Volume 21, numéro 1, 2000 Music Studies in the New Millennium : Perspectives from Canada Les études en musique dans le nouveau millénaire : perspectives canadiennes Sous la direction de John Shepherd

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A survey of the history of the CAUSM Journal/Canadian University Music Review from its founding in 1971 reveals how the journal, its contents, and policies have reflected conditions within Canada in general and Canadian musical academe in particular, whereby it has been a scholarly publication that above all has been marked by diversity and border crossing throughout its history.

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Canada and the Canadian University Music Review have proved fertile grounds for the development of progressive music scholarship since the 1970s. Such developments had to counter the weight of history, which supported established and securely institutionalized forms of academic music. Yet these progressive developments in turn benefitted from major social and cultural shifts, such as those of the Depression years and of "the sixties." A crucial lever and sustaining force in major developments in progressive music scholarship that were to occur from the 1970s onward was critical theory. Theory now pervades much academic work in music, and has given rise to more sophisticated and varied approaches than was possible in the 1970s. The essays in this volume evidence this sophistication and variety, and bear witness to the way in which the intellectual and social topography of Canada can be argued to have proved especially nurturing to progressive scholarship in music.

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The recent theoretical turn in musicology has made the discipline more relevant, both within the university itself, and in the larger society within which it is situated. I consider what this development may mean for younger scholars, both as graduate students and as new faculty members, and explore the paradox that critical theory is often attacked for its impenetrability, yet has allowed us to communicate more easily with our colleagues in other disciplines. Finally, I argue that the primary aim for music study in the twenty-first century should be an ethical one: the creation of whole, musical human beings, literate in, and accustomed to thinking about, musics, plural, rather than Music.

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Arguing that past attempts at introducing popular music into the curriculum have taken place primarily at the level of the individual course, the author argues that a more extensive and integrated approach to developing academic programs in popular music is now needed. The model for such a program must be both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in character and must include the full participation of departments and faculties of music. Consideration is given to the special demands placed on music programs in terms of the need to rethink the structures and pedagogical practices associated with present-day higher education in music.

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Popular music studies is approached from a number of disciplinary perspectives. Most recently, musicologists and music theorists have become interested in the analysis of popular music. This has sparked heated debates both within musicology and music theory, and outside it from sociologists and other cultural critics. The author traces some of that debate and argues for a popular music analysis that takes social meanings into account, using language that does not alienate those who are not professional musicians. It is argued that this is of paramount importance, since popular music is one of the most important means through which many people in the West shape their worlds.

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In different periods of Canadian cultural history, social difference has been articulated by means of discourses of morality, modernism, or mosaics (among others). Each realm of discourse has negotiated various fields of tension between, for instance, the local and the global, tradition and hybridity, or mediated and live performance. These fields of tension are not easily apparent unless we compare discourses relating to different genres of music and sociomusical spheres. The ways in which Canadian ethnomusicology has been complicit with strategies of "managing difference" become clearer with such analysis. Possible post-colonial strategies for empowering voices of difference are also considered in relation to Canadian studies.

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This essay questions the efficacy of conventional disciplinary boundaries in post-secondary music studies, boundaries that reductively define music education as a training ground for public school music teachers. Our expectations of music education and its sphere of influence have been far too modest. To the extent we segregate music education from the goals and objectives of music studies more broadly, we neglect our collective responsibility for the musical life of our country. We have focused inwardly, engrossed in our specialties, leaving the design of school music curricula and the fragile environments in which they must compete for survival to the whims of non-musician bureaucrats and politicians. We have been less than successful in our collective obligation to enhance the musical well-being of the country. Changing these circumstances is among our greatest challenges in the decades ahead.