Music professor Rob Bowman displays the CD box set that won him a Grammy.
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 25 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 1996 ISSN 1199-5246
ROB BOWMAN A PIONEER OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES.
Music professor Rob Bowman displays the CD box set that won him a Grammy.
York University ethnomusicologist Rob Bowman hit a high note in his career on Feb. 28 by winning one of the music industry's most coveted prizes: a Grammy Award.
Bowman won the Best Album Notes prize for his 47,000 monograph accompanying the 10-CD boxed set of The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975.
Bowman co-produced and wrote the liner notes for all three volumes in the Stax Singles reissue series. Comprising a total of 28 CDs, the set contains the releases of the famed Memphis-based recording label which launched artists such as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and Booker T and the MGs. "Stax Records represents a milestone in the history of American music," Bowman says. "It defined what we now know as Southern Soul music."
The first volume, the Complete Stax Singles 1959-1968, brought Bowman a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes in 1992. His other previous nomination, in 1988, was in the Best Historical Reissue category for The Otis Redding Story.
Rob Bowman pioneered popular music studies at York University. He has taught in York's Music Department since 1987, joining the full-time professoriate in 1993. He is an alumnus of York's music program, recognized as a leading centre for the study of contemporary and popular music, and the musics of many different cultures and traditions.
Bowman has written liner notes for dozens of recordings, and has lectured and published extensively in many areas of popular music, from country and R & B to reggae, rap and funk. His broadcasts include a five-part series on the history of Canadian popular music and a program on Christmas music in a multicultural setting for the CBC.
Parallel to his career as a teacher, writer and broadcaster, Bowman continues to perform professionally. His instruments - voice, euphonium, viola da gamba - reflect his eclectic interests as a musician: he is equally at home playing rock, jazz, or baroque music.
Rob Bowman is currently working on a book about Stax Records. Also in the works is a book on King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.
Denise Chong says writing a family memoir gives one's ancestors a "place in the world."
That was one of the topics of discussion recently as York's Centre for Feminist Research and the Writers' Development Trust co-sponsored the fifth annual Merle Shain Memorial Lecture, held in Osgoode Hall Law School's Moot Court. This year's speaker was Denise Chong, award-winning author of The Concubine's Children, a riveting story of three generations of her family divided between war-torn China and the insular but vibrant Chinatowns of Canada. The book won the 1995 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the City of Vancouver Book Award, the VanCity Book Prize and was short-listed for a 1994 Governor General's Award. It has been translated into Danish, Dutch, German and Hebrew.
Chong worked as an economist with the federal Finance Department in Ottawa, as well as senior economic advisor to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from 1980-1984. She has also worked as a freelance writer in Beijing, Toronto and London, England. The book grew out of an article she wrote for Saturday Night magazine. She now lives in Ottawa, devoting her time to writing.
Readers often ask her about the line between fiction and non-
fiction in her book, she told the audience. "They say, 'What did you make up? How could you know that?' To be a writer and write a book and get it published is to engage a public life and to be accountable to the reading public," she added.
The crucial difference is not between fact and fiction, but between fact and truth, she explained. The difficulty in writing a memoir is that there are as many truths as there are players in the story. "Writing a family memoir, you have a closed circle of suspects but many versions of events," Chong said.
Chong and York humanities and history professor Margo Gewurtz, who introduced Chong, both recounted the difficulties and discrimination Chinese immigrants faced in Canada in the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. One aspect of their culture Chinese immigrants held onto was the Confucian ideal of 'saving face,' and so a code of silence pervaded the culture of the Chinatown ghettoes, Chong said. When researching her book she ran up against this resistance, she explained.
"My mother would say she cooperated [in sharing her memories]," Chong said, laughing. "I would say something else. If the memories spilling are muddy and murky, some of the memories are just wordless. Even when there is a willingness to spill memories, it's still not easy."
Another problem is that a memoir writer must rely on people's memories. "Memory is the most powerful tool and the most unreliable. It's very flawed and fragmentary," Chong said.
Once she had collected the facts, the question became what to do with these facts. "I had already broken my mother's privacy. As a writer I was violating the privacy that my grandparents thought they took to the grave with them," she said. While she felt that was her heaviest responsibility, she decided "the only way to honour the family was to lay down the truth in all its dimensions."
Once she began writing, she found the story took on its own energy and rhythm. But the author must resist the urge to ignore, glorify, and embellish, she said.
"It's so important to know what were the forces that shaped people, whether or not they knew at the time what they were," she said. "When you collect those pieces and put them around the people, it reveals the people's strength of character and their temperament."
The non-fiction writer also faces the challenge of how the facts affect their prose. The non-fiction writer has to be generous to the reader, to share the power of creativity that is usually reserved for fiction, she said.
"The fiction writer loots from reality and the non-fiction writer loots from imagination. Fiction and non-fiction writers search to be free from fear of limitation," Chong said. "When you transcend above the facts, somewhere in that mysterious relationship is the beginnings of art. Art is the more permanent truth."
Writing a family memoir is not easy but has value in many ways, Chong said. "When you write about the past, it survives as an act of writing. My grandmother didn't know her place and her place didn't know her. The act of writing gives my grandmother a place in the world."
Furthermore, "your ancestors hold a kind of authority over you. Why not look at [your family history] and revisit it? The life you lead begins before your time and I believe it lingers long after your time. [Writing this book] let me go forward and make up my own life as I go."(continued on page 2)Caribbean artists' exhibition
Harold Levy doesn't rely on textbooks to lead his students to the concepts he teaches. He brings the players right into the classroom.
For the last 15 years Levy, a criminal lawyer who also writes about legal issues for the Toronto Star, has taught "And Justice For All," an undergraduate course for Winters College, part of the Faculty of Arts curriculum.
"When the movie [of the same name] came out, it inspired me," he explains. "The movie is about justice in a pressure cooker. What kind of justice is it when people are in a hurry?
"The course is about the weak points in our criminal justice system - where it breaks down, sometimes by its own weight. Al Pacino is the patron saint of the course," he adds, laughing.
Most people have, or think they have, some knowledge of how the justice system is supposed to work, Levy says. He tries to cultivate in his students a sense of what justice should be.
"We look at particular cases," Levy says. "I send the students to the courts to be court-watchers, to interpret everything in the courtroom, not just what is being said but what is being communicated, to measure what is going on and evaluate it for the justice being meted out. I encourage them to talk to everybody, the judges, the lawyers, defence people, accused people. No one has ever been arrested for contempt of court [but] a few have been invited into judges' chambers to talk about what they saw."
Students then report to the class about their experiences. "Occasionally I'll send them to court and when they come to class I'll ask them to critique the judge in front of the judge, in the class," he adds.
Last year Levy and his students spent four months studying the Guy Paul Morin case. During the year, Morin was acquitted by the Court of Appeal. "We had Guy Paul Morin in. He was very frank. He talked about his whole experience - his lawyers, the prosecutors, how it felt to be an innocent person prosecuted for a horrific crime. His attitude amazed the class. You felt no cry for vengeance or brooding anger.
"The week before [Morin came to class], we had David Milgaard in. It was a very different type of experience. David Milgaard went in at 17 and was in for 21 years in Stoney Mountain, B.C., a horrible institution. His mother didn't have public support until near the end [of her crusade to free him]. You could sense the hot, simmering anger. The class felt empathy for both of them. We'd done
our groundwork first, studying the cases intensely. The breakdowns are classic in demonstrating what goes so horribly wrong and how an innocent person can be convicted."
In other years, Levy has chosen specific, sometimes troubling areas, for the class to study. One has been the laws relating to to consensual activities, in other words, prostitution-related offences. He invited someone he describes as "a very prominent prostitute in the city" to talk to the class about the interaction between the prostitutes, the law and the police. Another time a group of street prostitutes addressed the class. "Every one of those women had extraordinary experience with the criminal justice system," Levy explains.
The next week the class heard from the morality police. "I'm always showing various sides and viewpoints," he says. "I try to give [the students] a unique learning experience."
Last year, Levy told his students that they would have a guest speaker the following week. They arrived to find two of the jurors from the Paul Bernardo trial. "They [the jurors] spent two hours giving their insights on the Bernardo prosecution. The students were absolutely thrilled. They got extraordinary insights into what the jurors thought about prosecutors and about Karla Homolka as a battered person. They had a very different view of Karla Homolka than just about everyone else who wasn't in the courtroom. It really fascinated the students."
Jurors, of course, can't talk about their deliberations but are free to discuss their perceptions from the time they got their notice for jury duty through the trial. "What is really fascinating and the reason they gave for coming to the class, they felt they'd learned so much from the experience that they wanted to share it with others. These particular jurors felt some sort of public trust." Levy says. "It's a hard act to follow," he admits.
Unfortunately, this might be the last year for this course. Classes like this are under the cutting knife because of government cuts. The leaders of the seminars have been notified by the University that the classes are under review, Levy says.
An exhibition of work by seven artists/lecturers from the Creative Arts Centre, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, is on display at York's Arthur Haberman Art Gallery, March 4-14.
The hand-woven tapestry pictured here, titled "Flaming Hillside," was created by Caribbean artist Keith Cadette.
The show includes: paintings by Caribbean artists Ainsworth Ovid and Kenwyn Crichlow; tapestries and fabrics by Melanie-Kim Barker and Keith Cadette; sculpture by David Collymore; architectural designs by Azeem Rahaman; and carnival designs by Lari Richardson.
Two of the artists represented in the exhibition, painter Kenwyn Crichlow and textile artist Keith Cadette, came to York to install the show and to give guest lectures and workshops.
"Painting is a reference for vision and a validation of shared experience," Crichlow says. "My own challenge as artist is to paint every day to avoid self indulgence as a substitute for originality and to make every painting an act of witness, a manifestation of artistic form."
Cadette is currently focusing his work on the production of hand-woven tapestries. "They afford me the opportunity to relate my earlier interests in landscape painting and my own desire to engender greater public awareness of environmental issues," Cadette says. "The distinctive and deliberate use of colour, motif and forms from the environment, together with handling of the technical processes, is my own contribution to the evident identity and uniqueness of Caribbean people."
The exhibition and the artist-in residencies of Crichlow and Cadette are co-sponsored by
the Fine Arts Cultural Studies Program and York University's Founders College. This project is part of the exchange agreement between the University of the West Indies and York University.
Environmental Studies professor Gerda Wekerle is the recipient of the 1996 Constance E. Hamilton Award, presented by the City of Toronto. The award was established in 1979 to recognize the 50th anniversary of the Person's Case which recognized that women were persons and could be appointed to the Senate of Canada. It was named after Constance E. Hamilton, the first woman member of Council who was elected in 1920.
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Visual arts professor Vera Frenkel gave the plenary address at a recent conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada. Her talk constituted a critical analysis of the current government's cultural policies and their adverse impact on the arts and arts education infrastructure, concluding with a call for joint action on the part of arts institutions in Canada. Part of Prof. Frenkel's speech was also broadcast nation-wide on CBC-FM's "Arts National" program.
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Several people associated with York Fine Arts were singled out in a recent annual "Best of..." issue published by Now magazine. Rated tops by Now readers were Theatre alumnus Sky Gilbert for Best Local Playwright; his theatre company "Buddies in Bad Times" for Best Small Theatre Space and Company; and Dance adjunct professor Danny Grossman for Best Dance Company and Choreographer. Pianist Frank Falco, a former York student who now teaches in the Music Department's Jazz Studies Program, took second place for Best Music Teacher.
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Theatre professor Ines Buchli was one of just four Canadians invited to participate in the 19th International Festival of Art and Educational Film held recently in Paris. Buchli presented her 20 minute film Exposure, which she wrote and directed.
York Lanes adYork participants discuss some of the issues raised at a recent international symposium on Governing Medically Assisted Human Reproduction. Held at the University Women's Club of Toronto, the symposium was sponsored by the University of Toronto's Centre of Criminology and York's Centre for Health Studies.
From left, PhD history student Fiona Miller, PhD social and political thought student Lealle Ruhl, sociology professor Lorna Weir, masters sociology student Rachel Epstein, and acting-director of the Centre for Health Studies Penny Van Esterik.
Others who attended included representatives of departments of justice and health from Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Ontario, as well as representatives of the U.S.-based Human Genome Project, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
