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Article Excerpt
La vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. By Elisabeth Gallat-Morin and Jean-Pierre Pinson, with the collaboration of Paul-Andre Dubois, Conrad Laforte and Eric Schwandt. Redaction des encarts et recherche iconographique: Francois Filiatrault. Montreal: Septentrion, Cahiers des Ameriques, 2003. (Collection "Musique.") [578 p. ISBN 2-89448-350-3. $42.95 Can.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography, discography, index, appendices.
The publication of La vie musicale en Nouvelle France marks an important date for musicology in Quebec. In fact, this substantial book fills a serious lacuna in the history of music in Canada and in Quebec. If the specialized work of the explorers in this area such as Helmut Kallmann, A History of Music in Canada, 1534-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1960); Andree Desautels, "Les trois ages de la musique au Canada--le premier age: la Nouvelle-France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle" (in La musique, les homes, les instruments, les ceuvres ..., 2 vols. ed. Norbert Dufourcq [Paris: Larousse, 1965]: 2:314-22); Willy Amtmann, La musique au Quebec, 1600-1875 (Montreal: Les Editions de l'homme, 1976), and an enlarged version of Music in Canada, 1600-1800 (Montreal: Habitex Books, 1975); Helmut Kallmann, Gilles Potvin, eds. Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2d ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), as much as that of ethnologists and folklorists Ernest Gagnon, Chansons populaires du Canada (Quebec: Bureaux du "Foyer canadien," 1865); and Edouard-Zotique Massicotte and Marius Barbeau, "Chants populaires du Canada" (Journal of American Folklore 32, no. 123 [January-March 1919]: 1-89) have contributed to revealing the existence of a musical life in New France, no exhaustive research encompassing historical, sociological, ideological, institutional, and musicological aspects of the period between the founding of Quebec (1608) and the Treaty of Paris (1763) has been undertaken, much less completed. The result of almost twenty years of research, the present study answers many questions and from now on will serve as a reference on the subject, putting an end to the long held belief in the absence of significant musical activities in New France. The area under French rule was large, and the authors have chosen to limit their work to "the ecclesiastical, civil, and military center of New France, that is the Saint Lawrence valley, what is today Rimouski, up to Montreal and through to Quebec and Trois-Rivieres" (pp. 17-18). Even Acadia, Louisiana, and New England receive coverage.
The present work, written with erudition and great scholarly rigor, is distinguished as much by the number and diversity of the sources used--French and local, printed and manuscript--as by the way the materials are collated, scrutinized, analyzed,...
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