HEADLESS MUSICAL SEEDS AND GESTURES WITH ADJECTIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KEIKO DEVAUX

Keiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a Canadian composer, originally from British Columbia, who now lives in Montréal. She began her musical career in piano-performance studies as well as composing, touring and recording several albums in independent rock bands. Her concert music is widely performed throughout Canada and Europe. From 2016–18, Keiko was the composer in residence of Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She joined Salvatore Sciarrino's masterclasses at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, between the years 2017 and 2019. Keiko was commissioned by music@villaromana festival, Florence, to create Echoic Memories. She is the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music (2020) and is also engaged in a two-year residency as a Carrefour composer with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2020–22). This interview was conducted over Zoom in late spring 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

MusicCohort: Pilot feasibility of a protocol to assess students’ physical and mental health in a Canadian post-secondary school of music

Objective Music-related physical and mental health conditions are common among post-secondary music students, with many studies reporting a prevalence greater than 70%. However, there is currently no consensus on appropriate, validated assessments for this population. The aim of this pilot study was to test the feasibility of an assessment protocol developed for a German longitudinal study with Canadian post-secondary music students, and to compare the health of music students to non-music students. Using a cross-sectional design, first-semester music and non-music control students were recruited at two campuses at the same university. Both groups completed questionnaires and physical testing, including range of motion, core strength, and pressure pain threshold. Nineteen music students and 50 non-music student controls participated in this study. Results The German protocol is feasible in a Canadian post-secondary setting. Canadian music students demonstrated similar health outcomes to those in the parent study. All participants demonstrated poorer mental and physical quality of life than the Canadian norms, though this was not statistically significant. The results of this study should be confirmed in a larger study. Future studies with larger sample sizes can provide further insight into the health of Canadian music students, providing a basis for prevention and intervention.

The Divas Get Real: Training Singers for Success in the Canadian Cultural Domains

To the accepted three cornerstones for innovation of undergraduate music major curricula—creativity, diversity, and integration—must be added fourth, professionalization, that is, the establishment of viable professional identities. This article focuses on a subset of Canadian music undergraduate singers, reporting on research into the structure and reality of the eight cultural domains in Canada, and investigating three important themes that emerge from statistics for the training of singers in postsecondary training: the range of work available to music graduates, the portfolio nature of working musicians’ careers, and the increasing significant role of technological fluency in musicians’ careers today.

Hidden Ground: Exploring an Approach to Educational Music for Strings

This article presents the findings of a study that explored the composition of Canadian educational music. Particularly, the authors focus on the analyses of composers’ scores on creating new string compositions for young musicians within the New Sounds of Learning Project. On a macro level, the composers predominantly composed multiple movements (three to four), using single section (A), binary (AB), ternary, or variation forms (A, A’, A”, A”’, etc.), and they adopted simple meters throughout. At the micro-level, the majority of the compositions also included a technical element that was used to further skill development, that is, lack of meter to focus attention, syncopation to develop rhythmic fluency, interactive rhythms between parts to promote player coordination, modular structure to address varied skill levels, or free rhythm to promote imaginative thinking. The findings will be of interest to those members of the music profession who promote or would like to promote the dissemination of new music for strings within educational settings in Canadian music classrooms.

Through the looking glass: A researcher’s perspectives on a collaborative music composition project

Making Music: Composing with Young Musicians was a multi-year, multi-site research project partnered with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Canadian Music Centre to commission composers to collaborate with teachers and students to write educational music. On-site observations undertaken by the co-author and examined through a pragmatic lens employing Brief Focused Inquiry focused on the contributions of students, teachers and composers to the collaborative music compositions. Students contributed their creativity and knowledge of musical elements and concepts, and they provided feedback to the teachers and composers. Teachers contributed technical, instrumental feedback to the composers and their understanding of musical elements and concepts. Furthermore, they led band rehearsals and played musical instruments with the students. Composers contributed their musical creativity and feedback while undertaking a teacher-like role. The composers, teachers and students also used technology during this creative endeavor. The findings will be of potential interest to post-secondary music educators, composers, music teachers, and music publishers.

Opening up the pit: Negotiating a punk ethos with PUP

What does it mean to be punk within the Canadian music industry? This article offers a close reading of the band PUP’s politics, grassroots partnerships and personal interviews to argue that they not only skew punk in genre terms, but also embody a punk ethos. Furthermore, this article will confront the ambivalent politics of punk as it becomes entangled with cultural nationalism and national identity-building through institutional arts funding and awards. If punk is about resisting the establishment, how might we reconcile PUP’s reputation as a definitively ‘Canadian’ band with their outspokenness around issues ranging from anti-Black racism to police violence to ongoing colonialism? In what ways might PUP’s leftist politics be absorbed into Canada’s national identity through their receipt of institutional recognition, funding and awards? To make sense of these entanglements, we draw on Tavia Nyong’o’s punk or punk’d theory, which responds to the apparent reification of queer theory and calls on scholars to cultivate a punk spirit. Following Nyong’o and other punk scholars, we ask: is PUP punk’ing the Canadian music machine?

Same as it ever was

In this paper, I outline how the “piracy panic narrative” (Arditi, 2015) has repositioned the fan/musician dynamic in the digital era, from one between maker and listener to one between labourer and thief. The paper questions if the press has fairly assessed the fan/musician dynamic in the digital era and examines who has directly benefited from the reorganization of the relations between producer and consumer. The article provides a contemporary history of the American and Canadian music industries’ response to file sharing, crisis and piracy. Drawing on data from the 2017 Music Canada report on the Value Gap, the essay ultimately concludes that those most affected by the repositioning of the producer/consumer dynamic are not the various stakeholders whose voices are most frequently heard, but actually the musicians. The piracy panic narrative is thus nothing but an exercise in creating smoke and mirrors; music industries depict themselves as victims, all the while quietly rearranging their business practices to maintain a long-held position as gatekeeper.