Home

Éditorial 

Article sur Erudit

Ariane Couture and Paul Sanden

La musique actuelle au Québec : enjeux et perspectives méthodologiques d’une analyse génétique 

Article sur Erudit

Sophie Stévance
This article aligns with analytic approaches to the creative process for a stylistic characterization of contemporary Quebec Francophone musique actuelle, with a focus on how this musical stream uses improvisation. Based more specifically on "comprovisationnal" strategies, from which the actualist trio Les Poules developed their album Phénix (2008), our goal is to better understand this creative process. By tracing the successive states of musical elements such as genetic criticism, ethnographic surveys, and research-creation in music, we will observe, especially with modelisations, both consistencies and variations in writing operations between different paradigms which represent Phénix in its initial, composed and performed versions. However, without exhausting issues raised by this type of production, a context generating collaborations between researchers and creators has allowed us to go further in the application of genetic analysis to musical creation, by showing reciprocal influences of the research on creation that cannot be easily ignored.

Echo and the Recovery of the Past in R. Murray Schafer’s The Princess of The Stars 

Article sur Erudit

Tyler Kinnear
Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer is known for his outdoor works. Other scholars have considered the collaboration between musicians and the physical world in Schafer’s compositions and have linked performer-environment interaction with Canadian identity and environmentalism. Yet the role and meaning of outdoor acoustics in Schafer’s music remains understudied. This article investigates the aesthetics of echo in Schafer’s outdoor theatre work The Princess of the Stars (1981–4). Echo not only sends an original sound back from a surface but also offers insight into the role that musical sounds play in prescribing an interpretation of nature.

Mlle Aimée : étude sur la vie et l’image d’une actrice française à l’étranger au XIXème siècle 

Article sur Erudit

Daniel Polleti
In this article, we address the biography of the French actress, Mlle Aimée (Célestine Marie Aimée Tronchon, 1845?–87). She has been a main protagonist in disseminating the French opera-bouffe, especially in Brazil and North America, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The study of her life and image therefore contributes to an explanation of some aspects of cultural globalization and supremacy of the French theater at the time.

Inside Chinese Theatre: Cantonese Opera in Canada 

Article sur Erudit

Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Opera theatre forms an important part of Chinese Canadian cultural history. Since first appearing in Victoria in the 1860s, Chinese theatres were woven into the community’s everyday life, performing Cantonese opera, the regional genre known to the majority of Chinese immigrants who came from the Pearl River Delta of southern China. A brief survey of historical city maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century shows their central role in Chinese Canadian community of the Pacific Northwest. Recent discovery of a Chinese theatrical company’s daily business receipts provides a window into the performance culture and daily operations of a Chinese theatre between 1916 and 1918 in Vancouver. This vibrant period of the 1910s paved the way for full-fledged theatre operation in the following decade that brought about a new era of Chinese opera performance in Canada.

Constructing and Negotiating Chinese Cultural Identity in Diaspora Through Music and Martial Arts 

Article sur Erudit

Colin McGuire
The Hong Luck Kung Fu Club has been a fixture of Toronto’s Chinatown for over fifty years. Its curriculum includes not only self-defence skills, but also percussion music for accompanying martial arts demonstrations and lion dancing. Hong Luck’s blurred genre is a tool for preserving, transmitting, and promoting culture. At the same time, practitioners negotiate their identities in diverse ways. I thus interpret kung fu as a flexible, embodied practice whose purview extends beyond physical combat. Based on fieldwork at Hong Luck, this article uses cognitive semantics and phenomenology to demonstrate that kung fu, lion dance, and percussion help (re)construct Chinese identities emergently and strategically.

Des orgues et des hommes à Québec sous le Régime français : sur la piste du premier facteur d’orgue du Canada 

Article sur Erudit

Paul-André Dubois
Written in the form of a police investigation, this article examines a claim made by the first biographer of Mgr. de Laval (1623–1708) that a clergyman, whose name he did not mention, made wooden organs for churches in Quebec City and its surroundings. The author of this article formulates here a research hypothesis on the identity and life of this first Canadian organ maker based on several clues discovered in archives relating to the New France era. Ultimately, this article is a reflection on the cultural context that prevailed in Quebec City at the turn of the 18th century and an invitation to researchers to pursue this investigation, which reopens the debate on the genesis of organ making in Canada.

Fragments from a Broken Country: Jérôme Blais, in Discussion with Philipp Reisner 

Article sur Erudit

Philipp Reisner

Claude Abromont. 2019. Guide de l’analyse musicale. Dijon (Fr) : Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 457 p. ISBN 978-2-36441-318-4 (couverture souple) 

Article sur Erudit

Brice Tissier