see that notions about

race, gender and class are built into the structures of the music, the subject matter, desired tonal

qualities, enunciation and comportment associated with school music. These values were further

emphasized through the incorporation of “music appreciation,” that is, appreciation of the music

of the “Great European Masters” in schools and on radio broadcasts for young people.175

Schooling for “Others”

As we have seen, black students were not welcome at white schools in Canada until after the

1960s. If bell hooks’ description of the care and attention given to her at black-only schools in

the United States prior to de-segregation is any indication (hooks 1994, 3), black students may

well have benefited by being educated in schools run by black teachers committed to their

students’ social, intellectual and spiritual growth. Here, black musics would also have been used

and respected. Aboriginal students also received a separate education; however, these students

were not taught by members of their own communities, committed to their social, intellectual or

spiritual growth; rather, the goal of state supported Aboriginal education was to “destroy the

Indian in the child.”176

Egerton Ryerson, amongst other educational promoters, conceived of an entirely separate form

of compulsory education for Aboriginal children.177 Many Aboriginal parents wanted their

children to learn skills to help them thrive in new social and economic circumstances (Miller

1996, 5); however, like other individuals and groups resisting centrally controlled education,

they wanted a say in the education of their children. This was not to be the case however.

175 Roy Fenwick had a music appreciation show on CBC Radio for young listeners from 1944 to 1959 (Countryman 1981, 151). Music appreciation was based on the notion of raising the level of humanity of listeners:

The version of Darwinism that appears in Sir Hubert Parry’s The Evolution of the Art of Music (1884) outlined a ladder of ascent for complexity from primitive genres to Western musical forms. Since it was the prototype for American music listening guides up until 1920, it had an important influence on the ideas about race and nation as the “origin” and endpoint of musical expression…Recapitulation of the primitive stage narrative for every child became a byword in the music appreciation manuals: “It is true that we are always dealing with children who are recapitulating racial experiences and trying to catch up with civilization” (Gustafson 2009, 104).

176 This expression is part of common usage when referring to the Residential School experience. It is frequently

cited in association with Duncan Campbell Scott, without, however, providing a precise reference. Prime Minister Harper used the expression in his Statement of Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools (Harper June, 2008). 177

Ryerson wrote a report in 1847 that established what later became known as the Indian Residential School system (Milloy 1999, 15).

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Aboriginal children were initially educated in “industrial” schools where they might learn a trade

or domestic skills that would allow them to take up subservient positions in white families or

businesses (Milloy 1999, 34-35). In these contexts, Aboriginal students were learning what the

state wanted them to learn during school hours but they were still able to maintain their social,

familial and economic ties with their home communities (Milloy 1999, 18). When residential

schools were devised and made compulsory, however, the goal was to remove Aboriginal

students as far as possible from the influence of their parents and communities, end the

possibility of passing traditional knowledge from generation to generation and, therefore, lessen

their desire and ability to continue living as “Indians.” Legislative amendments in 1920 and 1930

legalizing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children was drafted by the Deputy Superintendent

of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, the poet who wrote the text for the Three West Coast

Songs transcribed by Sir Ernest MacMillan (Neu and Therrien 2003, 106). For Scott, the removal

of Aboriginal children was part of a larger project to separate Aboriginal peoples from their

lands and absorb them into the body politic. Indeed, his goal was to relieve the government from

its treaty obligations and free up Aboriginal lands for exploitation (Neu and Therrien 2003, 88ff).

Within all forms of the Aboriginal school system, whiteness was the norm to which Aboriginal

children were to aspire. As with rural and working class white children, breaking down cultural

norms and replacing them with norms desired by the state was part of an official objective;

however, shattering self-respect by debasing every expression of Aboriginal identity, including

language, was an additional strategy applied towards Aboriginal children with a vengeance.

Records show that music was part of the program in at least some Residential Schools178 and it is

possible that music may have offered, for at least some students, respite from the strict discipline

experienced at the schools.179 After all, like music in public schools, music was introduced as a

178

See the following for accounts of brass bands at Indian Residential Schools:(2012; Dust and Buck Fall, 2008) (Green and Vogan 1991, 92). Francis also documents a brass band at the File Hills colony, an agricultural community tightly controlled by William Morris Graham, the local Indian agent. Playing in the brass band was conceived as a substitute activity to keep “Indians” from taking up any of their traditional cultural activities (Francis 2007, 206). 179

It is beyond the scope of this study to pursue this issue, but it is noteworthy that the death rate of students at the File Hills Residential School was 75% (Bryce 1922, 4). This is a shocking statistic but, given that unsanitary conditions were the cause of so many deaths from tuberculosis, I have wondered whether the spread of the disease could have been exacerbated by sharing brass instruments. The practice in schools has always been to clean mouthpieces but not the instruments themselves so the students would have been exchanging germs every time they played an instrument.

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means of seduction in the hopes of then inducing compliance with other aspects of the

curriculum. According to Helmut Kallman, many of the Huron who first heard the music of

missionaries in the seventeenth century found the music appealing and enjoyed learning it. Once

this was discovered, Jesuit priests hoped that music might seduce Indians into attending their

churches and it would seem that, at least to some extent, this was a successful strategy (Kallman

1960, 10-11). The pleasure Aboriginal people might have experienced when encountering

Western musics, however, should not be mistaken for the cause of their cultural and material

losses. Learning music other than one’s own does not inevitably lead to cultural destruction. The

use of music and associated ideologies amidst a series of tactics to destroy the material, social

and cultural basis of a people, however, does reveal music as a weapon that imposes itself within

the body at the same time that other musics are banished. While Aboriginal children were

singing hymns and, in some residential schools, learning band instruments, they were also being

punished, violently, for speaking their own languages, communicating with their brothers and

sisters, or engaging in any of their own musical/spiritual practices (Milloy 1999, 37; Sellars

1992). Their own cultural practices were treated with contempt as were their identities as

“Indians.” If students were not yet convinced of the abjectness of their spiritual, musical

practices, they discovered, if they survived the schools and made it back to their home

communities, 180 that participating in the potlatch, ghost dance and other ceremonies was now

illegal and subject to imprisonment (Francis 2007, 98). Even in cases where ceremonies were

offered as part of tourist attractions, if word got out—and the job of the Indian Agent was,

amongst other things, to act as an informant—the RCMP could arrest anyone partaking in

Aboriginal spiritual ceremonies (Francis 2007, 101; Gordon 2010, 76). For Aboriginal

communities, the destruction of their social fabric, along with the banning of ceremonies and

their sacred uses of music were also attempts to quell the resistance that was made possible in

communal, spiritual gatherings (Gordon 2010, 73).

The desire to dominate through permitting and forbidding certain sounds is a further reminder of

the significance that musical practices have in relation to political relations and identity (Attali

180

Death rates at the schools were as high as 50% and, as we now know, students were also frequently subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Duncan Campbell Scott was made aware of the high death rates by Dr. Peter Bryce, Chief Medical Officer of the Indian Department beginning in 1904; however, “owing to the active hostility of D.C. Scott and his advice to the then Deputy minister, no action was taken by the department to give effect to the recommendations” made in 1907 to address the unsanitary conditions promoting the spread of tuberculosis (Bryce 1922, 4).

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1985, 19). Meanwhile, if Aboriginal students were successful learning Western music, their

success was used to demonstrate that the residential schools were succeeding in “civilizing the

savages.” Successful student bands, for example, were showcased at public and Mission

sponsored events (in Canada, the United States and South Africa) in order to show off the

success of school programs and raise funds for particular denominations of mission-run schools

(Troutman 2009, 120; Brass Bands; Olwage 2005, 40).

It is crucial to note here that I’m not arguing that each and every experience of music education

in the residential schools was necessarily negative. In spite of the standard anti-Aboriginal

agenda in these schools, it is possible that some students enjoyed their music-making and their

music teachers. Perhaps some of their music teachers, as some other teachers, were kind and

respectful. Perhaps, as in the public schools, music was the part of the day that, for some

students, offered a degree of relief and pleasure. John Troutman, for example, documents a

significant number of Aboriginal students who used their Western-based musical skills to earn a

living as musicians, using their public platforms, additionally, to advocate on behalf of the

political interests of their own people (Troutman 2009, 201ff). Regardless of whether the music

used in residential schools offered something pleasurable or simply represented one more avenue

of oppressive discipline, however, we know without question that, at the systemic level,

destroying cultural affiliations and supplanting them with European ideas of ranking and

aspiration were chief amongst the pedagogical and political goals of the residential schools.

Western music was intended to supplant Aboriginal spiritual and musical traditions—by

definition, savage traditions—with European sounds of civilization. If some students were able

to use western musical knowledge to their advantage, this did not change the intent to identify

their home cultures as savage and undermine their cultural understandings and social/economic

relationships by imposing European colonial values. Indeed, the cruelty lived out in the

residential Schools reflected the adoption of a world view that was promoted at the highest levels

of government. The outlawing of Aboriginal ceremonies functioned in concert with prohibitions

on mobility and bureaucratic tactics to reduce numbers entitled to status and band membership

(Gordon 2010, 44; Lawrence 2004, 45ff). Notably, the banning of Aboriginal musical and

spiritual practices was often followed up by moves to appropriate Aboriginal cultural artifacts,

including music, as a substitute heritage and history for white Canadian immigrants. As already

discussed in Chapter Four, this confluence is visible in the collection projects of Marius Barbeau

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and Ernest MacMillan and is reflected in later movements to draw on “Indian” motifs as the

basis for “art” music compositions.

Part II: Music festivals – competitions and the CPR Folk Festivals

Ernest MacMillan was prolific in his work to establish musical institutions across the country in

order to encourage the adoption of particular cultural values. He helped to establish competitive

music festivals as well as standardized exams across the country (administered by the Royal

Conservatory of Music, formerly the Toronto Conservatory of Music) and a series of Fine Arts

Clubs (Sir Ernest MacMillan Fine Arts Clubs, 1936), in secondary schools across the country

(Tippett 1990, 61). When MacMillan first helped to found local, regional and national

competitive music festivals, his goals included creating a culture of aspiration, providing models

of “good” culture, and showing people where they stood in relation to others. Maria Tippett

describes the multiple purposes envisioned by the originators of the music and drama festivals

below:

According to two of its most enthusiastic supporters – Arthur Collingwood and Ernest MacMillan – the music festival was ‘a healthy stimulus to the music students, [and] an ideal public forum for the competent teacher,’ for it encouraged playing ‘the right kind of music in the right way’ and gave ‘the student a sense of proportion, showing him where he stands in relation to others.’ And besides, while all this was happening for the student performer, the audience was ‘being educated in the art of listening to music’ and thereby ‘developing a critical taste’ towards what it heard. (56)

There was more at stake here than simply getting people involved in music-making however.

The festivals were primary sites for inculcating identifications with values of the British middle

classes and for normalizing white middle class identities as the benchmarks of civilization (56).

As MacMillan argued, cultural activity could exert “a splendid influence upon national

character” (55). Tippet suggests that “festivals did more than enhance ‘the critical appreciation of

the man in the street.’”

Their purpose, as MacMillan pointed out during a radio talk in 1935, was ‘by no means purely musical.’ Lord Grey intended music and drama festivals to be ‘a really useful school, both for good manners and beauty and purity of diction.’ . … By performing British music and plays and conforming to British standards Canadians were not only bringing Canadian culture into line with that of the mother country; they were also, in Grey’s words, binding the Dominion itself together by giving it ‘an identity of tastes and aspirations.’ (57)

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The modernist project of managing populations while improving society through improving the

“self” permeated the discourse of musical ideals. Missionaries brought salvation to savages;

farmers and industrialists improved lands that were being “wasted” by Aboriginal peoples (Neu

and Therrien 2003, 32), public education brought improved discipline and behaviour to the

rougher classes, classical Western music evoked civilized feelings across the classes and all these

attempts to modify behaviours contributed to the “progress of man.”

The construction of “desire” and the uses of external and internal discipline run through all

discourses of self-improvement; however, while the development of thought about the

management of populations theoretically applies to members of all classes, conceptually, middle

class people were expected to be “subjects” of their own lives and “subjects,” or “makers,” of

history. They identify themselves as individuals making individual lives together with their peers

“of the better classes.” Members of the lower classes, on the other hand, were conceived as

belonging to “populations” with homogenous and potentially threatening group identities. These

were populations that, according to bourgeois thinking, needed to be managed. The contrast

between the portraiture used to represent members of the bourgeoisie and the group photographs

so commonly used to represent workers and student-recipients of public schooling is a reminder

of the imaginary of those who believed themselves suited to rule and suited to make decisions for

themselves and others versus those who belonged to “the masses,” that is, to dangerously unruly

populations in need of strict management.

Figure 21. Mary Henderson Flett Dickson, first president of the Toronto Women’s Musical Club and Anna Mueller Farini, Women’s Musical Club President, 1907-1908. (Elliott 1997, 36, 51)

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Figure 22. Students and teachers in front of an unnamed Indian Residential School in Canada (Indian Residential School)

The Arts and Crafts festivals held by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) between 1927 and

1931 offer a tangible representation of the different levels of belonging assigned to people within

the Canadian body politic. During these four years, the publicist for the CPR, John Murray

Gibbon, organized sixteen music and handicraft festivals across Canada (Henderson 2005, 139)

Gibbon, a writer and cultural commentator, was concerned to find a language and practice that

might encourage the diverse immigrant populations living in Canada to see themselves as

members of a unified nation. His vision for the folk festivals emerged against a backdrop of

racism and xenophobia that was widespread in public discourse and reflected in government

immigration categories of desirable versus unsuitable immigrants (147).181 In fact, Gibbon

produced a pamphlet entitled The New Canadian Loyalists which made a case of being more

accepting of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants while continuing the practice of ordering different

ethnicities and “races” according to a hierarchy of suitability for immigration to Canada (Gibbon

1941).182 Gibbon believed that the folk music of each “race” expressed an essentialist identity;

however, he also argued that beneath these essentialist modes of being existed a common

humanity. Gibbon is known as the promoter of the “mosaic” conception of Canada in which non-

British settlers are encouraged to maintain a connection to their “ethnic heritage” as opposed to

181

(History in our Faces on Occupied Land:A Race Relations Timeline 2008) 182

For further discussion of this pamphlet and Gibbon see (Mackey 2002, 51).

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American policies of cultural assimilation (Henderson 2005). The mosaic, imagined by Gibbon,

made Canada a vibrant “colourful” place, and, in the sense that Gibbon was a supporter of

broader immigration policies and feared the effects of xenophobia on national unity, he offered a

progressive counter-narrative to overt hostility and racism expressed elsewhere towards non-

British immigrants and “Indians.” At the same time, however, Gibbon’s vision of the folk

festivals reaffirmed a hierarchy of belonging with “folk” cultures performed as pre-modern

identities, celebrated for the “colour” they added to the national identity but clearly in contrast to

the modernist, civilized identities of the founding peoples, i.e., the British and, to a lesser extent,

the French (Henderson 2005).183 Performances of ethnicity marked “folk” cultures as

entertaining but culturally and politically infantile. Like the projects to collect Indian artifacts,

they took what must have been living practices at one point, and turned them into non-

threatening, identifiable and consumable objects. Stuart Henderson argues that,

as a means to develop and represent an ersatz pluralism of Folk identities, Gibbon’s Folk festivals were, ultimately, about “outside,” or external performance. The festivals in no way allowed race to be taken for granted, but rather they aimed to establish a forum for the external performance of crucial internal ethnicities. These Folk were always acting as Folk, performing a Folk-ness to others—whatever took place on the stage must be regarded as an “outside” performance, designed for others, for those who do not immediately understand. (Henderson 2005, 150)

The creation of “folk” identities, transmitted aurally, and based on “tradition,” reflected the

modernist division of humanity into subjects and objects, i.e., those who are rational bourgeois

individuals—subjects of history, and those whose identities are objects of entertainment and

study. Citing a guidebook produced for the 1928 Winnipeg “New Canadian Festival,” Henderson

notes that in this guidebook,

“They,” …are always already someone else, and can never be “us.” Further, the land is always already “ours”—its Native inhabitants literally written off into oblivion. There is no room in the dialectic for Native peoples. Rather than deal with the messiness of their lingering presence, the guidebook prefers to erase them from the landscape, emphasizing instead the bareness of a new world begging to be filled. In this construction, there is only “us,” the hegemonic class of white, Anglo-Celtic Canadians, and “they,” the Other Europeans. (Henderson 2005, 150)

Thus, while the CPR festivals offered an idealized vision of social equality and harmony “in

which all ‘racial groups’ were represented side by side; ‘they’ were all basically alike, a

183

I suggest that representations of French Canadian culture in English Canada are also caricatured and sentimentalized as quaint and charming but politically infantile; however, pursuing the specific imaginary of French Canada in English Canada is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

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harmonious race of races for ‘us’ to observe, recognize, and enjoy,” with a clear division

between the “us” of British modernity and the “them” of pre-history (Henderson 2005, 155).

This hierarchy played out in the musical presentations of the festivals. There was the “folk”

music of Aboriginals and non-Europeans on side stages and then there were the central

presentations of culture represented by the work of various “Canadian,” high art composers. Sir

Ernest MacMillan, for example, was one of the first composers to become involved in the folk

festivals by arranging a number of French folk songs into “art music” to be performed by the

Hart House String Quartet (2012a). Other music composed by classically-trained musicians for

the festivals included a ballad opera based on French-Canadian folksongs by Healey Willan,

Suite Canadienne by Claude Champagne, a Suite for string quartet by George Bowles, and

arrangements (Four French-Canadian Folksongs, for mixed voices, by Alfred Whitehead and

Irvin Cooper (Kallmann and Potvin 2012b).

The folk festivals, while promoting a “tolerant” approach to “Otherness,” clearly established

Anglo, masculine identities as the rational centre with “ethnic” difference providing not only a

way to distinguish Canada from the United States but also a way to construct the “Canadian” as

“welcoming and tolerant.” “Us” and “Them” are clearly demarcated and held in place. The

dominant group is anointed with a special quality of mature civilization, while lesser Others

serve as props to demonstrate the “tolerance,” and, therefore, the special civility of the dominant

group. The tradition of framing non-Anglo groups as colourful Others continues today in the

form of annual Multicultural festivals in which performances of Otherness replay the distinction

between “founding” Canadians and second-tier Others.

Part III: Public spectacle and the production of historical memory

School music programs and music festivals reflected the racial entitlements and sense of

belonging (or not belonging) that were part of the overall educational project to support

particular ideas of social order; however, public spectacles provided further venues for asserting

the legitimacy of the white settler state. Public celebrations, such as centenaries or the launching

of new institutions, offered moments in which historical narratives, social hierarchies, and

notions of belonging were presented during high intensity, pleasure-filled events created for the

consumption of large numbers of people. This was the education of feeling in order to produce

identifications with the nation state on a grand scale.

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As “performance art”, the construction of public memory is about legitimizing “states, ideologies, or political factions by offering imagined communities of shared posterity and common descent (Alan Gordon as cited in Freeman 2010, 22).

These are projects that also remind us of the instability of relations of power and the need to

continually legitimize particular social relations. The narratives expressed in public ceremony

assert legitimacy through grand statements coupled with other strategies that, it is hoped, will

connect people on a deep emotional level with the narratives offered. The role of the musician in

such projects is to produce music that will link particular emotions with a particular narrative of

exaltation. On festive occasions, the role of the composer and performing musicians is to

produce an intensification of emotion that results in an experience of euphoria. There is

seduction involved in these moments of ceremonial identity-production. Public celebrations are

moments during which truth claims are made and are reinforced through ritual and music has an

important place in the effectiveness of such moments for, it is through the rehearing of such

ceremonial musics that memories, and their associated feelings, are often evoked, long after the

actual words of speeches have been forgotten.

In this section, I offer three brief examples of public celebrations in which music is used to

reinforce particular notions of Canadian history and identity.

A Masque: Canada’s Welcome

An early example of an event designed to produce historical memory is found in the short opera,

A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879).184 The narrative of this work, in semi-

operatic form, depicts the settlement of Canada as the peaceful and inevitable evolution of the

wilderness to a thriving British colony. In order to produce this particular narrative, Indian

characters have important roles to play. The piece opens with an “Indian Chief” singing a

plaintive farewell to the woods in which he relinquishes his way of life to the white man, based

on the advice of a higher power:

184

“As Shewn Before His Excly. the Marquis of Lorne & H.R.H. the Princess Louise, On February 24, 1879 At the Opera House Ottawa" (Clappe and Dixon 1879).

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Recitative – Indian Chief:

The Manitou has spoken! From the distant east Rises the dawn; the dawn that brings us death. Faint as the morning mist that lingers o’er the lake, I see great towns supplant the wigwams of our tribes: The iron plough drives back the thronging buffalo; With waving corn the prairie mocks the Indian foot; The white man comes—The red man faces from off the land. The Manitou has spoken. Woods and Lakes—Farewell!

Aria:

O prairie, boundless as the sea, Whose grasses wave in every wind; O forest, dear in leaf and tree; Ah, must I leave you all behind? Is fate so cruel to the tree; Is freedom born to misery?

Fair lakes, upon whose gentle swell My frail canoe has danced her way, Dear hunter’s life I love so well, Dear woods I track from day to day, Dear motherland—I may not stay; The Great Voice wills it.—I obey.

Farewell! Farewell!

Figure 23. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 6)

The Indian Chief portrayed above is of the “noble savage” variety. Here, the audience is

encouraged to experience a form of catharsis over the losses expressed by this Chief; however,

the demise of his people is to be taken up as an inevitability, brought about by the good-

intentioned actions of a superior civilization.

The next character to take the stage is “An Indian Maiden,” the narrator of the story who plays

the role of “Canada.” In her story, the “Indian Maiden” looks forward to the arrival of the white

man with anticipation and joy. Interspersed throughout her narrative are appearances by different

“provinces” telling their part of the story of the Nation. In the passage below, the hardy European

literally clears the way for greater forms of civilization to come:

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Chorus of Backwoodsmen:

Strong and ready, firm and steady, Through the world we’ll cut our way, Looking to the bright tomorrow; Who can think of cares today?

Solo:

With his pack upon his shoulder, and his axe beside his hand, And a thought for wife and little ones at home, far away, Comes the hardy pioneer to the forest, bound to clear Home and freedom in the future, through the toils of today.

Though the winter frost be cruel, and the winter storms be fierce, And his life may be bitter, hard and rough, for a year. Yet the spring time surely comes, boys, To all who work it comes, boys, And the Maple Leaf can give him land enough, never fear.

Figure 24. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 7)

After this, each “province” is introduced and honoured with a story of its origins. For example,

Quebec, now to be ruled by Britain, is presented as a gracious loser, happy to be part of the

British Empire:

Quebec:

Welcome England’s noble scions! In the language of romance: -- Long may England’s mighty lion’s Guard the fleurs de lis of France

Figure 25. From A Masque: Canada’s Welcome (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 11)

In the final Aria, the “Indian Maiden” representing “Canada,” thanks the two members of the

British Royal Family, in whose honour the “Masque” has been written, stating that “Canada has

one heart only and that heart she gives to you” (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 18). The Masque ends

with “an exceedingly noble march,” with all the provinces represented, and a final rousing

rendition of “God Save the Queen” (Clappe and Dixon 1879, 19).

Written in honour of a specific royal visit, Canada’s Welcome is one of many representations

that suggest that Aboriginal peoples willingly relinquished their lands to the noble and good

rulers of Britain and the hardy adventurers who opened the country to civilizational

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development. The active players in this narrative are masculine, with feminine characters

watching in delight, as the fruits of each province are brought forth through manly enterprise.

The disappearance of Indigenous peoples is portrayed as a “natural and inevitable phenomenon”

(Freeman 2010, 24). This is not a story of aggressive Imperialism and accumulation; it is an

exalted story of national innocence in which dispossession is the inevitable effect of progress.

There is no resistance from Aboriginal peoples because, according to this narrative, childlike

Aboriginal peoples have willingly relinquished their lands and sovereignty in order to worship at

the feet of the British Crown. Here, public spectacle brings an experience of euphoria to a

narrative that is all about legitimating the white settler project.

1884 Toronto Semi-Centennial Celebration

In all the glory of a bright summer morning, with flags and banners gloating merrily from housetops and windows, with sounds of music from east and west and all around, the ‘Semi-Centennial Week’ was ushered in. (Careless 1984, 148)

In spite of a harsh economic downturn, (“there was worry about jubilating when so many were in

need”), the 1884 semi-centennial celebration of the incorporation of the city of Toronto was

marked by six days of elaborate celebrations: Municipal and Historical Day, Military Day,

Trades and Industrial Day, United Empire Loyalists Day, Benevolent Societies Day and

Educational Day (Careless 1984). Music was an important part of each of these celebratory

events. An enormous parade with bands and a series of historical tableaux took place on the

opening day but parades with bands were also part of most of the other “days.”185 Trades and

Industrial Day included a performance of Haydn’s Oratorio The Creation, “nobly sung by a choir

of some 300,” and the high point of United Empire Loyalists Day was a performance of

Gounod’s The Redemption,” performed by the Philharmonic Society under the “esteemed”

conductor, F. H. Torrington. The climax of the entire week, the close of Education Day, was an

evening music festival presented by 600 pupils of public and separate schools in the Horticultural

Pavilion at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition:

'United in singing the praises of the city they lived in, and of the country they claimed as their own.' The young girls, 'dressed in white centred on and above the stage, reminded one of the heavenly choirs.' (Scadding and Dent as cited in Careless 1984, 152)

185

“There were the cavalry of the Governor General’s Body Guard, with their mounted band, the horse artillery, the fusiliers, the foot guards, and the grenadiers, dazzling in scarlet, and always bands, bands for the soldiers of queen and country”(Careless 1984, 150). There were also company bands such as those of the Ontario Bolt Company and Dominion Organ, as well as the ‘Coloured Band’ (Careless 1984, 149-151).

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The celebrations of 1884, were also marked by the enthusiastic singing of a “near-national

anthem,” The Maple Leaf Forever, written by Toronto’s own Alexander Muir in 1867 (Careless

1984, 143).

Historian, J.M.S. Careless, describes Toronto as a “Victorian, and very British city in the 1880s,

flag-waving imperialist though no less ardently Canadian in national hope.”186 The twelve

historical tableaux presented on horse-drawn wagons during the opening parade offered an

“illustration of events which should be familiar to every inhabitant of Toronto” (The Daily Mail

1884 as cited in Freeman 2010, 23). The tableaux represented a historical narrative of past,

present and future that encapsulated the overall narrative of the semi-centennial. Victoria

Freeman suggests that two overlapping narratives were presented throughout the celebration:

One was the erasure of the indigenous past of Toronto and the celebration of its British-Canadian and imperial future, while the other offered a vision of an idealized past in which indigenous peoples and newcomers to the Toronto area coexisted harmoniously, thus supporting the idealization of Canada as a peaceable kingdom. (Freeman 2010, 22)

In the tableaux itself and subsequent speeches, “fictive” Indians187 represented a picturesque and

primitive past, happily swept along by European progress—a narrative belied by the problematic

land surrenders of the Mississauga Indians, including the surreptitious increase of surrendered

lands in 1805 and the destruction of hunting and fishing areas through “settler poaching, sawmill

development, and the ecological transformations of colonial agriculture” (Freeman, 24). The

narrative is also belied by the fact that the Mississauga Chief, Peter Jones, a Methodist and friend

of Egerton Ryerson, traveled to England and met with Queen Victoria in 1838 to plead that the

Monarchy force the Canadian government to give Aboriginal communities title deeds to their

reserves to protect their “few remaining lands” from further encroachment because agreements

were continually being violated by settlers (Smith 1988, xii).188 This actual history

notwithstanding, one of the main speakers during the celebrations, Toronto-based historian,

186

Ninety-three percent of the population was of British stock.(Careless 1984, 142) 187

Freeman offers a detailed account of which “Indians” were invited to perform in the parade and speak during the celebrations. The Mississauga Indians who had most recently been removed from the Toronto area were not part of the celebration (Freeman 2010, 26). 188

See also Victoria Freeman’s account of the desperation of Indigenous refugees, including the Mississauga who had done everything asked of them to become successful farmers but were still being hounded off every patch of land by encroaching settlers (Freeman 2009, 220).

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Daniel Wilson,189 exclaimed that Torontonians inhabit a city with “scarcely a past either for

pride or for shame” (Daniel Wilson as cited in Freeman, 23) —a form of deliberate historical

amnesia that might, today, be referred to as a project of “rebranding.”

The music performed throughout this six-day celebration was chosen to mirror and amplify the

overall narrative of imperial “progress,” substituting a romanticized past of “neither pride nor

shame” and drawing all classes of society into a narrative of progress and success—in spite of

the great disparities of wealth and ongoing class conflicts being fought out in Toronto (Careless

1984, 146). Here, an attractive and exalting narrative, the euphoria of spectacle along with the

euphoria of a mass musical event, contributed to a project to produce historical memories that, it

was hoped, would also produce loyalties across class. In relation to their American neighbours,

public gestures were cautiously open and optimistic; however, “there was always a strain of

doubt” towards American intentions “in this defensively British and Conservative city: doubt not

felt in happily flying the guardian Union Jack” (Careless 1984, 143). In this week of events,

pride of ownership clearly belonged to white British Settlers as “daughters of the Empire.”

British Protestantism and “free” markets were the models for morality; however, “ethnic” groups

were invited to dance during some of the parades, literally adding “colour” to the character of the

city, while Aboriginal people had the role of standing in for a “colourful” past.

Bodies, hearts and minds were the targets for this spectacle intended to draw members of all

classes together, with music offering particularly rich, embodied moments in which identities

were performed into being. Notably, there were many moments during these celebrations when

moving the body and cheering were welcomed. Unlike the Masque of Canada celebration, this

week-long series of events was intended to offer a place in which members of all classes could

see themselves reflected. The role of music in these celebrations was to reinforce particular

interpretations of history, assert the “rightness” of the current status quo, and generate positive

emotional associations, even euphoric associations, with particular narratives of the self in

association with national identity.

189

Like many other professional and amateur “collectors,” Daniel Wilson, professor of history and English literature at the University of Toronto in 1884, robbed Aboriginal graves in order to collect artifacts for personal and museum collections (Freeman 2010, 25). David Boyle, curator of the first Provincial Museum in Ontario was also an avid collector of “Indian” skeletons (Stephenson 2004).

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United to Serve

A third example of creating historical memory through public events was the 1927 pageant

created to celebrate the joining of several church denominations to form the United Church of

Canada. 190 The title page is interesting for the names of the principal creators of the piece—all

highly placed Anglo-Canadian men associated with the University of Toronto:

United to Serve: A Pictorial Presentation Written and Produced by Denzil G. Ridout, assisted by Dr. E. J. Pratt, Victoria University, who has specially written the New Hymns and the Poetical Selections for this Pageant; Dr. Ernest MacMillan, Principal, Toronto Conservatory of Music, who has arranged the Music (including his own original composition for “Thou God of all the Peoples”). (Ridout, Pratt, and MacMillan 1927)191

In this particular public event, the music consisted mostly of hymns and thus provided an

opportunity for attendees to make an additional emotional connection to the spirit of the

celebration by singing together with others; that is, by bringing particular sounds and associated

emotions into the body itself. The text from this pageant, cited below, offered a heroic vision that

merged the mission to bring Christianity to all corners of the earth with the mission to bring

progress to the world by colonizing “primitive peoples.”

190

“The United Church is the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. Ours is a rich history closely entwined with the development of Canada itself.” The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational denominations merged to form The United Church of Canada in 1925 (Canada 2013). As the church’s descriptor says, the colonization of Canada is “closely entwined” with various churches. This included the assertion of white supremacy enacted, in part through church involvement in running the Indian Residential Schools (Milloy 1999, 27; Neu and Therrien 2003, 105). 191 Denzil G. Ridout (1886-1954),

was a Methodist/United Church minister and administrator. He was born in Dorset, England. He left the Methodist Book Room in London to work in the Methodist Book Room in Montreal. He studied theology at Victoria University, and was ordained in 1920. He edited The United Church Record; served as Assistant Secretary, and Secretary from 1945, of the Missionary and Maintenance Committee. (Biography - Denzil G. Ridout ).

Edwin John Pratt, poet, professor, critic (b at Western Bay, Nfld 4 Feb 1882; d at Toronto 26 Apr 1964):

Son of a Methodist minister, Pratt grew up in a succession of Newfoundland outports, completing his schooling at the Methodist College, St John's. After teaching for 2 years he became a candidate for the Methodist ministry in 1904, serving a 3-year probationship before entering Victoria College, University of Toronto, where he studied theology and psychology. Ordained in 1913, Pratt never served as a regular minister, teaching psychology at University of Toronto before being appointed to the department of English at Victoria College in 1920, where he taught until retirement in 1953. (Pitt 2012).

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The Great Appeal and Final Triumph: “United Church: “I would give thanks for the heritage which is mine and for the great army of loyal disciples who are now serving the Master in this and other lands. My ambassadors go forth to the Church (ambassador goes off), the Dominion (Ambassador goes off), the Empire (Ambassador goes off), and make known the God who so loved the world….Then the King will say to those at his right ‐ ‘Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take possession of the Kingdom which has been destined for you from the creation of the world.  

Figure 26. Excerpts from United to Serve (Ridout, Pratt, and MacMillan 1927, 21)

The back page of the program booklet contained a request for donations to the United Church of

Canada for the “The Maintenance and Extension Fund…for the Investment of your gifts in the

Dominion and World Service”—a reminder of the close relationship between the project of

Imperialism and Christian missionary service (Ridout, Pratt, and MacMillan 1927).

Like the music for schools and the CPR Folk Festivals, the use of music at the three events

described throughout this section constitute a form of governmentality, that is, a tactic employed

in the management of populations; a tactic to produce shared subjectifications amongst large

numbers of people. In these examples of public meaning-making several narratives are evoked:

the colonial narrative of evolutionary/social progress; the narrative of colonial benevolence and

“innocent” domination; and the notion that Canada has no history prior to the arrival of

Europeans. Through these projects of public celebration, we see associations generated between

civic events and particular relations of power. The various means employed to affirm particular

relations of power include the use of music as a means to produce emotional experiences that

link notions of the self with exalted notions of the nation. As is the case with singing the national

anthem on a daily basis in schools, these experiences are part of people’s subjectification; they

are part of how people come to know themselves as particular kinds of subjects with the goal of

having these emotions easily re-invoked when the same music is heard again.

With this analysis, I am not suggesting that every person takes up every public moment in the

same way. The fact that relations of power are central to the design of such celebrations means

that, inevitably, there are those who disagree with and resist the stated messages and desired

emotional responses. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that music is employed in these instances to

support political objectives that the presenters hope will result in a deep emotional response that

will become part of who individuals understand themselves to be in the desired hierarchy of the

white settler state. The role of music is not innocent; rather, it is a powerful tool employed in the

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hopes of achieving specific political outcomes. I chose these three examples as sites of the

production of particular tropes of belonging, demonstrating the explicit use of music—as a tactic

power--to generate emotional associations with particular notions of identity.

Part IV: Popular music and reassuring identities

Thus far in this chapter, I have analyzed the uses of music chosen by musical experts, planners

and administrators to influence different populations and express notions of Canadian history and

belonging. In this final section, I analyze music that people chose for their own pleasure in their

homes, in social settings, and as entertainments they paid to attend. Many of the popular songs of

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate that the themes of racial belonging and

national identity were a constant source of anxiety and engagement. The instability of racial

identities and the pressing emotional and political needs to rationalize white entitlement and

class hierarchy was reflected in many forms of popular music including Canadian patriotic

songs, operettas about colonial adventures, theatre pieces on Indian themes, and minstrel songs.

These popular musics demonstrated a need to address insecurities about racial identity and racial

entitlement through the performance of reassuring identities—identities that provided white

settlers with a “toe-hold of respectability” in relation to debased identities of racialized Others

(Fellows and Razack 1998).

When people chose to attend performances of operettas and minstrelsy, or play popular pieces in

their homes and amongst friends, they were calling forth desirable emotional experiences and

enacting their own, self-chosen, notions of identity. I have already called attention to music that

drew on an imaginary of empty landscapes and hardy masculine adventurers—the “hardy

northerners” who are identified as the true inheritors of Canada (see Chapter Four). The popular

music I consider below reflects the insecurities of the white colonial project in other ways. I have

divided this music into three types, all performed in white spaces: Patriotic Songs, Songs and

Operettas that celebrate white deeds and white belonging in the course of colonial adventures,

and songs that allow white people to “play” at being Others.

Celebrating white deeds and white belonging (1): Patriotic songs

I have included the texts for three Canadian patriotic songs, one from 1867, the year of

Confederation, one from 1890 and one from ca 1926. All of these songs appear in multiple

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collections as school songs192 and individual pieces of sheet music.193 The first piece, The

Maple Leaf Forever, by Alexander Muir, was entered into a song-writing contest to celebrate

Confederation in 1867. The song didn’t win the competition; however, Muir self-published the

piece and The Maple Leaf Forever went on to become an informal national anthem used up until

1980, when Calixa Lavallée’s song, O Canada, became the official national anthem (Canada).

Note the image of the Thistle, Shamrock and Rose in the text below (Figure 27)—signifying an

alliance of the English, Irish and Scotch, and “pride” in their racial membership.194

The Maple Leaf Forever,  by Alexander Muir, 1867  In days of yore, From Britain’s shore, Wolfe the dauntless hero came, And planted firm Old England’s flag On Canada’s fair domain!  

 Here may it wave, Our boast, our pride,  And joined in love together, The Thistle, Shamrock, Rose entwine, The Maple Leaf forever!  

Figure 27. The Maple Leaf Forever, 1867 (Muir 1867)

My second example, My Own Canadian Home, draws on mighty landscapes as allegories for

national nobility and belonging, heroic deeds, the blessings of “God,” and the noble heritage of

the brave “race” of British men fighting against Americans during the War of 1812.195

“Freedom,” a theme that also appears in Augustus Bridles 1909 version of O Canada, refers, in

this case, to freedom from becoming part of the United States.

192

Cringan and Marshall 1931-1934. 193

Found in the archival Sheet Music Collection of the Edward Johnston Building Library, University of Toronto. 194

Daniel Coleman documents the use of Thistle, Shamrock and Rose imagery in the construction of “Britishness” as the “civil norm” in Canada (Coleman 2006, 19). 195

Queenston Heights and Lundy’s Lane refer to battles won by the British against the Americans, during the War of 1812 (Kidd 2013).

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 My Own Canadian Home  by M. Morley McLaughlin & E.G. Nelson, 1890   Of thee I sing, O happy land, My own Canadian home. Thy lakes and rivers, as the voice Of many waters raise To Him who planned their vast extent A symphony of praise.  Thy mountain peaks o’erlook the clouds— They pierce the azure skies; They bid thy sons be strong and true— To great achievements rise. A noble heritage is thing, So grand and fair and free;  A fertile land, where he who toils Shall well rewarded be, And he who joys in nature’s charms, Exulting, here may view— Scenes of enchantment—strangely fair, Sublime in form and hue.  Shall not the race that tread thy plains, Spurn all that would enslave? Or they who battle with thy tides 

Shall not that race be brave? Shall not Niagara’s mighty voice Inspire to actions high?  ‘Twere easy such a land to love, Or for her glory die. And doubt not should a foeman’s hand Be armed to strike at thee, Thy trumpet call throughout the land Need scare repeated be!  As bravely as on Queenston’s Heights, Or as in Lundy’s Lane, Thy songs will battle for thy rights And freedom’s cause maintain. Did kindly heaven afford to me The choice where I would dwell.  Fair Canada that choice should be, The land I love so well. I love the hills and valleys wide, Thy waters’ flash and foam; May God in love o’er thee preside, My own Canadian home.  

Figure 28. My Own Canadian Home (1890) (McLaughlin and Nelson 1931-34)

Land of Glad Tomorrows also makes the link between Britain, noble deeds, blessings from God,

and the glory of belonging to Canada.

Land of Glad Tomorrows  by Gordon V. Thompson, ca 1926 

Land of glad tomorrows Canada our own, Daughter of Britannia, Be they glories known! Deeds of glowing valour Crowd they story's page; Nobler parts await thee,  On the world's new stage.  Shadows have departed, Dark was yesterday, Now a golden sunrise, Dawns upon thy way. Forward then with courage: 

Onward to thy goal!Glad be thy tomorrows, While the years unroll!  Chorus:  'Tis the land of glad tomorrows, Our own Canadian home, So today forget your sorrows; And sing of her where e'er you roam! in the sky there shines a rainbow That the Lord himself hath planned; God save our King, our Empire dear, 

And Canada our home Land! 

Figure 29. Land of Glad Tomorrows (ca 1826) (Thompson 1931-34 )

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It am not stating anything new by pointing out that a majority of the white population in colonial

Upper Canada identified with the British Empire; however, what I want to draw attention to by

including the texts to these songs celebrating national identity is the way that whiteness and

entitlement are normalized through the repetition of particular tropes and taken into the body

through the repetition of particular songs.

The indoctrination of populations through the continual repetition of patriotic songs is intended

to by-pass the capacity to question one’s emotional identifications with a state. To speak

critically about a national narrative is to attempt to pry apart pleasure-filled associations between

notions of personal merit and exalted myths of the nation—myths that have been internalized

over a lifetime. The three patriotic songs shown above offer a very specific story through which

the Canadian subject achieves personhood; however, it is a story based on raced and gendered

identities, imagined histories of generosity and innocence, and the absent presence of those

constructed as outsiders to the nation (Bannerji 1997; Thobani 2007, 67). It is a story of race

pride and innocence; a story about bringing civilization to the “wilderness.”

Celebrating white deeds and white belonging (2): Colonial adventures

Beyond overtly patriotic music, there are numerous pieces in a variety of genres that draw on the

notion of shared noble identities through participation in military or missionary service in distant

colonies. These include hymns, popular songs, and operettas. The Colonial Harmonist, for

example, published in 1832 by musician Mark Burnham, contains four-part settings of “the most

approved tunes, anthems, and chants,” including two hymns about the nobility of overseas

colonial conquest. The two songs below demonstrate notions of exalted identity, based on the

risks of fighting against the “errors” of heathen peoples:

Ceylon, by B. Holt, publ. 1832 

From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand; Where Africa’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river,  From many a palmy plain; they call us to deliver Their land from error’s cabin [claim]. 

Missionary Hymn, by B. Holt, publ. 1832 

Yes, my native land I love thee, All thy scenes I love them well,  Friends connexions, happy county, Can I l bid you all farewell? Can I leave you, Can I leave you Can I leave you, far in heathen lands to dwell? Can I leave you, far in heathen lands to dwell? 

Figure 30. Ceylon & Missionary Hymn (Burnham 1832, 163; 177)

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The Military Opera, Leo, the Royal Cadet, by Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann (music) and George

Frederick Cameron (lyrics), offers a particularly rich example of tropes used to dehumanize

indigenous peoples and sustain rationales for overseas colonial “adventures.” The story is about

“a soldier’s military career at Kingston’s Royal Military College” and his service during the

Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom. The piece has been

very successful with 150 performances from 1889-1925, 1982, 1990 and 2010 (Beharriell 2012).

The story revolves around a romance between a young cadet, Leo, and a “maiden” living near

the Royal Military College. The battle that takes place in Zululand between British soldiers and

Zulu people defending their land is actually only a very short scene in the play. Leo, the Royal

Cadet is a well-crafted, humorous drama that makes light of everyone—drinking cadets,

“Bloodswigging Captains,” Socialists, maidens who suffer from lovesickness, and

Bohemians/artists of questionable masculinity. The character “Wind,” a composer, given a

ridicule-inducing speech impediment, is a reminder of the dubious status available to male

artists. The lovesick maidens are also cast to type as emotional females driven by love and the

need to “get a man.” I want, however, to focus on the use of the Zulu warriors in this piece. An

interesting feature of the story is that the text of the Zulu number, sung by the Zulu leader and his

warriors, expresses very good reasons for the Zulus wishing to defeat the British:

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“Song of the Zulu Warriors” 

CETCH (Zulu leader):  

The stars as they look from the spaces above  On the Northerner sleeping on earth,  (Zulu warriors strike the ground with spears) May waft to his pillow sweet visions of love  From ocean‐washed isle of his birth. 

Chorus: From the ocean‐washed isle of his berth. 

And the faces of old he shall not see again, And his dreams shall be dreams evermore;  (Zulu warriors strike the ground with spears) For the vultures shall feast on the forms of the dead, Lying thick on our far away shore. 

Chorus: Lying thick on our far away shore. 

But the justice we asked—our possession from birth We shall take with the brand and the shield; And the whites who would trample our dear native earth Small yet learn how the Zulus yield 

Then away to our task, for the stars grow pale With the gleam of the Day‐god’s tread; And the shades of our sires from the heart of the gale Cry loud for the English dead. 

ZULU CHORUS: (This after every two verses.)  Oh, ho! Oh, ho! He, he! He, he!  We sing of the battle that is to be; Of the blood and the fire and the Cannon’s roar,  Of the hearts that have throbbed and shall throb no more.  Oh, ho! Oh, ho! He, he! He, he! Oh, ho! He, he! Oh! Hoo. 

Enter, from left entrance, BLOODSWIGGER and WIND [Bloodswigger is an army Captain of the Royal Military College of Kingston. Wind is a reluctant army recruit who wants nothing more but to finish his “Faewy Opera.”] 

B. (Looking after Zulus.) There they go. This is the sixth band that I’ve come across tonight. As sure as I’m an Englishman, we’re surrounded. W. Suwwounded! Then we shall be cut to pieces. B. (Coolly) Probably we will. W. We will! And I hav’nt finished the first scene of my new Faewy Opewa yet! B. The what? W. The first scene of my new Faewy— B. (Seizing him) If you open your mouth again about that infernal opera. I’ll— W. Look out! 

Seizes BLOODSWIGGER by collar and throws him to one side. A javelin on the instant whistles over the place where B. was standing and as W. draws his sword and revolver CETCHO and his Zulus rush upon the state. WIND fires and CETCHO drops. Shots are exchanged and a hand‐to‐hand conflict ensures. W. And B. fighting like heroes. The blacks crowd in from every side. A loud cheer, and LEO dashes in at the head of his men (right upper entrance). Rapid shooting; LEO falls. At the same instant WIND leaps over his body, B. by his side. The Zulus are driven back. Shots from behind. They give way, fighting stubbornly. B. carrying LEO and W. bringing up the rear with the Union Jack. W. falls. Cannon from right side. Zulus falling.

Figure 31. Excerpt from Leo, the Royal Cadet (Telgmann and Cameron 1991, 8-9)

In this narrative, the Zulus are portrayed as protecting their homeland. If Britons were faced with

the same situation, the defence of their homeland would have been presented as necessary and

legitimate. The rationale for the war from the side of the soldiers, however, is that they are

completely justified in fighting on behalf of “the Fatherland,” “against the faithless foe.” As

soldiers, they are a select group of heroes prepared to die for the honour of a flag:

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Song and Chorus: “Glory and Victory”  Chorus: For the soldier knows no fear,  He is one of a hero‐band;  And he dies with a soldier’s cheer;  For the flag of the Fatherland.  

 

Last Verse:  And as warriors bold, while lasts our breath,  We’ll guard it with heart and hand;  For the death men die is life, not death,  For the flag of the Fatherland. 

Figure 32. Excerpt from Leo, the Royal Cadet (1889) (Telgmann and Cameron 1991, 8-9)

In balancing the two rationales for war, the latter seems a rather feeble, i.e., “Zulus are heathen;

we are Christian; therefore Zulus must die;” however, this is a rationale that still has currency.196

The Zulus, in fact, function as props in the play; the reason the white men go to war; and the

means through which white soldiers produce themselves as heroes. What leaps out here, of

course, is that this is exactly the way that most colonial stories are told. The Indigenous peoples

are portrayed as faceless throngs, devoid of humanity or any point of view that is worth paying

attention to. The true actors of the story are the colonial soldiers fighting for the better good. The

illustration that accompanies the Canadian Musical Heritage’s excerpt of the play portrays the

Zulu warriors as blackface caricatures—a rabid-looking throng of primitives calling out to be

slaughtered by the modern European (Telgmann and Cameron 1991). Our sympathy is drawn to

the individual white soldier sacrificing his life for the flag.

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Modern-day assertions of evolutionary superiority are expressed in terms of “democratic” versus primitive and underdeveloped.

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Figure 33. Drawing of battle between British troops and Zulu warriors. Canadian Illustrated News, 1875, as reprinted in (Telgmann and Cameron 1991)

This is a remarkable drawing for what it tells us about how reducing Others to props, in a play

about European advancement, is completely normalized—as if European colonial adventures

were really nothing more, nor less, than a moment of theatre in the grand narrative of

“civilizational advancement.” Mahmood Mamdami makes a key connection when he links the

European Holocaust with the wars of genocide undertaken by European powers in the colonies:

The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: “the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples. The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique—but only in Europe. (Mamdami 2005, 7)

In the case of Leo, the Royal Cadet, it may be tempting to shrug off the light hearted depiction of

the British-Zulu war; however, the depiction and celebration of these slaughters as a minor side-

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effect of colonial adventure is precisely the means by which Others are reduced to non-human

identities. Wars against non-whites were based on the premise that “Imperialism [was serving]

civilization by clearing inferior races off the earth” (Mamdami 2005, 6):

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-sates, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as a biological necessity. (Mamdami 2005, 7)

Light-hearted depictions of colonial adventures are, therefore, not simply examples of poor taste,

they are reflections of, and contributors to, a process of normalizing who does and who does not

count as human.

The use of “exotic Others” as props in stories about white colonial adventures appears frequently

in other early operettas. Not all of these works are extant; however, the titles offer strong

suggestions of a continuing narrative: Off to Egypt: or, An Arab Abduction, (1884), and Chon; or

the Mummy’s Bride (1898), The Ottoman (1905), Le Rajah (1910), Arabia (n.d.) and Semiramis

(n.d.) (Cooper 1991). The exoticized Other, a construct of the Western imagination, is what

marks these stories as heroic adventures; however, genocide, in colonial settings, is the material

reality behind these narratives.

Theatre pieces providing titillating encounters with exoticized Others were not restricted to tales

of overseas adventures. As described in Chapter Four, there has long been a fascination with

“Indian” stories, identities, and fictive Indian musical themes in Canadian art and popular music.

Nineteenth century theatrical pieces include The 90th on Active Service; or Campaigning in the

Northwest, (1885) – a “musical and dramatic burlesque of the Riel uprising,” the ballad opera

Tammany that includes the song Alknomook: The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians;

Hobomoko: An Indian Romance (1907) and Le Fétiche (Propitiation of Iroquois Hunters),

(1912). These portrayals provide reassuring identities of whiteness and white entitlement to both

listeners and performers, by portraying the strangeness of that which one is not. They also

function as consoling narratives that tell the story of colonization as one of either innocence or

necessity. Mamdami writes that racism and genocide occurred in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt

and South Africa long before the European Holocaust but occurred even earlier in North

America:

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The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history. (Mamdami 2005, 6)

Le Fétiche, a music-drama written in 1912 by Joseph Vézina is a theatrical version of the

“Captivity Narrative” genre, discussed in Chapter Five, in which white women are captured by

bloodthirsty Indians and rescued by noble white men, in this case, white soldiers (Cooper 1991,

viii). Like Leo, the Royal Cadet, a love interest frames the narrative. In this case, the exoticized

Others are also based on an historical incident: “the propitiation of the Iroquois hunters near

Lake Champlain in 1701”(Cooper 1991, xv). The “fetish” of the title is the good luck charm

embodied by the French Governor’s daughter—a woman, literally as fetish object—and the

theatrical device that generates the conflict of the story. Dorith Cooper’s description of the

Iroquois war-chorus “Chanson du scalp,” shows the uses of stereotypes to create “the Iroquois”

as fearsome savages:

The Iroquois war-chorus “Chanson du scalp”…punctuated by the voice of the young Indian girl Saïka, gives powerful expression to the text’s bloodthirstiness by means of repetitive melodic motives, rhythms and harmonic blocks. Saika’s cadenza-like interjections recall parts of the “Bell Song” from Delibes’ Lakmé, giving the scalping song a quality of genuine mystery and exoticism. Sharply contrasting with this excerpt is Gaston’s [the white male hero] brief but impassioned air “Ah! Tu recules” [Ah, you retreat]…filled with agitated orchestral figures in the best tradition of Massenet. (Cooper 1991, xv).

An Iroquois hunter tells the heroine of the story, the Governor’s daughter Gaëtane, that the

hunting season has been poor and that “according to the Manitou spirit, the season will be

abundant only if a white woman is caught during a full moon and is offered as a hunting

‘fetish.’” She is taken to Chief Tecumsah while the male hero, Gaston, and his friend Perussé,

are captured in the forest by members of another tribe. The chief of this tribe, (Wolf tribe), Chief

Bison-Borgne, offers to set the prisoners free in exchange for their rifle; however, the Chief is,

apparently, quite gullible: he allows the captive soldier to keep his gun because the solder claims

it was a gift from the “Manitou.” One of the white soldiers—an unwanted suitor of Gaëtane, dies

in the ensuing action and the white lovers are brought together in a happy ending. Notably

missing from this story is a realistic portrayal of why the Iroquois might have been hostile

towards the white settlers. Whatever questions there might be about this, however, are left out in

favour of portraying the Indians as both childishly naïve, and savagely bloodthirsty. (The scalp

song celebrates the number of scalps carried on the belts of each warrior). Thus, the Iroquois is

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neither fully human nor capable of rational agency because he is lower on the scale of humanity,

driven by superstition and mindless aggression. This piece, like the other pieces cited in this

section, demonstrates that these artworks do not exist separate from the politics of colonization.

They provide reassurance that white settlers belong on the land and are entitled to rule over all

others.

A theatre piece by Calixa Lavallée, with a libretto by Will F. Sage and poems by Phillips

Hawley, stands out for a different portrayal of Indians in what appears to be a different

accounting of historical relations between Indians and whites in the piece TIQ—Settled at last.

TIQ stands for “The Indian Question” and is subtitled “a melodramatic musical satire” (Cooper

1991, x). The piece offers a counter-narrative to the usual “white settler as victim,” and “Indian

as animal,” as found in Le Fétiche. In TIQ, Indians are humanized and depicted as peace-loving,

fighting only because they are being forced to fight to protect their land from duplicitous and

expansionist governments. The following three pieces from the operetta are remarkable for the

counter-narrative they express against the assumptions of “Manifest Destiny”197 that underlie so

many creative accounts of the colonial encounter. Piece No. 2, (Figure 34), offers a peaceful

depiction of Chief Sitting Bull, maidens198 and warriors:

197 Manifest Destiny: “the belief or doctrine, held chiefly in the middle and latter part of the 19th century, that it was the destiny of the U.S. to expand its territory over the whole of North America and to extend and enhance its political, social, and economic influences” (Manifest). 198

The idea that Aboriginal women should be described as “maidens” is not reflective of Indigenous notions of female agency but is, rather, a Western projection.

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No. 2 Ah! My loved Braves 

Sitting Bull: Ah, my loved braves and maidens,  A murmur I heard in the air,  Like the low merry note of the Songbird Throbbing  Its devoidance of care.  How the Great Spirit overwatches  How all our fires burn bright,  Auspicious the day for devotion,  To convert the poor misguided white. 

Now my loved braves and maidens,  Let each to his labour repair; Rememb’ring that who feeds the ravens  Will cuddle you up in his care. 

You to the fields and meadows,  You to the orchard fair, You to the wigwams follow, Where warm wigs will furnish your hair. 

Oh, braves, I am your chieftain, And they love all my peaceful ways; for love must command a sweet pleasure, And live with them all their days. 

Chorus of Braves and Maidens: Oh King, thou art our chieftain,  And we love all thy peaceful ways,  For love does command a sweet pleasure,  And lives with us, with us, All our days.  

Figure 34. No. 2 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca 1865)

Piece No. 7 satirizes the thoughts of Colonel Carter, by making a weak case for war with the

Indians: “Tranquility will not be tolerated.” The chorus that answers is equally satirical with

Indians suggesting that they “wouldn’t mind trying a little hand at dying” and soldiers suggesting

that the Indians “now do try, lay down and die” since they “wouldn’t mind a little thing like

that.”

No. 7 “Uncle Sam is Very Much Dissatisfied” COLONEL CARTER: Uncle Sam is very much dissatisfied,  He says that ev’ry wish of yours is gratified,  He gives you guns, You will not fight, He gives you rum, You won’t get tight. He says tranquility will not be tolerated, That something to incite you must be circulated, That if you will not war he will surely go to law,  And the whiskey ring as jury mediated,  Now do try, lay down and die,  You wouldn’t mind trying a little hand at dying,  Now do try, lay down and die, Sure you wouldn’t mind a little thing like that. 

CHORUS OF INDIANS/SOLDIERS: Hear their cry/ Now do try, lay down and die, We/You wouldn’t mind trying a little hand at dying, Hear their cry/ Now do try, lay down and die, Sure we/you wouldn’t mind a little thing like that. 

COLONEL CARTER:  Don’t think my pleasant ways an indicator That I came here at all as mediator; You cannot check the torrent’s pour, I’m only here to have your gore. He says that I must pounce upon you unsuspected, That every mother’s son of you’s elected to fill a hero’s grave,  Where monuments shall wave,  And flowers bloom and nothing left neglected. Now do try, lay down and die,  You wouldn’t mind trying a little hand at dying, Now do try, lay down and die, Sure you wouldn’t mind a little thing like that. 

CHORUS OF INDIANS/SOLDIERS: Hear their cry/ Now do try, lay down and die, We/You wouldn’t mind trying a little hand at dying, Hear their cry/ Now do try, lay down and die, Sure we/you wouldn’t mind a little thing like that. 

Figure 35. No. 7 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca 1865)

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Finally, in No. 22, the American soldiers have been captured by the Indians. The Indian’s dance

is stereotypical but the intent seems to be to make the commissioners and soldiers, as well as the

political promises they make, seem ridiculous.

No. 22 “We Never Tell a Lie” 

CHORUS OF BRAVES: Oh no, we never tell a lie, For if we did, ‘twould make us cry. Ah! …… We always keep our hatchet high,  For that is what we swear by. Ah! ….. (Dance around captives and blow on fish horns)  

SIMEON AND COLONEL: Colonel, I’m sick (And so am I) Do you think he’ll weaken? (No,) Oh, my, oh, my, My teeth are all on edge, (My blood is chill’d.) the marrow of my bones with fear is fill’d,  I’m tied here like a beefsteak to a broil. (This is a mistake, that I’d like to foil,)  What stake? (This stake, Oh, for a knife, This stake is a mistake, I’ll stake my life.) 

COMMISSIONERS AND SOLDIERS: 

But let us free, And we will be, Most peaceful in the nation, And congress too, shall put it through, A grand appropriation, A grand appropriation, A grand appropriation. 

‘Tis said of Washington of old, At least the story so is told 

 

MAIDENS: Ah!.... 

COMMISSIONERS AND SOLDIERS: 

That he is brave, and good, and bold, 

Could never, never tell a lie. 

MAIDENS, COMMISSIONERS AND SOLDIERS: : Ah!.... 

(Dance around captives and blow on fish horns) 

SIMEON AND COLONEL: 

Simon (Eh!) I think (Of course you do) I hardly know, Which way to turn, (Me too,)  I thought to count their slain by hundreds, sure.  (And there’s not a single Indian fewer,)  They do not care for guns, Let’s offer money.  (And feed the tribes upon brown bread and honey.) But, is not brown bread made from Indian corn?  (I do not care to tread On Indian corn.) 

COMMISSIONERS AND SOLDIERS: 

But let us free, And we will be, Most peaceful in the nation, And congress, too, shall put it through, A grand appropriation, A grand appropriation, A grand appropriation. 

(Indians dancing around and blowing Horns until the end) 

Figure 36. NO. 22 from TIQ—Settled at Last (ca 1865-66). (Lavallee, Sage, and Hawkey ca 1865)

Calixa Lavallée is the same composer who wrote O Canada and he wrote this piece during his

second lengthy stay in the United States (Cooper 1991). There is no record of a performance of

this piece although it is clear that a great deal of work went into writing the lyrics and score.

What is noteworthy for the purpose of this study is the awareness of the conflict between

“Indians” and the ambitions of white settler governments—an awareness, that, unlike stories of

adversity faced and overcome by innocent white settlers, expresses the political issues of the

colonial project in political terms. This is not the same kind of remorse expressed by the “anti-

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conquest” men described in Chapter Four—those cultural workers whose work assumes the need

for colonial domination while separating themselves from the violence of that domination;

rather, the writers express a kind of resistance to the colonial project. In this sense, they are

positioned similarly to myself: they are part of the colonial project but do not accept that

continual displacement and duplicity should be hidden or remain as the basis for political

relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people living in Canada.

“Dressing up” as the imagined “Other”

Parlour music, that is, music intended to be played at home and for informal social gatherings,

was enormously popular in Toronto up until World War II. Piano manufacturing was a major

industry during the late nineteenth century in the city and, by the twentieth century, rather than

catering to the well-to-do, sales were aimed at the average family. The piano in the home was the

major site of home entertainment and “dances, marches and salon pieces for keyboard, and

patriotic songs and parlour ballads” were the most popular forms of music (Kallman 2012a).

Sheet music was widely available from both New York and Toronto publishers through

merchants such as the T. Eaton & Company. Included in these collections, for example,

“Irving’s Canadian Series of Five Cent Music,” were songs with Indian themes, and minstrel

songs caricaturing the lives of black people.

An “Indian” song that appears in numerous collections is Thurlow Lieurance’s By the Water of

Minnetonka: An Indian Love Song, written in 1914. Enormously popular, the song has been

recorded by numerous artists including Stanley Black, Jerry Gray & His Orchestra, John Kirby,

Glenn Miller, Ray Noble, Smith & Amherst Glee Club, E.A. Smith, Ethel Smith, Eddie South &

His Alabamians, Slim Whitman, and Artis Wodehouse—a remarkable array of performers (By

the Waters of Minnetonka). The song has also been used in films to represent “Indian” moments

from 1934 to as recently as 1995 and can be found on Youtube by artists such as Marion

Anderson (Marion Anderson sings By the Waters of Minnetonka),199 and comedians Desi Arnaz

and Lucille Ball, who used it as a comedy sketch (Arnaz and Ball). In the Arnaz and Ball sketch,

199

Marion Anderson was refused permission by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 to sing at Constitution Hall. On Easter Sunday of the same year, she performed an open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for 75,000 people (1928 Marian Anderson makes her Carnegie Hall recital debut).

186

they dress up in red face200 as an Indian Chief and Indian Princess. In all of these versions, the

song taps into a fascination with the “beautiful Indian Princess,” a fantasy that allows the singer

to present an exotic and romanticized version of the “noble Indian” from a distant past.

Lieurance describes the “legend behind the song” as follows:

Moon Deer, daughter of the Moon Clan, loved Sun Deer of the Sun Clan. Tribal law forbade marriage between the two clans. It was decreed that daughters of the Moon Clan must marry into the Eagle Clan. The two lovers, in tears, ran away far to the east and north. They came to a beautiful lake called Minnetonka (Minne means water; Tonka means large and round). Their happiness was disturbed because their traditional enemies, the Chippewa, lived on the north shore of this lake. They feared to return home and be separated, and finally in desperation they decided to end it all. The legend states that they disappeared beneath the waves and were no more. The waves moaned a rhythmic sound and the pines crooned their love song. Many moons afterwards the warriors of the Sioux drove the Chippewa north to Lake Superior. One night while they were camped on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, they heard the waters singing a weird melody and, in the moon-path on the waters, two lilies appeared and grew to the skies. The lilies were the spirits of Moon Deer and Sun Deer. (Cited in Wolff 1996)

This “legend” offers an “Indian” version of Romeo and Juliet, suggesting the irrationality of

warring families/tribes as well as explanations (tribes were perpetually killing each other off) for

the “unfortunate, but inevitable,” disappearance of the “Indian.” The melancholia of the song

provides a source of pleasure for a white audience able to indulge in wistful longing for an

imaginary, romantic past while providing reassurance that the “disappearing” Indian is nothing

more than a ghostly vision of some other time—neither a source of threat or guilt.

Along with the “legend behind the song,” the lyrics and their placement in the music also add to

the quaintness of the portrayal. In this slow moving, lyrical song, one word per bar is sung

recalling the “pidgin,” mono-syllabic English so often used in films to portray “Indians” as

unintelligent and unable to communicate, for example, “No fear, In heart of mine” (q = ca 80).

Given that Aboriginal men and women acting as diplomatic representatives had a reputation for

being extremely good orators, it is particularly ironic that the mono-syllabic utterance is the

gesture so often used to represent the “Indian” (King 2012, 187).

200

Daniel Keyes uses the term red face to refer to the practice of white people painting their skins red and dressing up to look like a fantasy version of the “red” Indian (Keyes 2011).

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“By the Waters of Minnetonka”, (1914) by Cavanass / Thurlow Lieurance  Moon Deer, How near Your soul divine! Sun Deer,  

 Skies blue O'er you Look down in love. Waves bright Give light As on they move. 

 Hear thou My vow To live to die, Moon Deer, Thee near, Beneath this sky. 

Figure 37. By the Waters of Minnetonka (Thurlow 1917)

A version of the song printed in 1917 portrays an “Indian Maiden” in the bush, looking

Caucasian, winsome and Raphaelesque.

Figure 38. Illustration for Thurlow Lieurance’s By the Waters of Minnetonka, first published in 1917201

The composer is said to have based the song on a recording he made in 1911while visiting the

Crow Reservation in Montana. If the story is true, Lieurance learned the song from Sitting Eagle,

a Sioux woman who provided the melody which Lieurance “clothed with the harmonizing which

our ears demand” (Wolff 1996). Lieurance’s interest in Indian music is said to have begun

around 1905 when the composer met a number of American Indians through the Chautauqua

Society, working in traveling tent schools teaching music to American Indians. Lieurance

became very interested in Indian culture and began to transcribe songs that he heard.202 He also

learned to make traditional Native American flutes (Thurlow Weed Lieurance 2013) and,

201

Sheet music selections with illustrated covers were found in the archival Sheet Music Collection, Edward Johnston Building Library, University of Toronto. 202

The reader should note that there is no such thing as a singular form of “Indian culture.”

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together with his wife, made a career of travelling and performing this song dressed up as

“Indians.” Whatever the origins of the melody, the song was intended to be performed by and

for white people (Marion Anderson’s performance notwithstanding). Its appeal for white

audiences was not the reality of Indigenous life during the early twentieth century but fantasies

about “Indians” who lived in a distant and romantic past. The audience gained pleasure by

tasting the exotic, while reassuring themselves that they were safely ensconced in the “civilized”

world of the theatre. The “Indians” of the song have no relationship to the real live Indigeneous

women and men robbed of their land-base, confined to reservations, and policed by Indian

agents. The story has appeal precisely because it offers a sad story in response to which one can

sigh with pleasurable melancholy: “if we could have prevented this we would have but, alas, this

world has disappeared into the mists of time.” In this moment, we “steal the pain” of the

disappearing Indian, asserting our great humanity through our pleasurable indulgence in feelings

of melancholy (Razack 2007).

Daniel Keyes, writing about two Canadian operas composed in the 1950s by Barbara Pentland

and the team of Lillian Estabrooks and Mary Costley, suggests that by painting their faces red,

invader settlers “articulate a longing for whites to achieve a sense of stable independent

sovereign national identity by performing “native.”

Red face seeks to displace First Nations from the term “native” and strives to give ownership of “native” to settler-invaders who thus become patriotic “native Canadians.”…Thus, red face enacts an alibi for invasion-settlement that theatrically displaces First Nations into “native” role play for whites. (Keyes 2011, 32)

Through red face, colonial subjects act themselves into being the original inhabitants of the land.

Sara Ahmed describes the desire to play-act “going native” as a “fantasy of overcoming” the

violence of the colonial relationship through “getting closer” to the native Other. This is a

fantasy that reaffirms the Western subject as agent and the “Indian” as object—an object that,

here, fulfills the colonial subject’s need both for redemption and the entitlement attached to

“belonging.” This is a psychic “eating of the other” that produces the self as open to difference;

open to transformation, reasserting the central agency of the white subject while effacing the

selfhood and agency of the other—constructed as Other (Ahmed 2000, 144-125).203 In the case

of the Indian, this is an Other that must disappear—not because of political or economic desire

203

The concept of “eating the other” originates with bell hooks (hooks 1992).

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but because it is simply inevitable. Play-acting in red face thus produces pleasing fantasies about

the colonial subject as owning a history that is entirely innocent, yet rich and exotic—a history

that produces the settler colonial as the new “native Canadian.”

A theatrical piece, The Gift of the Sun, composed in 1971 by Silvio Pasch for a school in

Scarborough, Ontario, also draws on pleasant white fantasies about the disappearing Indian.

Subtitled, “A play with music based on North American Indian lore for children,” the piece

closes with the line: “and if you have a chance to build a bonfire, at girl guides or at boy scouts

or at your cottage, remember our story and sing and dance like the people in the old, old days”

(Pasch and Pasch 1971). It is noteworthy that the families of the white children meant to perform

this play have displaced the Indigenous person twice over—first out of the city and then out of

what becomes known as “cottage country.” Here, again, we have the fantasy of the noble Indian,

a tribute to “lost” Indigenous knowledge of the land and an utterly innocent portrayal of

dispossession and disappearance. Indigenous knowledge is reduced to the status of “lore” and,

again, the story depends on the myth of the already “dead” Indian—a romanticized being

belonging to fantasies of the past but abjured in realities of the present.

The idea of “playing Indian” is not restricted to theatrical pieces. Well known Toronto piano

pedagogue, Boris Berlin, wrote a very popular piece in 1950, called The Indian Chief’s Dance,

which draws on the aural cliché of repeated open fifths to project “Indianness.” The images on

the cover of the 1950 edition of the music present an imaginary and caricatured Indian Chief

carrying a tomahawk and doing a war dance—very much like the images so many of us imbibed

as children watching Saturday morning cartoons—images that we then took outdoors for our

games of “Cowboys and Indians.”204 Like the “Indian” in popular boys adventure stories, the

Indian Chief is used here to provide an exotic contrast to who we believe ourselves to be. We

experience delight in trying on this other identity and we come to know the Indian Chief as a

silly and childish cartoon character.

204

Oslem Sensoy includes links to cartoon and film examples along with an excellent critique of popular cartoon and movie portrayals of Aboriginal peoples (Sensoy 2012).

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Figure 39. Sheet music cover page for The Indian Chief’s Dance, composed by Boris Berlin and published in 1950 in Toronto.

Keyes suggests that red face serves a number of functions: invader settlers mimic the Other as a

means to make themselves “native,” marking their privileged positionality as white by being able

to perform an Other that has otherwise been banished. The performance itself also acts as a

literal displacement and, with faces painted red, symbolically suggests a sense of shame and

“imperial melancholy,” (Keyes 2011, 33) —an experience of pleasure through melancholic

regret that reinforces the notion that the displacement of Aboriginal peoples is the sad but

inevitable result of “progress.” Through these exoticized presentations of desire and fantasy that

draw on notions of an idyllic pre-industrial world, the settler invader also exerts “semiotic

control” over the Other and in this way displaces anxiety and guilt with a pleasurable experience

of melancholy.

Songs about the imaginary lives of black people present a different kind of narrative. Minstrel

songs also appear to have been enormously popular in Toronto homes with many of these songs

gaining popularity through travelling minstrel shows—entertainments that, although aimed at

lower-class audiences, were attended by people of all classes.205 By attending lower class

entertainments, middle class audiences could, in fact, reward themselves with a double

pleasure—first by crossing social boundaries to attend a working class and somewhat

205

Recall the Minstrelsy performance at the Arts and Letters Club in Chapter 4. See also the long lists of Minstrel performances that took place in Canada, catalogued in (Le Camp 2005).

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disreputable entertainment (“slumming”)206 and then by enjoying the voyeuristic pleasure of

watching an Other be lambasted and ridiculed. Minstrel songs commonly found in Toronto

parlours include De Massa ob de Sheepfol; Little Black Me (A pathetic Story in Verse and

Melody), Old Black Joe, Down Among the Sugar Cane, Hush My Little Coon, Nigger, Nigger

Never Die, Way Down in Old Palmetto State and Coon, Coon, Coon amongst many others.207 In

the illustrations for these songs, black people are presented in the exaggerated caricatures created

by white people wearing blackface (Figures 40 and 41). Often there are dual images on the music

cover pages that contrast the performers wearing tuxedos, depicting themselves as “white and

upstanding” with the same performers dressed up in black face, portraying the highly caricatured

“Negroes” they embody and lampoon during their performances. In the songs, the “black”

narrators created by the song’s white lyricists, describe their skin colour as a source of shame

and ridicule. These fictional black narrators long to return to the old days of slavery when they

were “well cared for by kindly white masters.”208 I include the lyrics and cover pages of Nigger,

Nigger Never Die below as an example of a particularly vicious “coon” song in circulation in

Toronto during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Figure 40).209

206

See also Razack 2002, 136. 207

I found numerous copies of these songs in the archival Sheet Music Collection at the Edward Johnston Building Library, University of Toronto. 208

Note the thematic similarity between these popular songs, with their narratives of “longing for a return to the good old days of slavery” and the songs chosen to be included by Ernest MacMillan in The Canadian Songbook as representative of “American” music. 209

Blackface was still acceptable as late as the 1950s as evidenced in the extremely popular films made featuring Shirley Temple performing in blackface (Le Camp 2005, 168).

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When I was a Pick‐a‐ninny, my mamma sent me to school, She said, Boy, you’re old enough to go and learn the golden rule  At the Branch school where she sent me all the other kids were white,  Every mornin’ noon and evening, with these kids I had to fight. If at study I should whisper someone would be sure to tell  When we went to play at recess, all the white kids at me yell: Oh, Nigger, Nigger, never die, black face and a china eye,  Mouth as big as a steamboat slip, India rubber nose and a liver lip.  Eny, meny, miny, mo, catch a nigger by the toe,  Nigger eat scrap iron, nigger chew glue.  And when I grew up to manhood, I took to myself a wife,  Just the prettiest little black girl, to be my partner all through life,  After years of love and happiness, we all had pickaninnys too,  That used to play with the white kids, like his daddy used to do.  

 If I catch him I will scold him. I would make the youngster tell.  He said daddy while I’m playing, all the white kids at me yell,  Oh, Oh, Nigger, Nigger, never die, black face and a china eye,  Mouth as big as a steamboat slip, India rubber nose and a liver lip.  Eny, meny, miny, mo, catch a nigger by the toe,  Nigger eat scrap iron, nigger chew glue. 

Figure 40. Nigger, Nigger Never Die by William Osborne and Nellie Sylvester. (Sylvester and Osborne 1897)

Eric Lott writes that “from ‘Oh, Susanna’ to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday

morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have figured in the white Imaginary of the United

States" (Lott 1993, 3). Based on the volume of minstrelsy songs found in Canadian archival

collections and research into minstrelsy in Canada by Lorraine Le Camp, these blackface images

were also common in Canadian homes.

Figure 41 shows the cover pages of three Minstrel songs found in Toronto homes.210 Note the

picture of the performer in formal dress in contrast to the exaggerated faces of the “Coons” in the

first picture. The performer of the third piece, also in formal dress, is placed in a position to look

down on the poorly dressed black woman and her child. The middle cover is an interesting

hybrid in that the performer is wearing black face and dress tails at the same time. The subtitle of

the song is “A Coon’s Simplicity.”

210

Archival Sheet Music Collection, Edward Johnston Building Library, University of Toronto.

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Figure 41. Cover pages of Minstrelsy pieces found in Toronto collections of sheet music.

As Lott argues, minstrelsy was based on the “borrowing” of black cultural materials that

“ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery.”

[T]he minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Although it arose from a white obsession with black (male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruthlessly disavowed its fleshly investments through ridicule and racist lampoon. (Lott 1993, 3)

The use of minstrelsy met a number of needs for white settlers. Ridicule functioned as a

protection against fears of retribution; that is, the Black or the Indian returning to reclaim his

stolen capital (Lott 1993, 19) yet, like the racial plays performed by men at the Arts and Letters

Club, it allowed people an opportunity to flirt with Otherness; to try on an Other’s identity while

carefully drawing a line between one’s self and the reprobate Other. In this way, white people,

whatever their social location, could imagine their own identities, no matter how precarious, as

relatively “safe and secure,” as part of the mainstream and part of the constructed norm. Here we

have a version of performativity that, through the rehearsal and performance of such songs, one

is able to place into the body iterations affirming what one is by pretending to be what one is not.

The frightening violence of slavery is reduced to a source of frivolity and laughter, a lower class

variation, perhaps, on the distancing between material realities and artistic expression so

foundational to middle class forms of aesthetic expression. For example, I suggest that Arriaga y

Balzola’s orchestral overture, “The Happy Slaves,” (Arriaga y Balzola 2000 (1819 or 1820)) is

as much a part of the “troubled fantasies” of middle and upper class white audiences as “coon

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songs” are a part of the “troubled fantasies of middle and lower class audiences” (Lott 1993, 6).

Both types of music allow an interaction with Otherness that distances the self from an

engagement with harsh material realities. The appeal of this music is its capacity to offer moral

reassurance through forms of pleasure and play and a titillating thrill and taste of the Other,

without any risk of contradiction or unpleasant repercussions.

Conclusions

In this chapter, I have explored a number of sites in which music contributes to who people

understand themselves to be. In the context of compulsory schooling, music is part of a

curriculum intended to instill particular notions of the good, the loyal and the patriotic. The

model of “normalcy” is linked to whiteness and the ideals of disciplined, obedient and docile

workers. In the festival context, musics are generated and presented along a hierarchy of merit

and belonging in which “folk” musics and its performers represent pre-history, while European

composers, commissioned to turn folk melodies into “art music,” present the white Euro-

Canadian male as the harbinger of modernity and a higher state of cultural evolution. In sites of

public spectacle, narratives of the nation are presented in raced, classed and gendered terms.

Music is chosen and/or composed with the goal of invoking identifications with the dominant

economic order. In the personal domain, white men describe themselves as heroes on noble

missions to bring civilization to heathen corners of the earth. The slaughter of native peoples

during colonial wars is reduced to a colourful backdrop in entertainments for white audiences. In

other popular musics, playing at being the Other offers a means to produce the self as part of a

secure, rational and racially dominant group—even when the realities of one’s class or gender

position might, in reality, only offer a meager form of security.

As a tactic of power, creating notions of superiority and racial solidarity serves at least three

political functions: 1) Pointing to “difference” as the source of biological, economic or social

threats, draws attention away from structural inequalities while offering racial (and/or gender or

class) solidarity as a solution to social and economic injustice; 2) The dissemination of racial

anxieties foments divisions amongst less powerful groups of people undermining their potential

to create unified resistance against dominant forces. Membership in an imagined higher echelon

of humanity also offers the seduction of greater entitlement—even if that entitlement does

nothing to significantly alter class relations; and, 3) Racial solidarity creates rationalities for the

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dispossession and harsh exploitation of those with lower status under the guise of moral projects

to civilize, modernize, Christianize or democratize—whatever the current form of “necessary”

improvement is for those classified as “lacking” the requisite “human” qualities.

The material I have analyzed thus far is part of our historical heritage and constitutes at least a

partial genealogy for the values, ideals and institutional structures that continue to be

commonplace in contemporary Canadian musical settings. This study began for me with

questions about the values and embodiments expressed in a 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters

Club of Toronto. My questions have led me to explore a wide range of historical materials and

discussions. In the final ensuing chapter, I analyze this contemporary concert as a moment of

eventalisation; a moment in which relations of power can be made visible by noting identities of

merit and identities of belonging that, I will show, replicate the Imperial identities expressed in

musical practices and notions of national identity established in the nineteenth century and

continued into the contemporary moment, to affirm the legitimacy of the white settler state.

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Chapter 7: The Contemporary Moment and its Genealogies

Underneath the sanitized garb of a postmodern, multiracial, multiethnic ‘tolerant’ Canada beats the heart of a stubbornly colonial national-formation, sharing a common imaginary with other white settler societies. (Thobani 2007, 29)

In the preceding chapters, I have explored the construction of identities through a range of

engagements in the context of nineteenth and twentieth century discourses, events, and

institutional formations in which the Canadian subject, as an Imperial subject, is produced and

ennobled through various cultural activities. In the analysis that follows, I track the production of

Canada as white settler space in the contemporary moment, first by describing typical rituals

associated with classical music performances in the present and, then, by analyzing the specific

elements and identities invoked through the 2008 MacMillan Singers concert at the Arts and

Letters Club.

Rituals, reverence and hierarchy

The rituals for the performance of classical music are, by now, quite well-established. Concerts

take place in up-scale, well-lit parts of a city in special spaces designed for the performance of

classical music. There are intimate spaces for the performance of chamber music and grand

spaces for the performance of symphonic music. Concert halls have fine acoustics and are

resplendent with beautiful lighting. The faces of audiences are mostly white although there are

also many middle and upper class Asian people on stage and in the audience. The musicians are

dressed in formal attire, falling somewhere between uniformed livery and bourgeois

respectability and, if there is a female soloist, she is likely wearing a beautiful dress recalling ball

gowns of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie. Audience members are also well-dressed. They are

not in formal wear, but they are also not in jeans, sweat pants or Doc Martins. Drinks are

available and patrons line up quietly to use the bar. Hierarchy is the accepted norm and

“civilized” is the word that best describes the comportment and appearance of the patrons and

there is no one in sight who might threaten the decorum of the space. Audience members sit in

rows, carefully organized according to social status and financial means and the musicians sit or

stand in rows, carefully organized according to their musical rank and function. Once everyone is

inside the hall and the lights are dimmed there is quiet throughout, except at approved moments

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for sound or applause. The conductor makes a grand entrance and is now in command of the

proceedings. The music follows its prescribed order and each musician makes their sound only

when instructed to do so. The physical movement permitted the conductor contrasts quite

noticeably with the stillness and discipline of the musicians and audience members. When the

music is finished, the audience is invited to applaud. There are closing rituals of bowing and

acknowledgements and a collective release of the tension held in place during the performance.

Now, talk, movement and laughter are permitted, although even this takes place within narrow

parametres of the permissible.

Today, classical music is presented with a great deal of ritual not only intended to mark each

performance as a “special event” but to pay tribute to the exalted status of the art form and its

leaders. This is a musical setting in which “respect” is demanded. On those occasions when

something happens to disrupt the aura of silence and respect—perhaps because the audience has

not been schooled in “proper decorum,” a conductor may stop the concert and walk off stage as a

rebuke to the audience, refusing to come back until due reverence, in the form of silence, is

achieved (Levine 1988, 188).211

The rituals of the classical concert, based on discipline, order, respect for authority and reverence

(for the repertoire, the conductor and the composer—if he (she?) is part of the Western canon),

are now standard practice. For those whose emotional identities have been formed through life-

long experiences with this tradition of music-making, classical music concerts are exalted and

exalting events filled with pleasure. This is an art form we understand to represent the heights of

human expression and, in spite of all the prescriptiveness surrounding what one can and cannot

do in these musical settings, we anticipate visceral pleasure and euphoria in the hearing and

afterglow of such events. Our engagements with the world of classical music and its dispositif or

“regime of practices,”212 are a significant part of how we come to know ourselves as members of

the “civilized” world—disciplined, skilled, and sophisticated—in contrast to Others identified as

less disciplined, less skilled, less sophisticated and less evolved. Indeed, in our investment in the

exaltedness of our identities as civilized lovers of civilized music, we are positioned much like

211

I have experienced this twice and it was deeply unsettling for everyone: musicians, audience members, stage crew and, presumably, the conductor who believed that a dramatic intervention was required to bring proper order to the event. 212

Dispositif : Foucault 1980c, 194-195; “Regimes of practice:” Dean 1999, 40.

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Christian missionaries: bearers of a great Truth that the heathen or, in secular language, the

unruly masses, fail to appreciate. The belief in our cultural superiority is also what marks us as

representatives of a system invested in hierarchies of human worth—a system that draws on

narratives of “moral superiority,” to explain past colonial projects as triumphs of civilizational

advancement, and narratives of “development,” to justify contemporary projects of neo-colonial

domination.

The 2008 concert of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, the focal point of this chapter, takes up

the master narrative of colonial domination as a moral project undertaken by Great Men on a

Great Adventure—a moment linking past colonial projects with rightness; the righteousness of

contemporary relations of power.

The concert as a moment of eventalisation

The occasion is the 100th anniversary of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto and the setting is

the Great Hall at 14 Elm Street, the home of the Arts and Letters Club. The performers are the

MacMillan Singers, the Faculty of Music’s top-tier choir at the University of Toronto and the

audience is made up of the mostly white, male and female members of the club, their spouses

and invited guests.213 As a musical event produced in order to celebrate the influence of a

colonial institution on contemporary artistic practices, the concert offers a particularly rich

moment of “eventalisation” in which relations of power can be made visible; a moment in which

a regime of truth can be separated from its taken-for-granted place of authority and re-

contextualized as merely one of a number of competing discourses (Foucault 1982, 211).

Like most concerts, the January 14, 2008 event is recognizable as “special” because of ritual

enactments that separate the concert from mundane, daily activities. The concert is intended to be

memorable; a marker and maker of meaning and memory that draws on standardized techniques

of concert performance to create conditions for shared social, psychic and emotional experiences.

The concert is also, however, “ordinary” in the sense that the rituals enacted are consistent with

expectations associated with contemporary classical choral concerts, the colonial space of the

Arts and Letters Club, and celebrations of Canadian nationhood. Analyzing the identities and

histories invoked by the repertoire, ensemble, concert presenter, concert location and the 213

Women have been admitted as members since 1985. Recent photographs show that there are a few members who are not of Anglo-Saxon heritage (McBurney 2007).

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comportment of the participants allows me to illustrate several “technologies of the self” in

which particular kinds of national subjects are performed into being through music. Of particular

relevance to this analysis is Thobani’s concept of “exaltation” through which the “national

subject” is venerated “as the embodiment of the quintessential characteristics of the nation and

the personification of its values, ethics, and civilization mores” (Thobani 2007, 3). Exaltation, as

a form of population management, functions to create emotional bonds between notions of

personal merit and notions of national identity. Exaltation is also a much used technique to

invoke loyalty to schools, sports teams, corporations and their products, and pride in particular

accomplishments. In the case of the concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, the source

of exaltation is identification with the nation state and pride in the artistic institutions developed

through colonial enterprise—an identification and pride consistent with Thobani’s description of

the prevailing Canadian master narrative which, she argues,

takes as its point of departure the essentially law-abiding character of its enterprising nationals, who are presented (for the most part) as responsible citizens, compassionate, caring and committed to the values of diversity and multiculturalism. (Thobani 2007, 4)

As Thobani argues, however, the much-valorized notion of Canadian identity is based on

hierarchies of who counts as human and who has the right to claim membership in the

human/Canadian family. Indeed, in the detailed analysis that follows, I argue that the musical

and social discourses drawn upon in this concert, including the use of multicultural tropes,

rehearse and embody raced and gendered hierarchies, that is, colonial hierarchies and, through

the repetition of “exalted” national tropes, continue the process of erasing from historical

memory the violence inherent in colonization and capital accumulation.

The performers and embodying the civilized

Dressed in formal attire, the MacMillan Singers embody the comportment, diction, taste,

respectability, and ‘national character’ that cultural animators, such as Lord Grey, in 1907, and

Ernest MacMillan, in 1935, hoped would be the fruit of music and drama competitions and

festivals established across the country during the early twentieth century (Tippett 1990, 51-58).

Choir members wear tuxedos, if they are men, and long black skirts or dresses, if they are

women—a uniform that expresses prescribed gender identities and a particular class identity,

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while muting the individuality of the performers.214 The choristers stand at attention with little

movement, have immaculate vocal diction, and follow the direction of their expert leader,

renowned female choral conductor, Doreen Rao.215 The choir is a highly disciplined and skilled

ensemble in which static comportment and a lack of individuality are meant to keep the attention

of listeners on the “music itself”—with music understood as an autonomous, sacred object—

sublime and universally meaningful (Wolff 1987). As we have seen in previous chapters,

however, these practices and distinctions were developed as part of a process to separate those

with ‘critical taste’ from those with ‘barbarous’ pronunciations and poor manners (Tippett 1990,

56). Carefully cultivated comportment and gesture are part of an invented vocabulary of the

body, closely aligned with notions of civilization; race, gender and class identities; the right for

some to rule over others; and, the imperative to protect the self from contamination through

contact with lesser Others. These are distinctions of comportment that can be read on the body,

separating the lofty and rational from the “base” and physically driven; the worthy and desirable

from the unworthy and abjected. To embody disciplined comportment is to mark the self as well-

behaved and “good.” To embody something other than the dominant race, class and gender

paradigm and, further, to resist the authority of these embodiments, is to reinforce one’s

designation as a dangerous Other—a person that must either be “saved” or expelled.

If Christopher Small is correct in his conclusion that musical performances “bring into existence

relationships…thought desirable by those taking part, and in doing so…not only reflect those

ideal relationships but also shape them” (Small 2011, xi), then the ideal relationships expressed

by the chorus are disciplined uniformity, control and precision; obedience to the score and

obedience to the musical director. These ideals are as much an embrace of particular values of

order and being as they are a rejection of other possibilities. For example, they do not embody

the exuberant movement of gospel song, the defiant and declamatory gestures of hip hop, the

individualism of jazz or the overtly sexual gestures of many forms of popular music. The

MacMillan Singers, like most classically-trained choirs, minimize the relationship between the

214

Some ensembles do allow women to wear pants; however, the current leadership (2012) of the MacMillan Singers does not [personal knowledge]. For an informal discussion of women’s dress codes, see (ChoralNet:Concert dress for female singers and conductors) 215

In the gendered world of classical music, women have had more success as choral conductors than as orchestral conductors. This may be because, while men continue to control opportunities to conduct bands and orchestras in schools and colleges, women are able to gain experience in a domain considered to be feminized and lower ranking by leading vocal ensembles (Gould 2001) .

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physical production of sound and the aural effects of the music; the spiritual (or aesthetic)

significance of the performance and the material conditions of its production.

In light of the various cultivations of identity noted here, I want to bring to mind Judith Butler’s

notion of performativity as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a

highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a

natural sort of being” (Butler 1993, 25). Butler’s statement serves as a reminder of the power of

repetition to produce identity as well as the importance of having an audience for whom the

repetition of particular stylized performances is both legible and desired. In the case of the

MacMillan Singers, these are the stylized identities of cultured, civilized persons; embodied

representatives of Western cultural supremacy and understood as such by their audience.

Repertoire:

As a musical staging of the Nation, the repertoire for this concert celebrates the relationships

between the past colonial history of the Arts and Letters Club and “authorized” contemporary

cultural institutions. Seven pieces were chosen for inclusion on the program:

El cielo canta alegria, by Pablo Sosa, arranged for choir by Roger Bergs (2005) England, by Ernest Campbell MacMillan (1917) Rise up, my love, my fair one, by Healey Willan (1929) Deliverance by Sir Ernest MacMillan (1944) Keewaydin, by Harry Freedman (1972) Magnificat, by John Burge (1985) Song for Canada, by Paul Halley (1984)

Several elements bind these pieces together. All are composed by white, university-educated

men and all are connected in some way with the University of Toronto and/or the Toronto Arts

and Letters Club.216 Five of seven pieces (El Cielo, 217 England, Rise Up, Deliverance and

Magnificat) express elements of the Christian tradition brought to North America as part of the

colonial mission to “civilize” the natives. Together, these pieces establish the primacy of 216

Roger Bergs received a PhD at the University of Toronto and currently teaches theory and composition there. (Roger Bergs). Healey Willan was a founding member of the Arts and Letters Club (and president for one year), was Principal and Vice Principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (later the Royal Conservatory of Music) and taught at the University of Toronto (Brown and Bryant 2012) .Harry Freedman studied at the Royal Conservatory and later taught composition at the University of Toronto (Litwack, Beckwith, and Nygaard King 2012). John Burge received his BMus and MMus at the University of Toronto (John Burge) and Sir Ernest MacMillan was the Dean of the Faculty of Music, Principal of the Royal Conservatory of Music and an active member of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club (Willan Mason and Wardrop 2010). 217

In the case of El Cielo, I am referring to the song’s Canadian arranger.

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Christianity as the basis of Canadian identity and, thus, a particular narrative of righteous

entitlement and belonging. The songs proclaim: “This is who we are!” with subtexts that also

proclaim: “This is who we are not!” Each song makes its own contribution to a narrative of

Canadian identity and a narrative of belonging.

The piece that opens the concert, El cielo canta alegria, for example, functions, symbolically as

the multicultural offering in the program. Sung in Spanish, the words and music are by Pablo

Sosa and have been arranged for choir by Canadian Roger Bergs (Sosa 2005). It is an energetic

piece and offers a lively opening to the concert that also suggests a kind of exalted

cosmopolitanism through the use of the Spanish language. The song, originally from Argentina,

“has appeared in several recent North American hymnals” and so is part of contemporary

Christian worship (Sosa 2005). It also, perhaps inadvertently, offers additional evidence of the

normalization and validation of the colonial work of Christian missionaries, in both North and

South America, to undermine indigenous social structures and thus facilitate colonial

domination.218

Rise up, my love, my fair one, by Healey Willan, the third piece on the program, is an Easter

motet with text taken from the Song of Solomon (Willan 1999). Compositionally, it fits into

twentieth century conservative British pastoral and Christian tonal sacred choral traditions. The

text draws on the love between a man and a woman and is often interpreted as the basis for

Christian marriage. The fourth piece, Deliverance, by Sir Ernest MacMillan is based on “The

Geneva Psalm tune, ‘Old 124th’” (MacMillan 1944). The text is about the deliverance of God’s

“chosen people” from being “devoured as prey” by their enemies—an “us and them” theme

common to Old Testament writings that aligns well with the notion of a sacred battle to assert

dominance over “heathen” races. Like Willan’s Rise up, my love, my fair one, it is written in a

traditional tonal church style in spite of its late composition date. Magnificat, by John Burge is

based on the “Song of Mary” from Luke of the New Testament (Burge 1985). This piece is

218

Of course, Christianity, like other religions, is taken up in different ways by different people. The significance of relations of power is reflected in the use of Christianity as a tool to support colonial domination. Shifting relations of power are also visible, however, in conflicts within the Roman Catholic Church over interpretations of Christianity that support political establishments versus those who embrace “liberation theology” (Service Apr-1-2005). What is important to note here is the way a discourse, in this case, a discourse based on Christian teachings, can be taken up and used to different purposes within contests over relations of power. Thus, it is not religion per se that is the “cause” of oppression but its use to facilitate dispossession through strategies of fear-mongering, discipline and control.

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technically challenging, however, it is largely tonal and is a contemporary extension of the

British Christian choral tradition. The text affirms the traditional Christian role of women as

mothers, in this case, as the mother of Christ.

These four selections are linked through their embrace of a Christian world view, the religious

commitments associated with the men of the Arts and Letters Club and the view that Canada is a

“Christian” nation. In the context of this celebration of colonial institutions, the persistent use of

Christian themes serves to affirm the righteousness of the Imperial project and reiterate the

primacy of the white Christians credited with “founding the nation.” In noting this emphasis it is

important to remember that other forms of spirituality were not only extant in Canada throughout

the nineteenth century but were activity repressed.

The remaining three pieces of the program merit closer analysis as each draws on additional

colonial tropes that reinforce notions of Canadian identity as a morally righteous, Imperialist

identity.

England

England, by Sir Ernest MacMillan, is a large-scale orchestral work based on a text by British

poet, Algernon Swinburne (MacMillan 1918).219 The piece is a rousing portrayal of epic

emotions and events based on Britain’s overseas Imperial adventures. The narrative outlines the

good fortune of colonized lands that have been ‘saved’ by the noble hearts, minds and deeds of

English occupiers. In Swinburne’s words, the English are the “first of the races of men.” They

are produced as exalted, civilized, rational, heroic, noble, manly, and racially superior.220 The

following passages offer a sense of the mission and ideals expressed in this portrayal of

Imperialism as “the Great Adventure of Empire”:

219

The choir performed a section of this orchestral work arranged for piano and chorus. 220

See Daniel Coleman for a discussion of the “Muscular Christian” that is a significant trope in nineteenth century literature asserting the righteousness of the Canadian colonial project (Coleman 2006).

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Far and near from the swan's nest here the storm-birds bred of her fair white breast, Sons whose home was the sea-wave's foam, have borne the fame of her east and west; North and south has the storm-wind's mouth rung praise of England and England's quest. … If the race that is first of the races of men who behold unashamed the sun Stand fast and forget not the sign that is given of the years and the wars that are done, The token that all who are born of its blood should in heart as in blood be one. [See Appendix A for full text]

Figure 42. From England (Swinburne 1890)

This song was chosen for inclusion on the program because it was written by Sir Ernest

MacMillan, a composer responsible for the development of so many pivotal Canadian musical

institutions. Performing the piece proved to be difficult however. The hand-written parts were

hard to read and, even after shortening the piece and changing portions of the text, it did not sit

well with members of the choir, in part, because choristers were not comfortable with the

sentiments expressed in the piece. In the end, the piece was dropped from the program.221 It

remains important to this analysis however because the piece embodies the spirit and thinking of

members of the Arts and Letters Club and the imperial project that is being celebrated through

this particular concert.

Taken together with the location, participants and purpose of the centennial concert, England

reflects the use of exaltation to valorize links between the British “race,” and the idea that

histories of conquest and colonization are histories of noble deeds undertaken for noble purposes.

Discourses of dominance and natural superiority are performed into being in these moments of

exuberant celebration—glorious conceits that mask the violence of colonization. Here, the

‘power of naming’ described by David Goldberg functions to establish hegemony, entitlement

and moral righteousness (Goldberg 1993, 174). A much repeated version of the Canadian

national narrative is that the relationship between Canada and “its” Indigenous peoples was not

as ruthless or bloody as the overt warfare undertaken by United States governments against

American Indians (Mackey 2002, 23;45; Thobani 2007, 34); however, as previously discussed,

the decision to use treaty processes in Canada to complete the colonization process, rather than

military force, was more one of tactics than intent. The end goals were the same: contain the

221

Personal communication: I attended a rehearsal of the piece, heard comments from members of the choir and later heard from the Music Director that the piece had been dropped from the program.

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potential political resistance of Indigenous peoples, gain unimpeded access to the land and

resources and draw immigrant populations into economies of accumulation as pioneers invested

in the idea of building a “new nation.” MacMillan’s epic piece is like a musical representation of

the insignia of the Arts and Letters Club: “the Viking ship with sails full spread before the rising

sun, to remind us of the open sea and the great adventure,” that is, the great adventure of imperial

conquest; the great adventure to “civilize” the world (C.W. Jeffreys in McBurney 2007,

frontispiece). The notion of valorizing conquests is nothing new of course, but, it is important to

notice the uses of exaltation, as central tactics of power, to enjoin people in missions portrayed as

noble and ennobling. This is a strategy intended to invoke identifications with particular relations

of power and the institutions that support these relations.

Keewaydin

Keewaydin, by Harry Freedman, offers a different variation on the colonial story. Here, righteous

colonial conquest is not an overt part of the narrative; rather, the narrative depends on the notion

of the “disappearing Indian,” as a historical process portrayed as if it has taken place without any

intentionality. Keewaydin was written in 1972 for the senior girls’ choir at Bishop Strachan

School, a private school that is also Canada’s oldest ruling class school for girls (The BSS Story).

Based on pitch intervals rather than tonal structures, the composer uses Ontario Ojibwa place

names as text. According to the program notes accompanying the piece, however, the words are

not intended to have any particular meaning; rather, they are meant to function as abstract sounds

(Freedman 1972). In Keewaydin, Harry Freedman draws on the trope of the “Indian as

landscape” and disappears the Indian into ghostliness twice over (Crosby 1991, 273). First, the

existence of living, physically present Indians is reduced to place names; to geographies now

owned and controlled by the dominant culture and, second, the place names themselves are

reduced to abstractions (Freedman 1972). The flesh and blood reality of Indigenous peoples

doubly disappears while the Canadian national subject claims imaginative ownership of the

landscape as well as a substitute ancestral history by relegating living and breathing people to

invisibility. Renée Bergland writes about the appearance and function of Indians as ghosts in the

American imagination:

By discursively emptying physical territory of Indians and by removing those Indians into white imaginative space, spectralization claims the physical landscape as American territory and simultaneously transforms the interior landscape into American territory. (Bergland 2000, 5)

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The process Bergland describes is not, of course, unique to the American imagination but is core,

also, to the Canadian imagination. Indeed, Harry Freedman’s use of Indian place names draws on

the longstanding trope of the Indian as ghost—vanished from political reality but drawn upon for

its invocation of a romantic past (Francis 1992, 173) with the music, itself, composed to sound

ethereal and otherworldly. The Indian specter stands in as evidence of progress, of colonial

mastery of the landscape and its former inhabitants, and a romantic figure that is the substitute

for non-existent European ancestral ghosts (Bergland 2000, 19). In the context of this particular

concert, it is as if the eradication of the flesh and blood Indian is accomplished by running the

image through a series of chemical baths until there is nothing left except a bleached out image

and a state of white innocence. The Indian not only disappears through the work of the

composer, the Indian is disappeared by the music director’s choice to represent First Nation’s

peoples by a white man’s creation of ghostliness. Bergland’s linking of ghostliness with the

structures of power describes the effect of these disappearances particularly well:

Derrida is right. The hierarchies of power that structure our lives are themselves ghostly. Power is unreal, insubstantial, somehow imaginary. At the same time, of course, it is undeniably real. When we describe hegemonies as socially constructed, we mean that they are built on history, memory, fear, and desire. They are made from the same things that ghosts are made from. Because politics of the national, the racial, the classes, and the gendered are the politics of memory and false memory, they are also, necessarily, the politics of spectrality. (Bergland 2000, 6)

Likewise, our relationship with imaginary Indians, as mirrored in this song, is based on the

“politics of memory and false memory”—not necessarily a politics pursued consciously by either

the music director or the composer but a politics, nevertheless, that has been so normalized, it is

presented as an unquestionably romantic, noble and innocent representation of Canadian identity.

Song for Canada

Song for Canada, by Paul Halley (Halley 1984), is a patriotic song that celebrates the Canadian

landscape and Canada as a place of tolerance for many peoples and creeds. With words in both

English and French it echoes the dominant narrative that Canada was established by two

founding peoples (Thobani 2007, 38-42). Song for Canada follows a long Canadian tradition of

creating national identity via association with a dramatic landscape emptied of its original

inhabitants. Musically, this is the kind of song often written for children and for national

celebrations: technically easy, melodic and sung in a light pop style reflecting Horace Mann and

Lowell Mason’s nineteenth century prescriptions that school music should model civilized

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comportment, use only the upper body and avoid any sound, expression or gesture that might

overly excite performers or listeners (Gustafson 2009, 20-21). De-raced and de-sexed, it is music

that never strays into the degenerate territory of popular musics—especially musics produced in

the dangerous spaces of resistance, rebellion and revolution. The light swing rhythms represent a

whitening of black musics in conformity with standards of white propriety.222 This tradition of

whitening “black” rhythms is in response to the criticisms leveled at ragtime and jazz by white

musical authorities that these rhythms were dangerous and degenerate.223

In the song’s lyrics, the author refers to the “rich harmonies of races and creeds” that “join in the

chorus from sea to sea.”

Sing of this land of our hopes and our dreams. Rich harmonies Of races and creeds Join in the chorus from sea unto sea: Where the whale’s ancient lullaby Meets the song of the wind in the whisp’ring pines, All our voices come together, always singing, “Land of tomorrow, your time has come.”

Figure 43. Song for Canada (Halley 1989)

The author draws on the idealized multicultural narrative that Canada is home to multiple races

and creeds celebrating the idea that the national character is defined by an acceptance of

difference—a “feel good” song that draws on the notion that Canadians are essentially

222

White performers made successful careers by “tam[ing] jazz to a middle-class white agenda” (Middleton 2000, 73; Rose 1994, 5). The institutionalization of jazz studies in university music faculties has done much to erase the political roots and potency of jazz as a music of resistance and rebellion (Rose 1994, 102). For a detailed chronicle of fears of contamination due to the power of jazz music, see (Radano 2000).

223 Campbell cites a number of nineteenth century writers describing the “dangers” of ragtime music:

One reformer claimed that he could demonstrate a direct causal link between ragtime and moral dissipation. Ragtime's syncopated rhythms, he stated, "act upon the nervous system of the listener at unexpected and unnatural parts of the measure." As a result, "the entire being is thrown into a succession of jumps or musical contortions whose irregular character excites unhealthy immoral tendencies." Anne Shaw Faulkner, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, launched a vigorous attack claiming that jazz had no small role in the unprecedented "immoral conditions among our young people." Jazz, she asserted, was a "bolshevik element" that disorganized "all regular laws and order" and stimulated its listeners "to extreme deeds, [and] to a breaking away from all rules and conventions." Alberto Jonas, a New York City pianist and music teacher, concurred, branding jazz the embodiment of "lawlessness, corruption, and degeneracy." (Campbell 2000, 263)

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“compassionate, caring and committed to the values of diversity and multiculturalism”—

(Thobani 2007, 4) something that history as well as contemporary politics tells us is not actually

true. Shaped by a particular narrative of multiculturalism in which “original” Canadians,” i.e.

“white Canadians” are generous and welcoming of Others – the national subject is valorized

while masking the political refusal to make the legal and policy changes necessary to endow all

peoples with full humanity (Razack 2002, 23; Thobani 2007, 67; Bannerji 1993, 87).

The notion of being a country with no history, a “land of tomorrow,” draws on the same trope of

“new beginnings” that informed Daniel Wilson’s claim at the 1884 Semi-Centennial Celebration

that Toronto had “scarcely a past either for pride or for shame” (Daniel Wilson as cited in

Freeman, 23). “Land of tomorrow” stakes out a future with no past portraying a permanent state

of innocence that reproduces the claim that Canada has emerged as a civilized nation, based on

hope and good feelings, ignoring the fundamental roles of dispossession, oppression, broken

treaties and appropriation in establishing the Canadian state and notions of Canadian belonging.

In this case, the absent presence of the “Indian” necessary to Canadian identity is even further

removed from consciousness. Even the French presence is somewhat ghostly through the

translation of English lyrics into French, rather than an actual presentation of past or present

French identities. This is, indeed, an idealistic song that sings into being innocent subjectivities,

devoid of both self- and political knowledge.

Here it is important to note distinctions about the use of this multicultural identity. There are,

indeed, people in Canada committed to anti-racist, anti-oppressive politics; however, there is also

a continuous circulation of the notion that Canadians, i.e. “white Canadians,” are easily taken

advantage of because of their “famous” generosity. The trope becomes a form of

governmentality, circulated in order to incite resentment and mask the strategic function of racist

dividing practices to distract people from moves to lower wages and safety standards for all

workers in Canada. The use of temporary foreign workers is a case in point. Wanted as cheap

labour but not welcome to immigrate, temporary foreign workers are completely vulnerable to

exploitation by their employers. In addition to being a means to increase immediate profits, they

are also used to undermine union strength and working conditions for all workers. If racializing

tactics are successful, foreign workers are blamed for social unrest and job losses—and those

profiting from the construction of scapegoats are left free to profit from a constructed economy

of scarcity. The notion of Canadian superiority and the fantasy of Canadian fair play is also

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brought into play as a rationale for dividing people into categories of deserving and undeserving.

The most recent Guide for new immigrants to Canada contrasts the “barbarism” of non-white

immigrants with the notion that Canada is a place of equality in which gender oppression, for

example, no longer exists (Welcome to Canada. What you should know 2013, 36). Depictions of

dangerous Others as threats to the nation, are political strategies that hark back to the exploitation

of Chinese workers, fears of the “yellow peril,” and the prohibitive Chinese Head Tax used to

keep Chinese people from gaining permanent status as Canadian citizens. The production of

racial threats to the nation, along with the production of exalted, “normal” identities is a tactic of

power used to distract attention away from internal conflicts and unite people against constructed

enemies. All of these political tactics and outcomes should not be laid at the feet of Paul Halley;

however, the composer of Song for Canada does not need to have intended to whitewash

Canadian history or contemporary realities for the song to have the effect of reinforcing

particular notions of inclusion and exclusion and the effect of reinforcing identities of innocence.

Halley’s music and lyrics draw on such long-standing textual and musical tropes of Canadian

innocence that they are naturalized beyond critical notice—at least within the frame of reference

of white Canadian choral music. Indeed, it is important to ask why anyone would question the

message of a piece that encourages performers and listeners to feel good about their identities as

Canadians but, this is exactly the potency of exalted identities. When personal identities are

conflated with notions of an exalted national identity, internalized during moments of shared

euphoria and sustained through narratives of moral conviction and righteousness, it is extremely

difficult for people to separate their notions of self from the notions of national identities

constructed in order to enjoin populations in particular projects. Challenging the narratives used

in such moments of exaltation is extremely unsettling because of the emotional conflation of

notions of personal worth with notions of national identity based on particular narratives of

moral superiority and innocence.

Music offers significant tools to link to emotions with particular notions of identity. These are

not all-powerful tools against which no act of resistance can prevail but they are, nevertheless,

tools deployed in order to instil particular associations and, if these associations are of long

standing, then music is drawn upon to resonate and strengthen existing associations. Each piece

on this centennial concert program contributes to very particular notions of Canadian identity

and Canadian history: the primacy and righteousness of white Christian founding fathers; the

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white, masculine adventurer as a natural ruler; the rugged, empty landscape as the maker of

Canadian character; Canada as a land with no past; ghostly Aboriginal identities as the source of

a romantic history; the invisibility of living Aboriginal people in the present and the notion that

Canada welcomes “all races and creeds.” Each of these significations reinforces the notion that,

through our engagements with these colonial cultural institutions and our identifications with the

colonial project, we, ourselves, are civilized, good and innocent.

The race and class identities of the concert sponsor, the location of the concert, as well as the

concert participants perform the myth of colonial benevolence into being in this particular

moment of claiming/celebrating ownership of the land and its revered institutions. The

celebration, in the embodied experiences it offers—listening, performing and socializing in the

venerable space of the Club—expresses, through the bodies present, and the bodies absent, the

exalted status of a particular kind of subject. Where ‘our’ Others are evoked, it is in fantasy form,

something very different from the flesh and blood presence of people whose lives might contest

this dominant paradigm of ‘benevolent paternalism.’ Carefully chosen images of Otherness are

twinned with the material absence of any “Others,” even women composers of the same

educational background and era as the men represented in the concert. Thus, in place of material

realities, the space is filled with seductive embodiments of exalted and proud innocence. This is,

indeed, how we educate feeling and learn to invest particular notions of identity with deeply felt

emotion.

The concert setting itself recalls Derek Hook’s notion of “monumental space and the uncanny”

and the notion of the poetic endowment of certain places as a means to “sharpen the mind’s

‘sense of itself,’ to lend and indeed refine a sense of subjectivity” (Hook 2005, 694). Considering

the concert venue, there is a clear logic in the choice of program. It represents a continuity of the

tradition and identities that continue to flourish in the Arts and Letters Club and, in its

celebration of these identities, honours the “rightness” of the ruling order as well as the wisdom

of the white patriarchal leadership that was so active in asserting particular notions of Canadian

identity. A very particular set of embodiments and relationships are expressed and valorized in

the performance and reinforced by the location of the concert in “white settler space” with voices

that might disrupt the dominant narrative wholly absent.

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That such a program does not represent the breadth of musical heritages or contemporary

musical practices found in Canada is an easy critique to make; however, it is important to point

out that different material by different composers might not necessarily have changed anything

about the overall narrative presented. The programming for the event is noteworthy, not because

it was narrowly chosen, but because of the ease with which such an imperialist program could be

constructed, drawing on standard narratives of Canadian belonging, without posing any

challenge to the notion of Canada as a “multicultural” nation. This, I suggest, is because the

much touted “official multiculturalism” of contemporary Canada works in much the same way as

the “mosaic” ideal enacted during the nineteenth-century CPR folk festivals. The festivals

established the logic of affixing the label of “Other” to non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon identities,

while carefully establishing whiteness as the norm against which all else was to be measured—

the norm that affirmed a hierarchy of belonging and a hierarchy of access to rights and

privileges. There is a considerable literature by Canadian race scholars that critiques the purposes

and racializing effects of official multicultural policy in Canada.224 This is important material

that all Canadians should know; however, I do not wish to restate these arguments beyond noting

their salience; rather, I use the device of a “limit case” to demonstrate the unspoken but very real

limits of “tolerance” that attach to the 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club.

Limit case

Canadian race scholar, Sherene Razack, argues that racial projects are manifested in both

symbolic and material form where a “dialectical relationship between spaces and bodies is

played out via the permitting of certain actions and the prohibiting of others” (Razack 2002, 9). It

is worth considering whether it would have made a difference to the significations of the concert

to perform works by female composers of the same era or perhaps the black composer Nathaniel

Dett (1882 – 1943) who worked in both Canada and the United State (Nathaniel Dett).

Performing Otherness for the benefit of members of the club might, in fact, be quite welcome.

After all, the nineteenth century version of the club prided itself on its open-mindedness.

Continuing in this tradition would be consistent with the character of the club and would affirm

the identities of its members as tolerant and generous. The limits of multicultural tolerance and

belonging become visible, however, if we imagine people performing ‘abjected’ musics or

224

See: Bannerji 2000; Carty and Brand 1993; Ng 1993; Bannerji 1993, 1993; Carty and Brand 1993; Bannerji 2000, 1997; Razack 1998, 2002; Thobani 2007.

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bringing a message that challenged the narrative of Canada as tolerant, generous and innocent.

For example, it is unlikely that the young musicians of Toronto’s Beatz to da Streetz225 could

have stood in for the MacMillan singers in this celebration of Canadian arts institutions even

though the members of this group live in Toronto and may have Canadian family histories dating

back several generations.

The members of Beatz to da Streetz are street-involved musicians who write and perform their

own music. Unlike members of the MacMillan Singers, they do not have institutional support or

access to a university education. They are self- and peer- taught and their music-making is, in

part, a means of talking back to power and expressing the realities of their own lives. Their very

embodiment as black bodies, with tattoos, piercings and street clothing, function as an affront to

middle class representations of respectability, decorum and moral righteousness. In their

unwillingness to cater to the middle class language of gesture, they also embody a rejection of

the notions of “self-improvement” as any kind of means to address their oppression. Beatz to da

Streetz represents an embodiment that is an overt challenge to narratives expressed through the

comportment, dress and repertoire of the MacMillan singers and, I suggest, would not be

welcome at the Arts and Letters Club, not only because of their status as “unruly” Others but

because their presentation would be labelled as “too political.” What is elided here, however, is

that the performance of the MacMillan Singers was also fundamentally political. The difference

between the two is that the political representations, expressed by the MacMillan Singers, do not

contest current relations of power; rather, at every level, their presentation affirms the

“rightness” of these relations. An all-black choir could easily present a concert at the club and be

welcomed; however, any music that contradicted the notion of the expected narrative of national

identity as generous, noble and innocent, would create a fissure; a challenge to relations of power

that would make these relations visible and therefore subject to contestation—something that

would not be tolerated in a space devoted to the legitimacy of the white settler state.

Where the musicians in Beatz to da Streetz express explicit political and personal goals through

their music making, the MacMillan Singers present the music of “high culture…assumed to be

above politics as a matter of unanimous convention" (Saïd 1982, 21). Colonial hierarchies,

however, are the unacknowledged framework, best hidden behind walls but there nonetheless. 225

Amongst other things, Beatz to da Streetz perform highly politicized rap music giving voice to their experiences of racism and economic oppression in Toronto (Beatz to da Streetz).

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Beyond the masking of relations of force that classical musicians facilitate through our

performances of political innocence, however, there are other effects that flow from notions of

our positionality, as artists, as politically disinterested. Like the humanities scholars described in

the following passages, the classical musician claims the sacred ground of universality but, in the

process, denies our potential as politically engaged subjects. Regarding the claims that literary

representations are only about “themselves,” Said writes,

This is depoliticization with a vengeance…. For if the study of literature is "only" about literary representation, then it must be the case that literary representations and literary activities (writing, reading, producing the "humanities," and arts and letters) are essentially ornamental… The particular mission of the humanities is, in the aggregate, to represent noninterference in the affairs of the everyday world...to represent humane marginality, which is also to preserve and if possible to conceal the hierarchy of powers that occupy the center, define the social terrain, and fix the limits of use functions, fields, marginality, and so on. (Saïd 1982, 22)

Through the claim that high art forms embody universal values, public space is filled with

performances of both innocence and ignorance and performers produce themselves as little more

than ornaments signifying the rightness of the ruling order. Thinking through the possibility of

Beatz to da Streetz in the space of the Arts and Letters Club centenary concert provides a

contrast to the imaginative of the concert and a means to disrupt the normalization of particular

bodies performing particular actions in particular places. Bringing a resistant discourse together

with a dominant discourse does important work to draw attention to the relations of power in

play. Through this strategy, we can “make strange” what is otherwise taken-for-granted.

Recalling Foucault’s notion of disciplines and of surveillance of the body (Foucault 1977, 137,

184), we can observe that the MacMillan Singers stand in rows, follow a formal dress code, keep

their body movements within a very limited range and discipline their voices to produce

controlled and studied sounds. They are under the gaze and discipline of a music director and

embody the attributes of what we know as “the civilized citizen” through their comportment. In

contrast, members of Beatz to da Streetz embody everything the ‘civilized’ choral group does

not. Youthful black bodies dominate; the music is contemporary, created by the performers, and

the expressive use of their bodies punctuates every aspect of the performance. There is nothing

ornamental about a performance of Beatz to da Streetz. What they do “matters” in a way that the

music performed by the choir, on the basis of Western claims to apolitical universality, does not.

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Relations of power can be observed elsewhere too—in the relationship between the Arts and

Letters Club and members of a “disadvantaged” community. A recent event that took place at the

Arts and Letters Club reveals relations of power in a different way. In this instance, young

people, from the same neighborhood as the performers in Beatz to da Streetz were given

permission to perform in the space of the Arts and Letters Club. 226 In this instance the “doors of

the Club were opened” for “inner city kids” (a term that is code for “racialized and poor”), from

Dixon Hall who were given the space of the club, free of charge, to stage the musical Cinderella

(McBurney 2007, 159). Here it is important to notice that this gesture positions club members as

generous in relation to those with less than themselves in a way that does not, however,

challenge established class relations. To be sure, the gesture was helpful and undoubtedly offered

in a spirit of generosity, however, as with similar acts of “charity,” the giving, absent

acknowledgement of the political causes of economic marginalization, reaffirms the exalted

positionality of the benefactor without addressing, or even acknowledging, the giver’s role in

systemic causes of marginalization. Under these circumstances, the presence of “inner city kids”

at the Arts and Letters Club does not, in fact, challenge the nature of the club as white settler

space, it affirms it.227

Terminal naivety

As classically-trained musicians, we take part in an exalted art form and understand ourselves to

live in a world separate from that of the undifferentiated labourer and I believe that part of the

appeal of becoming a professional musician is that, whatever our class origins, 228 we have the

opportunity to see ourselves as someone “special,” someone “better than” mere labourers,

226

Regent Park is a well-known area of under-supported social housing in Toronto and is the location of the Dixon Hall Music School (Regent Park) as well as the home of some members of Beatz to da Streetz. I heard B2dS perform in 2008. A recent show indicates the program that supported Beatz to da Streetz program was shut down in 2011 (Beatz to da Streetz - Farewell showcase). 227 Razack articulates the affirmation of entitlement through “charitable” acts particularly well:

The daily realities of oppressed groups can only be acknowledged at the cost of the dominant group’s belief in its own natural entitlement. If oppression exists, then there must also be oppressors, and oppressors do not have a moral basis for their rights claims. If, however, we are all equally human, with some of us simply not as advanced or developed as others, then no one need take responsibility for inequality. Moreover, advanced, more civilized people can reconfirm their own superiority through helping those who are less advanced. (Razack 1998)

228 Usually middle or upper class due to the cost of instruments and private lessons (Bourdieu 1984, 18); however,

when prodigies are discovered, whatever their parent’s incomes, they are often given full scholarships at a very young age (About Curtis).

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because of our status as “artists.” There are really very few musicians, however, who are able to

completely escape the confines of wage labour. Within the symphonic field, for example, some

classically-trained musicians attain an aristocratic status however most others are locked into the

position of children in relation to the decision-makers who shape their working lives. This

structure applies even in the most sought after and highest-paid orchestras. Indeed, Christopher

Small describes the symphony orchestra as a mirror of “that most hierarchical of organizations,

the military” (Small 1998, 68). Major financial decisions are made by the well-off members of

the Board of Directors and management makes the decisions that shape the working conditions

of musicians. (Management must also be able to display class attributes that will allow them to

mingle and interact well with wealthy donors.) Conductors make most artistic decisions and

command the forces of the orchestra. Conductors and soloists receive fees hundreds of times

greater than wages received by “rank and file” members—similar to the differences in pay

between CEOs and company workers (Small 1998, 31). Volunteers continue to provide

necessary support for all symphony orchestras, both amateur and professional; however, the

ability to participate in volunteer activities, raise money, and attend expensive fund-raising galas

places volunteers socially and economically above rank and file musicians. Within the orchestra,

principal players communicate with their superiors, that is, the Conductor and/or the Concert

Master, and then pass down decisions to the “rank and file” members of their sections. Beneath

the musicians are the many workers who make a concert possible: librarians, production crew,

low-waged cleaners, ushers and ticket sellers. There is a rigid division of labour and rank and file

members of the orchestra have minimal influence over policy or artistic decisions (Small 1998,

35, 69) and, as on any other shop floor, the ability to improve the working conditions of rank and

file members is dependent on the strength of their union. While rank and file musicians are often

invited to attend post-concert receptions, they are almost never of the same economic or social

class as sponsors or board members; rather, they are the ornaments that add colour and

authenticity to social events.

Like an industrial or military organization, the symphony orchestra is a complex organization in

which all the parts must function as efficiently as possible. The aural results can be phenomenal

but this is not in any sense an organization based on principles of equity. Indeed, there has never

been any suggestion that the symphony orchestra has egalitarian ambitions; rather, in many

respects, the symphony orchestra is a model of colonial relations: everyone is in their assigned

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place, and any breach of order is met with the threat of expulsion.229 For most musicians,

however, in spite of resentments arising from jockeying for position within a rigid hierarchy, the

psychic and visceral pleasures of meeting demanding physical and intellectual challenges,

experiencing one’s sound amplified and appreciated in a beautiful acoustic, experiencing

carefully crafted compositions in the midst of an ocean of remarkable sounds, experiencing the

euphoria of performance followed by applause, and believing that one is “special” and playing a

part in a noble mission, is enough gratification to outweigh the restrictions on musical agency

and financial insecurity that are intrinsic to the work.230 Unlike workers on the shop floor, we

experience euphoria through our performances, applause, a sense of the importance of our craft

to the final product, and our sense of taking part in something remarkable—a shared experience

that can provide, at its best, a moment of shared community. Still, we work within a hierarchy of

human beings that keeps wages low on the basis of our replaceability and we work in a field

considered a frill—a field that exists only by the grace of government, corporate and individual

subsidies. Indeed, like most workers, we do the best we can for ourselves, given available

conditions, and do our best to improve conditions where we can. Still, I suggest that our social

locations as “special” individuals, doing “special” work, function as barrier to noticing the larger

systems of power that shape all of our lives.

For musicians, the normalization of life as a hierarchy is set in motion well before musicians

seek out professional positions. Foucault’s description of the intensification of disciplinary

procedures in the eighteenth century and the invention of the “drill” as a means to maximize the

effectiveness of individual bodily mechanisms and external control over the actions of many,

229

Thanks to collective activism, there are some areas of contract strength for rank and file musicians. They have union representation, there are grievance procedures, and there are democratic processes in place to choose new members of the orchestra. It’s a limited form of democratic authority however, as conductors often have veto rights over decisions made by committees of musicians. 230

Although a high level of specialized skills is required to play in a professional symphony orchestra, there are far more qualified musicians coming out of music schools than there are positions available thus we are in a situation of “surplus labour.” The work itself is standardized according to the stipulations of musical scores thus, symphony musicians, particularly the rank and file, can be replaced by other musicians able to render their parts according to the requirements of the score. Indeed, there are enough musicians anxious for the opportunity to perform that positions are usually filled, with or without good working conditions or rates of pay. For example, in one professional, regional orchestra, young musicians coming from distant cities are hired as “extra musicians” at the local rate of pay but with only a partial travel subsidy. At best, these players will break even on their engagements, but only if they share the 18-hour drive with other out-of-town musicians and billet with an orchestra supporter [Personal knowledge].

217

parallel the forms of training developed for musicians during the nineteenth century and still in

use today.

What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.(Foucault 1977, 138)

Indeed, the drill and related mechanisms of discipline have been highly effective in generating

particular kinds of musicians with amazing levels of skill. Nevertheless, the discipline of our

studies also forecloses other musical possibilities, teaches us to believe in the myth that resources

are distributed in society according to merit and not relations of power, and, as well, teaches

passivity in terms of political awareness and agency.

Throughout this study I have indicated that a lack of awareness of power relations and

obsessions with individual self-improvement result in a way of being in the world I refer to as

“terminal naivety.” This is a state of being that I think of as a marriage of innocence with

ignorance and passivity; an investment in the need to believe the self to be upright, proper and

good, not rebellious or “degenerate” and, therefore, deserving and entitled. It is a mode of being

that interferes with our capacity to locate ourselves beyond a very narrow frame of winners and

losers in the world of classical music. It is a mode of being in which individuals are constantly

engaged in forms of self-improvement, divorced from any sense of the systems of

governmentality that shape our and other people’s lives and, it is a mode of being whether we are

aware of it or not, in which we embody rationalities of rule that continue to provide support for

projects of imperial accumulation and colonial domination—projects that, today, are promoted

under the guise of neoliberalism and the “entrepreneurial self.” These are projects in which

hierarchies of race, class and gender are normalized—as if they were necessary, natural and

inevitable.

Conclusions: What are the interests we protect through our ignorance?

Music is a powerful accompaniment to any occasion because it impacts people physically,

psychically, and emotionally. Every act of musical programming is intended to generate some

218

kind of emotional and psychic response, whether it draws on familiar narratives, sentimental

associations, or deliberately sets out to undermine auditory, psychic, intellectual or emotional

expectations. Where contemporary classical music discourses and practices distinguish

themselves from other musical practices, however, is through investments in notions of:

civilizational superiority, the merits of constrained and authorized forms of emotional and

physical expression, hierarchical scales of human worth, the self as distinguished from the

“masses,” the inherent spirituality, universality and nobility of the classical repertoire, and,

finally, political disinterestedness.

With my analysis, I am not suggesting that classical music and the work of classical musicians

should be abandoned or demonized—although it is certainly true that many other forms of music

are demonized within classical music institutions; rather, my intention is to demonstrate that our

assumptions about the exalted nature of our work and our exalted status as Canadian nationals,

locate us very much as obedient representatives of the ruling order—an order that continues to

exploit tropes of identity, race, class, gender and other embodied markers to justify vastly

unequal distributions of wealth, health and security. And we take up these roles from a position

of naivety, disciplined, not only by the requirements of our profession but through continued

experiences of carefully orchestrated moments of national pride which we experience as both

performers and members of the public.

The exalted characterization of national subjects and their emotional identification with the state

however is a relationship that must be imagined, articulated and continually reproduced in order

to remain resilient to the contradictions that arise amongst differently situated people, as well as

contradictions between state interests and the people living under its dictates. The mass singing

of the national anthem and association of nationality with civic and public pleasures creates

opportunities for shared experiences with compatriots reinforcing the idea of a bond between

legitimized members of the nation and the state itself. The emotional bonds created in and

through the body during such events—even when individual histories and experiences are quite

different from those expressed in the national narrative—can be quite powerful. Thobani

describes this process of subjectification, as deriving from the invention and deployment of

‘exalted’ identities:

219

In the case of Canada, the historical exaltation of the national subject has ennobled this subject's humanity and sanctioned the elevation of its rights over and above that of the Aboriginal and the immigrant. (Thobani 2007, 9)

These national identities are produced through disciplining processes that link pleasure with

exalted and ennobling notions of belonging. Producing, reiterating and celebrating a valorized

national identity thus produces the individual as an “effect of power” (Foucault 1980a, 98).

As classically-trained musicians, we continue to embody the colonial subject as worldly,

sophisticated, civilized, innocent, and entitled. This is the education of feeling we both receive

and convey through our work as embodied representatives of race-, class- and gender- based

notions of civilizational advancement. Even while there are almost daily news items regarding

conflicts between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples over land rights, dreadful

conditions on remote reserves, the destructive paternalism of the Indian Act and challenges by

international rights organizations including Amnesty International and the United Nations to

Canada’s treatment of First Nations and Inuit peoples;231 even though there are on-going claims

against the Canadian State based on racist and unjust practices of the past as well as

contemporary practices of racial profiling, racial exploitation, attempts to demonize particular

racialized groups, and the use “foreign workers” to lower the general level of wages in the

country; even while there are reports coming from all over the world about the human rights

abuses taking place on behalf of Canadian mining companies; the narrative of the tolerant white

Canadian, as the true Canadian, as an innocent in the world of politics, persists unchallenged and

is, for some, a reason to go to war. Meanwhile, the classical musician is disciplined to remain

disinterested. Indeed, in our adherence to notions of cultural sophistication and our rejection of

musics that challenge white ascendancy, we, like so many of our compatriots, continue to

perform ourselves into a state of naivety and innocence accepting the notion that the West, as the

site of modernity, the site of “development,” is the source of civilizational advancement,

ignoring the knowledge that peoples within Canada, as well as in other parts of the world labeled

as “underdeveloped,” are literally dying from modern-day predatory projects of neo-colonialism,

supported by our own governments.

What are the alternatives if we give up our investments in disinterestedness; our embodiments of

naivety? Is there room within the confines of our work as wage-labourers working for 231

See: Gordon 2010, 91; Hicks May 10, 2013.

220

institutions funded by major corporate interests to contest dominant narratives and relations of

power?232 In the context of the Arts and Letters Club celebration, would it have been a useful

intervention, for example, to invite a writer such as Thomas King or a filmmaker such as Alanis

Obamsawin? The dangers of tokenism, co-optation, and re-inscription of dominant relations are

significant. Gestures of “inclusivity” risk replicating the notion of the “tolerant” Canadian. And

for those whose art is dedicated to fighting for social change, the risk of having one’s art and

energy coopted to reproduce the same old narrative is also great. Even the idea of inviting

“guests” poses a significant problem because it reproduces the relationship of “owner,” with

rights of entitlement, and “guest,” present only “at the pleasure of” the owner. Nevertheless, I

believe that creating spaces for views that contest the dominant discourse is a useful intervention

in that it furthers the circulation of competing discourses. In our particular historical moment, the

challenges are to displace whiteness from the normative centre; disrupt our need to distinguish

ourselves from larger populations derisively dismissed as “the masses;” discover grounds for

solidarity; and collaborate in ways that move forward, not only discourses of justice, but

embodied and material practices of justice and equity.

Culture always has been and will always be a site of contestation in which different world views,

different values and different life experiences are expressed. Arnold Walter, in his 1969

introduction to Aspects of Music in Canada, expresses a view of culture with which classically-

trained musicians are very familiar. In Walter’s words, “culture always has been, always will be,

a pyramid with little room at the top” but this is a very particular notion of culture that assumes

that some lives are exalted while others are trivial, perhaps even expendable (Walter 1969, 4). It

is a very particular view of life and meaning-making that reflects relations of power as much as it

reflects any kind of absolute “truth” about the function of “culture” in different people’s lives.

Recalling Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between “truth” and power, the task is thus, not

to seek to replace one truth with another but, to notice the role of relations of power in

constructing what stands as “truth” at any given moment.

I have argued that the 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club was deeply political. A concert

that calls upon the work of white male composers to celebrate colonial relations is not the telling

of a universal story; it is the telling of a particular colonial story from the point of view of a 232

Members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra were publically chastised and forced to apologize to the Volkswagen Corporation for undertaking an anti-war concert in the 1980s.

221

particular group of colonizers, and it is a story that masks the violence, displacement and

exploitation of our colonial past and present. Edward Saïd presses the point that literary scholars

have rendered themselves “ornamental” through their insistence on universal yet apolitical

significations (Saïd 1982, 22). Classical musicians do much the same with our insistence on

claims of universality, neatly contained within performances of decorum and virtuosity. There is

a great need for other stories to be told and to be heard; for claims of political neutrality to be

discarded and for classical musicians to take up roles, not just as obedient producers of

disciplined art forms but as participants in social change.

Our subjectivities, developed through years of disciplined training and indoctrination produce us

as “docile bodies” performing our art form without the knowledge, tools or imaginative need to

be political actors, thus producing ourselves as both entitled and terminally naïve. Our separation

from the ways that art forms and expressions are woven through with history, politics, class

relations, gendered expectations and racial boundaries, makes us complicit in political relations

but, it is a complicity that is based, at least in part, on naivety.

This study has been grounded in a critique of a particular concert chosen because of its

usefulness in revealing relations of power. More than critique however, it is also an invitation for

musicians to begin a process of discovering the rationalities behind taken for granted practices,

listening to other voices, and thinking through how we might use our skills and access to

audiences to challenge dominant narratives and become part of larger movements for social and

economic justice. Finally, it is an invitation to take seriously Edward Saïd’s call to connect

“politically vigilant forms of interpretation to an ongoing political and social praxis....[and]

refuse to believe…that the comforts of specialized habits can be so seductive as to keep us all in

our assigned places" (Said 1982, 25).

To practice freedom, to be a moral subject, is not to establish a final truth but to “unveil the

technologies of power” of the contemporary moment in order to discover and act upon what is

needed in the present (Foucault 1994b, 133). For Canadians, raised to know ourselves as exalted

members of an exalted nation, the task, I believe, is to locate ourselves in history and in

contemporary social and political relations; to step outside of our disciplined states of political

docility; to challenge the pleasures invested in our states of ignorance; and, to engage in practices

of freedom, as subjects and actors of history.

222

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Copyright Acknowledgements

Most of the images and texts reproduced in this dissertation are in the Public Domain.

In the case of Figures 17, 28, 29, 33 and 39, the publishers are no longer in business and, thus, I

have been unable to seek their permission.

Figure 10: Permission granted to reprint home page of the London Savage club.

Figure 43: Copyright permission granted to reprint lyrics. Song for Canada © 1989 Paul Halley (Back Alley Music) ASCAP. Administered by Pelagos Incorporated. All rights Reserved.

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Appendix

England, (1917) by Ernest Campbell MacMillan; Text by Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) I Sea and strand, and a lordlier land than sea-tides rolling and rising sun Clasp and lighten in climes that brighten with day when day that was here is done, Call aloud on their children, proud with trust that future and past are one. Far and near from the swan's nest here the storm-birds bred of her fair white breast, Sons whose home was the sea-wave's foam, have borne the fame of her east and west; North and south has the storm-wind's mouth rung praise of England and England's quest. Fame, wherever her flag flew, never forbore to fly with an equal wing: France and Spain with their warrior train bowed down before her as thrall to king; India knelt at her feet, and felt her sway more fruitful of life than spring. Darkness round them as iron bound fell off from races of elder name, Slain at sight of her eyes, whose light bids freedom lighten and burn as flame; Night endures not the touch that cures of kingship tyrants, and slaves of shame. All the terror of time, where error and fear were lords of a world of slaves, Age on age in resurgent rage and anguish darkening as waves on waves, Fell or fled from a face that shed such grace as quickens the dust of graves. Things of night at her glance took flight: the strengths of darkness recoiled and sank: Sank the fires of the murderous pyres whereon wild agony writhed and shrank: Rose the light of the reign of right from gulfs of years that the darkness drank. Yet the might of her wings in flight, whence glory lightens and music rings, Loud and bright as the dawn's, shall smite and still the discord of evil things, Yet not slain by her radiant reign, but darkened now by her sail-stretched wings. II Music made of change and conquest, glory born of evil slain, Stilled the discord, slew the darkness, bade the lights of tempest wane, Where the deathless dawn of England rose in sign that right should reign. Mercy, where the tiger wallowed mad and blind with blood and lust, Justice, where the jackal yelped and fed, and slaves allowed it just, Rose as England's light on Asia rose, and smote them down to dust. Justice bright as mercy, mercy girt by justice with her sword, Smote and saved and raised and ruined, till the tyrant-ridden horde Saw the lightning fade from heaven and knew the sun for God and lord.

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Where the footfall sounds of England, where the smile of England shines, Rings the tread and laughs the face of freedom, fair as hope divines Days to be, more brave than ours and lit by lordlier stars for signs. All our past acclaims our future: Shakespeare's voice and Nelson's hand, Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust in this our chosen and chainless land, Bear us witness: come the world against her, England yet shall stand. [Two stanzas have been deleted as they are not set by MacMillan] III From the springs of the dawn, from the depths of the noon, from the heights of the night that shine, Hope, faith, and remembrance of glory that found but in England her throne and her shrine, Speak louder than song may proclaim them, that here is the seal of them set for a sign. And loud as the sea's voice thunders applause of the land that is one with the sea Speaks Time in the ear of the people that never at heart was not inly free The word of command that assures us of life, if we will but that life shall be; If the race that is first of the races of men who behold unashamed the sun Stand fast and forget not the sign that is given of the years and the wars that are done, The token that all who are born of its blood should in heart as in blood be one. [Four final stanzas of Swinburne’s poem deleted as they are not included in the setting by MacMillan] (MacMillan 1918)