John Weinzweig stopped by the Institute for Canadian Music recently to remark that the University of Toronto is the only university in Canada not offering a course in Canadian music, according to a recent survey by the Canadian League of Composers. Presumably the survey was done in the 2001-02 academic year, as there is a course on "The Experimental, the Avant-Garde and Their Influence on Contemporary Canadian Music," at the University of Toronto this year, which is being taught by Linda Arsenault. I have not seen the survey, but if Weinzweig is correct then Canadian music courses are now offered at every Canadian university. If true, this marks a significant improvement over 1990, when Beverley Diamond found that at least a dozen of the 41 music programmes being offered by the member institutions of the Canadian University Music Society did not include a course in Canadian music.

Beverley Diamond’s article of a dozen years ago [Beverley Diamond, "Canadian music studies in university curricula," Association for Canadian Studies ACS Newsletter, 12.3 (Fall 1990): 16-18] was the last time that a comprehensive survey of Canadian music courses was made. As these courses are for the most part currently taught in isolation, with little or no communication between the instructors who are offering them, the ICM Newsletter is undertaking an ongoing survey of Canadian music course offerings.

Here is the first installment, offered in the hope that it may promote an exchange of ideas, information, and encouragement to all who are engaged in teaching any form of Canadian music at the university level.

The course 3T03E/History of Canadian Music was implemented and first taught by Frederick Hall in 1978 at McMaster University. Since that time it has been offered every other year, and more recently it has been taught by various local scholars. Currently, it is a one-semester course that runs for 12 weeks in the form of a once-weekly three-hour evening lecture. Since its inception 3T03/Canadian Music has served as an elective for both music students and non-specialists, attracting a wide variety of students. This past term, which was my second year as the course instructor, there were 36 students from a total of 16 disciplines and four different levels (second-year to fifth-year). Initially I used the textbook Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1994) edited by Beverley Diamond and Robert Witmer.¹ Currently, I am using my own course-kit with articles culled from a variety of texts (the Diamond / Witmer reader amongst them), anthologies, newspaper articles, and journals; however, the ordering of topics, issues and articles in the Diamond / Witmer book continue to exert a strong influence on the organization of materials for the entire 3T03E course.

The first four lectures are devoted to the centuries of musical practice up to and including the late nineteenth century. Weeks five to seven comprise a three-part section called "Towards a Canadian Identity": one seminar each is allotted to the discussion of the cultivation of an early twentieth-century audience, dissemination of folk music, and early broadcasting/radio practice and history. Next comes a two-part series entitled "Musicians in the ‘Canadian’ Context." Using a variety of methodologies, we look in-depth at five musicians in a plurality of situations. A high-point of this module was a visit by Douglas Miller, a freelance musician living and working on both sides of the Canadian/U.S. border, who designs whatever musical instruments are required for the particular music-work situation.

The showing of the quintessential Canadian film Goin’ Down the Road (1970) in Week 10 was used not only to kick-start a discussion of Canadian popular identity in and around the Centennial era, but also to highlight issues of diasporic space, and centre-versus-margin culture. Finally, some of the most recent musical-cultural developments considered include the Toronto-Cuban musicscape (as written about by Annemarie Gallaugher), the burgeoning aboriginal blues movement, and the evolution of music-television in Canada.