Luigi von Kunits (1870–1931) had a substantial impact on classical music in Toronto. Born and educated in Vienna, he emigrated to Chicago in 1893 and then moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 as the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Orchestra. After 17 years in the USA, he returned to Vienna for two years, before moving to Toronto to take up a teaching position at the Canadian Academy of Music. From the time of his arrival in Toronto in 1912 to his death in 1931 he was active on many fronts: teaching violin, composing, editing The Canadian Journal of Music (1914–1919), performing as a chamber musician and violin soloist, and serving as the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1922–1931). To many he seemed the very embodiment of the great Central European musical tradition: a pupil of Bruckner and Hanslick, associated with Brahms and acquainted with celebrated European musicians and composers. Much of what we know about Kunits derives from statements issuing from the musician himself or his immediate circle, with little or no corroborating evidence to support his assertions. As a result, it is difficult at this remove to separate fact from fiction. This article takes stock of the sources of information that are available and attempts to construct as accurate an account of his life and activities as possible.

This article explores the origins and productions of the Société Canadienne d'Opérette et d'Opéra de Montréal, a short-lived opera company active in the late 1870s. Headed by Calixa Lavallée and Frantz Jehin Prume, the Société was established in part as a result of a decree that forbade the use mixed choirs throughout the archdiocese, and consequently made obsolete Lavallée's choir at Saint-Jacques Church. Following the success of their first production, Lavallée and Prume realized that the company might be used as a stepping-stone to the creation of a government-funded music school, modelled on the Paris Conservatoire. This article explores the social and political context in which the Société was created, and details the staging and reception of its productions of Gounod's Jeanne d'Arc and Boieldieu's La Dame blanche. In selecting these works for performance, the organizers responded to demands and constraints of a society accustomed to popular entertainment from the US and under pressure from the conservative and influential Catholic Church. They were works that were feasible to produce and likely to be successful in a city whose population was divided by religion, language and cultural traditions.

This research engages the ways composers and librettists in early Canada constructed the roles of First Nations Peoples in two staged dramatic musical works: Clappé and Dixon's Canada's Welcome from 1879 and Vézina, Villandray and Fleur's Le fétiche from 1912. My exploration begins from a desire to cultivate an historiography of First Nations musical archetypes that extends beyond viewing representations as stereotypes to explore how they are used intertextually to reflect social and political realities in early Canada. The extent of play with indigenous traditions in each of these works belies their creators’ intentions to underscore contemporary beliefs in the civilizing power of colonization. And while Clappé and Dixon's work might now be interesting primarily as upper class entertainment, Vézina, Villandray and Fleur's exemplifies the evolution of Canadian culture through a more complex use of intertextual relationships. In Canada's Welcome, Clappé reserves his most nuanced musical representations for the European immigrants on stage; Vézina performs similar homogenizing musical acts but contrasts the French in grand operatic expression and the Iroquois with more extensive use of stereotypical markers to create distinctions within his Western art music setting. The most overt expressions of Otherness in these works are therefore largely carried by the texts, mediated through their encoding of the tropes of the fairness and acceptance of a tolerant civilization.

A study of public musical life in Edmonton, Alberta from the 1897 Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria through the beginning of World War I provides a case study in the development of new urban musical cultures during the settlement of western North America. The contrast between the Jubilee celebration and Alberta's inauguration as a province in 1905 reveals growing ambition to demonstrate a capacity for the serious music that could be viewed as a marker of civic achievement, and the absence in 1905 of First Nations dancers and drummers, who had taken part in the 1897 event, provides a reminder of the displacement of indigenous peoples that accompanied the immigration booms that characterized settler colonialism. Popular music too developed with the city; as an alternative to non-literate, rural practices like fiddling, it could represent another form of urban sophistication, but also provided an opportunity to import high culture's dismissal of the popular, yet another signifier of urban cultural practice.