The Canadian Musical Heritage Society (CMHS) has been a leading research institution for the past 21 years. It was founded in 1982 with the aim of publishing a multi-volume anthology of historical Canadian music. By 1999 the 25-volume anthology had been completed, with professionally edited scores of some 1500 works composed before 1950. The individual volumes are organized by genre, and each volume opens with a scholarly essay and critical notes on the repertoire by the volume’s editor. For the initial volumes much of the music was copied by hand, but CMHS began using music notation software programmes in the mid-1980s; music for the later volumes was often newly engraved.

In 1997 a two-volume Historical Anthology of Canadian Music (HACM) was produced; it contains 122 works from the Canadian Musical Heritage series, arranged chronologically from Jesous Ahatonhia (ca. 1648) to Godfrey Ridout’s Ballade for viola and strings (1938). Another project was a web-based Inventory of Notated Canadian Music to 1950, created initially in co-operation with the National Library of Canada. This database contains over 30,000 items, with works by 342 Canadian composers and authors.

As the vast majority of compositions published by CMHS have never been recorded, and as 95 per cent of Canadians do not read music, CMHS launched a recording project to make the works more accessible. Two CDs were issued in the Série Lavallée Series, one of songs (Le Souvenir, CMC-CD 5696, 1996) and one of choral music (Noël, Marquis Classics 77471 8122728, 1998), but the funding necessary to sustain this project on an ongoing basis was not forthcoming.

In a meeting in Ottawa on 12 April 2003, the Board of Directors of CMHS gave Clifford Ford, the CMHS’s Executive Secretary for its entire history, the mandate to continue the publication and sales projects of CMHS through his company Clifford Ford Publications, with effect from 1 June 2003. A new project will be Performing Our Musical Heritage, a graded series of educational pieces, the first volumes of which are to be published later this year. Good luck to Clifford Ford Publications as it prepares to continue the activities of CMHS.