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Éditorial : hommage à une pionnière de la recherche en musique au Québec

Danick Trottier, Vanessa Blais-Tremblay and Ons Barnat

De quelle couleur sont les yeux de Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre ? Hommage en forme de témoignage

Pascal Blanchet

Le laboratoire sans murs de Marie-Thérèse : indiscipline et imagination de l’historiographe

Micheline Cambron

Pour « entendre chanter l’âme des choses » : l’archive musicologique comme laboratoire d’expérimentation

Victor Brunelle

De la modernité à l’avant-garde : quelques moments clés de la création musicale dans le Québec de l’après-guerre, occasions d’une transformation du rôle de la presse musicale

Jean Boivin
In the 1940s and the following decade, the Quebec music press, and more specifically the Montreal press, paid increasing attention to works that music lovers were discovering at concerts or on the radio and that could be described as “modern.” While music criticism in the 1930s was largely conservative, it became more welcoming in the following two decades as opportunities to hear new works from Western Europe and the United States, as well as Canada and Quebec, multiplied. Some columnists, including Jean Vallerand (1915-1993), who wrote for Le Canada and then Le Devoir at the time, attempted to demystify this musical modernity that frightened many. Occasionally, a kind of dialogue developed between critics and composers; Jean Papineau-Couture (1916-2000) and Serge Garant (1929-1986) thus put forward their divergent points of view. A review of the music press between the early 1940s and the 1961 International Week of Contemporary Music in Montreal reveals a number of recurring themes, including the inadequate training of apprentice composers, as well as an initially undifferentiated use of the terms “modern,” “ultra-modern,” “contemporary,” and “avant-garde.” A few notable events reported in the newspapers illustrate the transition, beginning in the mid-1950s, from a modernity that was more widely accepted—both by music lovers and music critics—to the affirmation of a true avant-garde, championed by Garant, François Morel, Gilles Tremblay, and Pierre Mercure, nourished in particular by the works of Webern, Messiaen, Varèse, Boulez, Schaeffer, Cage and Stockhausen, for which an interested audience gradually developed. A handful of columnists, including Vallerand, helped raise their readers’ awareness of the issues surrounding musical creation known as “of our time.”

La dernière des Soirées-Mathieu du 17 mars 1952 : un succès pour André Mathieu sur fond de romantisme moderne

Danick Trottier
The article focuses on the last of the Soirées-Mathieu events, held on March 17, 1952. This type of evening gathering was launched by Rodolphe Mathieu in the early 1930s as a forum for debate on ideas related to artistic modernity, supported by a concert. What happened several years later when his son, André Mathieu, took over the event and placed himself at its center? The debate proposed for this final evening was entitled “Theater of Yesterday and Today” and featured influential figures in 1950s Quebec, such as Jean Bruchési. Although composed in the late 1940s, the works chosen by André Mathieu were selected in line with his artistic vision. Archival materials from the period, notably reviews published by Maurice Huot in La Patrie and Jean Vallerand in Le Devoir, allow us to gauge the media reception of the event and see how it constituted a final moment of grace for André in his reception in Quebec. His Trio, which he carefully placed at the end of the evening, was hailed as the highlight of the program. In conjunction with his writings at the time, it was the cornerstone of the artistic vision he advocated for during this period, which was echoed in the Soirée-Mathieu on March 17, 1952. The event therefore invites us to reconsider the vision of musical modernity that the Mathieus defended: Rodolphe in his time in the name of individual expression, then André in the late 1940s in the name of modern romanticism. Similarly, the support network behind the evening of March 17, 1952, is noteworthy for the ideological positioning it highlights, with Rodolphe and André Mathieu showing their affinity for the nationalism and conservatism of the time.

Québec et New York, virtuosité et vocation : trajectoire de Dina Bélanger sous le prisme de la vie musicale

Sandria P. Bouliane
Recognizing the contribution of female musicians and composers in early 20th-century Quebec is a historiographical challenge whose difficulty reveals only part of the obstacles these women faced. Name changes and careers cut short by marriage make it difficult to trace their history. The lack of attention given to the history of music education or amateur musical practices also contributes to women being forgotten. The same is true for the little-known work of all those whose musical activity took place in the intimate setting of their homes or convents. Studying the life of Dina Bélanger allows us to unfold the threads of a musical career that was brief, remarkable, and little known. After studying in New York and giving a few concerts, she joined the Congregation of Jesus and Mary. Becoming Sister Marie Sainte-Cécile de Rome, she taught piano and composed pieces for her community.Dina Bélanger’s musical career provides an opportunity to explore the networks of musical education and professionalization that existed in Quebec City at the beginning of the 20th century. Which city institutions promoted the development of musical excellence among young girls? What local and international networks were in place? To what extent did religious life limit or support the development of musical talent? And how does Dina’s exceptional career path allow us, more generally, to write the history of musical life? The objective is to examine her musical career through the lens of microhistory in order to offer a biographical trajectory that complements her famous destiny, while contributing to the history of musical life in Quebec. The study will draw primarily on her autobiography, but also on diaries, excerpts from correspondence, and fragments. After examining the autobiographical source, we will look at Dina’s musical training, then her career in performance, teaching, and music creation.

« Des tuiles !! Comme il en a tombé sur mon chemin ! » : des archives de l’intime à la vie musicale racontée. Albertine Caron-Legris (1894-1972)

Vanessa Blais-Tremblay
This research reaffirms the importance of biographical studies in Quebec cultural history and offers a first account of the life of composer Albertine Caron-Legris (1894–1972). At forty-five, Caron-Legris leaves her native Louiseville to pursue a bachelor’s degree in composition at the Conservatoire National de musique de Montréal. She composed nearly seventy works for voice and piano and collaborated with key figures in literary regionalism (Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard, Félix-Antoine Savard, Claude-Henri Grignon) and in the promotion of French-Canadian chanson (Marius Barbeau, Charles-Émile Gadbois, Eugène Lapierre, Albert Viau, and Olivette Lamontagne).Seeking to avoid the exceptionalist tropes of women’s music historiography, this article anchors her biography in the materiality of archives preserved in her private collection: a youth diary, two notebooks from different periods of her adult life, her scrapbook, and 52 hand-annotated scraps of paper from which fragments of her final years can be pieced together. In bringing together intimate archives and press clippings, this article reconstructs the composer’s social and artistic worlds while highlighting the advances and limitations of the professionalization, promotion and dissemination of music in Quebec in the first half of the 20th century.

Guillaume Couture : un critique virulent du commerce musical aux allures de pamphlétaire

Francis Lapointe
On arriving on the Montreal scene in 1875, Guillaume Couture sought to create a discursive space in which debates of ideas could be freed from the commercial forces that had taken hold since the 1830s. He asserted his conception of good taste and of good music, a serious music that aligns itself with the Fine Arts, with what pertains to inspiration and genius, intended to be consumed as a refined pleasure, and which, by contrast, regards popular arts as vulgar and tied to entertainment. Couture thus adopted the ethos of a pamphleteer. He addressed readers from a position of truth, denounced the prevailing imposture in a world where the false passes for the true, took on the role of a crusading avenger with a sanitizing mission, and made himself the defender of the “unknown and misunderstood artist.” He imported his ideas and his modes of action from French pamphleteers. This constituted a disruptive model on the Montreal scene. But the culture was different, and agonistic discourse was less readily accepted. The article attributes to Guillaume Couture the pen name of a certain Rapin, presenting a polemic with the Viennese pianist Gustave Satter, which lays out the rhetorical strategies used to oppose the music trade in Montreal in 1880.

Nouvelles figures de l’artiste montréalais à la fin du xixe siècle : le gentleman artiste rencontre la femme nouvelle

Lorne Huston
This article analyzes the changing status of painters in Montreal’s English-speaking community at the end of the 19th century, focusing on the emergence of two figures: the gentleman artist and the new woman. It is based on an analysis of the participation of painters in the exhibitions of the Art Association of Montreal.. Three phases are identified. Before 1880, the fine arts milieu had no autonomous institutional existence. Women’s and men’s artistic practices took place in separate contexts. A turning point came in the 1880s with the creation of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the AAM’s decision to organize annual exhibitions for Canadian artists. These initiatives established a hierarchy within the artistic community and increased its public visibility. An analysis of the participation of painters living in Quebec in AAM exhibitions between 1880 and 1897 reveals a sharp increase in the participation of women painters in official art institutions. A third phase began in the 1890s. The institutionalization of the art world contributed to the enhancement of the artist’s social status. This process fostered the emergence of new artistic identities: that of the gentleman artist, who sought above all to distinguish himself from the traditional status of artists as craftsmen, and that of the New Woman, who aimed to transform artistic practices traditionally confined to the private sphere into professional careers. An invitation extended by women artists to their male counterparts to collaborate in organizing open-studio days provides a revealing opportunity to observe the dynamics at work in this new type of encounter.

Le concert comme reflet de l’histoire de la musique selon Serge Garant

Ariane Couture
Composer Serge Garant was the musical and artistic director of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) from 1966 to 1986. In this capacity, he was responsible for programming concerts in consultation with an artistic committee and in collaboration with the board of directors. However, concert programming is not neutral; it creates symbolic relationships between the selected works and composers appearing together in a given context. Indeed, concert programming suggests (implicitly or explicitly) a history of music in which the organization of works expresses a temporality in the juxtaposition and sequencing of older and more recent works or new creations within a single concert. In this article, an examination of the SMCQ’s concert programming through a few concert examples will shed light on Garant’s historical vision of music in the 20th century. The result is a dual temporal movement, whether through the preparation of concerts focused on works from the past that offer stimulating models for current works, or through the proposal of concerts focused on creation that allow us to measure the advances of contemporary music.

Est-ce qu’une oeuvre à programme nécessite une description externe ? Un exemple de narratologie musicale du point de vue des personnes auditrices avec une symphonie de Maxime Goulet

Louis Brouillette
The study analyzes and compares the intentions of a composer and the perceptions of two distinct populations when listening to seven excerpts from a program piece, to determine whether certain elements refer, for most respondents, to common extramusical ideas in line with the composer’s intentions. The seven 8- to 24-second excerpts are taken from the program piece Symphonie de la tempête de verglas by Maxime Goulet, a Montreal composer renowned in the symphonic niche for tonal, accessible music conceived around an often-extra-musical concept. For each excerpt, 123 grade 5 and 6 children from a Quebec elementary school and 73 undergraduate students from a Quebec university faculty of education answered the question “What does this music make you think of?” The responses were subjected to content analysis and factorial correspondence analysis. The results were then compared with the musical analysis of the excerpts and the composer’s intentions. The results show that perceptions of musical excerpts from Goulet’s Symphonie de la tempête de verglas share striking similarities within each population and between the two generations, suggesting that music can evoke similar narratives in different individuals from a shared culture. The results also reveal a lack of concordance between the perceptions of listeners and the composer’s intentions for most of the excerpts, suggesting the need for means of music mediation as program notes, pre-concert lectures or explanations by the performer or composer. The study makes a contribution to musical narratology from the point of view of listeners, thanks to its findings and the unusual concomitant use of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis.

La percussion classique occidentale au Québec : genèse de la discipline et interprètes et ensembles marquants

David Therrien Brongo
This article offers a historical and analytical study of classical percussion in Quebec, tracing the origins of the discipline, its main aesthetic and institutional influences, and the role played by certain notable composers, performers, and ensembles. It also pays explicit tribute to musicologist Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre, whose work, teaching, and historiographical approach have profoundly shaped thinking about Quebec music and provided a decisive theoretical framework for this research. The objective of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to situate the emergence of percussion writing in Quebec within an international context shaped by the European heritage of the post-World War II period; on the other hand, to highlight the local dynamics that contributed to the development of a repertoire and a percussive tradition specific to Quebec.The approach is based on a historical-musicological perspective combining analysis of works, study of pedagogical and aesthetic affiliations, and consideration of institutional networks. The author draws on archival sources, existing musicological writings, and interviews from his doctoral research, while establishing links between Quebec practices and certain European composers, notably Messiaen, Stockhausen, Boulez, and Xenakis. After an introduction devoted to the origins of percussion in Quebec, the article examines the founding role of Serge Garant and Gilles Tremblay, both in terms of creation and pedagogy. It then focuses on Michel Longtin and Claude Vivier through an analysis of their works for solo percussion, before concluding with an overview of the performers and ensembles that have contributed to the dissemination and continuity of this tradition.

Le regard critique de Claude Gingras sur la création musicale contemporaine (1953‑2015)

Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre
For several years, we have been interested in the discourse of composers and cultural criticism in Quebec. We have published texts by Serge Garant, Jean Vallerand, and Gilles Tremblay. However, the systematic analysis of reviews and columns produced by journalists working for several Quebec newspapers during the 20th century remains a largely unexplored field. One notable example is the writings of Claude Gingras (1953–2015). A music critic for La Presse newspaper for 63 years, Claude Gingras was undoubtedly one of the most important witnesses to the development of musical life in Quebec during the second half of the 20th century. Often contributing more than three articles to a single issue, he published numerous articles in a variety of genres throughout his career, including concert season announcements, interviews, previews of events, concert reviews, record reviews, year-end reviews, and obituaries. A colorful character with a sometimes virulent but always elegant pen, he elicited many reactions, both positive and negative, throughout his career. We have chosen to focus our attention on reviews of works composed mainly by Canadian musicians, asking the questions: how did Gingras present these concerts, and to what extent did his articles contribute to shaping readers’ opinions on musical creation? In order to answer these questions, this article will be divided into three chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of his career, focusing particularly on his origins and early career. The analysis of his writings will be the subject of the second chapter, in which we will first present his vision of the profession of critic, then discuss his priorities when it comes to musical creation: the performers first, the work second, if necessary. In the third chapter, we will give him the floor, first studying the period from 1953 to 1969, during which he sharpened his knives, then the period from 1969 onwards, when he became the leading classical music critic at the newspaper La Presse, until 2015.

Julie Ackermann, Hyperpop — La pop au temps du capitalisme numérique, Lyon, Façonnage éditions, 2024. 153 p., ISBN 978-2-36481-133-1

Michael Charbonneau-Marcos

Laetitia Corbière, Du concert au show business. Les imprésarios au coeur des échanges internationaux 1850-1930, Lyon, Symétrie, 2023, 434 p., ISBN 978-2-36485-118-4

Mathilde Veilleux

Antonio C. Cuyler, Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations: Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the U.S., New York, Routledge, collection Routledge research in the creative and cultural industries, 2021, 119 p. ISBN 978-0-367-55788-1

Simon Chalifoux