Canadian music includes pop and folk genres; the latter includes forms derived from France (Quebecois folk music has undergone a recent revival), England, Scotland and various Native American and Inuit ethnic groups. Outside of Canada, artists like The Band, Celine Dion, D.O.A, Shania Twain, Alanis Morrissette, Dream Warriors, Bryan Adams and the Barenaked Ladies have achieved success in genres ranging from folk-rock to hip hop.
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2 Pop, rock, hip hop and country 3 Jazz Music 4 Classical Music 5 References 6 External Links |
Folk music
Canadian folk music includes Quebecois, English and Scottish and First Nations and Inuit forms, as well as other genres from immigrant communities representing Vietnam, Haiti, India, China and other countries.
Quebecois music
French immigrants to Quebec established their musical forms in the future province, but there was no scholarly study until Ernest Gagnon's 1865 collection of 100 folk songs. In 1967, Radio-Canada released The Centennial Collection of Canadian Folk Songs (much of which was focused on French-Canadian music), which helped launch a revival of Quebecois folk. Singers like Yves Albert, Edith Butler and, especially, Felix Leclerc and Gilles Vigneault, helped lead the way. The 1970s saw purists like La Rêve du Diable and La Bottime Souriante continued the trend. As Quebecois folk continued to gain in popularity, artists like Harmonium, Kate and Ann McGarrigle, Jim Corcoran, Bertrand Gosselin and Paul Piche found a mainstream audience.
Maritime music
Scottish and Irish settlers in the eastern provinces of Canada brought traditions of fiddling and other forms of music. Having declined in popularity during the 20th century, artists like Figgy Duff inspired a revival of Maritime traditions beginning in the late 1970s. Soon, Newfoundland Cape Breton Island and other Eastern locations were hotbeds of musical innovation. The Rankins, Mary Jane Lamond, Natalie MacMaster, Barra MacNeils and, especially, punk rock-inspired Ashley MacIsaac brough Cape Breton music to mainstream Canadians. Scott Macmilian's Celtic Mass for the Sea further brought Maritime music, this time from Halifax, into pop markets. Barachois and Albert Arsenault have popularized Acadien folk music, while Loreena McKennitt has similarly become an international star.
Inuit music
Approximately 25,000 Inuit live in Northern Canada, primarily spread across Nunavat, Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories. Prior to European contact, Inuit music was based around drums but has since grown to include fiddles and accordions. Music was dance-oriented and requested luck in hunting, gambling or weather, and only rarely, if ever, expressing traditional purposes like love or specialized forms like work songs and lullabies. In the 20th century, Inuit music was influenced by Scottish and Irish sailors, as well as, most influentially, American country music. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has long been recording Inuit music, , beginning with a station in Iqaluit in 1961. Accordion players like Charlie Panigonak and Simeonie Keenainik quickly found an audience, with the latter notably incorporating musical influences like polkas and jigs from Quebec and Newfoundland.
Throat singing has become well-known as a curiosity. In katajjaq, female singers produce melodies from deep in their throats. A pair of singers stare at each other in a sort of contest. Common in Northern Quebec and Baffin Island, katajjaq singers perform in sync with each other, so that is producing a strong accent while the other is producing a weak one. The contest ends when one singer begins laughing, runs out of breath or the pair's voices become simultaneous. To some extent, young Inuit have revitalized the genre, and musicians like Tudjaat have even incorporated pop structures.
Immigrant communities
Montreal's large immigrant communities include artists like Zekuhl (a band consisting of a Mexican, Chilean and a Quebecer raised in Cameroon), Karen Young, Eval Manigat (Haiti) and Lorraine Klaasen (South Africa), while Toronto has a large Balkan and Turkish community that has produced, most famously, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band and Staro Selo, alongside Punjabi by Nature, who incorporate bhangra, rock, dub and English Punjabi pop, and the Afro-Nubians, who included musicians from across North America, Europe and Africa. Outside of these major cities, important artists include Uzume-Taiko and Silk Road Music from Vancouver and Finjan from Winnipeg.
Prior to the late 1960s, the Canadian recording industry was limited in both scope and financial resources, and devoted little effort to the development of Canadian artists. Although Canada did produce many important musicians during this time, such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and The Band, these artists generally had to move to the United States to develop their careers. With rare exceptions, Canadian records were simply covers of American or British pop hits. One important example was a Winnipeg band called Chad Allan & the Expressions, who had a 1965 hit with a version of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over".
The decks stacked as they were against Canadian artists building successful long-term careers, the Expressions wanted radio stations and record buyers to believe they were a British Merseybeat band in disguise. So when they released their debut album, it didn't bear their own name -- instead, it was labelled "Guess Who?"
The ruse worked, and within a few years The Guess Who were one of Canada's biggest musical names. To this day, their best-known songs ("American Woman", "Share the Land", "These Eyes", etc.) remain among Canada's most enduring classic rock anthems.
In 1970, the Canadian government introduced new Canadian Content regulations, requiring radio stations to devote 30 per cent of their musical selections to Canadian artists. Although this was (and still is) controversial, it quite clearly contributed to the development of a nascent Canadian pop star system. Led by The Guess Who, the early 1970s were a golden age for Canadian music. Important artists from this era include The Stampeders, Lighthouse, Crowbar, Skylark, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Rush, Kate & Anna McGarrigle and A Foot in Coldwater.
Canadian pop music evolved with the times, reflecting worldwide trends. In the late 1970s, as punk rock and disco ruled the landscape, Canadian punkers such as D.O.A., The Viletones, L'Etranger and The Young Canadians were there, along with disco divas like Patsy Gallant and Claudja Barry. As those gave way to New Wave in the early 1980s, bands such as The Parachute Club, Rough Trade, The Spoons, Rational Youth and Teenage Head were along for the ride. (Rough Trade were particularly notable for "High School Confidential", one of the first explicitly lesbian-themed pop songs to crack the Top 40 anywhere in the world.)
Then, in turn, the mid-1980s produced mainstream pop-rockers such as Bryan Adams, Tom Cochrane, Platinum Blonde and Corey Hart, as well the quirky art-pop of Jane Siberry -- who never exactly became a pop star, but remains one of Canada's most enduring cult artists -- and the country cowpunk of k.d. lang, who did eventually become one of pop music's biggest names. In the late 1980s, the Canadian recording industry continued to chase pop trends, but the real action was happening underground, with independent artists such as Blue Rodeo, 54-40, The Tragically Hip, Sarah McLachlan, Skinny Puppy, Spirit of the West, Cowboy Junkies, Andrew Cash, The Pursuit of Happiness, Kashtin and The Grapes of Wrath all gaining their first widespread attention during this time.
The alternative revolution of the 1990s was kicked off in the United States by Nirvana and in the United Kingdom by The Stone Roses, in Canada it was ignited by an unassuming demo tape by the Barenaked Ladies. After the "Yellow Tape" became the hottest item in Canadian record stores in the fall of 1991, Barenaked-mania took the country by storm -- in turn, paving the way for an explosion of Canadian bands to rule the airwaves. The roster of artists emerging in this era includes Sloan, Change of Heart, the Skydiggers, Eric's Trip, the Doughboys, The Lowest of the Low, 13 Engines, the Rankin Family, Alanis Morissette, The Rheostatics, Ashley MacIsaac, Susan Aglukark, Our Lady Peace, the Philosopher Kings, Deborah Cox, Jann Arden, Ron Sexsmith, Hayden, Céline Dion, Rufus Wainwright and Shania Twain. The Barenaked Ladies didn't just clear the way for alternative bands, but for a whole new Canadian pop landscape, defined by a national pride and self-confident distinctiveness that had never been seen before in Canadian music.
No band benefitted more from that landscape, however, than The Tragically Hip. Unlike the Guess Who, The Tragically Hip's lyrics proudly wore their Canadian perspective on their sleeves. And while the Hip never made it big outside of Canada, it finally didn't matter: their Canadian fan base alone was enough to sustain a long, healthy career.
Canadian hip hop, on the other hand, developed much more slowly than the rock scene. Although Canada certainly had hip hop artists right from the early days of the scene, the infrastructure simply wasn't there to get their music to the record-buying public. Even Toronto, Canada's largest and most multicultural city, had difficulty getting an urban music station on the air until 2000, so even if a Canadian hip-hop artist could get signed, it was exceedingly difficult for them to get exposure. Maestro Fresh Wes and The Dream Warriors were two acts that did manage, for a brief time in the late 80s and early 90s, to break through to mainstream pop, but by and large the door was closed until the late 1990s, when acts such as The Rascalz, Choclair, Saukrates, Kardinal Offishal, Esthero, Buck 65, Nelly Furtado and Swollen Members began to emerge to a pop audience much more receptive to hip-hop and R&B than in the past. When Toronto's urban radio station finally debuted in 2000, these acts now had a long-overdue radio outlet to play and promote their music.
Canadian country music, in turn, evolved along a different path than its American counterpart. Canadian country draws more openly from pop and folk roots, and in turn inspires and influences the development of Canadian pop, folk and rock music. Thus, country stations in Canada often play folk-identified acts such as The Rankin Family, Leahy or Bruce Cockburn, and more mainstream pop-rock acts such as Blue Rodeo, The Skydiggers, The Tragically Hip and Sarah Harmer draw quite readily from country influences. This can also be seen in the music of Canadian country stars such as k.d. lang and Shania Twain, who straddle the line between country and pop. Other significant figures in Canadian country music have included Hank Snow, Sylvia Tyson, Anne Murray, Rita MacNeil, Prairie Oyster, Michelle Wright and others, many of whom have had hits on the pop charts as well. One particularly distinctive figure in Canadian country music is Stompin' Tom Connors, who has parlayed a simple approach (guy with a limited voice, an acoustic guitar and a board on which he stomps out the beat as he plays) into an image as a voice of the Canadian identity. Country music in Canada is centered around Edmonton, which is sometimes called the Nashville of the North.
Canadian folk music encompasses the singer-songwriter genre (Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Stan Rogers, Stephen Fearing, the McGarrigles, etc.), as well as traditional music such as the Celtic folk of the Maritimes and Newfoundland, the Acadian tradition of New Brunswick, the French Canadian folk of Quebec, and the aboriginal folk traditions of the First Nations and the Inuit. Especially in the 1990s, it was very common for folk-inspired artists in Canada to combine folk traditions with a rock or pop approach -- this can be seen in the folk-rock of Spirit of the West, Great Big Sea, La Bottine Souriante and Ashley MacIsaac, as well as the pop of The Rankin Family, The Barra MacNeils, Kashtin, Natalie MacMaster and Susan Aglukark. There is a well-established circuit of summer folk festivals in cities across the country, which are often open to blues and country artists as well as folk musicians.
While jazz in Canada certainly does not begin and end with Oscar Peterson, the internationally celebrated pianist from Montreal, it's fair to say that he is Canada's best-known jazz export. Some other important Canadian jazz artists and groups and the sub-genres they work or worked in are:
Classical music in Canada is performed by a variety of orchestras, such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and many smaller orchestras and groups; such as the Canadian Brass.
Several important musicians of international stature were born and raised in Canada. These include the pianist Glenn Gould, violinist Lara St. John, tenor Ben Heppner, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, and many more.
With regard to composition, the earliest composers of classical music in Canada were generally Quebecois catholics who wrote religious music. In the twentieth century Canada has had many internationally-known composers, such as R. Murray Schafer, Srul Irving Glick, John Beckwith, Louis Applebaum, and Lucio Agostini.
Pop, rock, hip hop and country
Late 1970s
1980s
1990s
Hip hop
Country music
Modern folk
Jazz Music
The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is Canada's best-known jazz festival, drawing thousands yearly. There are many other summer jazz festivals in major cities in Canada.Classical Music
References
External Links
