v. 31  no. 2    August / août 2003

CAML/CUMS Conference at Dalhousie University

May 28-31, 2003

Despite a preponderance of cool, foggy weather, CAML members were warmly received at Dalhousie. At past conferences (IAML Ottawa being the exception) I cannot recall ever having been welcomed by a live person at the CAML/CUMS booth: Jennifer Bain was a calm and friendly face. The Dalhousie University Concert featured Lynn Stodola (piano), Marcia Swanson (mezzo) and Megan Bain (viola and a new alumna) in a program of works by Berg, Hindemith, Debussy and Chausson. The welcoming reception offered an opportunity both to renew old acquaintances and meet new colleagues.

Canadian Archival Jazz Collections
James Code, Mount Allison University

Peter Higham (Mount A) provided an introduction to the Don Warner Collection at Dalhousie. A local musician, Warner hosted a CBC jazz radio program for many years and led a dance band that toured to New York, Montreal and Toronto. The collection is comprised of LPs, CDs, printed and manuscript arrangements for Warner's group, as well as tapes of Warner's radio broadcasts. Some of the arrangements were written by Ed Graf of Willowdale, Ontario, and Toronto band leader Pat Riccio.

Lisa Philpott offered "Uncharted Waters: Hidden Jazz Collections at the UWO Music Library," which discussed two sheet music collections: the Simmons Collection (music for small combo/dance band) and the CKGW Radio Orchestra Collection. The Simmons Collection (provenance of Bert Simmons and members of the London Jazz Society) is more popular in nature, being published dance band music from 1919-43. There are 800 titles, including a few jazz titles, with some Canadian content.

The CKGW Radio Orchestra Collection (provenance of CKGW Radio (the "GW" being Gooderham and Worts distillers), Canadian Radio Commission, Frederick Evis, William McAulay, James and Margaret Whitby) is comprised of 2,500 titles and includes both published and manuscript arrangements dating from the 1920s to 1932. Included in the collection are a number of orchestrations (A.B.C. Dramatic Sets published by Photoplay Music) to accompany silent films. This portion of the collection may have an association with Luigi Romanelli who is known to have both led a band at the King Edward Hotel and to have conducted music for silent films at a Toronto cinema. There is a greater proportion of light classical music in this collection, and Canadiana is represented with jingle-arrangements by William Dudley and works by at least eighteen other Canadians including Nathaniel Dett, Percy Faith, Luigi von Kunits, and Rex Battle.

Richard Green (NLC) read David Fraser's paper on the Paul Bley Fonds, published in English and French on pages 30-37 of this issue.

Kathleen McMorrow (U of T) reported on "Two New Archival Resources at the U of T." The first collection was donated by Rob McConnell, the leader and premier arranger of the Boss Brass for the past thirty years. McConnell's meticulous arrangements were written with coloured pencils on large scores, which poses a challenge with respect to storage. The second is the Phil Nimmons Archive. Nimmons, who turns eighty this year, is one of Canada's most prolific and successful jazz musicians. The archives formerly occupied seventy-five linear metres of space in Nimmons' home, and includes hundreds of scripts, scores, sets, parts, work diaries and awards. Fortunately, this collection comes with a family member who is preparing a catalogue.

James Code read Andrew Homzy's paper, "Montreal Jazz Archives Summing Up: Canadian Jazz Archives in the International Context." A number of archival resources for prominent Montreal musicians are located at Concordia University, including fonds for Joe Bell, Walter Boudreau, John Gilmore (author of Swinging in Paradise), Herb Johnson, Maurie Kaye, and Vic Vogel. Homzy stated that recorded archives are abundant, but that archives of sheet music are rare. He also referred to the Jazz Association of Montreal, publishers such as Kendor Music, and international jazz archives in the U.S., Scandinavia and Great Britain. There is a serious issue to address with respect to what archives should collect for popular music - a concern also raised by McMorrow in her talk - as well as the supporting infrastructure of cataloguing, research, education, and outreach to the wider community.

Reports from the Field Alison Hall (Carleton)

Hall reported that legislation in Denmark has mandated all Danish public libraries must deal with music. She also mentioned IAML's Public Library Initiative.

Diane Peters (Wilfrid Laurier)

The Chinese proverb, "May you live in interesting times," has certainly been the case with Laurier's recent library renovation. Peters was on the Renovations Committee, and returned from her leave to be Acting Head of the Reference Department. Despite the emptying of seven floors, in March 2002 the Chief Librarian mandated "business as usual" and then departed, leaving the Dean of Business in charge. (He was out of the country, and thought the renovation merely involved painting and redecorating.) In short, anything that could have gone wrong, did. The building was not ready for occupancy by September; the bibliographic instruction room is still not finished; there are 600 new study carrels, but no chairs; there is no signage; the books' extended storage outdoors over a long, hot summer has accelerated the ageing of the glued spines; and a rainstorm caused a flood on the seventh floor. The building was built in three stages: three floors in 1963; two more in 1971; an additional two in 1984. The original budget was $3 million: cost overruns (books had to be moved twice, the necessity of storing the collection from June to November was not anticipated or budgeted for) were significant, leaving no money for finishing details (or chairs). Photos from this renovation can be viewed at: http://www.wlu.ca/wwwlib/reno/ photos.html

Richard Green (National Library of Canada)

Richard brought greetings from Tim Maloney (U Minn), and shared the fact that NLC has had plastic sheeting over its Reference Collection for two-and-a-half years. The NLC and the National Archives have shared resources for many years. The Throne Speech in Parliament in fall 2002 announced that the two institutions would merge their computer and technical resources; a merger of preservation and communications is expected to come in the near future.

The transformation is from top-to-bottom: a brand new organization and institution. There are to be no job losses, but there will be reassignments. The corporate culture will need to revised to bring a common appreciation. For instance, access has never been a focus at the Archives.

The bricks-and-mortar of the new institution includes 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa, the Gatineau Preservation Centre, Renfrew Ontario, and various niches across the country.

The transition is expected to take three to five years. This all depends upon prompt passage of the legislation, which is at the Second Reading stage. There has been a two-day meeting of all staff, with the creation of thirty-three working groups. The status quo is an option, if it can be justified. There will be additional all-staff sessions, and consultation with interested clients; participation is encouraged.

The intent is to bring new synergies and technologies to institutions that, so far as the public is concerned, are one and the same. Canada is changing, and having one institution might improve the funding of needs, rather than pitting one institution against the other. This move will certainly challenge the staff of both institutions.

The big unknown is how this transformation will occur. In many ways, the Music Division is a model, having subject expertise, and expertise in diverse areas such as archives, reference, acquisitions, description/cataloguing, preservation, access, and legal deposit. Perhaps the ideal would be to have centres of excellence with doubled staff, a manuscripts database, subject expertise, and (last but not least) a non-leaking roof. The NLC and the NAC serve widely-differing clientele, and there is little common ground with regard to the depth of cataloguing. Eventually, the manuscript database will employ Encoded Archival Description, offering item-level access.

Peter Higham (Mt. Allison U) (Summary written by the presenter)

Higham reported on the expanded and newly renovated Alfred Whitehead Music Library at Mount Allison University. Though planned for several years, full funding was not secured until the spring of 2002. Work commenced during the summer months, the Music Library was operational by October, and finally officially opened in January 2003. In utilizing existing space within the Conservatory of Music Building, the expansion increased the floor space by fifty-three percent. This was accomplished by eliminating a corridor which had formerly split the Library in half, and by incorporating two adjoining rooms into the Music Library space. Supportive pillars or partial wall cutouts which replaced load-bearing walls were adopted into the design features. Two new areas fell naturally to use as library staff office space and an attractive reference reading room. The resulting facility is an open, ambient space with adequate equipment and computer resources, improved ventilation and lighting, and room for further growth of its valued collections.

Don McLean (Dean, McGill Music)

Due to a change of conference scheduling, Cynthia Leive was unable to present. McLean offered her apologies, and discussed the plans for the new facility at McGill. The present "temporary" library space in the eleventh floor of the office tower has been inhabited for a decade. The previous library location was the basement and one level above the basement, in close proximity to a swimming pool. The cut-away floor plan shows separate floors for printed and recorded music, plus a floor devoted to state-of-the-art recording studios.

Collection Development and Popular Music
Kathleen McMorrow (U Toronto), Chair

Collecting Popular Music for the Music Library
Monica Fazekas (UWO)

Popular music became a collecting focus at UWO about two years ago, with the addition of popular music courses to the curriculum. Since then, UWO has identified this as an "emerging priority" adding an undergraduate degree in Popular Music Studies, with plans to add a graduate degree to its offerings in the near future in collaboration with the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. The range of available materials is staggering and, having never previously collected in this area, UWO is playing catch-up. Targeted funds will be needed to develop a research-level collection. This program cannot be supported at the expense of other areas of excellence. (Unfortunately, new programs are regularly approved without any additional funding to support them.) Selective collection development is a necessity, but requires much time and effort.

Liaison with faculty is crucial. One must ascertain whether world music will be included, and also how popular music will be used in the other departments of the Faculty of Music. Interdisciplinary studies mean that colleagues at other libraries on campus may offer some collections support. More general databases are useful for popular music, but unfamiliar databases will require additional reference and instructional support.

Approval plans have not worked well for collecting popular music, and have had implications for collecting in other musical disciplines. For instance, deselecting "heavily illustrated" items meant that anything with musical examples was also excluded from the profile. This creates much extra work for the selector, as items must be individually selected and ordered from the firm budget line. Dealing with trade publications means that titles go out-of-print much more quickly; in terms of recordings, new formats do not necessarily duplicate older formats and, if they do, should they then be repurchased? UWO's recent "streaming" pilot under the auspices of the Canadian Recording Industry Association meant that streamed tracks had to be on labels licensed by the Audio-Visual Licensing Agency. Consequently, many titles had to be repurchased on the approved labels.

Liaison with the Development Office requires constant communication of the library's needs and policies. Otherwise, unrealistic promises may be made by the Office. The Development Office has brought some useful popular music donations to UWO, with the potential of more to come.

Given that popular music is a recent addition to the collections' focus, there will be large gaps for years to come. The proximity of the local public library can be helpful, as it has collected in this area for many decades, but it cannot be expected to support the curriculum. Other concerns for collecting in this area include evaluation and use of "fandom" Web sites, what to collect in print and/or online versions, and the nature of the core audio collection for undergraduate courses.

Certainly developing a popular music collection will require increased space, funding, and staffing. Therefore, lobbying for targeted funding becomes mandatory.

Supporting Popular Music Courses with Library Resources
Diane Peters (WLU)

Traditional music has long been a focus at WLU, with its roots as a Lutheran Seminary (1910) and the establishment of a Faculty of Arts, affiliated with UWO, in 1925. Ulrich Leupold (PhD, Berlin) conducted the university choirs (Elmer Iseler was a chorister), and church music was a compulsory course. By 1968, one could pursue a Bachelor of Music (four-year) in church music, and in 1975 the Faculty of Music was established. Today, students may study opera, world music, classical music and music therapy; a Masters degree in Music Therapy is planned. New degree programs are offered with no consultation with library personnel, nor with any groundwork; a bibliography of required materials is not compiled.

Music and popular culture courses tend to be generic, special-topics courses, which makes collection development a challenge. The lack of funding is such that only about 175 new music books are added to the collection annually, and a recent search on popular music yielded a mere 150 hits. As part of the TriUniversity Group, WLU students can request materials from Guelph and Waterloo, but must pay fees to use the Waterloo Public Library.

Collection Development in the Widening Canon at Large Research Libraries
Virginia Danielson (Richard French Endowed Chair, Harvard)

Libraries exist to serve scholars and students at any given time; they must also sustain depth over a period of time. Harvard mandates support for senior faculty positions, with acquisition of appropriate primary source materials for their entourage of graduate students. Areas supported include popular and vernacular music, ethnomusicology, cultural theory-new musicology, retrospective jazz (Ingrid Monson suggested acquiring fake books). New technologies require new electronic equipment and upgrades. Existing staff must acquire new knowledge, and one must try to avoid stepping on the toes of neighbouring institutions. Faculty members are touchy about downgrading older priorities and insist on maintaining previous levels of support. Often maintaining balance is purely a matter of guessing right. Harvard is conspicuously wealthy, but even so the expanding canon creates a domino effect: Someone has to find, pay for, catalogue, advertise, preserve, and house everything. Presently, there are 25,000 volumes housed off-site, with a twenty-four-hour turnaround: the cost of transportation is $3/title. Support for a new senior faculty appointment in jazz is costing $110,000. A corpus is required for research, not just a "whiff of vanilla" across the board. The library is the companion, not the servant, to the research endeavour. Collecting "world music" is difficult. Even the Library of Congress's cooperative programs are limited to books - no scores, no recordings.

Harvard Libraries got its first development officer in 1997. Jazz has been a good target; opera is a hard sell. Do let faculty members know that you are working with the Development Office. New faculty members need to add library resources into their salary negotiations (and get it in writing). If you are collecting Swahili, you will also need materials written in Wolof!

9. Invited Lecture: Postmodernity: << que me veux-tu >> / "what do you want of me"
John Rea (McGill) (CUMS)

Rea is the Composer in Residence for the Scotia Festival. (Note: This summary can only hope to capture the flavour of his presentation: it was performance art.)

Rea assumed an attitude of prayer, with a green apple in front of him.

"What do you want of me?"

Sex. "All artists are undersexed" (Nietzsche). Fauré cautioned his students to not try to be a genius in every bar of music; he took his own advice. Ravel did not heed the advice. Giambattista Vico. Musicologists have it all wrong: Postmodernism always precedes the next modernism. You are dining out, and find an insect in your soup: the waiter is apologetic (equals modernism) versus the waiter who gives you a dirty look (equals postmodernism). (You end up giving a greater tip to the latter, the exploited worker.)

"What do you want of me?"

The Granny Smith apple is a postmodern apple, an apple without sugar; the red apple is modernism. The Granny is green, with a special shine, it "cracks" when you eat it. Green apples are usually cooking apples.

Eve gave a green apple to Adam, the ancestor of the green postmodern apple of knowledge. René Magritte's La Chambre d'écoute II (1953) features a room entirely filled by a single, large green apple.

Taverner. Pärt. Hovhaness. Gorecki. Schnittke (to cut; mowed down).

The apple of Guillaume Tell. The apple of discord. Paris. Three goddesses.

Messiaen. Webern. Wagner.

"But what do you want of me?"

The geometry of naiveté. Not to look back, or to look back at one's peril. The psycho-technical imperative: Necessity is the mother of invention. Berio. Liszt. Wagner. Kandinsky. Varèse. Xenakis. Garant. Tremblay.

Postmodern. Anti-modern. Psycho-technical imperative: Invention is the mother of necessity (Veblen). Art moves forward. In modernism, the horse draws the cart; in postmodernism, the horse pushes the cart. Things are brought to the marketplace with no perceived need. The PC is an invention in search of a composer, incessantly improvised and refined: the world is upside down!

Ninety years ago, there was the need to hear: Schoenberg created the Society for Private Performances. Fifty years later, the Domaine Musicale ensemble was created in Paris, of a flexible instrumentation, as an internal necessity of creators to hear their own works. These were modernist concert societies. Now, we have the Ensemble Moderne (Paris) and The Fires of London, invented groups of fixed membership which create a need to write for them.

The Modern chess player must win, and must also agree to play, to abide by the rules, and to move. The Postmodern chess player likes to play. There is a need for rules, but he may also move backwards.

In the early 1960's Rea's grandmother returned to Italy after a forty-year absence, taking her daughter, Rea's aunt, with her. She had taught her daughter Italian, and this was a source of amusement and astonishment: her language was frozen in time (forty years past), a dead language. This filled the villagers with nostalgia. It was a private language: nostalgia in the mind of the beholder.

The teaching of composition in the U.S. and Canada is moribund: who did you study with? Elgar and Vaughan Williams influenced Healey Willan. Musicians from Québec were trained in Europe. You must choose the right parents at the time of your artistic birth.

"You are looking for what, exactly?"

Brahms is postmodern, writing for a fixed ensemble. Wagner is modern. He bets on the future, avoids symphonies and writes for a flexible, open-ended opera orchestra. Stravinsky and Les Six are postmodern. Schoenberg is modern. Penderecki is a political composer, latterly postmodern.

"What can you possibly want of me?"

Troubles of the times. Mask of the times. Troubles of the mask.

Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were working together. Hoffman, a method actor, was unable to "get into" his character. Nothing worked. Olivier suggested, "Why don't you try acting?" (Put on a mask, like me.) To what ends, the mask of postmodernity? Costumes. Smoke. The Kronos Quartet. The Arditti Quartet is real, unmasked, and absolutely modern.

Early music is extremely ornate: a fading mask of authenticity.

Stockhausen turned to Buddhism; John Taverner embraced the Eastern Orthodox faith. Their musics feel pre-modern. Takemitsu's music is sound and light. He is privileged: he has and understands masks. Truffaut: Modernists do not want to be unmasked.

We are uneasy about masks. We are unconscious of always wearing individual masks. Life and art involves learning to take off a mask, prior to taking off yet another. Often, an artist in unmasking a personal neurosis, loses inspiration.

Listening? It is postmodern. Listen to a favourite piece broadcast on the radio. Turn down the volume. What do you hear? Céline Dion's "The Power of Love." Her voice gets louder. Whether it be Céline, Dvorak, or Tchaikovsky, the tunes persist. The radio is a mask of melody; a three-inch speaker is the mouth. It reinforces melody and prefers postmodern composers! The three-inch speaker-mask is magical, with a deforming power over taste, expression.

Epigrams. Dichotomies. Axioms of proximities. Cautions to young composers.
12. Postmodernity is about remembering while cognizant of forgetting.

11. Postmodernity is a type of relaxed revisionism. "Are you feared?"

10. Please do a composition for a symphony orchestra. Postmodern.

9. Thirty-five years ago, the Beatles' "Let it Be" was postmodern; the Rolling Stones' "Let it Bleed" was modern.

8. Postmodernism documents and is didactic, creates a pastiche. Cinéma verité, the dialogue comes first.

7. Postmodernism pushes; modernism pulls

6. Boulez as composer is modern; as conductor, is postmodern. (Frank Zappa conducted by Boulez is modern!)

5. Postmodernism is a woman: monody, melody, lullaby; modernism is a man: counterpoint, jam-sessions. Mozart is a woman, as is Schubert and Clara Schumann. Bach is a man, as is Beethoven and Hildegard of Bingen. Where do you fit? Which gender?

4. Postmodernism prefers metonymy; Modernism prefers metaphor. In postmodernism, the performer is king; in modernity, the composer/creator reigns.

3. Radio is modern, but transmits a post-modern culture. It is a hot medium trying to become cool, electro in search of acoustic.

2. Choosing professions? Disabuse yourself of this notion. Choosing to become an architect means using software with a computer!

1. Artistically undersexed? There are hormone pills. Listen to Tristan and Isolde.

Amen! (Sung)

In the question period that followed, Rea said that by singing Amen at the end, the piece became postmodern. The Enlightenment promoted the concept of freedom and individual liberty: a modernist concept. Modernism and postmodernism are impregnated one with the other. The west has long debated the notion of liberty and freedom. Inventions and progress are the result of freedom: the computer makes one a prisoner of it. Modernism and postmodernism have occurred over a thousand years of history. Terms like "first" and "second" practice are arbitrary: a chicken and egg debate.

Postmodernism aims for simplification: Bach's music was old-fashioned (i.e., modern), his sons simplified their music (i.e., postmodern). Tunes are simple (and memorable). Rea was asked if he adds the title before or after the composition is written. He answered that the title often contains the clue to the project's structure, so one hopes it is indeed linked to the project. Occasionally, one can be obsessed by a title and drawn down false paths!

Regional Collections
Lisa Emberson (NLC), Chair

Establishing a Provincial Music Collection: The Saskatchewan Experience
Richard Belford (U Sask)

Belford has a varied background as a double bass player, arts administrator, music publisher, piano tuner, music librarian at the Saskatoon Public Library, and teacher of library technicians.

The University of Saskatchewan's regional collection aims to cover the entire province. Saskatchewan musicians include Joni Mitchell, Buffy Ste. Marie, Smilin' Johnny and Elinor Dahl, Bobby Gimby, Captain Canada and the Sons of the Golden West, Humphrey and the Dump Trucks and the Grand Coulee Jug Band. The Saskatchewan Music (SM) Collection will include print materials, sheet music, recordings and ephemera: with a critical mass of 1,000 items. The project began in 1997 with Neil Richards (a former history major and library assistant in special collections) collecting postcards and sheet music. In 1998 a task force was formed, and the university consented to the creation of the collection. The parties met in 1999, and drew up guidelines in 2000. Sound recordings and sheet music were transferred to the Education Library (home of the music collection) in 2001; Belford was hired in 2002. In that same year, a grand opening was held and Neil Richards retired.

It was determined that the University of Saskatchewan was to become the authority in this venture: the U of Regina had no holdings; the Saskatchewan Public Library had 30,000 catalogued sound recordings, some of which would be coming to the SM Collection. The guidelines were a near-disaster: the scope? Anything with a Saskatchewan connection: by, about, recorded there. Pop? Jazz? Comprehensive or representative? (Rap?)

The purpose of the project was deemed to be twofold: first, to collect musical items dealing with reception; styles; history of performers, places, musical trends; support for future courses (popular culture, ethnic music); and support for the Aboriginal Portal Project (sound recordings). Second, collecting on a sociological basis is also necessary: history; styles (non-musical); lifestyles (polka music); links to big cities (music published in NY); ethnic varieties (Ukrainian); residential schools (First Nations).

The task of acquiring materials for the SM Collection is definitely not business-as-usual. One frequents local vendors, purchases from local record companies, attends local festivals (and purchases sound recordings at the festivals), visits local antique dealers, keeps in contact with secondary market dealers (antiquarians) to purchase their duplicates, solicits donations and keeps an eye on E-Bay. Preservation is a concern, and one does well to cooperate with the Archives. Duplicate copies are kept as backup, and any third copies become traders.

Access to the collection is via the university's Web catalogue. Items are fully catalogued with series and local notes. It is a separate, non-circulating collection, technically on reserve but available to all. There are record, tape and CD players in-house. Promotion of the collection is ongoing. There was an exhibit of Western Cover Art in 2002, a Web site is planned and the upcoming (2005) Saskatchewan Encyclopaedia centennial project will include information about the collection.

Community support is wide-ranging: the A. F. of M. (North and South Saskatchewan), the Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association and the Saskatchewan Country Music Association all offer support, as do radio stations and record companies. Watchers keep an eye out for potential acquisitions; the Saskatoon Symphony's annual book and record sale permits Belford a ten-day advance look). Performers such as Michael "Bear" Miller (Humphrey and the Dump Trucks), Brian Sklar (Captain Canada) and Brenda Baker have donated their material; Neil Richards remains an avid and active supporter.

Popular Music Icons
Serge Lacasse, Laval, Chair and respondent (CUMS)
(Summary by Kathleen McMorrow)

Intersecting nations: a look at the career of "La Bolduc" in Québécois and Canadian Culture
Meg Kwasnicki, York

Kwasnicki is examining the current media images of the singer Marie Travers as heroine of both Quebec and Canada (popular press and biographies, Web sites, state-sponsored television "History moments," an eponymous beer available only in Quebec) and her identity in her own time (bilingual Gaspé origins, both local and Canadian patriotic references in her texts.) Lacasse cautioned that the term Québécois has been in use only since the Quiet Revolution, so her references to "canadiens" would mean French-speakers anywhere in Canada. Richard Greene noted that the family, with whom he had extensive contact in preparing the Music Division's documentation of her work, much preferred the usage "Madame Bolduc."

Motion Ensemble
Helen Pridmore, soprano and Andrew Miller, double bass offered a wonderful performance of excerpts (miniatures) from György Kurtág's Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Geor Christoph Lichtenbergs, op. 37a.

Keynote Address (CAML/CUMS)
Introduction: Beverley Diamond, Memorial University

Classical Music in Iraq
Virginia Danielson, Harvard University

An introduction to Iraqi classical music necessitates some discussion of the social environment, as well as references to the poetry, the nature of the forms used, and the place of the virtuoso in modern times. The music is melodically modal, and moves in a stepwise motion with repeated notes. Use of the lower end of a melodic range is characteristic, as is the use of silence: one listens through the silence. Following a cadence, the singer moves up to the next range of pitches. An arch shape is discernable, and the work ends in the original mode.

Poetry is always rendered clearly. Poetry is the art of the Arabs, and sung poetry is the finest of all. In Baghdad from 760-1260, writers spurned musical notation. There was a keen sense of live performance and theory. An extant tenth-century book of songs, in twenty-three volumes, is being translated by George Sawa and Suzanne Meyers Sawa.

Singers of the Baghdad Court were praised for their excellence in composition, their knowledge of history and songs, and their ornaments and innovations. There was support for female singers and orators, such as the beautiful Arib, a skilled poetess, calligrapher, lutenist, composer, and backgammon player who wrote more than 1,000 songs. The common instrument (comparable in popularity to the piano or violin in the west) is the ud, the mother of the lute.

The maqam is an accompanied vocal form, thousands of years old. Improvisational, yet composed, it contains several large poems, several modes and tunings. The instrumental group can contain hammer dulcimer, spike fiddle, percussion, and a short-necked lute or ud to accompany the reader/singer; the audience also plays a role in the performance. A contemporary performer named Farida is a breathtaking maqam singer.

Early efforts at recording maqam were limited by the available technology: Seventy-eight-rpm discs contain a mere six minutes per side. Despite this, 10,000 seventy-eights were recorded in North Africa prior to 1910. The vocal quality has an extreme frontal resonance, which is not nasal in quality, with a marked absence of head voice. There is an equal strength from top to bottom of the vocal range.

Danielson played a recording from 1950: a long introduction, with a strong "one" beat. The voice is somewhat drone-like in the opening tahrur. The language is very clear in this devotional poem to Mohammed, and the arch-form is apparent. The performance ends with a folk song, with the instrumentalists and audience singing along. (In Iraqi classical poetry, there are no declensions, the singer must provide his/her own!) The audience helps to shape the performance by asking the singer to "do it again!" Silence can force a musician to go on.

Danielson's experience of Iraqi social life is there is a communal disposition of time. Arriving at a party a half-hour late, with the explanation that a relative visited unexpectedly was not entirely satisfactory: you should have brought the relative with you! Dinner may be further delayed by telephone calls, and the need for proper greetings and chatting. The use of time is regularly altered, and because of this, food is prepared ahead of time, is served warm rather than hot, while drinks can be served hot, cold or warm.

Historically, music would have been played for gatherings of men. With the advent of the sound recording industry, things have changed somewhat. Today one invites musicians to perform at weddings; by the first quarter of the century, concerts were being staged at concert venues.

Women musicians teach lessons, and perform when they can; musicians are eligible for pensions. Classical Iraqi music is identifiable by the genre/canon, and by how it is performed. However, in Cairo, works written in the 1960s have become the canon. The French and Swiss recording industries have been largely responsible for documenting this repertoire.

Altogether, Danielson played six musical examples: 1) a 1992 ud piece by Munir Bashir; 2) a piece from the 1932 Cairo conference; 3) a 1950's piece by Yusuf Omar; 4) a violin piece notated in western European style by Farid al Awandi; 5) a notated ud piece by Munir Bashir; and 6) a notated ud piece by Nasir Shamma. The latter three pieces are from the Modernity Project.

Tour of the Killam Library
Karen Smith, Dalhousie University Library

The main floor Learning Commons houses 175 machines, with Internet access, and Microsoft software packages. Sound and video editing are also available. Student Navigators staff the Technical Assistance Desk, assisting with the glitches that occur. The equipment is new, funded by the President's Office through infrastructure funding.

Special Collections and Archives are housed on the fifth floor: the Don Warner Collection occupies a separate room which contains the manuscripts, scores, and sound recordings. Items from the Ellen Ballon Collection were on display: Ballon (b. Montreal, 1898-1969) was a child prodigy who studied with Josef Hofmann and Wilhelm Backhaus during ten years spent in Europe. She greatly admired Villa Lobos. Commissioning his Piano Concerto and giving its premiere in 1914, Ballon also later recorded the work with Villa Lobos conducting. The Ballon Collection includes some 600 scores by 195 composers. Her recordings were issued on ten-inch seventy-eights and LPs. Her family hopes to reissue them.

J. D. (John Daniel) Logan, a Harvard-educated philosopher born in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, bequeathed his collection to Dalhousie University, his alma mater. Logan spent nearly a decade in advertising (Chicago and Toronto), and was a critic for the Canadian Magazine, the Toronto Daily, and the Sunday World. His Aesthetic Criticism in Canada was published in 1907, and he wrote a critical study of the regimental band. He served in the eighty-fifth overseas battalion (Nova Scotia), and collected autographs (Alma Gluck, Nellie Melba, J. P. Sousa).

The remaining display items represented a selection of musical Canadiana, and included broadsides, a copy of "Our Boys in the Riel Rebellion" (1866, words only), the Union Harmony published at St. John (1815), song sheets, and first editions of Burney's and Hawkins's histories of music.

Eastern Europe to Canada
Walter Kemp, Dalhousie, Chair and respondent (CUMS/SMUC)
(Summary by Kathleen McMorrow.)

Arnold Walter, Nicholas Goldschmidt and Herman Geiger-Torel: Prophets in the Desert?
Lindsay Moore, U of T

Moore summarized the roles of these Central-European emigrés in the establishment of the COC, on the basis of published interviews and writings about them, concluding that without their presence the development of professional opera in Toronto would have been different.

Conflict and Cooperation at the Local, National and Global Levels: the Emigration of Central European and Baltic musicians to Canada, 1937-ca. 1955
Paul Helmer, McGill

Helmer presented some chronological and geographical statistics from a larger study he is preparing. One result of his research is an apparent contradiction between the exclusionist rhetoric of politicians ("one is too many") and the documented behaviour of Canadian bureaucrats in aiding refugees from fascism to this country.

Music, Culture, Ethnicity and Nationalism: the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir
Benita Wolters-Fredlund, U of T

This was a look at the radical socialism of the founders, and the evolution of the repertoire and activities of the group in reaction to political events through the mid-twentieth century.

Baroque Studies
Gordon Callon, Acadia University, Chair (CUMS)
(Summary by Suzanne Meyers Sawa.)

The Baroque Studies session featured two presentations. Janette Tilley, from the University of Toronto, spoke about "A Musical Emblem: the Sacred Musical Dialogue in Seventeenth Century Germany." She asked why the form flourished in the mid-seventeenth century and what made it so popular, and answered by linking its structure, which featured a conversation and a choral close, to the popular literary form of the emblem. The emblem consisted of three parts, the inscriptio, the pictura, and the subscriptio, or, a saying or phrase, a graphic image, and an explanation that is sometimes moral in tone. Tilley stated that the combination of words and pictures were consistent with Lutheran interpretations of Scripture.

After showing a few examples of the emblem, she demonstrated its relationship to the musical dialogue by discussing a piece by Wolfgang Carl Briegel, "Herr hilff uns" from Erster Theil Evangelischer Gespräch Auff die Sonn-vnd Hauptfestage von Advent bis Sexagesima (Frankfurt, 1660), that tells the story of Jesus calming the waters. The musical conversation between the Apostles and Jesus is initially depicted by the use of syncopation and wide ranges, illustrating the Apostles' terror, followed by a musically serene response from Jesus. The choral close that corresponds to the subscriptio quotes a chorale from 1524 by Paul Speratus, "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her."

The second presentation dealt with an eighteenth-century topic. Pauline Minevich, of the University of Regina, spoke about "'Britons strike home!' Performing Empire in David Garrick's The Fairies (1755)." Garrick was a famous actor and producer. In 1755 and 1756, he consolidated his reputation for staging Shakespeare by producing no less than four adaptations of Shakespeare plays. The Fairies, an English Opera, adapted A Midsummer Night's Dream. Minevich examined the music of the production in the light of the scholarly work of Michael Dobson, the author of The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptations, and Authorship, 1660-1769, who argued that the ways in which Shakespeare was amended reflected the need to validate the role of England as a colonial power. Minevich demonstrated how the music depicted the English as the dominant power, especially over France and Italy, even in the casting of roles, with John Beard (Handel's first tenor) in the role of Theseus, and the Italian castrato Gaetano Guadagni (Gluck's Orfeo in 1762) as Lysander. Musical examples performed by Minevich's colleagues at the University of Regina Department of Music and Conservatory of Performing Arts highlighted the presentation.

Dance
Karen Pegley, Queen's, Chair and respondent (CUMS)

Wherefore Pavane? An Analysis of Louis-Guillaume Pécour's La Pavan Des Saisons
Ilene McKenna (McGill)

Pécour is the author of one of three surviving Pavan choreographies. The pavan is found in the context of French theatrical works; the musical sources are ambiguous (Padua?) with some references to peacocks' tails. It requires an upright, aristocratic posture, but Pécour dismisses the dance as unsophisticated, and devotes a single paragraph to its execution. The sixteenth-century pavan incorporates walking steps with stop-steps and transfers of weight so that the dancers advance and recede, moving slowly, and are accompanied by hautbois and sackbut. Between 1620-1700 there are memorial works in pavan form (Tombeau de la reine), and in the Philidor Collection, the ballets of the court of Louis XIII contain pavans, although only one is named as such. A work by the choreographer Favier contained a pair of pavans as introduction and conclusion (essentially a wedding processional and recessional), designed to move the eight dancers into and out of the space, while accompanied by eight oboes. Pécour's La Pavan Des Saisons (music by Lully) has a binary form of fifty-four measures, wherein eight measure describe small semi-circular movements containing a rencontre, a reference to the peacock's tail mentioned earlier. The alternation of steps is suggestive of an older dance form, the half-circles are the peacock effect which suggests a courtship relationship between the dancers. This social dance choreography has potential for the addition of a comic aspect (or even Bacchanalia), but paired with Lully's music, it achieves an aristocratic significance.

Urban Rumba and Cha Cha Cha: Two Cuban Dances
Leslie Hall (York)

April 1930 marked the beginning of the rumba dance craze in the U.S., with the popular song "The Peanut Vendor." The popularity was such that the 1932 Chicago World's Fair featured a rumba expo. Xavier Cugat, trained as a classical violinist, had an extremely successful career as a bandleader during the 1930s and 1940s, and entitled his autobiography Rumba is My Life. The popularity of rumba seemed to nationalize "blackness" and promote an equilibrium between blacks and whites. One of the earliest how-to books for the tango was published in Chicago (1914) by Irene and Vernon Castle. The "cha cha cha" was abbreviated to "cha cha" in the 1950s. The name reflects the sound of the dance, due to the sliding motion of the dancers' feet.

Social dancing enjoyed popularity from 1900 to the 1960s, but declined during the rock era when couple dancing was not popular. The 1990s saw a return to couple dancing, with salsa and the revival of swing dancing. There are fewer than 2,000 Cubans in Toronto, but 54,000 Latin Americans (the sixth largest ethnic group). Dance events are sponsored by soccer clubs and other organizations, and are open to Latinos and non-Latinos. In addition, dance studios and dance classes (run by white and/or non-Latino people) and dance sport events are ongoing avenues for social dancing in Toronto. Since 1990 Latin dance has been offered in Toronto at concert halls (Roy Thomson, Massey, and Hummingbird Centre), at non-profit festivals (Harbourfront), and at various clubs and studios (Berlin offers regular Latin Tuesdays, Club Blue Silver teaches classes to 500 people, Arthur Murray, et. al.). Reasons given for pursuing social dance activities are diverse. They include exercise, social activity, emotional outlet, to be able to dance at weddings, relieve stress, influence of films, the challenge, and makes-me-feel-happy/young. Hall showed a couple of film clips featuring dancers at a street festival and youngsters involved in a dance competition.

Hot and Sweet: Race and the Emergence of Swing
Howard Spring (Guelph)

The exploitation and racial oppression of blacks in the 1920s and 1930s also extended to jazz. By 1932, "swing" was developing with a transitional period from 1932-36. Pizzicato string bass and percussion riffs became the norm, with a two-beat rhythm, antiphonal choirs/sections, "hot" playing (i.e., an energetic, hot style) in solos alternating with sweet, timbrally subdued sections. In jazz, "hot" was used to a similar degree.

The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra played all types of music at the Roseland Ballroom, but hot music was reserved for recordings. "Hot" had connotations of excess, sexuality, and sounded essentially improvised. The advent of white players brought a need for music-reading skills and, in the late 1930s, jazz repositioned itself for the emergent bop style. Big bands generally had eleven or more players and a vastly different sound. Spring played two versions of the "King Porter Stop" (Jelly Roll Morton), recorded in 1928 and 1933 to illustrate the remarkable changes in style during that short time. (You can hear both examples in RealAudio at this address: http://www.redhotjazz.com/fho.html.) The 1933 version has a totally different feel, with no sustained background chords. It's a much faster version: it "cooks" and has a "call and response" format, and "brakes" to the end. It is much easier to hear the pizzicato bass in this example. Recording technology had greatly improved by this point, with performances broadcast live from venues; the Lindy Hop craze was such that instructions were given over the radio!

There was a synchronicity between the musicians and the dancers during the Swing era. Dicky Wells (trombone) said that the band related with the dancers, and knew what they liked. The sound of thousands of feet enhanced the momentum of swing. Chick Webb responded with drum accents, which added to the dancing and vice versa. In Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom (1926) attracted a diverse population and a wide social strata. The Lindy Hop (1928) had African American origins, and became a national craze (four beats to the measure). The Fox Trot (in two) was the previous dance craze. The Charleston (1922) was a vigorous, total-body dance, frenetic and voluptuous. The Lindy Hop had more hip motion and was more physically demanding than the previous popular social dances; it was dismissed by some as being a passing fancy, and not at all suitable for the ballroom! Radio lessons were a huge boost to the Lindy Hop's popularity, which also contributed to the African American dance leadership phenomenon. Part of the "authenticity" of the Lindy Hop was its athleticism, with its sliding moves and "dipped" men. The Lindy Hop ignored the gender issue and set the stage for the jitterbug and jive. The dance palaces hosted a diverse population, attracting all social strata, and offering a leadership role (in dances like the cakewalk, charleston, black bottom, etc.) for African Americans. Gentrification and class changes came about through the evolution of the various forms of dance: the black and poor became accepted in the ballroom. In many ways, the ballroom was analogous to a court, where the elite gathered. Swing entered the mainstream in 1935, thanks to Benny Goodman, but Goodman was playing music arranged by Fletcher Henderson for his black orchestra in 1932.

Spring spoke of Frankie Manning, who was involved in the original Lindy Hop craze and who has taught the dance literally for decades. Spring attended a three-day workshop given by Manning (who was in his eighties at the time), and lasted one day!

Two Ongoing Projects (CAML)
Desmond Maley (Laurentian U), Chair

RILM Canada: the Interdisciplinary Wave,br> Lisa Emberson, Chair, RILM Canada (NLC)

Interdisciplinary studies is a pervasive theme in contemporary scholarly writings on music. CAML's RILM project involves a small team of dedicated abstractors who peruse core music materials in search of likely titles for inclusion in RILM. Finding suitable materials in non-music disciplines seems to be serendipitous, such as finding an article on "music and the brain" in a French-language journal. Articles are drawn from academic journals, book reviews, music articles, and individual issues of journals that have a music focus. Using music to achieve results for a study or experiment will also qualify an item for inclusion. Emberson's work for RILM Canada began in 1995. Resources such as Expanded Academic Index and Ebsco are plumbed. Alert services from Scholars Portal and Elsevier are also employed, but the online services are not comprehensive.

Emberson reminded attendees that new RILM abstractors are always welcome and noted that her Database of Canadian Theses and Dissertations will be mounted online at the Library and Archives of Canada's Web site in the near future.

The Virtual Gramophone
Richard Green (NLC)

Green announced that there will be symposium on preservation issues at NLC on Sept. 15-18, 2003.

Green played what he called the "song of the bureaucrats" live from the Virtual Gramophone site: "Cows May Come, Cows May Go, But the Bull Goes On Forever" (performed by Henry Burr and the Peerless Quartett, recorded in 1915).

The Virtual Gramophone was the first fully integrated site offered by Canada's National Library, and it is still a work in progress. Its genesis can be traced to Edward Moogk's Roll Back the Years, the standard reference work covering Canadian discography up to 1930. Moogk's collection was donated to the library and, rather than publish a print update, the decision was made to use the World Wide Web as a means of testing multimedia technology. The so-called test became "real" very quickly! In fact, the site has been such a success that the IT department uses it as PR.

A Web site is not a book: not everyone will read the table of contents, the index, or the introduction. Serendipitous users happen upon it thanks to a variety of search engines. While a book has a particular audience, the Web will attract anyone and everyone. A book is finite; the Web is infinite in its ability to grow and remain current. In 1998, the RealAudio sound files were made available on the site; MP3 has been added, and there is a long-term commitment to maintaining this particular site. Twenty percent of the site budget is devoted to "refreshing" the site. It is a challenge to offer something for every level of user, and the help pages are rarely read. Copyright restrictions are abided by, and, while the physical recording might be in the public domain, often the music and lyrics remain under copyright protection. Major additions to the site are vetted: the article on La Bolduc was reviewed by five people prior to mounting it. One cannot please everyone: some complain there is too much detail; others that there is not enough. Visitors spend an average of twenty to twenty-four minutes at the site, and the number of visitors increases with the number of sound files mounted and made available. There are literally thousands of items to be added: 2,300 entries, 870 recordings, new biographies, French Canadian material, Canadian dance bands, classical performers (Donalda, Albani), etc. As a matter of interest, Ellen Ballon's recordings are in the public domain, and there exists the potential for the site to offer a comprehensive view of the era of the seventy-eights in Canada.

Canadian Studies
Andrew Zinck, UPEI, Chair (CUMS) (Summary by Kathleen McMorrow.)

Claude Vivier: Intuition and Reason
Abigail Richardson, U of T

This paper was a close analysis of Vivier's piano work Shiraz, demonstrating the mathematical principles, including his idiosyncratic use of the Fibonacci procedure, controlling the scale degrees, intervals, and durations of this minimalist chordal piece.

Salvaging Culture: Ethnographic Modelling and Marius Barbeau's 1927 Nass River Field Trip
Gordon Smith, Queen's

Smith charted the artistic collaborators, informant singers and interpreters involved, listed the documentation of this trip in recordings, transcriptions, films, writings, and musical compositions, and praised Barbeau's openness, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, and admiration for northwest culture.

The Legacy of Wind Quintet Playing in Canada
J. Drew Stephen, U of T

This was a survey of activities of over a dozen professional ensembles from the 1950s to the present. A handout was distributed that included the names of personnel, lists of compositions commissioned and premiered with dates, and complete discographies.

Lisa Rae Philpott
Music Library, The University of Western Ontario

Editor's Note: Most of this report was written by Lisa Rae Philpott. Peter Higham, Kathleen McMorrow, and Suzanne Meyers Sawa also contributed summaries, and their authorship is noted with the particular session. The report includes several of the CUMS sessions as well as the CAML sessions.

© Canadian Association of Music Libraries / L'Association canadienne des bibliothèques musicaux