Middle Power Music: Modernism, Ideology, and Compromise in English Canadian Cold War Composition

This dissertation argues that English Canadian composers of the Cold War period produced works that function as “middle power music.†The concept of middlepowerhood, central to Canadian policy and foreign relations in this period, has been characterized by John W. Holmes as “a way of explaining to the world that Canadians were of greater consequence than the Panamanians but could not take on the obligations of the Americans, or even the French.†Political scientist Adam Chapnick has noted that it is paradoxically through acceptance of a second-tier position that Canadian political leaders sought increased international status and means of resistance to the interests of more powerful nations. In cultural domains, likewise, English Canadian cultural nationalist artists frequently accepted (or even embraced) second-tier status, voicing ambivalence towards modernist notions of canonicity, progress, and prestige. Yet at the same time, these artists largely embraced a narrative of national modernization and decolonization, and sought to participate in international modernist or postmodernist movements. English Canadian composers in this context would produce music that is stylistically, technically, and ideologically flexible—a kind of double-voiced discourse that imports or utters the sounds of the modernist metropolis, but inflects, unsettles, and strikes compromises with the ideologies and power structures that accompany those sounds. Thus serialism becomes neither a language of radical refusal (as Mark Carroll argues about Pierre Boulez), nor a technique of anti-Stalinist high culture (as Martin Brody argues of Milton Babbitt), nor a “polar opposite†of neoclassicism, but instead a compositional technique that can be deployed in the context of compositions that indeed sound neoclassical, or can be dissolved into minimalist processes. Neither is neoclassicism tarnished or marginalized by association with leftist politics, as Elizabeth Crist and Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett suggest of the United States in the 1950s. Situating this project in the Cold War context clarifies George Grant’s iconic assertion that Canada becomes, by the mid-1960s, “a branch-plant society of American capitalism,†and opens up the narratives of Canadian modernization and decolonization in this period for refinement or recontextualization. English Canadian composers in this period respond to British influence in a manner that can be characterized as colonial or post-colonial resistance. Their reactions to American culture, on the contrary, are shaped not by a colonial relationship to the United States, but rather by second-tier status in relation to the dominant western power. This dissertation thus recognizes Canadian composition and Canadian culture as meaningfully different from (and in some senses opposed to) U.S. culture, but qualifies claims to Canadian “colonial resistance†of the United States. In addition to representative works by Barbara Pentland and R. Murray Schafer, this dissertation focuses on the serial techniques of John Weinzweig, Harry Somers, and Barbara Pentland, composers often identified in histories of Canadian music as “radical†or avant-garde. The final chapter explores the intersection of serialism, minimalism, and feminism in Ann Southam’s Rivers. | 218 pages

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