More North/Essay Thoughts

Okay. So. The paper due Friday may finally have some sort of coherent plan. I say "may" because I came up with said plan while bopping around on my front porch smoking, so I'm going to try to write it out to see if it's at all coherent before I break out the champagne and the snowshoes.

So: 4000 words for "The Social History of Music in Canada" on 'The Ideas of North: Or How Canadian Composers Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.'

As I've been rabbiting here and in class for months now, the North is a catalyst for finally talking about Canadian identity in terms of what it is, not what other countries see it as, or what it isn't. The problem is, it's not an idea that starts with music. The painters pick it up first (re: the Group of Seven), as do the poets (re: the amount of snow in M. Atwood's New Oxford ed. of Canadian Verse). Art musicians don't get into the swing until the 70s, when the Inuit are starting to raise awareness of their culture and there's an ethno musical interest in the drum dances and throat-singing games of the inuit.

So, even though the north finally allows Canadian composers to start moving towards music of identity, it's still playing catch up. Music's still behind the rest of the intellectual pack.

But sometimes, oddly enough, being behind the pack isn't so bad. Because while the Group and the poets have often been playing with the 50s/60s conception of the barren north, the composers come into the game when the national focus (so much as there ever is one for native issues, sigh) is on people.

So, while the three composers I'm going to discuss (D. Healey and "Arctic Images", A. G. Bell and "Monashee", and C. Hatzis's "String Quartet 01 (The Awakening)") are writing pieces based on the same North of 60, 'new shade of white' landscape as the artists that came before, they're also interacting with it in a new way. Healey's work is based on Inuit prints, Bell's on aboriginal spiritualism and harmony with the land, and Hatzis' with the problems of trying to interact with a different culture without changing or appropriating from them.

It’s worth noting because, unlike much of Canada, the composers are the only ones playing with our national mythology in a way that's really up to date. While those who venerate the north are often content to leave it as a frontier, a blank canvas, the musicians are well aware that there is a real political and cultural movement up north that needs to be engaged with.

The creation of Nunavut, the settling of land claims, the fight in the NWT for real political representation, the acceptance of the inuit "metis" as an actual indigenous people are all very different from what's going on in much of Canada. And composers seem to be more interested in exploring this than the academics (the resources on the north are kind of shoddy), politicians and other artists.

So, in a weird sort of way, showing up late to that party allowed the Canadian art music scene to go off in a different direction, all its own. To surpass the northern dialogues of its predecessors, to do something completely new. The sounds of the inuit gave Canadian music a new, distinctly unique sound to play with. And their politics, struggles and successes gave them a new spirit and a new consciousness and a model that may finally allow the Adrienne Clarksons of this world to proclaims us a "Northern Nation" and mean it as something more than a geographical half-fact.