Growing with Canada: The Émigré Tradition in Canadian Music (review)

Reviewed by: Growing with Canada: The Émigré Tradition in Canadian Music Elaine Keillor Growing with Canada: The Émigré Tradition in Canadian Music. Paul Helmer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 388, $49.95 cloth Helmer presents 121 émigré musicians who left their European homes during the years 1933 to 1948. He interprets musicians to include 'vocal and instrumental performers, teachers and educators, conductors, and composers, … music administrators, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, lexicographers, broadcasters, managers, and music patrons' (4). In this book he has researched their arrivals and their [End Page 208] contributions to Canadian musical life. His central argument is that Canada's major anglophone musical institutions and the vibrancy of its music-making today would not be at their present level if these émigrés had not reached our shores. After explaining the procedures under which these émigrés arrived in Canada, Helmer discusses the situation of present exile studies, pointing out how this academic field has been rooted in the work of European researchers and narrowly focused within municipal, provincial, or national boundaries. This approach is limiting and its theoretical framework can be applied only partially to those who arrived in Canada from several different European areas. Besides, Helmer discovered in his interviews with a number of the émigrés that they did not think of themselves as exiles. Accordingly the author developed a new model, which he has called 'exile as émigré,' based on the concept that the person has made a choice to pursue a new avenue and to grab what opportunities emerge. After outlining the European situation Helmer indicates how émigrés left in three waves. The first fled National Socialism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia between 1937 and 1940. Fleeing the advancing Red Army, émigrés of the second wave from the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary fled after April 1944 and until 1948. The third wave mainly from Eastern Europe left between 1956 and 1987. Some members of the first wave were literally stateless without proper papers. Helmer relates stories of Mario Duschenes, Istvan Anhalt, and George Fiala, among others. A notable group was the 'Camp Boys' sent to Canada by Britain as 'enemy aliens' that included eleven musicians. Helmer details the Canadian camps used to house these 'aliens' and, where possible, the musical activities that took place. After sketching the musical life in Canada at the time, Helmer traces how certain individuals coped with the conditions that they found and then in most cases embarked on making improvements – among them Arnold Walter and Helmut Blume. Walter transformed the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto to include the fields of music education, musicology, ethno-musicology, and performance, and an Opera School. Helmer underlines that Walter did not duplicate a European, British, or American model. Instead he created a unique Canadian model for music within the university system that 'incorporates elements from all three traditions' (112). Inspired by Walter, Blume set about reorganizing McGill's Faculty of Music in Montreal. [End Page 209] With the data showing how various musical institutions were transformed, as well as material on notable performance careers of many émigrés, Helmer convincingly argues his main thesis. Unfortunately there are some errors in fact and certain interpretations are overstated. The chapter covering the Canadian music situation is probably the weakest. Even though two of the Camp Boys, Helmut Kallmann and Willi Amtmann, established the study of Canadian music history, it appears that Helmer accepted the viewpoint that a British bias prevented little from happening in the field of opera or in avant-garde musical composition before 1950. Investigation of operatic companies and performances along with the careers of musicians such as Léo-Pol Morin, Rodolphe Mathieu, and Colin McPhee could have presented a more balanced interpretation. Among the errors noted was the statement that examinations were introduced at the Toronto Conservatory of Music in 1898, but that was the year when local exams went national (85). Leonard Isaacs was yet another British appointee (327, note 81), as he was born in Manchester. Unfortunately the book reveals sloppiness in copy editing. There are numerous errors of misplaced or additional articles, poor syntax, and...

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