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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2014
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.
1 In recognition of the important role of text in dramatic music, works are attributed to both composer and librettist(s). The creators of the two works studied here are: Arthur A. Clappé (1850–1920), composer and Frederick Augustus Dixon (1843–1919), librettist of Canada's Welcome; and Joseph Vézina (1849–1924), composer and Alex Villandray, pseud. Alexandre Plante (1885–1916) and Louis Fleur, pseud. Antonio Langlais (1886–1977), librettists of Le fétiche.
2 For a more extensive discussion of musical citizenship as it relates to First Nations Peoples in Canadian operas, see Ingraham, Mary I., ‘Assimilation, Integration and Individuation: The Evolution of First Nations Musical Citizenship in Canadian Opera’, in Opera Indigène, ed. Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011): 211–230 Google Scholar.
3 Solie, Ruth A., Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 1.
4 Solie, , Music in Other Words, 2 Google Scholar.
5 See especially work in the field of native American music by Michael Pisani and Jonathan Bellman that acknowledges the non-specificity and relational and contextual significance of stereotypical musical devices. Many cultures, for instance, draw on harmonic drones, open sonorities, pentatonic scales and minor modes (to name a few of the features ascribed to the indigenous peoples of North America), but these conventionalized features, referred to here as ‘stereotypes’, are widely deployed to represent the sound of a generic ‘Indian’. See especially Pisani, Michael, ‘“I'm an Indian Too”: Creating Native American Identities in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Music’, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999): 218–257 Google Scholar. For the larger context of musical treatment of Native Americans, see Pisani, , Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar and Levy, Beth E., Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Miller, Kahn-Tineta, Lerchs, George and Moore, Robert G., The Historical Development of the Indian Act, 2nd edition, ed. John Leslie and Ron McGuire (Canada: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, PRE Group, Indian and Northern Affairs, 1978): 25–26 Google Scholar.
7 Miller, , Lerchs, and Moore, , The Historical Development of the Indian Act, 30 Google Scholar.
8 English and French, referred variously in Canadian Studies contexts as the voices of ‘founding’ or ‘colonizing’ voices might more broadly – and politically – be considered in the context of this study as the ‘governing’ voices that influence cultural creation.
9 See Ingraham, ‘Assimilation, Integration and Individuation’.
10 Brandão, José António and Starna, William A.. ‘The Treaties of 1701: A Triumph of Iroquois Diplomacy’, Ethnohistory 43:2 (1996): 209–244 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 209.
11 Ralph Locke describes this process as ‘inscribing [works] with an ideologically driven view’. Locke, Ralph. ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”: Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila ’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 261–302 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 262.
12 A caricaturist of Canadian politics in particular, J.W. Bengough was a liberal, and therefore not kindly disposed to the Tory party or its leader, then Prime Minister Macdonald. However, his work with Grip magazine reflects a broad interpretation of Canadian society that was somewhat sympathetic to the plight of First Nations in the 1870s and 1880s, inasmuch as he or any other Canadian was aware of the realities of their situation. Several of Bengough's images are reproduced in Cumming, Carman, Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 18.
13 Cumming, , Sketches from a Young Country, 201 Google Scholar.
14 In her introductory comments to a collection of excerpts from early Canadian operatic works, Dorith Cooper notes that the first performance of Gilbert and Sullivan in Ottawa took place in 1878–79 and that English operettas, parodies, burlesques, masques and so forth were commonly heard, suggesting that this was a British society accustomed to parody, popular song and (as it turns out) patronage. Dorith Cooper, ed., The Canadian Musical Heritage, vol.10: Opera and Operetta Excerpts I (Ottawa: Canadian Musical Heritage Society, 1991): x.
15 There are 11 characters in total in the drama, with the seven provinces reflecting those that were at that time constituents of the Dominion (in order of appearance: Quebec, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia); the singers also perform a variety of choruses: ‘Invisible Spirits’, ‘Backwoodsmen [and Trappers]’ (men alone) and a ‘right loyal chorus’. A piano/vocal score appeared as Clappé, Arthur A and Dixon, Frederick A., Canada's Welcome (Ottawa: J.L. Orme & Son, 1879)Google Scholar.
16 A fermata on the word ‘is’ that occurs in final iteration of the phrase in bar 47 strengthens this reading.
17 ‘West’ here refers to western Europe. Locke ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”’, 265.
18 Cooper, The Canadian Musical Heritage, x.
19 The reviewer writes that ‘[Clappé's] setting of Mr. Dixon's libretto displays intelligence of a very high degree of excellence, characteristic and correct musical expression, in the brilliancy and grandeur wherewith he has clothed the sentiments of the words’. Cooper, The Canadian Musical Heritage, x.
20 The Governor General's speech on arrival in Ottawa is published in his Memories of Canada and Scotland: Speeches and Verses. To place this brief quotation in its longer context: ‘It is with a peculiar feeling of pride in the grandeur of this Dominion that I accept, on the part of the Queen, the welcome given to us at Ottawa, the capital of the greatest of the colonies of the Crown. It is here that we shall take up our abode among you, and the cordiality of your words makes me feel that which I have known since we landed: that it is to no foreign country that we come, but that we have only crossed the sea to find ourselves among our own people, and to be greeted by friends on coming to a home’. John [George Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland] Campbell, Duke of Argyll and Marquis of Lorne, Memories of Canada and Scotland: Speeches and Verses (Montreal: Dawson, 1883).
21 CP Sessional Paper No. 27, Annual Report of Deputy Supt.-Gen. Pedley to [Frank] Oliver, 1 Sept. 1908, xxxv, cited in Miller, Lerchs and Moore, The Historical Development of the Indian Act, 107 Google Scholar.
22 Mackey, Eva, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002): 28 Google Scholar.
23 The real Tecumseh, a Shawnee Chief and military leader in the War of 1812 was not born until 1768, making his character anachronistic to this story set in 1701.
24 As a French nationalist expression, opéra-comique would have appealed to Vézina and his largely French (and mostly educated, upper class) audiences in Canada to whom Bizet's Carmen and Delibes’ Lakmé would likely have been familiar. The style of these and other late nineteenth-century realist works included the extensive dialogue, spoken rather than sung recitative, pseudo-historical settings and highly nuanced but real-life characters that appear in Le fétiche.
25 Mackey, , The House of Difference, 38–39 Google Scholar.
26 Locke, , ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”’, 276 Google Scholar.
27 A longer excerpt from Le Soleil is cited by Cooper: ‘Our pen isn't nimble enough, nor is it quite qualified to attempt an appreciation of this opera, but we can well say that the music is original and characteristic, has a pleasant cohesiveness which has drawn frenzied applause.’ Cooper, The Canadian Musical Heritage, xv–xvi.
28 Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993)Google Scholar: 131.
29 Locke is referring to evidence of orientalism in music, however, I suggest that this perspective applies here and similarly to any ‘Other’. Locke, ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”’, 285.
