Abstract
The author presents a genealogy of gendered and raced relations of power in the development of classical music institutions in colonial Canada, noting how institutions come to be established, symbolically and materially, as White property within a patriarchal, White supremacist framework. The author focuses on the roles of White bourgeois women in proliferating classical music institutions, noting how gendered identities constrain their possibilities, while raced and classed identities allow them to attain status as exalted members of the nation. The genealogy illustrates a persistent relationship between exalted White identities, notions of “the arts” as signifiers of “civilizational superiority,” and their uses to rationalize material entitlement and its corollaries: dispossession, domination, and exploitation. Political and pedagogical implications of the analysis close the chapter.
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- 1.
I use bourgeois to refer to members of the middle and upper classes who share an investment in the sanctity of private property and whose political and economic interests are defended by the state (“Bourgeois Democracy,”). In the case of colonial Canada, bourgeois interests are represented by the “White settler state” (Razack, 2002).
- 2.
I capitalize “White” and “Whiteness” along with “Indian” and “Black” to indicate that that these racial identities are social constructions that serve political/economic purposes. I use the term “racialize” to indicate the process of defining someone as “not White,” an “outsider to the nation,” and an outsider to the human family. White, it should be noted, is an unmarked category that is the taken-for-granted norm even though Whiteness, as a distinctive identity, must be continually refurbished in order to remain politically salient (Mackey, 2002). Who qualifies as “White” has also changed in different historical moments – another indication of the use of the category of Whiteness to designate political entitlements (Ladson-Billings, 1998; McClintock, 1995).
- 3.
“The Crown” is synonymous with “The State” in historical and contemporary Canada (“Crown”).
- 4.
- 5.
I use the term “classical” to refer to what is commonly understood as Western art-music.
- 6.
The insignia of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto was a “Viking ship with sails full spread before the rising sun…to remind members of the open sea and the great adventure” [of colonization] (C. W. Jeffreys 1911 as cited in McBurney, 2007, frontispiece).
- 7.
The mission of colonial cultural workers was to valorize and sustain enthusiasm for colonial, imperialist projects, reflected in the words of British Parliamentarian, William Macaulay: “There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. [Its] triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws” (Macaulay 1833 as cited in Leppert, 1993, p. 115).
- 8.
O Canada was first performed in 1880 and was officially adopted as the Canadian national anthem in 1980 (“O Canada,” 2013).
- 9.
Imaginary is used here, as a noun, to refer to a collective idea about a particular era or project.
- 10.
Champlain was an early French explorer and played a major role in founding French settlements in what later became Canada (Samuel de Champlain).
- 11.
The merging of English and French identities as distinctly “Northern” and robust is grounded in the ideals of the Canada First movement “in which Canada is positioned as superior to the United States because of its ‘superior racial characteristics’” (Mackey, 2002, p. 30).
- 12.
Cultural capital is a term developed by Bourdieu that represents “non-financial social assets that promote social mobility beyond economic means, such as education, intellect, style of speech, dress, and even physical appearance” (Sernau, 2017, p. 189).
- 13.
- 14.
Members of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club included the artists later known as “The Group of Seven” as well as musicians such as Ernest MacMillan and Healey Willan, whose names were synonymous with the development of Canadian classical music institutions (McBurney, 2007).
- 15.
The club movement was not limited to the interests of White bourgeois women. Black women’s and rural women’s clubs were also formed to address the material and spiritual needs of different communities (K. J. Blair, 1994).
- 16.
Members of the all-male Arts and Letters Club of Toronto reveled in displays of boundary-crossing with their own performances of Minstrelsy, Blackface, Brownface and Redface (Bridle, 1945, p. 6).
- 17.
Women were not considered persons, in the legal sense, until 1927. The benefits of this change in status, however, applied only to White women (Marshall & Cruikshank, 2015).
- 18.
Canadian musical icon, Sir Ernest MacMillan, for example, equated the singing of a female member of the Nass River Indians to “the voice of nature crying out” (Schabas, 1994, p. 88).
- 19.
In 1927, Marius Barbeau invited Ernest MacMillan to travel with him to the west coast to collect and transcribe music of the “Nass River Indians.” Duncan Campbell Scott was later invited to provide English lyrics for the set of songs published as Three West Coast Songs: Recorded from singers of Nass River Tribes, Canada (MacMillan & Scott, 1928; Schabas, 1994).
- 20.
By 1913, the Canadian Pacific Railway (later to host “folk” festivals across the country) had already amassed 25 million acres; much of it expropriated from First Nations groups (Neu & Therrien, 2003).
- 21.
In 1887, Nisga’a and Tsimishian chiefs attempted to negotiate treaty rights and self-rule for the Aboriginal peoples living in the Nass River watershed. Notably, Scott, in his role as Superintendent of the Indian Department, made a further amendment to the Indian Act making it illegal to hire lawyers or advisors to help them in their claims against the government (Francis, 1992, p. 211). N.B.: In 2001, 130 years after their failed 1887 negotiation, a treaty was ratified with the Nisga’a people recognizing claim to approximately 2000 square miles (Neu & Therrien, 2003, p. 172).
- 22.
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Vaugeois, L.C. (2018). White Subjectivities, the Arts, and Power in Colonial Canada: Classical Music as White Property. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_3
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