I hear the soundscape as a language with which places express themselves ...

I like to position the microphone very close to the tiny, quiet and complex sounds of nature, then amplify and highlight them ... Perhaps in that way these natural sounds can be understood as occupying an important place in the soundscape.

I like walking the edge between the real sound and the processed sound. On the one hand I want the listener to recognize the source, and thus want to establish a sense of place. But on the other hand I am also fascinated with the processing of sound in the studio and making its source essentially unrecognizable. This allows me as a composer to explore the sound's musical/acoustic potential in depth. But I abstract an original sound only to a certain degree and am not actually interested in blurring its original clarity...

Hildegard Westerkamp, liner notes to Transformations. Montreal: empreintes DIGITALes, 1996: 19-20.

In these excerpts from the liner notes to her 1996 CD, Hildegard Westerkamp describes some of her concerns regarding issues of place in her music. She describes the sounds of a place as its language, acknowledging the active voices of places, expressing themselves rather than being given voice by a composer. She wants to highlight the voices from those places that we do not usually hear, privileging the small, quiet and complex sounds that are lost in noisy soundscapes. She writes about the relationship between the place of the original recording and the place created in the composition, and acknowledges her fascination with sound processing and transformation. She describes her search for a balance between studio transformation and the original clarity of a recorded sound.

These are unusual issues for a contemporary concert music composer to explore in relation to her work. Part of the difficulty in even approaching the significance of these questions from a theoretical standpoint is that unlike visual art, where forms which concern place such as landscape painting have been accepted for centuries, place has been considered an issue peripheral to music, or extra-musical, until recently. In order to provide a context for my extended discussion in later chapters of Westerkamp's compositions and concerns about place, I will consider several initial questions: why is it that place has been considered peripheral to music--particularly concert music? How and to what extent have Canadian concert composers referred to place in their music? What is the relationship between music that refers to a symbolically defined place such as a nation or an imagined, idealized wilderness and music that refers to a specific locale? How does Westerkamp's approach compare with those of other contemporary Canadian composers?

Place as Peripheral to Concert Music Western art music has often been construed as one of the most abstract arts, and is conventionally defined as different from popular or folk music in its very placelessness:

The labeling of music as "classical" as opposed to "popular" ... has worked in part through a value system based on a geographical categorization, with classical music in conventional accounts contributing to the development of a progressive, abstract Western high culture universal, self-justifying, ostensibly place-less and popular music marked down as a "merely" local form, appealing to everyday emotions and particular circumstances and making no contribution to an autonomous realm of musical language. (Leyshon, Matless and Revill 1998: 5).

Within concert music, the labels "absolute" and "programmatic" categorize the genre further. Music that is most abstract, that refers only to itself, is considered most prestigious:

Of all the sacrosanct preserves of art music today, the most prestigious, the most carefully protected is a domain known as "Absolute Music": music purported to operate on the basis of pure configurations untainted by words, stories or even affect. (McClary 1993: 326)

Program music, which refers to the world outside the musical piece through the use of a program note or descriptive title, is less prestigious than absolute music, which is considered to refer only to itself. References to the natural environment are traditionally considered programmatic. Susan Bradley notes that environmental references in the works of R. Murray Schafer are generally considered to be "extra-musical" references by most authors who have discussed his work: thus, even though he may refer to the rhythmic structure of wave motion to create the work called String Quartet #2 (Waves) (1976) this rhythmic structure is only considered musical when it is in this piece, not in the rhythm of the waves themselves (1983: 1-3). Bradley also notes that the use of extra-musical references can lessen the prestige of a work, since absolute music is viewed as purer and nobler than programmatic work (1983: 14). At the same time, Schafer's work is well- known, and has won many awards, gaining international prestige. Perhaps this is because of his mythological approach, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

The dichotomous division of absolute and program music is also related to current discussions about space in contemporary concert music, and the relative paucity of musicological discussions about musical place.1 Robert Morgan says that although Schopenhauer described music as being perceived solely in terms of time, spatial metaphors abound in discourse about music:

... anyone familiar with the philosophical and theoretical literature dealing with music must be struck by the persistence with which spatial terminology and categories appear. Indeed, it would seem to be impossible to talk about music at all without invoking spatial notions of one kind or another (1980: 527).

However, as Susan McClary points out, Morgan does not discuss specific places:

Except for a brief aside in which he mentions pieces that deliberately exploit spatial arrangements within performance sites, Morgan's comments address only the metaphorical space within compositions: qualities of high and low, of relative distance, of surface and background (McClary 1991: 136).

This discussion of metaphorical musical spaces within compositions keeps the discussion securely within the framework of "the music itself." Another example of the musical discussion of place is Trevor Wishart's "Sound Symbols and Landscapes" (1986), which concerns electroacoustic music. Here, Wishart discusses the symbolic meanings of sounds in the creation of mythic landscapes. Although he mentions the overall properties of recorded environmental sounds in terms of generalized moor lands, valleys, and forests, he does not discuss places as particular, historically specific, local and multiple. His symbolic moor lands can stand for particular emotions or thoughts, but cannot stand for themselves we are not intended to hear the sonic differences between one moor land and another, or a moor on different days, instead they represent particular feelings or ideas.

In Wishart's work, the composer's manipulation of the properties of a place are the focus of interest. This is also evident in a recent article by Denise Cooney on American composer Charles Ives. Her approach is unusual in that it focuses on how specific places are reflected in his compositional work. Although Ives wrote several pieces that refer to specific places, in other recent literature on Ives, the discussion of place in relation to his pieces is less detailed. For instance, Mark Tucker's "Of Men and Mountains: Ives in the Adirondacks" (1996) is primarily about Ives's use of the Adirondacks region as a place to do compositional work, and less directly about how this place affected his compositions. Tucker does occasionally mention how listening to this place inspired Ives's approach in particular pieces. For instance, Tucker says: "He was fascinated by hearing sounds from a distance and sought to recreate the effect in An Autumn Landscape from Pine Mountain" (1996: 172). However, he does not elaborate on this insight these brief mentions do not extend to detailed discussions of works. Denise Cooney discusses Ives's use of the "musical memorializations of places to get at ideas that were especially important to him" (1996: 276). She describes the musical, social, historical and political roots of Ives's Putnam's Camp, in an article which integrates a fairly traditional musical analysis with historical and biographical information, and poetry related to the theme. Even here, though, the place itself is represented as passive, "sonified" by Ives. Cooney explains her use of the word "sonification" as the descriptions of "aural manifestations of otherwise nonsounding phenomena--objects and places" (1996: 304, my emphasis).

More particular accounts of place in concert music can be found in a relatively recent publication, The Place of Music (Leyshon, Matless, and Revill, 1997).2 Revill's discussion of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor considers questions of social, political and physical place in Edwardian London and the United States, while Robert Stradling discusses English concert composers such as Vaughan Williams, who "worked up their pastoral Englishness through sensibilities of the particular" (1997: 9). The discussion of the physical and imaginal influence of place in the composition of concert music is an issue which is beginning to receive more specific attention through publications such as this.

Canadian music and nationalism

Nationalist music invokes an imagined place through symbolic constructs, thus retaining a measure of authority and universality while referring to an imagined, mythological construct of a country. Leyshon et al. note with reference to nationalist music composed in the nineteenth century that "such music combined a belief in the sovereign authority of the composer and the universality of musical forms with a faith in music's power to refer directly to everyday experience" (1997: 8).

Nationalist music attempts to synthesize an image of the country as a whole, creating an imagined community through sound. Current literature on nationalism often refers to Benedict Anderson's description of nations as imagined communities built, not from actual shared ancestry, but from what author William Gibson might refer to as a "consensual hallucination,"3 a kind of shared dream of the nation. This is perhaps particularly obvious in a country such as Canada, whose written history is fairly short, where the geography is vast and diverse and where so many of us are immigrants. Anderson says that language, especially poetry and song, is particularly effective in expressing community. When people sing a national anthem, they feel a sense of simultaneity, what Anderson refers to as "unisonance" or "the echoed physical realization" of the imagined community (1983: 145). He points out that anyone can be invited to join this chorus: the process of naturalization allows nations to be joined not necessarily by shared bloodlines but by language, ritual and song.

In the Canadian national anthem, our home and native land is described as the true north strong and free. Is this [strong true free] northernness the defining image of Canada,4 the metonymic characteristic that shapes the imagined whole? Are we defining ourselves as northern against our southern neighbours, particularly the big one just below? Do we see ourselves as strong and free northerners? Do others?

Canadian identity is often defined in contrast to its southern neighbour the United States, which is economically and culturally one of the most powerful nations in the world. James Fernandez, in his discussion of the region of Andalusia in Spain, notes that Spain is seen as a southern country, particularly by the tourist industry (1988: 22). This means that the country is defined by its southern areas, and northern areas are ignored or marginalized. In the same way, countries perceived as northern (such as Canada) are defined by other countries as only northern, particularly by their southern neighbours. The image of Canada as a northern hinterland was promulgated by Hollywood for many years. Between 1907 and 1975, Hollywood made 575 movies specifically set (although not usually filmed) in Canada.5 Pierre Berton writes:

If foreigners think of this country as a land of snowswept forests and mountains, devoid of large cities and peopled by happy-go-lucky French- Canadians, wicked half-breeds, wild trappers and loggers, savage Indians, and, above all, grim-jawed Mounties that's because Hollywood has pictured us that way (1975: frontispiece)

Berton claims that these stereotyped depictions of Canada have buried Canadian national identity under a "celluloid mountain of misconceptions" (1975: 12), blurring and distorting it so that many Canadians believe that we have no national identity. Current cultural theorists6 would argue that there is no essential national identity to be uncovered. Identity is complex, and in a contemporary world with massive dislocation, relocation of borders, immigration, and mass communication, the concept of an essential and true national identity is impossible. Reid Gilbert writes:

repetitive images of isolation, harsh weather, and deprivation have formed recurrent motifs in Canadian novels, plays, and films. But these themes have also dominated much western literature, and [Northrop] Frye ... noted that Canadian poets had begun, by the 1960s, 'to write in a world which is post-Canadian.' (1993: 181)

As I will discuss later, internationalism and the denial of a specifically Canadian identity became important themes in some contemporary Canadian composers' attitudes towards national identity. At the same time, to the extent that a desire exists among some artists to create, maintain and question imagined Canadian identities, it is both difficult and important to discuss 'outside' representations of Canadian culture while simultaneously thinking about what images of Canada are being created by Canadian artists.

The position of Canada as the northern neighbour of an economically and militarily powerful nation challenges some received anthropological notions of north-south relations. In his reading of Campbell and Levine's 1968 Ethnocentrism, Fernandez says that southerners see northerners as physically strong, energetic, pessimistic, slow and heavy, stupid, and rough and dirty.7 All of these qualities might be seen in the Hollywood movies described by Berton. Yet Fernandez also says that southerners perceive northerners as powerful militarily and economically. This would not be likely in American perceptions of Canada. The economic power of the United States and the proximity of its television and radio transmitters flood the Canadian market with American cultural products, and lead to an ambivalent attitude towards the United States: Canadians often define themselves, Manning (1993: 3) says, in a position of reversible resistance to American identity (sometimes in opposition to American identity, sometimes in resistance to this opposition, both not American and not not-American).

Many Canadian cultural theorists have written about Canadian identity in terms of a difficult relationship with the United States and one with the northern hinterlands. Andrew Wernick writes that these depictions are romantically tinged:

What has particularly bedevilled that search [for a national identity], from George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965) to Gaile McGregor's The Wacousta Syndrome (1985) is that "the" Canadian difference has tended to be defined in terms of quasi-logical contrarieties vis-Í-vis the United States.... Especially tenacious has been a romantically tinged dichotomy that counterposes America as a symbol for city, industry and automobile to Canada as a figure for escape and the untamed land. More subtle is the nationally divergent approach to Nature depicted by Northrop Frye (The Bush Garden, 1971) and Gaile McGregor. On this reading, the American myth of wilderness is anthropocentric and paradisiacal Nature as cooked whereas the Canadian myth is defensive and agonic Nature as raw. (1993: 297)

In The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye depicts Canada as a long ribbon stretching east to west, in which Canadian national identity, to remain established, must be perceived in an east-west direction, because to look north or south is to be overwhelmed:

The essential element in the national sense of unity is the east-west feeling ... The tension between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the sense of whatever the word "Canadian" means ...The imaginative Canadian stance, so to speak, facing east and west, has on one side one of the most powerful nations in the world; on the other there is the vast hinterland of the north, with its sense of mystery and fear of the unknown, and the curious guilt feelings that its uninhabited loneliness seems to inspire ... If the Canadian faces south, he becomes either hypnotized or repelled by the United States ... If we face north, much the same result evidently occurs. (1971: iii-iv)

Unity, for Frye, is east-west, whereas imaginative identity is north-south, and is therefore regional rather than national, conceived of as longitudinal slices of Canada. He discusses two different tendencies in Canadian life, which he refers to as romantic-exploratory and reflective-pastoral. He links these tendencies with the two directions (east-west and north- south), and ultimately with nationalism or unity, and regionalism, or identity:

an alternating rhythm in Canadian life between opposed tendencies, one romantic, exploratory and idealistic, the other reflective, observant and pastoral. These are aspects of the tension of unity and identity already mentioned. The former is emotionally linked to Confederation and Canadianism; the latter is more regional and more inclined to think of the country as a series of longitudinal sections." (1971: vi) Frye sees Canadian cultural identity as fundamentally concerned with the natural environment (1971: 247). Writing of the romantic tendency, he refers to the landscape work of the Group of Seven and of Emily Carr, describing this work as concerned with linear distance, nobility, and a love of exploration:

The sense of probing into the distance, of fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that Canadian sensibility has inherited from the voyageurs. It comes into Canadian painting a good deal, in Thomson whose focus is so often farthest back in the picture ... It would be interesting to know how many Canadian novels associate nobility of character with a faraway look, or base their perorations on a long-range perspective. (1971: 222-223) The pastoral myth, Frye says, is associated with childhood, or with social conditions such as small-town life, and a sense of kinship with the animal and vegetable world. He claims that it evokes nostalgia for the past, or a peaceful and protected world in which rapport with nature is symbolized through the use of Native characters (1971: 238-240).

This construction of nationalism as exploratory and latitudinal against a regionalism that is pastoral and longitudinal seems to conceal too much. Regions are not just provinces, and to proceed north (in a longitudinal segment) seems hardly pastoral. And neither of his two tendencies include an urban myth the pastoral myth is concerned with small towns, not big cities. Nevertheless, mythologies related to his two axes are firmly rooted in Canadian culture. The image, for instance, of painters in the Group of Seven as romantic nationalist explorers is particularly strong.8 Joyce Zemans (1995: 15) notes that Tom Thomson, in particular, was depicted both as a genius and as a Canadian folk hero. In 1929, in his selection of pieces for the National Gallery Canadian Artists series of reproductions, art critic Arthur Lismer discussed a similar dichotomy to that developed later by Frye, referring to pastoral and exploratory ideals. Lismer, however, associated the pastoral ideal with artists from QuŸbec, and once again the romantic-exploratory ideal is associated with the Group of Seven:

Lismer's narrative contrasts the traditional approach of QuŸbec artists and their portrayal of the pastoral ideal with the powerful quest for identity in modern English-Canadian art, where the moral order of nature and the mythic notion of the heroic wilderness shaped the new Canadian icon ... That the goal was to construct a coherent history and an autonomous identity through the aesthetic construct of the landscape is clear from the selection of work and Lismer's companion study guides. Thomson and the Group of Seven were presented as the culmination of that tradition and the texts are permeated by the notion of Thomson, "the first Canadian painter to capture the real spirit of the north country." (Zemans 1995: 17) The exploratory-pastoral dichotomy can also be seen as related to traditional constructions of space and place. Yi Ti Fuan says "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other" (1977: 3). In order to really know a place, we have to develop an intimate connection with it, whereas space (whether wilderness or outer space, the latest "last frontier") is connected with what is not yet known, wide and open.9 The concept of place has often been linked to what is civilized, secure and restrictive, and space to the uncharted, dangerous and exciting wilderness.10

Yi Ti Fuan deconstructs these stereotyped notions of space and place, pointing out that Paul Tillich discusses cities or "civilized" places as wide and spacious like the sea (1977: 4). Margaret Rodman notes that the simple association of place with containment is inaccurate: "Places are not inert containers. They are politicized, culturally relative, historically specific, local and multiple constructions." (1992: 641). In order to understand the politics, cultures and stories of specific places, it is necessary to let go of the romantic tendencies to associate one place with civilization and another with wilderness, to pay attention to the multiple stories that exist in each place. These recent reconstructions of place and space contest the simplistic formulations that associate space (and wilderness) with exploration and danger, place (and civilization) with security and restriction.

The image of known places as secure (and predictable) and unknown spaces as dangerous (and exciting) can lead to a feeling of entrapment in the known, as well as fear of the unknown. Gaile McGregor, in her extensive discussion of Canadian art and literature (but not music), claims that imagery in Canadian culture maintains a garrison mentality, with images of entrapment, isolation and vulnerability in the face of cruel Nature.11 The wilderness, she says, is depicted as unknown and unknowable, and recognized by authors and artists only as a conduit to memory, rather than perceived for itself. She contrasts the Canadian northern frontier with the American western frontier, in which the (American) western frontier represents the limits of control or knowledge, and the (Canadian) northern frontier represents the limits of endurance, of what is humanly possible. The image of the fort is seen as a correlative for the "beleaguered human psyche attempting to preserve its integrity in the face of an alien encompassing nature" (1985: 5). Later, she connects the image of the fort with that of the small-town community as the Canadian social reference point, claiming that "confronting the problems of a northern frontier...[c]ooperative effort is the only way one can survive, let alone thrive" (1985: 426).

There is much in McGregor's analysis that rings true, on a pragmatic level: the northern frontier is likely to represent the limits of endurance because of its extremes of climate, and in a sparsely-populated country, of course the small-town community would become an important theme. Yet eighty percent of Canadians live in cities, urban centres primarily clustered within a few miles of the US border. McGregor's analysis, like Frye's, does not consider the urban reality, perhaps because it is too (geographically? culturally?) close to the United States. Once again, Canadian identity is misconstrued as either pastoral or wilderness, not also urban.

McGregor's depiction of the American western frontier as concerned with the limits of control contrasted with a Canadian northern frontier concerned with the limits of endurance also seems too simple to me. I think, for instance, of the recent Clint Eastwood film The Unforgiven, in which the reality of subsistence farming in early western American settlements is shown as an act of endurance in extreme conditions, where famine is always a possibility. Also, the Rez cycle by Canadian Native playwright, multimedia artist, and composer Tomson Highway represents northern Canadian native communities in terms of their social and political relations, their relationships to control by Canadian social realities as much as endurance of the physical environment.

I also question McGregor's depiction of Canadian landscape painting as necessarily expressing a fear of the unknown. In her description of the garrison mentality, she describes the perspective of many paintings done by the Group of Seven as foreshortened and shallow, expressing a fear of the wilderness:

Ardently pro-nature in their articulated stance, these artists yet produced collectively a version of the Canadian landscape which, at least in the view of many of their contemporaries, was at best harsh and somewhat disturbing, and at worst evoked the quality of nightmare. (1985: 54). This analysis of the work is in direct contrast to Northrop Frye's, who saw the work of the Group of Seven as exploratory with an eye on the distant horizon, as I noted earlier. A recent interesting addition to this dialogue is a new article by Stan Brakhage, based on his view of work by the Group of Seven in 1988. Brakhage describes the Group's work as like a seine, netting the landscape. This would allow a far-off perspective to be enclosed and captured (neutralized) within the netting of brush strokes (Brakhage 1997: 28). This interpretation represents the wilderness as a menace but one that can be contained by the artist, enhancing his image as rugged explorer, capturing the wild.

McGregor's depiction of Canadian writers' and artists' work as representing a fear of the wilderness seems only to represent part of the story. For instance, her discussion of Emily Carr's work excludes some of Carr's experiences (1985: 58-59).12 She only describes Carr's ambivalence toward the wilderness, ignoring Carr's writings that proclaim her acceptance of nature. She also neglects to mention that Carr lived in the wilderness for extended periods. Her description of Carr's later painting as "un-creating the world (1985: 58) because of its "writhing" forms can just as easily be interpreted as a rhythmic style celebrating the vitality and movement that Carr represented within a landscape that she perceived as living and breathing, with which she celebrated an intimate connection.13

While Nature may be depicted as uncharted space, cruel and unknowable in some Canadian cultural artifacts, this is by no means a universal or uncontested image. In fact, McGregor's work in particular has been severely criticized by some. In a review of her book in Canadian Forum, Frank Davey describes her writing as naive, positivist and subjective, as well as American in its fundamental assumptions about unitary identity (1986: 40). Paul Rutherford writes "I find her argument so exaggerated and convoluted as to be unbelievable" (1993: 274, fn. 80). Ian Angus, in his recent work about Canadian national identity and wilderness, does not even mention McGregor, and attributes the discussion of the garrison mentality that was fundamental to her writing solely to Northrop Frye: "The Canadian version [of the negation of an other for self-identity] is Frye's garrison mentality" (1997: 128). This passing over of her work seems too extreme to me. McGregor's wide-ranging exploration of the theme of wilderness as menacing in Canadian aesthetics seems worthy of consideration and criticism, rather than outright dismissal.

Perhaps part of this dismissal is to do with a shift in thinking in Canadian criticism. Donna Palmateer contends that current Canadian cultural criticism has shifted from a concern with place to that of voice. Writing in a 1997 publication (New Contexts of Canadian Criticism) about differences from an earlier publication (entitled simply Contexts of Canadian Criticism), she writes: "The question of 'where is here?' has been superseded by the question that Frye thought, at one point in his career, was less important, namely 'who am I?'" (1997: 203). Later, she notes that multiple answers had always been offered to both of those questions, but some of the answers haven't always been heard:

A significant contextual change between 1971 and 1996 is the telling, legitimation, and dissemination of different narratives... often precisely in relation to past constructions that have precluded or occluded those different stories. (1997: 208)

This inclusion of different voices contributes to an understanding of Canadian culture which is more complex and multi-faceted. Yet Palmateer's description of it points to a difficulty as well: it seems according to her account that, in cultural theory, the problem of voice has received more critical attention in recent years than the problem of place. As Rodman said about anthropological theory a few years earlier, advocating more attention to place, "it is time to recognize that places, like voices, are local and multiple" (1990: 641).

Southern Canadians as Northern "Outsiders"

One important point to consider about voice and place is the location of the writer in relation to the place described. Many depictions of Canada's northernness have been created by authors, artists, and musicians living in southern parts of the country, in the urban eighty percent, the region that Yukoners call "outside." Hamelin notes that southern visions of the North often see it as a hinterland to be exploited. This vision of the north as hinterland has several aspects: the pessimistic vision, which focuses on the problems of the north; the developmental vision, which concentrates on northern resources, and the romantic vision, which sees the north as untouchable and unknowable. He claims that "the North has not penetrated deeply into the comfortable society of southern Canada" (Hamelin 1979: 8), as southerners continue to depict it as a hinterland rather than understanding its specificities.

This lack of understanding of the North in southern Canada is perhaps because southern communities are ambivalent towards the image of North, wanting at once to claim that identity, yet also to appear civilized, as Jody Berland notes:

No doubt the need to invent themselves as a civilized (near) northern community explains why (English) Canada's artistic representations of landscape so rarely did justice to the nation's brutally sublime real winter weather. (1994: 29)

The image of the frontier, as McGregor (1985) points out, suggests the idea of a frontier of knowledge, and by extension culture. Thus, the further north one goes, the less cultured, less knowledgeable and more childlike the inhabitants are perceived by southerners, whether those southerners are Canadian, American or from elsewhere:

Colonial representations within and about Canada have long been steeped in images of its weather that surround and account for mythic images of the 'Other' ... Just as the Inuit and other northern inhabitants have been viewed as childlike by whites because of their adaptation to snow, so Canadians have been represented as childlike and backward in comparison to Americans. (Berland 1994: 99)

Canadians have been able to redefine their relationship with southern neighbours somewhat through a technological (therefore perceived as technically skilled, and modern) adaptation to extremes of climate and distance:

Canadians pioneered the use of satellites to observe, map, and communicate with remote, frozen areas that were previously beyond the reach of geological science and/or electronic media. That experience not only provided a new technical and mythical infrastructure for nationhood, but also laid the foundation for Canada's secure niche in current space research. (Berland 1994: 30)

When Canadians are viewed as capable of surviving in remote Northern areas using technological means, they are then perceived as potential technological experts in the new wilderness of space. The image of Canada as able to explore northern wilderness through technological means is obvious in the words of the plaque that greeted visitors to the Great Hall of Canada Pavilion at Expo '86. Note the terminology similar to Star Trek in the last sentence ("to ... go where no one has gone before"), which is used to create a technological and mythical image of Canada's relationship to the north in terms of endurance and exploration:

Survival. Canada's multiple environments, its extreme northern climate, and [its] varied terrains test the endurance of the human body. Equipped with technology's skins, eyes, ears, hands, and feet, we go where we have never been before. (Ames 1993: 241)

Communications satellites allowed the broadcast of southern culture as well as local programming into the most northern parts of Canada. Patricia Kellogg documents how the extension of radio broadcasts to the Arctic can be perceived as an extension of civilization into the wilderness:

The term "wilderness" in the title of this article ["Sounds in the Wilderness"] reflects partly the immense territory over which the CBC must broadcast, sending out original Canadian classical music to such remote outposts as Tuktoyaktuk in the Arctic and Batteau on the Labrador coast. But it also refers to the early void in Canada in the support of Canadian composers and in the performance of new Canadian works and the way in which the CBC moved to encourage creative endeavours that would broadcast original Canadian musical sounds into both the geographical and this particular cultural "wilderness." (1988: 241)

Here, Canadian classical music is seen as a civilizing influence in the Arctic. The word "void" is used to refer to the cultural wilderness that initially did not support Canadian composers. The broadcasting of "original Canadian musical sounds" into the geographic wilderness of the Canadian north implies that there was a void there also. Kellogg does not even mention the original musical sounds that were already present in the North including Native musical traditions, and this omission marks these musical traditions as part of the (silent) wilderness needing to be civilized.

The association of Canadian identity with northernness and wilderness is thus a vexed issue: Canadian composers who want to participate in the construction of a shared national identity are presented with the challenges of how to approach the strong mythology of northernness, seen variously as a garrison mentality, a reaction against the United States, a parochial regionalism, a romantic mythology, and a difficult relation to Native cultures.

A Distinctively Canadian Music

John Beckwith reports that nationalist music only became somewhat acceptable in Canada after 1950 (1992: 6). Jody Berland, among others, traces an increase in nationalism in the arts to the influence of the report of the Massey Commission,14 which was published in 1951:

For the Commissioners, the danger to sovereignty flowed from the commercial mass media; therefore the route to national defence was to elaborate and disseminate the European tradition. Their Report and ensuing policies encouraged artists to direct their work to preserving European cultural traditions or the new, apparently uninflected languages of modern art. (Berland 1997: 17)

This mandate of the arts was quite paradoxical: they were to create a distinctive Canadian identity, untouched by the (American) mass media, by appealing to European traditions or to the aesthetics of modernism (which by the 1950s for English Canada was increasingly centred in the United States, while for QuŸbecois artists, it was centred in Paris).15 How did this paradox manifest itself in the thought and work of contemporary composers? One answer can be found in the Anthology of Canadian Music, produced in the 1980s by the CBC.16

When the CBC conducted a number of recorded interviews in the 1980s with Canadian composers of concert music, in most cases the interviewers asked the composers about whether they believed that there is such a thing as a distinctively Canadian music. Their responses to this question provide a sampling of the attitudes of contemporary Canadian concert composers in the late 1970s and 1980s to the idea of a music that refers to Canada as a place, as an imagined community.

Many composers respond that there could or should be no such thing as a distinctively Canadian music. Serge Garant (1929-1986) simply ignores the interviewer's question altogether. Asked whether he situates himself as a QuŸbecois, North American or Canadian composer, he does not answer, but instead talks about the importance of structuralism. Kelsey Jones (b. 1922) sees national identity as regressive: "I don't believe that there's any such thing; I think that this concept of a Canadian or American or British music ... is a ... carry-over from the nineteenth century where composers consciously used folk music to give their music an identity with its country17 ... Music is either good or it's bad" (ACM 24, 1986).18 George Fiala (b. 1922) replies that the question leaves him cold, and suggests that the label 'Canadian composer' should not be used, perceiving national identity as evidence of cultural immaturity: "the degree of immaturity of a given musical culture could be best measured by the intensity of its participants to define at any cost their own creative identity" (ACM 27, 1987). Gilles Tremblay (b. 1932) also sees the search for national identity as a type of lack defined somehow against real value in music: "To go on about QuŸbecitude ... could be a form of capitulation or a very large sign of spiritual poverty ... instead, be competent" (ACM 12, 1982). These comments reveal not only a lack of desire to create distinctively Canadian music, but also a feeling that to do so would be to evade universal standards of value, or somehow to give in to mediocrity.

Robert Turner's (b. 1920) comments reveal an ambivalent stance toward Canadian identity. Early in the interview, he speaks of a Canadian quality in some music, describing it as an "open landscape" (ACM 15, 1983). Later, in response to a direct question about Canadian identity, he says that nothing particularly Canadian exists in music, except through the use of poetic texts and so on, contradicting his earlier comment. The interviewer asks about the influence of landscape, suggesting that perhaps Canadian identity might be reflected in a sense of open space. Turner replies that this might have been so thirty to forty years ago, "but I think composers nowadays are interested in evolving a universal style or at least a varied style, each composer has his own way." The interviewer asks again about the effect of the environment, and Turner replies that he has always been an urban dweller, so the environment doesn't affect him, then concedes that his Prairie Settler's Song variations, based on a folk song written by Charles Davies in 1882, might reflect the cold, hard winters and the heat of summer. In Turner's thinking, nationalism is restrictive (neither universal nor varied enough), and the environment is "out there," not part of the urban dweller's experience, as if an urban space is not an environment. This radically separates nature from culture, city from environment, and nationalism from universality.

Other composers remark that there could not be a distinctively Canadian approach to composition yet, because in their opininon, Canada does not have a well established concert music community. This is similar to Kellogg's (1988) description of Canada as a cultural wilderness in the first stages of civilization. Alexander Brott (b. 1915) says that Canadian music lacks a continuity of development and tradition, therefore accepts the latest fashions from elsewhere. He adds that Canada cannot really be considered a nation, but is more regional. He approves of Canadian content regulations, since they provide good encouragement for the development of a national identity in composition (ACM 20, 1985). Bruce Mather (b. 1939) reports that when he studied in France, it "was a much more civilized place than Toronto." When he was asked whether there is a style of music that is Canadian or peculiar to Quebec, Ontario, or North America, he answers that there are more differences than similarities, then adds that Canadian work is sometimes described internationally as "nice" or "pretty" (ACM 10, 1981). Jean Papineau-Couture (b. 1916), one of the co-founders of the Canadian League of Composers, states that he always attempted to include Canadian works in concerts, and met with opposition. He says that people believed "there can't be anything good here, we're too small a country, unimportant" (ACM 3, 1979). In these reports, Canadian musical identity is viewed as something that has not happened yet. Canada is perceived by some composers, and members of the public, as too young to have developed an identity, while music from various established European centres may be perceived as having a particular national identity. Canada is viewed by these people as a cultural frontier territory, uncivilized, but with future possibilities of civilization.

The influence of European musical identities on the Canadian identity is further affected by the immigration of European composers to Canada during the twentieth century. Renato Rosaldo (1988) describes immigrants to North America as bobbing and weaving between cultures in a movement that reminds me19 of trapeze artists, swinging between the familiar pole of the original culture and the unfamiliarity of the new. This precarious position can be painful. Sophie Eckhardt-GrammatŸ's (1899-1974) first work on arrival in Canada was called Four Christmas Songs. The documentary of her life on the CBC anthology by Lorne Watson describes this as "inspired by the winter landscape, the decorative outdoor Christmas lights and the challenge of beginning again in a new homeland" (ACM 21, 1985). Her biography, written by her husband Ferdinand Eckhardt, is more poignant in its description of the impetus for this work: "written, I believe, out of a feeling of loneliness and homesickness" (1985: 122). Eckhardt-GrammatŸ's reference to the northern winter landscape through the use of a Christmas motif creates an image of loneliness and isolation from home roots in Europe.

Istvan Anhalt (b. 1919), in his CBC interview, remarks that in his early Canadian works, he was looking backwards, towards his home in Budapest, Hungary, which, he says, remains a strong influence on his work (ACM 22, 1985). At the same time, his position as a recent immigrant allowed him a listening post on Canadian work that may have eluded others who, living here all of their lives, did not have the same access to an outside perspective. Murray Schafer writes of a conversation with Anhalt:

Istvan Anhalt told me about how he first became aware of the Canadian style in music. When he arrived from Hungary he wanted to see the country, so he took a train from Halifax to Montreal. All day he travelled through the woods of New Brunswick, seeing nothing but trees. Here and there he passed a grubby clearing with perhaps a sawmill or a gas station and a few squat houses, then more trees. When he first heard the music of John Beckwith his mind connected back to that experience. Here were bars of repetitious ostinati followed by a sudden wild modulation, then the relentless repetitions again. The music and the forest were companies; they intensified one another. (1994: 225)

Anhalt's position as a newcomer allowed him to perceive relationships between the rhythms and harmonies of the Canadian landscape and those of Beckwith's music. He could perceive a Canadian style in distinction from his prior experience in Europe and in relation to the new and unfamiliar landscape.

Being in the position of an immigrant can affect a composer's way of working as well as their perception of a nation's music. In a 1993 interview with me, Hildegard Westerkamp relates how being an immigrant affected her dialogic approach to field recording for her soundscape compositions, while at the same time her use of recording technology as a composer was a tool of access for her as a recent immigrant. Westerkamp's development of a receptive, dialogic approach to soundscape may thus be seen as directly affected by her knowledge gained in experiences in Canada as a recent immigrant working with music recording technology. She seemed to feel at once part of Canada while at the same time still a stranger, still flying the trapeze. The development of her ability to bridge two cultures through conversation may be part of the reason that her work often situates itself around and bridges borders, such as those between city and country, technology and nature, dream and reality, civilization and wilderness. I will discuss Westerkamp's identity as an immigrant, and how it relates to other parts of her experience, in the biography chapter.

The immigrant's identity of necessity includes a sense of displacement, one in which there is rarely any going back, and therefore a need to become part of the culture. Appadurai describes the location of the anthropologist prior to the 1980s in terms of displacement as well, the "voluntarily displaced anthropologist and the involuntarily localized 'other'" (1988: 16). In this relationship, the (privileged) ethnographer comes from an un-named location, usually as a short-term visitor, and the object of study, the Native, is localized in terms of a specific place, and perceived as always belonging to that location. In artistic representations of a place, a Native character is often used to represent the spirit of the environment, its sense of nobility or danger. Gail Valaskakis points out that these representations rarely do justice to the actual lives of Native people:

Drawn from the image of the savage as noble or evil, neither representation allows newcomers to identify native peoples as equal, to recognize them as 'real inhabitants of a land'. Like the companion myths of the frontier or the pioneer, these representations conceal the structured subordination of Indians in a country carved out by companies and charters, proclamations and promises. (1993: 161)

Another concern of Valaskakis is the power of appropriated identity. "Who has the power, and who is given the opportunity, to speak in another's voice?" (1993: 165)

Speaking in another's voice can occur through the invention of a character from another culture, or more directly through the appropriation or utilization of their music. Just as the Native character can be stereotypically seen as localized and emblematic of Nature, traditional indigenous music can be perceived as linked to a specific place and hardly changing over time, in distinction from concert music, which in such accounts is perceived as responding and contributing to international innovation. While musicologist Willy Amtmann separates 'civilized' folk music from aboriginal music in his analysis, he clearly establishes a hierarchy in which aboriginal and then civilized folk music appear less advanced than church and concert music:

The claims to the origin of folk music are often tinged with romantic imagination and patriotic sentiment ... it is a well known and established fact that the "civilized folksong" as distinct from aboriginal and primitive music assimilated the highly advanced elements of church music as well as the superior resources of the educated Ÿlite ... [folk music is] greatly influenced by the gradual sinking of art music to the popular level. (1975: 166)

Composer Murray Schafer (b. 1933) makes no such distinction between civilized and aboriginal music, and notes that folk musicians of many backgrounds are particularly affected by the sounds of the environment, which in his view is a positive attribute, compared with concert music's relative alienation from the environment:

Folk musicians the world over have attested to the effect of environmental sounds on their music ... Concert music also often evoked the more populous environment beyond the music room as a kind of nostalgia (1993: 122)

While Schafer's view of folk music may celebrate its closeness to the natural environment, others in the concert music world have seen it as less valuable. For instance Rodolphe Mathieu Sr. (1890-1962) attributed the use of folk music by concert composers as a lack, as noted in the CBC report on his work: "Among other things Mathieu writes [in Parlons Musique] about the use of folk music in compositions (he considers it to signify a lack of imagination on the composer's part)" (ACM 32, 1988). As I noted earlier, Kelsey Jones associated the use of folk music by concert music composers with a regressive nineteenth century approach to nationalism. And Roger Matton (b. 1929), a composer who is also an ethnomusicologist, studying folk music, says "I think folk music is anti-development, you don't write great symphonies with folk music ... Folk music is a simple thing, complete in itself" (ACM 29, 1987).20

Murray Adaskin (b. 1906), a composer who is well known for his use of folk themes, remains quite ambivalent about the use of indigenous music. Asked in the CBC interview about the influence of the music of Native people, he responds:

I have no expertise in this area, but ... I've always loved folk music of every kind and I always tried to find a way of capturing a Canadian sound in my music ... I have used the odd folk song in the odd piece, not in all my music. Unfortunately, one gets labelled with this kind of thing ... I wrote some pieces when I went to the Arctic one early spring, with an anthropologist friend of mine whose subject was the Eskimo and the Arctic ... and I wanted to tape some of the old Eskimos singing their folk tunes ... and I used some of that material in various works of mine ... and I think for that reason I've had a label attached to me as sort of a folk song person. I don't have enough expertise in that field. (ACM 7, 1980) Adaskin's insistence that he is not an expert in the field, combined with his comment that "unfortunately one gets labelled with this kind of thing" indicates his belief that being linked with indigenous music may be deleterious to his work as a composer. He rejects the label on this basis.

Despite this attitude among some that folk music is simple and unsuitable for serious compositional material, many Canadian composers have used folk and indigenous music, particularly to represent northernness. Elaine Keillor, in her examination of the use of indigenous music as a compositional source in North American concert music, reports that far more Canadian than American composers have turned to indigenous music:

[The Indianist movement] can be dated as genuinely beginning in the 1880s in Canada, but not truly being in evidence in the United States until the early 1890s. Its importance in the United States then extended for approximately 4 decades, while in Canada the movement burst forth in earnest in the late 1920s and has remained vital to the present day. (1985: 203) Keillor notes that even though early European settlers seemed not to understand or like Native music, it seemed a natural source for nationalist music:

Nevertheless, when the question of establishing a music that was truly American or Canadian arose, an obvious way of doing it was to be part of the "Red Indian School," as John Powell labelled it. (Keillor 1995: 185) So the use of indigenous music does not necessarily imply understanding of or sympathy with Native culture, but rather can be a convenient way to represent identification with an imagined idea of Canada.

Keillor discusses two main compositional approaches to melody: either stating the original melody, or using it as a source of melodic motifs. Keillor notes that the second approach was the more prevalent: "In Canada, as interest in Inuit and Amerindian materials increased, the melodic line as source for motifs has become the principal approach, particularly in purely instrumental settings" (1995: 197). Approaches to rhythm generally show little understanding of complex Native rhythms, since most composers in her sample use a simple duple meter. There are some exceptions to this rule, in which rhythmic complexities are indicated by shifting meters, as in Violet Archer's Ikpakhuaq. Harmonic representation is even more difficult. Keillor describes the attempts of composers to harmonize Native melodies around the turn of the century as "incongruous, if not disastrous" (1985: 199), since composers were so dominated by European harmonic practice. In the twentieth century, the breakdown of diatonic harmony has allowed for a variety of approaches, but harmonic representation is still dominated by the use of open fourths or fifths, which have no definite relation to Native musical practice (1985: 199).

Keillor reports that "Canadian composers have drawn on Inuit material extensively" (1995: 205), citing this as a difference between the approaches of Canadian and American composers. Many of her examples are references to Inuit music, such as in Leo-Pol Morin's Weather Incantations, John Weinzweig's Edge of the World, Harry Somers's A Midwinter's Night's Dream, and Violet Archer's Ikpakhuaq. Keillor claims that Inuit music has been studied far more than any other Amerindian music, and that much of this research is Canadian. Keillor attributes this to ethnomusicologists' interest in music that was relatively "untouched" until quite recently (1995: 205). Ethnomusicologists' recordings of Inuit music have thus provided material for composers who may never have visited the North. I would also suggest that the appropriation of Inuit music could be interpreted as further evidence of a particular Canadian interest in representing northern wilderness.

Keillor concludes that the use of indigenous music by Canadian concert composers is primarily superficial, in which indigenous themes are imported into a musical style that remains dominated by the characteristics of Western European musical practice (1995: 203ff). This appropriation shows little understanding of Native concerns or history. Instead, Native music in these instances becomes a symbol for identification with an essentialized Northern environment.

At the same time, Keillor notes that some composers' innovative use of conventional orchestral forces has included serious efforts to reproduce aspects of Native music in their compositions. She cites Beckwith's Arctic Dances as one example of this. Beckwith records his efforts:

The dance song melody as transcribed by the ethnomusicologist Beverly [sic] Cavanagh (Beverley Diamond) exhibits a sort of monotone, D, surrounded by other nearby degrees B, C, E some of which are notated with accidentals or arrows indicating imprecise tuning. In the concert setting for oboe and piano ... this feature is retained in the oboe part while the piano part reflects it in two ways a left-hand part which interjects similar patterns surrounding another monotone, A, and a right- hand part steadily (but in irregular groupings) providing a background of clusters (1992: 13)

Beckwith also notes that he asked for permission to use this work from Diamond's informants, and he credits transcriber, performers and original composer on the manuscript, paying attention to the power issues that surround musical appropriation.

There are several examples of concert works by Canadian composers that represent the land through their links to the works of Canadian writers and visual artists, although Dawson notes that "in general, our composers have favoured non-Canadian or historical themes as the basis for song texts or libretti" (1991: 20). Violet Archer's Northern Landscapes (1978) is based on a set of three poems by A.J.M. Smith that evoke a harsh wilderness landscape. John Beckwith's Trumpets of Summer (1964), in which he collaborated with writer Margaret Atwood, explores the ways in which Shakespeare has become part of Canadian life. Beckwith collaborated extensively with writer James Reaney. One of their collaborations was Shivaree (1982),21 which is based in turn-of-the-century rural Ontario. Jean Coulthard's The Pines of Emily Carr (1969) and Wende Bartley's A Silence Full of Sound (1992) both celebrate the art (and in Bartley's case, also the writings) of Emily Carr. Harry Freedman's Klee Wyck (1971) is inspired by Carr's autobiographical book of the same name. Freedman honoured three other painters in Images (1958), where the first movement is inspired by Lawren Harris's Lake and Mountains, the second movement by Kazuo Nakamura's Structure At Dusk, and the third by Jean-Paul Riopelle's Landscape. More recently, Michel Longtin's Pohjatuuli (1983) honours four artists of the Group of Seven. These compositions reference the landscape indirectly, through its representation in the work of other artists and writers.

The most direct reference to the image of northern wilderness in Canadian landscape is in music that specifies a northern location in the composer's program notes or in the title of the piece, uses environmental sounds as a compositional source, or is written for a particular location. Several composers have a few pieces of this type. The music of five twentieth-century composers in particular Claude Champagne, John Beckwith, Harry Somers, Glenn Gould22 and Murray Schafer bear many references to Canadian environments that have been discussed in musicological literature.

Most of my discussion will focus on composers active in the twentieth century, since the majority of references to the use of natural imagery and music that refers to place in the musicological literature are from this time period.23 But there are a few earlier references. Kallmann (1960) and Amtmann (1975) both describe the music of Marc Lescarbot, a composer in New France who in 1606 wrote Le ThŸÎtre de Neptune, a music theatre piece which was performed in barques on the waves of the harbour, much as Murray Schafer's Princess of the Stars is now performed in canoes on the waters of a lake. Also, in Kallmann's discussion of sheet music written around 1900, he notes that both the St. Lawrence River and trains were sources of inspiration:

Next to patriotic sentiment the mighty St. Lawrence River provided the most powerful inspiration ...The railway was another marvel of the day. On Dominion Square in Montreal the Victoria Rifles played in 1887 A Trip from Montreal to Lachine on the G.T.R. In answer to "popular demand," the score called for "bells, whistles, steam etc." (Kallmann 1960: 259-260) Murray Schafer notes that trains have generally been perceived as one of the more pleasant sounds of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Canada: "To a Canadian especially, trains have unifying rather than destructive connotations, the railway long being recognized as the spinal column of Confederation" (Adams 1983: 128).

John Beckwith documents a range of nationalistic songs from the 1850s and 1860s that refer to Canadian natural imagery (1992: 5). He also notes that music in Toronto seemed to be more in tune with the local environment in 1884 than in 1934. Writing about his experience organizing a concert for a sesquicentenary celebration in Toronto in 1984, he says that in a concert in 1884: "the emphasis was on the city itself, its history, topology and accomplishments; and these were enshrined in a song especially commissioned from a local songwriter named Martens" (1992: 6) , whereas in 1934, a committee organized a concert with music only by well-known European composers.

While some of the composers interviewed by the CBC denied any connection to the Canadian environment, some others have referred to its importance to their approach to composition. Micheline Coulomb Saint-Marcoux (1938-1985) states that nature has always been present in her work. "I was ... born in the country, in the midst of a nature that was quite hard and arid" (ACM 18, 1984: 29). FranÏois Morel (b. 1926) says:

a Northerner will bring with him a Northerner's sensitivity ... I'm a Northerner of course... I think the North attracts us ... it's the poetry you get from a northern environment with its bright red maple leaves in autumn and the many colours. (ACM 6, 1980)

Jean Coulthard (b. 1908) describes herself as very much affected by nature (ACM 9, 1982). Her Sketches from the Western Woods (1970) reflects the "land of sea-drifts and snow-capped mountains" and Twelve Essays on a Cantabile Theme uses subtitles referring to natural themes and winter weather. Barry Truax (b. 1947) has composed several pieces that use environmental sounds recorded in Canada, including Dominion (1991), which is based on an east to west sequence of unique Canadian sound signals. Srul Irving Glick (b. 1934) believes that composers only achieve universal significance by close attention to the particular (ACM 34, 1989). His Northern Sketches, 1983, commissioned for the Festival of the Sound, Parry Sound, is based on northern imagery that explicitly refers in the program notes to Tom Thomson's paintings and northern weather.

Violet Archer (b. 1913) believes that the landscape plays a part in all Canadian composers' work at an unconscious level, even if it is not perceived consciously. In the CBC interview, she says that Somers and Weinzweig were influenced by the severity of the Canadian landscape, and describes her own music as "rugged." She mentions an article that she wrote in Panpipes (1959)24 on the subject of the influence of the landscape on Canadian composers. Some of her work titles, or more often subtitles, refer to northern themes: Under the Sun, (1949) #2: "First Snow;" Landscapes (1951); Ten Folk Songs for Four Hands (1953); #8: "Eskimo Prayer;" Three Sketches for Orchestra (1961), #2: "Dance" (based on an original Inuit tune); Prairie Profiles (1980), #2 "Have you heard the snow falling?," #3, "Ground Blizzard;" Northern Landscape (1978). Oddly, until a very recent paper by Elaine Keillor25 I could find no references in musicological sources to her use of natural imagery in her music. There is no mention in Beckwith (1958), or McGee (1985), although these authors discuss the use of natural imagery by other composers. In her monograph on Archer, Linda Hartig (1991) does not mention the use of natural imagery, and further does not refer to Archer's early composition lessons in MontrŸal with Claude Champagne, which may have influenced her in this direction.

Claude Champagne (1891-1965) Claude Champagne says that the contemplation of Nature was the strongest influence in his musical life. He said that he wanted to "decipher the music which is written in nature" (Desautels 1969: 107). He was also strongly influenced by French impressionist composer Claude Debussy, to the extent that he legally changed his first name from Josephe to Claude (Nevins 1990: 7).

The two works which most clearly show the influence of landscape on Champagne are Symphonie Gaspesienne (1944) and Altitude (1959). Symphonie Gaspesienne followed an earlier piece, Gaspesia, in which Champagne was not happy with his attempt to represent the landscape of the region. Gaspesia was:

inspired ... by the visual and auditory impression created by the imposing spectacle of the GaspŸ region ... I started developing this work in Gaspesia ... after hearing Gaspesia. ... it struck me as kind of pastel, and that annoyed me, because I wanted to create an acoustic fresco26 ... I really did, I think [with] what I call the Symphonie GaspŸsienne (Nevins 1990: 51) In a 1963 interview with AndrŸe Desautels included in the CBC anthology, he says of the Symphonie Gaspesienne:

I wanted to create the atmosphere of the place, and in the oboe solo ... one finds all the melancholy, the fog, the people who live there there's a touch of nostalgia in it. Then there's the sea, the movement of the waves in the St. Lawrence, and again the fogs which are present the whole time. (ACM 30, 1988)

Desautels describes the metric structure of the work as similar to the movement of the St. Lawrence: "The movement of the work is free, like the movement of the waves ... Such metric freedom is typical of Champagne" (1969: 107-8). George Proctor comments on Champagne's construction of spaciousness in the landscape: "Champagne achieves this feeling of vastness in time and space by repeating a drone-like bass figure for the first four and one-half minutes of the nineteen-minute work" (1980: 39).

The later piece, Altitude, is intended to represent Canada's west through a depiction of the Rocky Mountains. Here, the landscape is gigantic, awe-inspiring. In his interview with Desautels on the CBC anthology, Champagne says that Altitude suggests: "a majestic sight of the Rocky Mountains ... this rugged landscape with its sharp, gigantic peaks." In order to express the mystical atmosphere of the mountains, Champagne chose to use the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument. Proctor notes: "The Ondes was selected to perform this bit of musical geography because of its ability to manipulate glissandi and thereby translate the 'schema topographique' into sound" (1980: 69).27

In his discussion of Champagne's work, George Proctor describes it as being closely aligned in mood with the works of the Group of Seven (1980: 39). Although Proctor is not specific about how the work is related, his references to the vastness of the landscape seem similar to Northrop Frye's description of the Group of Seven as fixing their view on a distant horizon. Frye creates an image of the Group as northern explorers, and Proctor links Champagne to that mythology.

Harry Somers (1925-1999)
While Champagne was clear about the influence of nature on his work, Harry Somers has been more ambivalent. In the CBC anthology, he refers to the influence of John Cage, and how the work of Cage changed his attitude about distinctions between music and non- music. He describes a soundwalk that he did in the 1960s, working with non-musicians. He asked them to listen to sounds in a windy field and to describe them in musical terms before listening to music, then composing collaboratively. Somers was clearly influenced by natural sounds and the landscapes of Canada. His works include titles such as North Country (1948), Saguenay (1956), and Five Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (1968). Yet earlier in his career, he was ambivalent about the use of such titles. Brian Cherney, in his monograph about Somers, includes an excerpt from a program note written by the composer:

These titles are merely signposts indicating the direction the music has come from. In no instance are they to be taken literally as representing a particular thing, or that the music is trying to represent a particular thing. The important thing is that the titles are symbols. (Cherney 1975: 15) Later, Cherney refers to another program note which takes up the same theme and goes further, indicating that in the future, Somers intended to limit his use of descriptive titles:

In program notes for his piano recital of 13 March 1948, Somers wrote that in the future he intended to use descriptive titles only in very special instances: "I have discovered that it is very dangerous to use a title. People tend to hang on to a title for dear life, using it to visualize countless objects which they think the music represents. Consequently the music becomes a sort of second hand medium for painting or literature, instead of a medium in itself." (1975: 23)

Here the title is seen as a temptation to stray into extra-musical realism, implying that to visualize detracts from the listener's appreciation of the music rather than contributing to it.

In the fall of the same year, Somers wrote North Country, the work of his that has been most often described in terms of its landscape qualities. Cherney is careful to note that this is a piece of absolute music, then proceeds to link it with the work of the Group of Seven:

In the fall of 1948, Somers wrote North Country, a suite for string orchestra--conceived as a piece of 'absolute' music, yet marvellously suggestive of the qualities of that vast, silent land made famous by the Group of Seven." (1975: 21)

Later, Cherney describes the piece in more detail, again pointing out that the title is not necessarily related to the piece, then going on to describe its relation to the northern landscape:

It is the last work [in this period] to bear a descriptive title, but the title was added after the piece was completed ... Essentially the work is a four- movement suite ... Notwithstanding, the music ... is highly suggestive of certain qualities one associates with the vast semi-wilderness of northern Ontario bleakness, ruggedness, and loneliness. The musical characteristics which suggest these qualities are not difficult to isolate: the taut, lean textures and nervous rhythmic vitality (especially of the outer two movements) and the spare, thin melodic lines (especially in a high register, as in the first movement) are the most obvious traits. Mention has already been made of Somers's periodic visits to northern Ontario during the forties the qualities of that landscape were engrained in his consciousness. (1975: 35)

Again, in the 1980 CBC anthology, the same ambivalence about the title surfaces, then is followed by a description of the landscape: "Although the composer has never been absolutely specific with regard to its title, the work probably found its name in the rugged, almost wild landscapes of northern Ontario ... the harmonies are sparse, evocative of large empty spaces" (ACM 7, 1980: p. 4 liner notes). In Timothy McGee's account of the piece, there is no ambivalence about the title, and McGee discusses the piece as a clear description of northern Ontario:

The subject is northern Ontario, and the four movements depict ruggedness, tranquillity, majesty, and energy ...The isolation of the slow, regularly moving melody accompanied by such dramatic and dissonant chords (notice in bar 2 the clash of Eb and Bb against the melodic B natural, finally relieved by the melody note D#-Eb) paints a picture of loneliness, ruggedness, and stark beauty" (1985: 131)

In more general accounts of Somers's work, he is often described as a northern composer, with north represented as melancholy, rough, hard, and bleak. Peter Such (1972) describes Somers's music as showing a love of the North through the use of isolated lines and taut silences. Stephen Adams says that Somers's music shows "a rough sort of hard line in the melodic writing that you don't seem to find in other parts of the world, except maybe among Scandinavian composers" (Adams 1983: 59). In the conclusions to his monograph, Cherney says:

one senses a streak of melancholy running through Somers's music, even a certain bleakness, which originates in spare, dissonant textures. These characteristics, in addition to the use of 'long, severe melodic lines' are perhaps traits of a 'northern' composer, although attempts to establish such relationships are difficult and tend to obscure a thorough examination of the music itself. (1975: 152, my emphasis)

The depiction of the north as bleak, lonely, and severe is associated with the symbolism of the north, as described by cultural theorists such as McGregor and Frye. Another of Somers's pieces, Evocations, is based on the imitation of actual sounds heard in northern Canada, such as the cry of the loon which begins the piece. This change in focus from symbolism through titles to imitation of actual sounds may have been affected by Somers's encounter with the music of John Cage, although I have not seen any reference to this encounter in the musicological literature outside of the CBC anthology.

John Beckwith (b. 1927)
Perhaps the greatest advocate of Canadian music to the rest of the world is composer John Beckwith, who in addition to composing has also promoted the works of Canadians and has written at length on Canadian musical life. Writing in 1975 in a publication about contemporary Canadian music, he notes that Canadian composers try to locate themselves within the sights and sounds of Canada:

Read a book on Canada and you will find little in it about music. Read a book on music and you will find even less in it about Canada. A Canadian composer, not wishing to be a human contradiction in terms, tries to locate the ways in which the two concepts "Canada" and "music" have evidently influenced his particular identity. His knowledge of international and global musical trends finds a strong coordinate force in the sights and sounds and established cultural habits of his immediate environment and society. (1975: 6)

In his interview by Keith Macmillan on the CBC anthology, Beckwith notes that Canadian identity is often diminished in relation to that of the United States: "In the eyes of the rest of the world, Canada is a blank on the map ... it's the Northern part of the United States" (ACM 26: 1986). Integral to his belief in the development of Canadian music is his conviction that there is no such thing as purely abstract music: "I do not regard music as a pure or abstract phenomenon, even in such a traditionally rarefied Western-art medium as the string quartet. Connections with tradition, with a social environment, and with human- life attitudes are bound to be apparent" (ACM 26: 1986).

The Great Lakes Suite (1949) is one of his first geographically specific pieces. Istvan Anhalt writes:

The persistent theme in Beckwith's oeuvre ( a search for a Canadian voice through music) and the preferred mode of construction ( a quilt-like design) were present even in 1949 in The Great Lakes Suite, which suggests, as if through the perception of an imaginative child, familiar sights, people, attitudes, actions ... invoke[s] a 1920s music hall, a Victorian ballroom, a rowing excursion, a patter song heard long ago.... (Anhalt 1992: 98) This piece was also prophetic of his other work in its geographical location: much of his later work was concerned with social life in southern Ontario, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Arctic Dances (1984) visits the far north, the furthest north other located pieces refer to is Sharon, Ontario: Sharon Fragments (1966) and Three Motets on Swan's China (1981). This emphasis on rural and urban places in southern Ontario sets Beckwith apart from other contemporary Canadian composers of his generation.

Beckwith's focus on southern Ontario over two centuries' history allows a historical and geographical particularity which Anhalt notes in the previous quote about The Great Lakes Suite. Through Beckwith's work we are introduced to specific activities and locales associated with particular times and places. Many of this works are collaborations with writer James Reaney, works like Wacousta! (1979) and Shivaree (1982) that are based on Canadian historical stories. In Upper Canadian Hymn Preludes (1977) he composed interludes made of recorded environmental sounds. He describes these as realistic sound effects, concrete rather than pitched music, and notes that he had just read Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World before composing these pieces (ACM 26: 1986). Beckwith refers to the taped interludes as soundscapes "intended to evoke aspects of pioneer life in Upper Canada ... from the first outposts of religion and music in the wilderness ... to the advent of machinery and the railways" (ACM 26 liner notes, 1986: 12).

Beckwith's particularity is an unusual approach to place in Canadian music: it is much more common to hear pieces that refer to a mythologized and generalized Canada or North. Its focus on the local history and geography of southern Ontario could lead to its association with the pastoral mythology of Lismer and Frye. Note, for instance, that Frye linked the pastoral mythology with childhood, and Anhalt describes Beckwith's music as seeming "as if through the perception of an imaginative child" (1992: 98). Why does Anhalt use the image of a child's perception here? Is it to emphasize openness, or innocence, naivetŸ and lack of experience of the wider world? Is it because he does not take Beckwith's music as seriously as that of other composers?

Beckwith also produced a work about Canada as a whole, Canada Dash, Canada Dot (1965-67)28 described by Anhalt as a panoramic triptych conveying an image of a country and its people through the intricate weave of a disparate assemblage: stylized morse code, a country fiddler, enumeration of names ... a transmuted LavallŸe galop, railway lore, hawking, the song of a footloose pop singer, and hymns. (Anhalt 1992: 98)

Here, the piece is not associated with a particular place. But neither does it seek to create a unified northern myth. Beckwith uses collage to bring together the disparate experiences of a variety of Canadians.

Glenn Gould (1932-1982)
It would be difficult to discuss the idea of North in Canadian composition without including the work of Glenn Gould, who wrote three experimental radio documentaries collectively known as the Solitude Trilogy, the first of which he called "the Idea of North." In the liner notes, the pieces are described as follows: "these radio documentaries, or 'oral tone poems,' examine the lives of people living in isolation" (1992, unpaginated). His compositional approach is to take separate interviews recorded at different times, then weave them together fugally to construct imaginary dialogues among the interviewees. The first work contains interviews with five people about the Arctic, using the sounds of a train as a basso continuo;29 the second work contains interviews with people living in Newfoundland, using the sound of the sea as a basso continuo; and the third work the most experimental is a montage of ambient sound, music and speech with voices of people from the Mennonite community at Red River, Manitoba.

Although the works purport to be about isolation, the use of narrative and constructed dialogues including the perspectives of many different people creates nuanced and variable discussions of concepts of solitude and community. For instance, talking about the feeling of space in the wilderness, one of the interviewees says: "space makes me feel cooped in" because there are so many dangers out there. The discussion goes beyond the stereotype of northern life as radically isolated: several interviewees talk about the intensified necessity of community in a northern environment, recalling McGregor's (1985) discussion of the importance of the small town to northern life. There is also a reference to the machismo and moral rigour associated with the idea of a rugged northernness, when an interviewee says: "for us [Canadians] the moral equivalent of going to war is going North." This statement recognizes similarities between soldiers and northern explorers in their struggle against a harsh reality, as well as the camaraderie of banding together against a perceived threat to the community. It also constructs Northern nature as the enemy. By creating constructed dialogues about solitude and northernness between real people with differing viewpoints, Gould interrogates northern mythologies as much as creating them.

Murray Schafer (b. 1933)
The themes of struggle and individualism in northern life also arise in the writings of composer Murray Schafer, who has mythologized the idea of Canada as North the most extensively of any Canadian composer. Although he does not write about the importance of cooperative community to an idea of north, this theme appears in his musical works.30

Schafer has often written about Canada as a northern country, most notably "Music in the Cold," a monologue which was included with the CBC anthology (ACM 1: 1979). He begins with a description of winter and its weather, and asks what this will do to music, then answers that it will toughen it up, make it bare bones with a form as pure as an icicle: for Schafer, northern geography is all form, southern geography colour and texture (ACM 1, 1979). He continues with a description of north and south that clearly breaks down into a number of dichotomies, which are listed below: North : South
winter : summer
formal, structure : technicolor, surface
restraint : excess
lean stomach, fitness : dancing girls, slobber
strong bow, work : flatulence, ease
conservation of energy : prodigality
tiny events magnified : fast, many events

The over-riding theme of the monologue is resistance to the difficulties of the environment, and isolation: "my landscape is not a peoplescape. I am afraid of people. My head is a thousand acres of wilderness" (ACM 1, 1979). In the same monologue, Schafer describes the Canadian composer as like the "impassive, unpainted observer in a Group of Seven painting."

An interesting aspect of Schafer's cold music that is reminiscent of Fernandez' discussion of attitudes regarding northernness and southernness is the association of southernness not only with ease and prodigality, but also with femaleness and dark skin. He tells a story in the monologue of how leisure killed art, noting that when this happened: "Tall women in bikinis ran the country ... the people turned brown" (ACM 1, 1979).

In later publications, Schafer no longer speaks of the difference between north and south in terms of gender, but maintains the focus on isolation, hardship and vigour, which are defined against the cultures of the United States and Europe in his recent article "Canadian Culture: Colonial Culture":

The basic argument of "Music in the Cold" is that culture is shaped by climate and geography, that as the project of a northern territory Canadian art has a wildness and vigour not evident in the hot-house effusions of more civilized centres ... the essential difference between Canadian and European landscapes is that ours are not peoplescapes and that the viewpoint (i.e., the painter's position) of a Canadian landscape suggests hardship. (Schafer 1994: 224)

My reading of his earlier writing makes clear an often hidden association between stereotypes of northernness and masculinity, southernness and femininity. This association is also noted by Fernandez, in his reading of Campbell and Levine, which I have reproduced in Appendix A. Here, manliness is listed as one of the characteristics of a northerner's self-image. When Schafer continues to emphasize isolation and hardship as northern traits in his later writings, he no longer refers to gender, but it continues to be implied.

Other Canadian artistic and musicological descriptions of northernness as loneliness, ruggedness and isolation also imply stereotypical masculinity. The image of a single, parka-clad man crossing the tundra is almost as isolated and armoured as that of the suited man in space, a stereotypically masculine icon of independence from the environment (aided in both cases by technology, seen as Canada's area of expertise in dealing with the North, which has been appropriated to create hands and arms in space).31 Many Canadian composers' works have been described as rugged by musicologists. Both Desautels (ACM 30, 1988) and Proctor (1980:39) describe Champagne's work as rugged. Cherney (1975: 35) and McGee (1985: 31) describe Somers's work as rugged. This ruggedness is communicated by "taut, lean textures," a "nervous rhythmic vitality" and "spare melodic lines" (Cherney 1975: 35), "dissonant chords" (McGee 1985: 131), "isolated lines and taut silences" (Such 1972) and a "rough sort of hard line" (Adams 1983: 59). Schafer says that the position of the Canadian composer is like that of the unpainted observer in a Group of Seven painting, a position suggesting hardship and isolation.32 Cherney also associates Somers with the Group of Seven (1975: 21), and Proctor associates Champagne with them (1980: 39).

But this ruggedness seems only to be associated with male composers in the literature. While Violet Archer describes her own work as rugged (ACM 17 1983), and says that this is characteristic of many Canadian composers, this description of her work is not found in the writings of musicologists, as I noted earlier in this chapter. In her introduction to a book on the Group of Seven, Joan Murray describes the Group of Seven as engaged in a masculinized view of Nature: "It was essentially a grown-up boy's club. The boyish atmosphere extended to the kind of paintings the Group produced. They are full of a boy's story search for a site" (1984: 7). By associating these male composers' works with those of the Group of Seven, and by not describing Archer's work in the same way, Canadian musical texts increase the associations between northernness, ruggedness and masculinity.

Much of Murray Schafer's work portrays ruggedness as a Northern necessity. Images of isolation and menace by the environment are quite evident in Adams's description of one of Schafer's early works, BrŸbeuf (1961):

BrŸbeuf's antagonists are not just the Indians, savage and mistrustful as they are, but also the Canadian vastness itself, cold and isolating ...Winter is suggested by glittering tremolos ... in the violins' highest register over sizzle cymbals, while the interlude leading to section II represents the "sudden dramatic break-up of the ice on the St. Lawrence River" during the Canadian spring, which requires not a 'delicate flutter of sound' but a 'quite brutal strength.' (Adams 1983: 76)

In North/White, he moves away from this image of the landscape as unpeopled and menacing to one in which the landscape is austere and pure, and the menace is people. Humanity, represented through the use of a snowmobile in the orchestra, menaces the winter landscape with technology. Adams describes the effect as "imposing, even terrifying" (1983: 127). Susan Bradley notes that there are two themes in this piece: the first, "austere, spacious, lonely, pure or mysterious"(1983: 108) seems to refer to the northern landscape and the second, which she describes as ugly, to the effects of industrialization.

More recent pieces require the performers and audience to experience wilderness. The two pieces that Schafer says are "the two most authentically Canadian pieces I've written" are Music for Wilderness Lake (1979) and The Princess of the Stars (1981), both written to be performed in wilderness settings. Adams says that these pieces return to "an era when music took its bearings from the natural environment, a time when musicians played to the water and to the trees and then listened for them to play back to them" (1983: 180). This appeal to an idealized past when musicians were more in touch with nature is somewhat romantic, appealing to nostalgia for environmental connection. Another perspective on Schafer's wilderness pieces which questions this dialogic description by Adams is provided in an interview of Schafer by Hildegard Westerkamp, regarding Music for Wilderness Lake. Westerkamp asks whether Schafer had announced the event locally, and he replies that he did not, being "more concerned about the integrity of a musical composition" than about the audience (Westerkamp 1981: 20). Westerkamp questions whether the music was not written for the musicians rather than for the lake:

writing a piece of music for a landscape is not dissimilar to putting a piece of architecture into a landscape...Acoustically...I did not get any sense of dialogue because the music was continuous and uninterrupted. A true dialogue needs silences. (Westerkamp 1981: 20-21)33

While Westerkamp talks in this interview about the importance of dialogue with the environment and with the audience, Schafer describes the piece as "a confrontation; I would call it the dialectic of the environment versus society" (as quoted in Westerkamp 1981: 20). Whether dialogue or confrontation, human society is implicated in this wilderness.

While Schafer continues to maintain in 1994 that Canadian landscapes are not peoplescapes, his more recent pieces require the musicians, actors, and in the case of Princess, the audience, to abandon the concert hall for the wilderness, to undertake a trek, to sit on rocks: to imagine, for a while, that they are rugged. The idea of an environmental pilgrimage where an audience leaves the city to experience a wilderness environment, and of musicians playing in relation to the water and the trees both work against Schafer's description of an unpeopled landscape: the presence of people in the wilderness is required for the pieces to take place, forming a temporary culture in nature, as demonstrated in the following description by Schafer of Princess of the Stars:

With musicians positioned around the water and spectacularly costumed actors and dancers in canoes in the centre, an autumn ritual was enacted in which real birds intersected with singers and dancers imitating them, the sun-god appeared at the precise moment of sunrise, and the legendary substance of the plot sought in every way to unite the fate of characters in the drama with environmental changes in and around the water on a late September morning. (1994: 224)

Not only is this not an unpeopled landscape, it is also one made more colourful by spectacular costumes. While Schafer described northern music as concerned with formal structure rather than surface textures (see my chart earlier in this chapter), his own music reflects a concern as much with surface as with formal issues, a concern which is also evidenced by his remarkably beautiful musical scores. My experience of several Schafer pieces is one of spectacle which seems as much concerned with beauty of texture as with elegance of form. When I saw Princess of the Stars in 1997, at the Haliburton Forest, I was impressed with the dramatic staging in canoes on a lake. The costumes were indeed spectacular, as performers dressed as birds with large colourful wings were borne across the lake in canoes. When I attended The Greatest Show on Earth in Peterborough several years earlier, I experienced it as intensely theatrical and involving. Once again, costumes, staging, and sets were elaborate and colourful. His own musical productions work against the dichotomies that he has maintained in his writing to delineate northern from southern music.

In more recent writings his description of this type of work has changed: "Princess [of the Stars] is probably the most 'Canadian' work I've written, if by Canadian one means something that authentically reflects the habit of living in a place one knows and loves" (1993: 83). Later in the same article, he reflects on an open relationship with nature:

If we believe that we participate with the sensory data of the world rather than rule them, we cannot help but regard the environment with greater humility. You open to the world, waiting for it to touch you, to order you into action. Then other kingdoms of experience will begin to tell you about joys and griefs, enthusiasms and fears you had never suspected. (1993: 97) Perhaps this reflects a general change in Schafer's attitude towards the environment, a shift to a less confrontational and more receptive (yet dramatic and colourful) one.

Composers have approached the Canadian environment in a variety of ways, by using indigenous motifs, referring to the work of Canadian artists and painters, or by writing work that refers to an imagined, often northern, landscape or a specific location. Within this work, the depiction of the Canadian environment as a wilderness or northern landscape is quite common, while images of southern and city locations are found much less frequently.

Hildegard Westerkamp's Approach to Place
Hildegard Westerkamp's compositional work emphasizes dialogue with the acoustic environment that she records as well as with the audience. As with Beckwith, her landscapes are particular places, and most often are peopled. Another similarity to Beckwith's work is her engagement with urban places: much of her work is about the area of Vancouver, where she lives, often produced for radio in order to be played back to the community from which it originated. A difference between the two composers is that while Beckwith has only written some compositions that referred to place, all of Westerkamp's work to this point does this.

While much of Westerkamp's work is about the Vancouver area, she has also composed wilderness pieces, but not always about northern wildernesses. Cricket Voice was written about the Zone of Silence, a desert area in Mexico. This is one of the few pieces by Westerkamp that does not include the sound of a human voice. Human presence is indicated by the percussive sounds produced by herself playing cactus spikes, which is mentioned in the liner notes, as well as the sounds of people moving rhythmically in a reverberant cistern. In Beneath the Forest Floor, a work about the Carmanah Valley in B.C., human performance is radically limited: we hear it only in the distant sound of a chainsaw. Two works about Banff Alberta, Banff Razzle Dazzle and Contours of Silence, are concerned with the imagery of northernness in a tourist centre through the sounds and street names of downtown Banff and the further reaches of the park, as well as its history as told by a local resident. Westerkamp seems to be interested in questioning mythologies of northernness as much as creating them. Her emphasis, like Beckwith's, is on particular places, beginning with her home and extending outward in all directions. She is as much interested in urban places as in wilderness. She does not create unpeopled wildernesses a human presence is always heard.

To provide a taste of issues to be considered in more detail later in the dissertation, let me turn to how Westerkamp works with places, and consider them in light of a recent article about place, written by philosopher Edward Casey, and published in the anthology Senses of Place ("How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time," 1996: 13- 52). The volume, edited by anthropologist Keith Basso and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, considers current work about place by ethnographers. It begins with a discussion of the groundbreaking work regarding place by anthropologists such as Appadurai and Rodman (cited earlier in this chapter), and deepens those perspectives through descriptions and considerations of particular situations. Casey's article provides a theoretical framework for this discussion, and seems particularly suited to an exploration of Westerkamp's approach.

Casey begins with the question: "Are not space and time universal in scope, and place merely particular?" (1996:13). He points out that this has traditionally seemed the sensible belief, a contrast of universal and particular which echoes some of the comments made by contemporary composers cited earlier in this chapter contrasting "universal" music with "regional" styles, with greater value attached to the former (see pages 17-18 especially). This belief in the greater value of space and time over place is still prevalent in anthropology as well: Casey cites several examples in contemporary anthropological texts as recent as 1991. He then asserts that place is not merely particular, but is "particularly" important, at the very basis of the process of knowing:

Local knowledge is at one with lived experience if it is indeed true that this knowledge is of the localities in which the knowing subject lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in. (1996: 18)

"To live is to live locally" implies a much more intense focus than the kind of imaginary place we create whenever we speak of Canada as a whole. In her 1974 article, "Soundwalking," Westerkamp suggests that to begin listening to the environment, it is best to limit the area for the sake of increased focus and intensity:

The first soundwalk can be done anywhere, at any time, and as often as desired. For the sake of intensity it may be wise to limit the walk initially to a small area or even to one particular spot. (Westerkamp 1974: 19).

More recently, she has written directions for a "Soundwalk from Home" (The New Soundscape Newsletter, May 1997: 10), in which she advocates going for a soundwalk in one's own neighbourhood, starting from one's own house, listening to the most familiar soundscape that a listener would know. At the end, she asks "Did you hear the sounds of this place of this time in your life?" urging the listener to reflect on the place of these sounds in their own life stories, and to recognize that the sounds of a place change according to time and perspective.

Casey argues that for the modernists, space was conceived in terms of its formal essence, and place was disempowered precisely because of its specificity: as Clifford Geertz points out elsewhere in the volume, "Place makes a poor abstraction" (1996: 259). Casey claims that place can be considered both pre-modern (in ethnographic accounts of traditional societies) and postmodern (in the contemporary writings of ecologists, cultural geographers and others). He asserts that to reinstate place, to reoccupy the concept, we must approach it through our lived and moving bodies. Our bilateral, multiply articulated bodies allow a multiplicity of entries into places that can produce many specific perspectives on a place: "a given lived body and a given experienced place tend to present themselves as particular: as just this body in just this place" (1996: 22). Bodies in places are also bodies in motion: Casey considers the interaction between body, place and motion to be crucial. "Part of the power of place, its very dynamism, is found in its encouragement of motion in its midst, its "e-motive" (and often explicitly emotional) thrust" (1996: 23). Casey considers the living and moving body essential to emplacement:

Just as there are no places without the bodies that sustain and vivify them, so there are no lived bodies without the places they inhabit and traverse. (Even imaginary places bring with them virtual bodies "subtle bodies" in an earlier nomenclature). Bodies and places are connatural terms. They interanimate each other. (1996: 24)

Westerkamp, too, emphasizes the importance of the lived and moving body to work in place. She gives instructions on how to do a soundwalk, and begins with the following:

Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. They are closest to you and establish the first dialogue between you and the environment. If you can hear even the quietest of these sounds you are moving through an environment which is scaled on human proportions. In other words, with your voice or your footsteps for instance, you are "talking" to your environment which then in turn responds by giving your sounds a specific acoustic quality. (Westerkamp 1974: 19)

For Westerkamp, the sounds of the listener's body become an index of the scale of the environment, and the initiation of a dialogue with the place. In order to hear a place, it is important to listen to the sounds of the body in relation to it. Attentiveness to and knowledge of the local environment begins through attention to the sounds of the moving body in that place. Also, as Beverley Diamond noted when she read this paper, it is not only human bodies that inhabit a place. Westerkamp also stresses the importance of recognizing and maintaining a dialogue with the other bodies in a place, whether human or otherwise.34

Casey distinguishes among three types of motion. The first is staying in place, where the body remains in one position, while parts of the body may move slightly (rotating head, twiddling thumbs). The second is moving within a place, where bodies ambulate through a prescribed location. The third is moving between places, where the motion is a transition, for example emigrations, pilgrimages and nomadic circulations. I recognize, in Westerkamp's work, similarities between these three types of motion and three different approaches that she uses in recording environmental sounds:35 field recording (still body), soundwalks (moving body) and sound journals (transitional movement). Field recording is similar to the approach taken by members of the World Soundscape Project team in their research. Either the recordist remains still, or positions a microphone in a particular location, then leaves.36 The resultant recording would have the least audible traces of the recordist's subjectivity: since she does not move, it is unlikely that the listener would hear her, unless the microphone is positioned close to the mouth. In a soundwalk recording, the subjectivity of the recordist is heard in how the recording moves through a space, leaving traces of the recordist's pacing and gestures in her walk. Sound journals are by their nature reflective: one is moved to create a sound journal to document a sound environment over time, or when encountering the unfamiliar (whether that unfamiliar sound is in a familiar environment or a strange one), then comparing the unfamiliar sound with what is known. Westerkamp creates sound journals as written accounts that she later associates with sound recordings made around the same time in that place. The sound journal bridges the strange and the well-known. Westerkamp notes that these three categories are not fixed: during a soundwalk, the recordist may stand still many times, and during field recording the recordist may walk through a place. Sound journals often include soundwalks and field recordings. I find the distinctions useful in thinking about how they relate to the traces of the recording body that we hear in the resulting recording.

Besides having important relationships with the lived and moving bodies of its inhabitants, places also have a holding power, a tendency to gather:

Minimally, places gather things in their midst where "things" connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts. Think only of what it means to go back to a place you know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new things, the familiar and the strange, and much more besides. What else is capable of this massively diversified holding action? (Casey 1996: 24)

Westerkamp acknowledges the holding power of places in her musical works. Indeed, her description of the sounds of a place as its language implies culture within nature, the interweaving of memories, thoughts, lives and histories in these sounds. For example, in her description of "One Visitor's Portrait of Banff" she notes her own relation to this place through her family history. Her grandparents visited there in 1911, and in 1962, when she was sixteen, she visited Banff herself. It was on that trip to Canada that she met her future husband, which led to her immigration to Canada six years later:

I now have an audio portrait of Banff shaped in part by these memories. I used to think of a portrait as something definitive, framed, static, a face from a certain angle, something that captures a person in totality. This audio portrait tries to consider many aspects of Banff with open ears. At the same time, it allows listeners to construct their own portrait of the place. (Westerkamp 1994: 93)

While Westerkamp constructs an audio portrait from her own position and perspective, she wishes to leave it open enough that other listeners can create their own portrait. Because places do have such holding power, each person's memories and thoughts will be different, and although these portraits may be similar in many ways, they will hold different points of focus for each listener. By analyzing Westerkamp's works using listener responses as an element of my analysis, I intend to describe some of these different points of focus.

It is here that I must depart from Casey's theorizing. Westerkamp's work is as much about dialogue as it is about place. This is another aspect of her assertion that the sounds of a place are like its language. The reason for learning a new language is to communicate with others: "Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. They are closest to you and establish the first dialogue between you and the environment" (1974: 19, my emphasis). While Casey implies a dialogue by focusing on the lived and moving human body in a place, he does not take up this issue explicitly. Westerkamp often refers to dialogue: with the environment while recording, between recorded and processed sound in the studio, between the finished composition and the place that it refers to, between her perspective and those of other listeners. Her emphasis on dialogue reflects her desire to maintain relationships with her listeners and with the subjects of her recordings, whether human or other species, as is obvious in this quote from the first interview I did with her:

Cricket Voice is the cricket enlarged and slowed down and made into a musical piece and it s wonderful, but it s also funny when you think about it. I made a big deal about that experience of encountering this animal so close by, and I feel it's very important that we do that.... Just like photography gets into the patterns of natural environments or the close-ups of animals that we don't even know any more, if we also get into the close-ups of their calls we really get to know them, and we get a relationship to them again. You know you want to protect that sort of existence on an ecological level. I think it's very important to be able to do that. But let's be clear about the fact that it was two minutes. That animal is there for longer than that and it knows its place much better than I do and really all I'm doing is I'm bringing these two minutes out, and I'm highlighting them the way artistic work highlights certain aspects of our lives, amplifies them and gets us to think about things. But I want to be realistic, that it's no more than that. (Westerkamp interview with Andra McCartney, April 1993, my emphasis)

Westerkamp's respect for the cricket is grounded in the fact that it knows its place better than she, a visitor to its home, does. This respect affects the work that she does with its song, which she describes as part of the process of getting to know the cricket and its environment, part of her epistemology. In order to ground Westerkamp's dialogic approach to soundscape composition, I would like to survey epistemologies in the electroacoustic field as a whole, indicating how other composers think about their compositional subjects, and how work with recorded sound is placed within this field. This will be the subject of the next chapter.

1 Many articles have been written in ethnomusicology and popular music about place. Some recent examples in popular music are Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop, and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London: Leicester University Press, 1996; Charles Hamm, Putting Popular Music in its Place. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Mel van Elteren, Imagining America: Dutch Youth and Its Sense of Place. Tilburg, Netherlands: Tilburg University Press, 1994; Lipstiz, George, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso, 1994, and Cohen, Sara. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Recent examples in ethnomusicology include Ruth Glasser, My Music is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and their New York communities, 1917-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Stokes, Martin, editor. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg, 1994; John Lehr, "As Canadian As Possible ... Under the Circumstances: Regional Myths, Images of Place and National Identity in Canadian Country Music, In Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity, edited by Beverley Diamond and Robert Witmer. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1994. I should note, however, that most of these articles deal with social place, being concerned primarily with the identities of musicians and their audiences. Few deal with the sonic characteristics of these places themselves, but more with the human actors in those places. One ethnomusicological text which does consider the sounds of places and their relationship to the music produced by people is Feld, S. (1990). Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Also, the more recent Senses of Place, edited by Feld and anthropologist Keith Basso (1996), has some further discussion of the Kaluli, as well as several other studies. Later in this chapter, I include a discussion of an article from this anthology by philosopher Edward Casey.

2 This interdisciplinary volume also includes chapters on radio, rap , soul, punk and road songs, as well as discussions of the relationships between musical genres in specific locales.

3When Gibson used this phrase, he was referring to the online community, another imagined whole built of many parts. Gibson is the author of several 'near-future' science fiction works, including Neuromancer (1984).

4I am particularly aware of the power of this image of Nordicity; have been, and continue to be complicit in its maintenance: I lived for several years in the Yukon, several months in the Northwest Territories (including four months inside the Arctic circle at Tuktoyaktuk) and at another point built and lived in a log house beyond the power lines in Ontario. At several points during all of these experiences I was propelled by and often revelled in Northern mythologies, seeing myself variously as escapist, exile, earth mother, ecologist and intrepid explorer.

5 Now we have the opposite: many movies are currently filmed in Canada with the sets altered to place the movie in the United States.

6 See for instance Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1985; Davey, 1986; Handler, 1988; Rosaldo, 1988; Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Connor, 1992; Zukin, 1993; Wernick, 1993.

7 For the full list of qualities, see Appendix A.

8 See for instance Joan Murray Best of the Group of Seven. Edmonton: Hurtig. 1984: 7.

9 This dichotomy between space and place is often gendered. For instance, in the science fiction TV series Star Trek, the Enterprise space mission is "to boldly go where no one has gone before." In the first series, almost thirty years ago it was "to boldly go where no man has gone before." It was de-sexed for The Next Generation series in the 1980s. The most recent series, Star Trek Voyager, has the first female captain. The captain of the Voyager, Kathryn Janeway, is the first captain who does not speak the words "to boldly go..." at the beginning of the show. In fact, her mission is to get her crew home safely. She also constantly refers to the crew as her family, maintaining a reassuring air of domesticity, even in the Delta Quadrant. 10 See also McGregor (1985), a work that I discuss later in this chapter.

11 See also Stan Brakhage "Space As Menace in Canadian Aesthetics." Musicworks 68 Summer 1997: 28- 29.

12 I discuss Carr because her writings have influenced Hildegard Westerkamp in her approach to landscape. Westerkamp included readings from Carr's work in one of her Soundwalking radio shows. She has also influenced other Canadian composers, such as Wende Bartley, as I note in my analysis of Bartley's A Silence Full of Sound (McCartney 1994: 180-198).

13 See for instance Maria Tippett's description of Carr's work: "Carr gave those who saw her paintings a new way of seeing the forest interior. Her intimate close-up view of the forest was soon mirrored in the work of her women contemporaries." (1992: 74-75)

14 The official name is the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. It was headed by Vincent Massey, hence the more common name. The entire Massey Commission report is now online at .

15"While the majority of Quebec-based artists working in the non-representational mode took their ideas from Europe, and especially from Paris, women in other parts of the country were more likely to derive their modernist styles from the United States" (Tippett 1992: 127).

16 I realize that this is thirty years after the Massey report publication. I am interested in this particular anthology, because the CBC seemed particularly interested in composers' responses to questions about Canadian identity. Also, it is a set of interviews, which provides access to composers' thoughts in conversation with the interviewer, providing more depth and less mediation than shorter quotes in publications.

17 Ian McKay, in Chapter One of The Quest of the Folk (1994), discusses the influence of the idea of the folk on nationalism, tracing the development of this idea as a reaction against the urbanization and industrialization of modernism. Folk arts were represented as more authentic, more natural and closer to the national essence but also less complex and developed than high art.

18ACM refers to Anthology of Canadian Music. MontrŸal: Radio Canada International, 1978ff. Boxed record sets with liner notes and recorded interviews. French translations appear for the recorded interviews of anglophone composers, and English translations for the francophone composers. Written transcriptions are not included for the language actually spoken on the record.

19 also Arjun Appadurai (1988a: 19).

20 This comment is remarkable considering the fact that he himself used folk music. However, in relation to his Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion (1954-55) which uses the folk theme "Les Raftsmen," he says "I made little use of folk music in my compositions but .. introduced elements from it ... this music is a reflection of folk music without becoming folk music."

21 Another play by Reaney, Wacousta! has an interesting connection with the work of Canadian composer and performance artist, Tomson Highway. As recounted by Margaret Atwood: "A footnote to Wacousta! is that one of the students who helped with the play's creation and production was Tomson Highway, the Cree playwright who has since gone on to enormous success with his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapaskasing. According to Highway, it was Wacousta! that gave him the idea that he, too, might be able to create plays out of his own experience and locale. So a play about a fake Indian was inspirational to a real one. Such are the ironies of literature (Atwood 1995: 44).

22 Gould is primarily known as a performer rather than a composer. I will discuss his composition of three electroacoustic works radio documentaries that are composed in an experimental way.

23 Most of the descriptions of compositional activity of any kind refer to the twentieth century. Diamond notes in "Narratives in Canadian Music History" (1994a: 150-152) that Kallman represents a cultural blossoming in composition after 1850, while Ford and McGee primarily locate this "blossoming" later, in the twentieth century.

24 Unfortunately, I was unable to find a copy of this article in Toronto.

25 Elaine Keillor, "Women Hearing Home: How Canadian Compositrices Respond to Canada's Soundscape". Presented at the Sonneck Society for American Music, 1997. Violet Archer, Jean Coulthard, RhenŸ Jaque, Alexina Louie and Barbara Pentland are discussed with reference to the geographical locations of their formative years.Keillor discusses the differences between Archer's early work in QuŸbec, where she used jig patterns and dark sonorities (no reference here to her work with Claude Champagne), in contrast to her later work in Edmonton, which Keillor describes as having "spacious line with a texture that is more airy". There is no reference to nordicity.

26 This term seems to me to imply a landscape painted on a large scale with strong colours.

27The schema topographique that Proctor refers to is a graphic representation by Champagne of the form of the piece, in the shape of a mountain range.

28 Actually, three works: The Line Across (Canada Dash, Canada Dot, Part I) in 1965, The Line Up and Down (Canada Dash, Canada Dot, Part II) in 1996, and Canada Dot (Canada Dash, Canada Dot, Part III) in 1967.

29 Gould uses this musical term to describe the ambient sounds accompanying the dialogues.

30 Schafer's strong interest in the influence of environment on the soundscape (including music) is evident through his long-standing research in this area. He is particularly well-known as the initiator of the World Soundscape Project in Vancouver in the early seventies.

31 I was particularly struck by this perceived similarity between the far north and outer space when I lived for a few months at an oil base in Tuktoyaktuk, NT. The building stood high on stilts above the snow, resembling a space station in a science fiction story. There was even a room by the door in which everyone had lockers containing their outdoor clothes. People would speak of "suiting up". Helicopters landed right by the back entrance; the trucks, always running, waited by the front for people to run the few steps from door to door.

32 He comments that "the viewpoint (i.e., the painter's position) of a Canadian landscape suggests hardship" (1994: 24).

33 Perhaps this constant instrumental sound in Schafer's Music for Wilderness Lake could be considered similar to the "netting" that Brakhage considers typical of Group of Seven paintings, where the painters would cover the canvas, leaving no spaces, allowing the landscape to be captured and therefore neutralized (Brakhage 1997: 28). Westerkamp is advocating an aesthetic that leaves space for silence.

34 Such as the moving bodies of other animal species, architectural bodies of buildings, sculptural bodies of creekbeds, resonant bodies of cactus plants.

35 My interpretation of the terms soundwalk and field recording are somewhat different from Westerkamp's. She and I had an extensive email conversation about the difference between her use of these terms and my own. An excerpt of this conversation follows (I maintain formatting from the email message): >in many of your pieces, i hear what i would describe as a 'soundwalk kind of motion' throughout the >piece, no matter what your original process was... when i listen to 'Gently Penetrating...' for instance, it >sounds as though the original recordings are soundwalks--are full of a person's motion through those areas > in other words, i sense your presence, your perspective moving through places and listening.... perhaps >what i am getting at is that in much of your music, i hear a sense of motion and perspective that is >part of your appeal for me, something that i don't hear in the same way in other soundscape composition.

Are you perhaps saying that it is at the juncture between listening (perspective) and composition (motion in time) that the music occurs? or rather that that may be the point at which you hear actual music, just like I do. It is no longer soundwalking, soundscape work, but it is something that moves you. Music that moves you (to walk? dance?). My cousin's wife said after hearing "Beneath......" that this piece should be danced, like a ballet.

I attempt to describe how Westerkamp's subjectivity and movement enters her pieces. Westerkamp describes music as something that moves you, and soundwalking as different from that. I think that I do hear music at the juncture between listening and motion in time. And I also hear that motion through time as I listen in a soundwalk (whether recording or not): as I listen more intently, and focus, I feel myself start to move in response to the sound, bringing the microphone into a different perspective as I go. When we were in Queen Elizabeth Park, I felt Westerkamp respond to various sounds with her microphone, moving to intensify certain patterns and bring the microphone into a closer interaction with the sounds. This motion in time in response to listening is for me what characterizes a soundwalk: perhaps it could also be called a sound-dance. It is fundamentally soundwalking, soundscape work at the same time that it is something that moves me. Composition in the studio is then a further intensification and extension of this initial experience, a more reflective meditation on it than I can manage in the moment of recording.

36 This latter approach is particularly effective for recording bird song when the birds might be unwilling to approach a recordist.