Coming to terms with settler colonial values in the classical music world

11:03PM Apr 14, 2022

Speakers:

Bethany Reed

Dwayne Trudeau

Keywords:

people

music

canada

hierarchy

land

colonialism

musicians

happening

settler

indigenous

colonial

call

women

project

bit

create

culture

narrative

place

civilized

So there we go. Okay, so hi, everyone, again, welcome. My name is Bethany. And I'm just going to open up a little slideshow here to sort of get us going. I want to say thank you for coming and welcome to session number two of it's already happening. We have an amazing lineup of guests today, as you can see here on your screen. But before we get going, I just want to invite us all to remember that we're going to be in in building an accountable space together. So I've referenced this on the website, there's a link to the safe and brave spaces don't work and what you can do instead article by Elise, she's a fantastic person who I just happened to Google and find this article as part of this project. So I really encourage you to go read that like well if you have before, but after this as well. And check out her work at inclusion factor.ca as well. And then a little just like promo here. It's just to say we do have a lot of great sessions coming up. And since we're gonna get started with music today, I just wanted to share a little bit of the musicians that are coming up each are totally unique, totally amazing people in their own right. So check it out. And then I just wanted to say too, we have a surprise session tomorrow we've got a rescheduled session a little bit with one of our speakers Jacob Crane on Indigenous climate action, and that's tomorrow morning at 9am. So just in case it's last minute but if anyone wants to attend for that you're super welcome. Okay, um, so now I'm just going to turn my video on for one second and get things ready with our first guest, Dwayne Trudeau and I'm coming in we're gonna have a slight switch here and here we go. Dwayne is here and he's going to take us away with some of his awesome blues and what happens so

all right take the stage Dwayne morning death come my door come creepin death gonna stand made a deal Jesus gonna till Jesus Jesus gonna stand Jesus shall I hush lord call and children call call my name is children lord call my name oh my lord shall i do this? Is one I wrote myself this one's called Black Moon rising The roll just see from rising rising you not maybe did you darlin rising rising rising right you here's a Muddy Waters sail sail sail sail you're gonna keep on sailing you're happy Sounds like my little honeybee lot of buzzin you don't sounds like you've been all around the world making honey come home to me All right, thank you.

Thank you everybody, it's just like, as you can tell, we're just doing this from my place. So I'm just gonna turn the video up and return to my little like Office and give me like three seconds. We'll be right back. And thank you so much. Awesome.

Okay, one second. Okay, thank you for the little scene change here is

pretty casual session. Okay, so for our next part of the presentation, I would love to introduce Dr. Lise Vaugeois, who, I'm just going to hand it right over to them to let them take on whatever they want to do. So take it away.

All right. Hey, hello, everybody. And thank you, Bethany, for setting this up. It's awesome. And yeah, I'm excited to be able to talk about some of these ideas. First, I'd like to do a land acknowledgement. I am here in Thunder Bay, which is on the traditional territory of the Fort William, First Nation, signatory to the Robinson superior Treaty of 1850. And, you know, we do lots of not land acknowledgments. But it doesn't always means that anything actually changes in terms of land, back, restitution, and so on, all of which I think are actually what is necessary if we really want to see things change, and be more just. But I am still glad to acknowledge where I am at this at this time. And yeah, go on from there. So I think I don't know how easy it will be to have questions back and forth. But I would like to end I've got a presie. And I'll just say upfront that I am not an expert in this software at all. So I hope it doesn't let me down or I don't let you down by mucking up the software. So but before we do anything, I'd like you to think about what you love about playing in an orchestra or, and what you love about the classical music repertoire. And I don't know if anybody wants to type in any thoughts on that. I'm just going to leave it for a second in case anybody wants to pipe up. I know I've got things I love about it.

So I was trying to hear it because yes, because again, for me, it's the nonverbal communication that you get to experience with the other people around you making music. I've always loved that since I was a kid like you can just feel and know what someone is thinking based on how they phrase something or a little eyeglance or a slip a breath in body movement. That's, that's for me. But I do encourage everyone else to type in the panel. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, I love that too. I also love the complexity of the music. And sometimes the very subtle ways that you can be expressive with, you know, small things since, I mean, we've got three, at least three French horn players here. Playing a pedal note sometimes is incredibly exciting, because of all the harmonic changes that are going on over top. I mean, they're just many many things that yes, a large group working to for an overarching goal. And then the repertoire itself. I mean, there's just just some pretty darn amazing things and it's very physical and very rule. I wondered if anybody had any thoughts on you know, definitely, in my education as a classically trained musician. I learned subconsciously, but also, I think quite explicitly that the western classical Western classical music was considered superior to any other kind of music in the world. And that it it's universal, I was certainly taught that it that it is universal, the language of music is universal. And the language of classical music is universal, and really represents kind of the, the epitome of human development. Now, I don't know what anybody liked to contradict or affirm depends really, also when you went to school where you went to school, what kind of messages you've you've gotten.

Yeah, Bethany is saying agreed. So before we dive in, just thinking about the order of events, how to do this. I want you to you know what, no, I'm going to start I'm going to put up my Prezi. And just give us a little taste of this. So it's here. Turn on the sound, let's get a bit of this happening.

Now, if I could fade, I would, but I'm gonna do a bad thing and stop this. I'm sorry. So what I'd like you to think now, I don't know. I don't think I can see questions when I'm in screenshare. So Bethany, if you see anything come up, let me know. Please, I don't know if you can either. We're sure. Yep, I can. Okay. So for the moment, I would like you to forget everything you know, and feel about Canada. And about being Canadian. I think I hope you'll agree that that I certainly get all kinds of emotions stirred when I hear that music. I think it's a pretty darn exciting arrangement. And you think about it, we've been singing, hearing a national anthem since we were infants, certainly everyday once you're in school. So I'd like you to just note whatever emotional response you have to that. And then think, try and forget everything you know about being Canadian, what you think you know, about Canada. And almost as if you were on a satellite looking down this, that's the kind of perspective that we're looking to get some distance. I will come back to to our ideas and feelings later. But I want you to think back to the explorers, and various kings and queens, and businesses, like the Hudson's Bay Company that came to Canada to came to this part of the world, looking for wealth. Okay, that was the reason they were financing ships, financing explorers was that they were looking for wealth. So at the moment, I'm not talking about settlers. I'm just talking about the first people who came hoping to find some way to extract wealth and take it home. And I'd be rich. And I know for the kings and queens that was often about financing wars about other with other other European nations. So, of course, many were looking for gold, they didn't find gold, but they found a here, they found different resources that they could harness in order to become rich. So over these four or 500 years of exploration and colonization, European setup colonial governments and military outposts in different parts of the world so that they could extract resources, and make the people already living in these places work for them. So this is one type of colonialism. And the purpose of this has always been about getting rich by harnessing the land and labor from people already living in these spaces. So I'll go on to another slide. See what I had here. What is colonialism? A project to acumen In late wealth through the takeover land and resources and the harnessing of Indigenous bodies to provide cheap labor, and when I use the word Indigenous, that could be in India, the people already living in India in Africa. So it's not just referring to what we today in Canada, think of as indigenous. So then you've got the creation of Us and Them categories. And based on a concept of race that really didn't exist prior to this age of exploration. So in other words, there were ways of distinguishing, you know, you would, difference might be evaluated in terms of religion, where you came from, but there wasn't a sense of a hierarchy built on race built on what on people's physiology that really develops out of colonialism. And it comes out of distinguishing the rulers from the ruled. So in other words, you're European explorer, you're a European proxy government, you go to, say, India, you set up a government, you've got your military there to make sure that people do what you want them to do. And you start extracting resources, and you compel people there to provide cheap labor for you. And you will find in every colonial setting, that there were laws against miscegenation, so laws against actually

having children of then what would be considered mixed race, and need to think a little bit about why that would be a problem. But if the rulers are being distinguished from the ruled by what they look like, what they wear, how they carry themselves, then if you start to mix that up, you've actually undermined the hierarchy that you're trying to establish and hold in place. It's also this the were civilized the concept of the colonizing people being civilized, versus the the people, the people who are experiencing colonization, the colonized as uncivilized, Savage, primitive. And then at the same time, you've got laws that are created that enforce the distinctions between colonizers and the colonized. And then very strong work to maintain class, race and gendered categories of privilege or hierarchies, right hierarchies of who is believed to be more evolved more capable of reason, and therefore entitled to rule over others. So and you'll get the use of culture as a way to articulate distinctions between civilized and so called primitive peoples. So I'm going to go a little further into this. So here we have a European map of the world fairly fanciful. So I'm not going to dig into that, but I want to look at some more definitions. settler colonialism. So settler colonialism is a little bit different from the kind of colonialism practiced in in India, for example, because in in the wild call it term standard colonial colonial model, people went there extracted wealth, but eventually they left and went back to where they came from. settler colonialism is a different beast. So I'll read this is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of Indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops this distinctive identity and sovereignty. settler colonial states include Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Africa. Now take this one, one or two steps further. Yeah, it's been important to understanding conflicts. So not only in the go back, as we said, right, Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand as well. Okay, oops, there we go. Next one. And it is important in contemporary context to and trying to understand what is happening in Israel and Palestine, Kenya, Argentina. Anyway, we keep going. It just wanted to include a map of North America with all All the nations that were here, before Europeans came, or perhaps as they came, you know, obviously, these, these were were created to reflect where people were in North America. Right? So, we have in Canada, where we have I, by the way, I have a lot of dense quotes up here, I'm not going to read them all. In some ways, these are cue cards for me to make help me stay on track with what I want to explain. So settler colonialism is rare, an entirely new population is transplanted into a space already populated by other people. And the intent is to become the, the dominant population in that space. And in order to be a successful settler colony, ultimately, it means eliminating the Indigenous who were here first. And also maintaining a kind of the fancy word is exotics. Is it in here? Exogenous others really, that just means people from the outside and out, ultimately means racialized peoples are invited to the country, but never had to have exactly the same status as the settler population, which is a white settler population. So

again, you I don't expect you to necessarily take as the last word when I say some some of these things, because I will say that I've spent quite a few years trying digging through this literature and trying to understand why Canada is the way it is, why do we have reservations? Why is there so much poverty in Indigenous communities? Why was it set up that way? And then also to try and understand why incarceration rates are so high for Indigenous people, why Black people are so often killed by police. Things that are raised by black lives matter, all of these, these things happening to non white populations. Make sense when you understand the nature of a settler, colonial settler colonial project? Yeah, so let me let's take a step back again, and ask ourselves, what is racism? What is sexism? What is ableism? What are they? And what work do they do? Because I'm going to say that they are not natural. Responses to difference. Anybody feel feel like jumping in? And if not, I, you know, I'll keep going. I'm going to call them dividing practices. Okay. Racism is a way of dividing and ranking people into a taxonomy, which means just the hierarchy and order, right. And at the bottom of the order, you have people defined as savage and primitive. And then you have different colors, different Nash, different ethnicities that go up that scale. And then towards the top, you will have white women, white educated women. And at the very top of that, you will have educated white men as the pinnacle of evolution. So what what, what does it what does that do to have a hierarchy like that, really, it justifies differential access to the means of life. Right? It stands in as a rationale for why some people get a lot and some people are crushed down. And the more that hierarchy can make be made to seem natural, the more powerful it is. So I'm saying that these these hierarchies serve a purpose. They serve a psychological purpose. They serve a political purpose by dividing people from each other. And if you are a little bit higher up on that hierarchy, You actually have an investment in maintaining your place there, you certainly don't want to go down the hierarchy. And if at all possible, you want to go up. And I would say that that is probably maybe a little bit more of human nature, whereas I don't think that having hierarchies and these these categories is is necessary is part of human nature. I don't think it is. Okay, so I pulled out, I just pulled out this quote, It's from 1879. And the writer says, females in poets also belong to the degenerate race. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets, and novelists recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution, and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. Now, I include I included this, obviously, because it tells us about beliefs and bias biases, but also the choice of words, the degenerate race. So the notion that some races are more evolved than other races that are

dangerous in, in many respects, because they're degenerate. Now, obviously, women are then reduced to the status of children. And then we have savages, which is clearly in contrast to civilized man. And then poets and novelists who are dangerous because they weren't manly enough. And therefore closer to the female, closer to emotion. And, and not valued, not seen as rational, and civilized. So we might say, Well, okay, that's just a quote, it's all this from the 19th century, we're well past that. But in fact, you see these hierarchies playing out in so many systems. So let me move on from there. Yeah. So the great chain of being that's actually goes way back to medieval times. And it's not necessarily about the evolution of the so called evolution of races, was kind of had plants, metals, plants, it's kind of a stack of, of observable things with humans at the top, so that and then God above that. But then you will also that morphed into something different in the 18th and 19th centuries, great chain of being or the great tree of being where you ranked races. And I should say, Here, race is an invention, right? There's only one human race. It's not like we're different species, or fundamentally different in it in any ways we have come from different parts of the world. But race is a social construct. But it's extremely powerful. And is embedded in almost all of our institutions, and in philosophy and in law, so and then the invention of whiteness. So I don't think that initially was to say that the the British did not refer to themselves as white, they would have referred to themselves as British or from wouldn't have been the United Kingdom them at that time or but but from England. However, you have in the southern United States, the plantation owners, and they are importing labor, indentured servants from Europe. And also people from Africa coming over in the slave ships. Now initially, slaves and indentured servants didn't have there wasn't a huge difference in their status. They were both being forced to work. And, you know, what was happening is that they were actually aligned with each other, getting together and making babies together. And and they started organizing against the plantation owners. And the plantation owners came up with the strategy of creating very different categories. So Black people were reduced to property, exclusive property of their white owners. With no legal entitlements of their own. And white people, the indentured servants were given slightly more status, slightly better rights, and given power over the black workers. So it is pretty standard divide and conquer strategy. And we see it happening all the time that will never go out of style. And ultimately, through various laws, these things don't happen by themselves, you can't just say to your neighbor, hi, you know, yes, your skin is black, my skin is white, and we're friends. And then the next day you say know, whites have more status than blacks. You're not just going to turn on your friend in that moment and say not okay, I'm better than you. It has to be produced, it has the need to work at it. So you work at it through language, through how you describe things, and through law. And, and eventually, those white people, even though they had nothing really start to have an investment in understanding themselves as different and better than the black people who were initially basically in the same, having the same status they had. And so we see what we see over and over again, is then

politicians and others with a vested interest in dividing workers from each other, incite this kind of white panic, so that white people start to identify with their race. And with those who are actually ruling over them as as if that's really how they're identified and what shapes their status in society. I mean, we know that there have always been lots of poor white people. But it's been a very effective in in institutionalizing racism at a very, very deep level. And, of course, we do need to remember that the wealth of the United States, the wealth of Canada, has been produced through two main strategies. One is the dispossession of Indigenous people. So taking that land, and the other is through slavery, and, and therefore cheap labor. And slavery has had a significant role in Canada. One that a lot of people don't know about some most, most of the time we learned about the Underground Railroad, and how Canada was a safe haven. And, you know, we are so much better than Americans so much more moral. That was, in fact, not true. There were certainly people who tried to help and assist Black people escaping slavery. But there were also bounty hunters who followed them here. And they were easily taken back. They were shunned by white populations here. They were refused land. Even the UNITED EMPIRE loyalists who are Black who were promised land were never given the land. So there's, there's much more to the the Underground Railroad story. And slavery was a key part of the economy in Lower Canada and in Montreal, and on the east coast and in areas like Toronto. Okay, so where do we go from there. So we've got interesting things in in Canada, because the first big resource that Europeans were able to tap here was the first trade. And you've got this vast landscape that for Europeans was hostile, physically hostile territory, right, they didn't know had no idea how to survive. And in order to have a thriving flirt for trade, they needed to work together with Indigenous people. It was a shared trade, and intermarriage was encouraged. So this is a little different from what we see in many other initially other colonial settings, in that intermarriage was considered important. And this was because Indigenous women knew the land were very hard workers, and were able to help their European partners you know, stay alive, paddle canoes, catch the furs, etc, etc. What happens after this? Let me see if I've said what happens after this. Yeah, okay. And you know what, I'm gonna go back to this picture for the moment Once the fur trade dries up or stops being really useful, whether people stop buying or you know, beaver start to become scarce. The economic interests becomes resource extraction. Trees, initially trees for masts for ships, and ultimately minerals. So, at this point, the colonizing powers want the land, they want as much of the land as possible, they want control over that land. And they don't want anybody else getting in and taking it. So you know, ultimately, you've got the French English wars. And the Red River settlement, which is, you know, one of the first, initially, before it becomes a site of rebellion, one of the first places where white women are brought as a group to the country. And at that point, many men abandoned their Indigenous wives and children, and married white women. So that gave them higher status. And, of course, it left

many women and their children abandoned. And you see laws made that that say, Nope, those marriages, according to the custom of the country, they don't count. They're not valid. Only marriages that take place in a Christian church are valid. So the what you see in those laws, is that it's, the project has changed. So initially, the project was becoming wealthy through the fur trade. Now the project is going to be gaining status in the society, but gaining wealth through other kinds of resource extraction. And as they tried to expand their hold on the landmass, indigenous people are in the way, because they're already there. And they already have what would be considered natural rights to where they live. Now, lots of ways that Europeans found to eliminate those rights. So one of them is the concept of Terra Nullius. And you'll see this associated with any settler colonial state, there's the claim that the place was empty. And I think I included this, this particular image because it's clearly not empty, since 1847. And, and we'll see in other pictures that the landscape is clearly not empty, but it was used as a rationale, the other rationale that came from a papal bull. And if you follow indigenous political battles, you will, you may recognize the request that the doctrine of discovery, which comes out of a papal bull, that basically said that Christians could take land belonging to anybody who was considered a heathen. And so they had a couple of different rationales one was that well, the place was empty. So we just took it. And the other was, well, the people who were there were not civilized, they were savages, and they were heathen. And so we took it upon ourselves to Christianize them and therefore we still have the right to be here. Okay, I just included this one, just as a reminder of what this ruling group initially look like. So it's all man, it's all white men. And we'll come back to that idea of the rule of white men as the source of knowledge, rationality, and thus deserving of the highest place in society deserving of the people who make all the decisions. Okay. There's another concept that's particularly assorted associated with the United States is the idea of Manifest Destiny. In other words, the newcomers are here with by the great with the grace of God. And they are bringing civilization where civilization never existed before. And you've got this figure, Lady bountiful with books so she is bringing white wisdom and knowledge and of course, and many women then took on the role of being teachers, teachers of cultures, school teachers, and them. So again, so that's the third justification for taking over land that is already inhabited by other people. Okay, this one's contemporary. So I think this was fun, I found this online 1990 I believe it was painted for the Canadian military, I just find it amazing how this nubile white woman is, again, sort of used as a representation of Canada, and the True North strong and free as a as a as a military inspiration. Okay, so maybe I'll just take one step, before I talk about this, I might read this one. You've got this big landscape, you want control over it? How are you going to do that? Well, what they do is they import populations to take up the space. And they import populations that they hope will be loyal to the colonial governments. And at this time, of course, it would have been Britain, France.

And, you know, people were seduced in many ways to come to the new world to go to Australia. In some cases, in Australia, of course, they had no choice. They were taken there as prisoners. But they people had very many reasons to pick up from where they were, and move to an entirely new place. Some were oppressed in Europe and looking to escape. Some were younger sons of wealthy families, who would not inherit the wealth of their families, because that would go to the oldest son. And so they were looking for places to establish themselves for land that they could call their own. There were many, many reasons that people came. But for the colonial powers, the primary purpose of those people was to provide workers and to provide the means to own and control and populate the territory, the territory that they wanted to have control over. So and that, of course, ultimately involved the dispossession, a continuous process of dispossession of Indigenous through various means. And through legal structures, and through starvation, deliberate starvation, and so on. So that they could have access to all the resources, we still see this happening, wet sweat out west, the attempts to stop fracking out east, there's not a part of Canada, where there have not been or are not, at this moment, Indigenous people standing up and saying, Would you stop taking our territory, we have hardly any left. We live here and we want to, we want to control the place that we live in. This process of dispossession has never stopped. So that's kind of the background and I hope that you've been able to, you know, abstract your own feelings of who you are, because we all have stories of how our families came here. And who we are, and you know, how open and great Canada is and multicultural and so on. And you know, much of what I've said contradict set or at least puts sets those stories into a different context. So then we get to culture. And this Nicholas Dirks is one one writer who writes a lot about culture and colonization. Culture was what colonization was all about. cultural forms in newly classified traditional societies were reconstructed and transformed by and through colonial technologies of conquest and rule, which created new categories and opposition's between colonizers and colonized European and Asian modern and traditional west and east and even male and female. That said, it's a dense quotation, but if I break it down a little bit, there wouldn't necessarily have been the concept of European culture, white culture, versus what they would have said about Indigenous people as having no culture at all. Or in in different parts of Asia. Right. You've got suddnely you have a more and more definition applied to what it means to be European, what it means to be Asian. And these are brought in comparison with each other with a very clear hierarchy as as to what represents civilized and what represents something lower down on the scale. So culture is a very important part of the colonizing process. What is the colonizing process is the process of making the new comers, the natural owners of the territory that belong actually belong to somebody else. So you've got to naturalize this, you've got it you what you wind up doing is creating whole narratives of discovery, narratives of hearty noble explorers conquering the wilderness, and nothing actually about the political work of removing people from their homes, and doing whatever you can to make them disappear and no longer be in the frame.

They this I've included this quote, and again, it's fairly complex. But I'm going to read it. And Laura Stoller, so she is an amazing scholar of colonialism, but not so much of, of the kind of settler colonialism, but the colonialism that took place. In other parts of the world. She describes race as the organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity, the civilizing mission, and the measure of man were framed. So the imperial order, so we're talking about the, the European centers of power, in which modernity, so modernity is seen as associated with the European powers. The civilizing mission, again, and the measure of men were framed. So you've got people who are going to different parts of the world. And, and even in Britain, there, there are class wars taking place, okay, people are being dispossessed from their farmland, and being pushed into cities to become industrial workers, low wage industrial workers. And in much of their energy is this their anger towards the ruling classes is diffused by getting them to sort of invest in this idea that they are civilized, and that Britain, in this case, is off, doing great things in the world by bringing civilization to the savage parts of the world. So culture then gets harnessed to do very specific political work. So not only to mark difference, okay, so that should be fairly clear, we're using culture to distinguish one group from another group, but to rationalize hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the labor regimes of expanding capitalism, to provide the psychological scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule. So in other words, you are creating a kind of a buy in, you're creating a narrative that gets people excited about being part of the empire. And it also serves to somehow make the hierarchies and the exploitation that takes place under capitalism, whether that is in Europe or in the colonies, you may be being exploited in Britain, but at the same time, you're part of this white race that is bringing civilization to the rest of the world. And we'll come to that because we get songs of empire that are meant to, again, excite people about being part of a civilizing project. And somehow it makes these hierarchies then make sense, right? It's it's as a kind of an embodiment and a justification for very hierarchical societies. Yeah, so this is important. The practice of reframing the violence is of colonialism as the moral work of rationally superior beings engaged the project of bringing civilization to lesser others melds comfortably with evolving notions of Western cultural expressions as autonomous works existing outside of bodily needs the local contingent or political. And that should ring a bell should resonate really, with what most of us have been taught is that we are taught to be still when we play our instruments. And granted those instruments are hard enough that it's easier to play them when you are more or less still. But we are somehow divorced and completely separate from the political as if culture existed in an on an entirely different plane. And in that way, you have these exalted valorizing often very beautiful things happening that really cover over how violent the process of colonial is, colonialism actually is. Because it is a violent process because it's based on dispossession.

Okay, okay, now, I won't read all of this. But we've got all of these things going on. And it's becomes has become very important to be a man's man a manly man. I it'd be interesting actually, to do this study, if you at looking at at fashion, because men's fashions men, you know, wore such interesting, flowery flamboyant things at one time. As you move into the industrial revolution that disappears, and you know, men have to look somber, serious, and the suit becomes important, important way of distinguishing oneself as rational and destined to lead over others. So, this problem for musicians, first of all, the whole economic structure is changing. So whereas musicians we're working, we're certainly working for the ruling classes, but those arrangements are shifting, power is shifting and wealth is shifting. And musicians don't find themselves in a very weak position relative to the new men of commerce. And they it's difficult for many musicians to in even in the 19th century to be making a living. So, and we also move into more complex kinds of music. I mean, there's a lot of different things happening. But I love this, we do get the invention of the great maestro, leading his discipline forces of men in the interpretation of works of divine greatness. And this is said to embody the highest patriarchal principles of order. The above all, he is a leader of men, his subjects look to Him for guidance. He is at once a father image, the great provider, the fount of inspiration, the teacher who knows all to call him a great moral force would not be an overstatement. Perhaps he is half divine. Certainly, he works under the shadow of divinity. He has to be a strong man and the stronger he is the more dictatorial he is called by those he governs. He has to stretch out his hand and he has obeyed. He tolerates no opposition, His will His Word is very glance, our law. So this is written in 1967. And Schoenberg is describing really what he understands to be the the ideal of the conductor. The symphony orchestra also took on the complementary function of modeling the importance of accepting one's place under the guidance of a superior intelligence, a key rationale for the domination of owners over workers and colonizers over those being colonized. So it's yours, you'll see this, this comes to play more and more in the Canadian context. But so you you see a society that, particularly through the cult, through the colonial relationship, is highly invested in hierarchies. And an embodied an embodiment of who is entitled to rule who has the natural attributes of reason, rationality, competence, emotional distance, and that's what makes them suitable to rule over all others. Now, we know that, you know, many of the earlier orchestras that we know about Toscanini just being one, we're often quite dictatorial, I can think of one particular conductor in Thunder Bay, who was certainly enjoyed that sense of being the master over all others. Now, hopefully, we've all experienced, working with conductors working with musicians. Even though an orchestra is structured very much like in a hierarchy in a hierarchy that are more collegial. I think it's harder to these days to maintain that rigid hierarchy. But it is built into the built into the institution. And also, then you have, you know, the, it's not right for women to play in orchestras because they're emotional and sexual and distract men and their compositions are weak, and if the compositions aren't weak, then they're too manly, therefore, they're unnatural and so on and so on. I mean, the there are innumerable ways of justifying

elevating oneself, and devaluing other categories of the human. Yeah. So during the period of colonial encounters the project to catalogue a canon of great works of Western music coincided with the other intellectual projects asserting the supremacy of western male cultural accomplishments over the accomplishments of all other races. Within the field of art, music itself, distinctions of greater or lesser merit also proliferated. Music performed by male musicians was more worthy than music written for amateur female performers. music composed by men was inherently superior to music composed by women. Music conceived according to formal considerations was more worthy than music with programmatic elements. Instrumental Music is loftier than vocal music because there are no program at oops, sorry. Oh, what did I do? Okay, sorry about that. I have to move the picture. That's problem. Yeah. Nor should it be noted our female performers required to mute perform music that is not sung therefore it also has higher status musicians.

Yeah, symphonic music particular the music of the rational classical composers is the most elevated of public musical forms. symphonic music with its greater length, and the need to engage a number of a large number of musicians is a medium that is said to demonstrate the highest levels of compositional mastery. Okay, so we see that my number of male musicians are highly invested in having that highest rank or certainly being above the rank of women, or racialized peoples, and the notion that Western culture is superior to any other form of culture. And again, you have to ask yourself, well, why like, what work is this doing? It's actually doing political work. And the political work it's doing is and joining all the settlers in joining the colonizers in India and Africa, wherever they are, into a whole belief system and series of cultural practices that allow them to distinguish themselves from those who are lower on the hierarchy.

Yeah, so the the symphonic model is actually a military and industrial model with everybody has their specific part, when the parts by themselves have very little meaning. You won't have a concert just made up of French horn orchestral excerpts. So it only works when it all comes together and it is predetermined by the composer and then organized by the maestro. Whereas many earlier forms of music making invited composition switching up of instruments it was potentially more egalitarian. And I think it's also interesting you'll notice in paintings from those periods There are many female musicians, whereas you get to the colonial era in Canada. And women, the women's musical club is the place for women musicians, but the Toronto Symphony doesn't want any, and, and so on. So in so, you know, in certain respects as musicians that was easier for women before, before the colonial era, and before the invention of the symphony orchestra. Okay, yeah. So that's basically what I said I won't. I'm going to keep going because I don't want to run out of time. Oh, oh, what happened? Where's the rest of it? There's lots more here. So how do I get to it?

Oh, no, don't worry. You're doing awesome. I am also technically adversiv like this. So just a little don't worry about it. Yeah.

Okay. I know exactly what I'm looking for. So where the heck are you? Okay. It's there's a slide and maybe it's this one. Are you going to be horrible to me? Okay, this is good place. Music in the management of populations, hopefully, like, it's going to let me keep going a Oh, you will? I will. I hate you. Okay, it's not gonna let me that's gonna be harder, but I think I can manage. Okay. And that's too big. There we go. So you get divisions into kinds of music. So now we're talking about the colonial settler state. You've got music designed for schooling, schools designed for the masses. You've got music and education designed for the middle and upper classes. You've got the music and education designed for the residential schools, you've got what you can call pedagogies of music used to teach Patriot patriotism. And then schooling and music and nonconformist schools, I don't think I get go into that in this particular thing. So will you let me keep going? Nope, you are going to be so mean to me? No, oh, this is cruel. It's all here, but I'm gonna have to do it bit by bit. And it's probably not going to be an order. What is this picture here? Okay, you know what, I'm going to have to do it out of order. Because I, I can't actually see the bits and pieces. So let's just, we'll just go with it. Residential Schools, you think about music, it is understood to be very powerful. So when we think about those national anthems, how deeply they are inside of our bodies, you've heard it every day, for most of your life. And so really, the whole idea of national anthems is to create an emotional, visceral bond between how who you understand yourself to be and a sense of loyalty to the state. So while we might be looking at at Russia, for example, and saying, those are terrible things there, but they will, there will be a Russian going on, but there will be a Russian national anthem that people in Russia will have heard forever, and many will be convinced that everything Russia does is good, because that's what they've been taught on an emotional level for their entire lives. And that is true for us as well. We've been given a narrative of, of who we are as Canadians, and that is tolerant, peaceful. We conquered Canada peacefully, there was no violence involved. We've always been welcoming of racialized others, even though that's so not true. But that is the narrative. And so then we get, you know, this this, we tend to remain loyal to the concept of Canada, because we've got this really strong emotional bond. And that tells us that there's an acknowledgement of how powerful music is informing identities. So you get the residential schools well, they're not allowed to do Ah Do any of their own music. And their ceremonies are actually forbidden not just at the schools but throughout so that people were arrested if they were involved in any traditional ceremonies, which always involved music. And so then then they were, you know, fed a diet of hymns. And in some places that were actually banned programs. And I think there's another study to be had there because I suspect that tuberculosis spread through those banned programs. Knowing how lacks we were when I was a kid in high school, and all we ever did was washed the mouthpiece.

So, anyway, the point is, these communities were policed by Indian agents, they weren't allowed to do ceremonies, they were subjected to imprisonment. Their own music was therefore perceived as dangerous to the mission to assimilate Aboriginal peoples. It was acknowledged as a powerful form of identity and community cohesion. So now I got to try one of the others. Let's see public education, good schooling of the masses. So here we have people, we've got people from all kinds of different parts of the world. And the goal is to bring them all together and try to meld them into some kind of unified population. This is not the ruling class. These are farm kids, maybe merchant, the children of merchants, small merchants, merchants, and so on large class sizes initially as many as 100, ranking very strict ranking very strict discipline. Public education aimed at this group is intended to create a homogenous population, patriotic, docile, obedient to authority, accepting of their place in a hierarchical society. students in public schools were to learn basic literacy and numeracy and prepare to take up places as farmers and industrial workers. A particular repertoire of music is created for use in public schools. And what is amazing is that a lot of the music created for kids, for kids in this context, is still in our song books. And it's basically very, very simple music 34, 44, no syncopations, about pastoral scenes, and we love animals, and we love to go to work every day. And it's a very particular kind of repertoire, particularly given that there were many Black churches around, even at this time, and there were Indigenous people around although they've been already pushed to the margins. And so there's other kinds of music around but they were, it's very clear that the music for public education is to be not pollute, not polluted by other forms of music. And I'm going to skip I know there's one over there, but I'm gonna skip that one and try and find, right middle class men and women. Okay, so students at private schools, and grammar schools, so, such as the school of elocution, or the Toronto Conservatory of Music, students here were to be educated to embody a higher class of people. Members of this class were to benefit from the most advanced ideas in pedagogy, and concern themselves with the most profound problems of the human soul by studying the canon of English literature, and Western classical music. So people paid to send their children to the schools and at a certain point grammar for briefly women were girls were allowed to go to grammar schools, and then Parliament made it illegal for girls to go to those schools. So that would have opened up lots more space for women's colleges. Things like the school of elocution, you know, where women would go to be made into ladies young young ladies. They weren't accepted even in the conservatory which starts in 1986. There are women students there, but it's the men who go there who are expected to become professionals and the women are there you know, refining their social skills. Okay. But you add at these schools, of course, they are learning the canon of Western classical music. They're also learning how to stand how to dress how to move, so that it's immediately apparent through their education and through their bodily comportment that they belong to a higher class of people, a class that is entitled and naturally suited to ruling over others. Okay, was there anything else I wanted to say? Oh, public music's, I think is what I wanted to get to, if I can find it.

Yeah, okay. We'll just look a little bit at this one. So the other area that I spent a lot of time looking at was public forms of music making, again, that our you get a particular narrative tool, the music is there to create this visceral emotional bond with a particular narrative. And Vancouver Olympics, certainly one you see incredible spectacle, but it is always follows this narrative of Canada, the good Canada the great as it does in when the Olympics are held up elsewhere, and I just the mask of Canada, if I can find it here.

Did something similar? Will I find it? I might not? Don't? Why are you sitting there in the middle of nowhere.

This is important, but it's not the one I was looking for the mask of Canada, I can't find it. But it was done in the 19th century. And it basically tells a story about an Indian chief and his, his his daughter and their their, you know, showing loyalty to Canada and how glad they are that the British have come and brought them civilization and so on. These narratives, then, again, are used to boy up the sense of entitlement and righteousness of the colonial project. Now, so we are I run out of time, and I list some pretty cool things to show you. So I will show you this one and then I'm going to show you a few contemporary, more contemporary pieces if you get there. Three songs the West Coast. Oh, don't do that. Sorry. Please, they're come out. Come, come, come. Okay. I think you can see that Mario's Barbeau, Duncan Campbell, Scott, Ernest Macmillan. So I expect that anybody here knows Ernest Macmillan as a key musical person, you know, early Toronto Symphony, Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto and the Conservatory, and music clubs across the entire country. And Duncan Campbell Scott was the deputy minister of of Indian Affairs, he is he was a poet. I certainly studied him in university. And he was also the person who was one of the primary architects of the residential schools at the point when children were forcibly removed from their homes, and essentially kidnapped and sent to residential schools. And then Mario's Barbeau was a an at ethnologists, he collected folk songs and the National was big part of the National Archives. The three of them? Well, I don't think Duncan Campbell Scott, but Barbeau and Macmillan went out to and visited the NAS river tribes, there's actually film footage of it to record some songs. So the idea was, and they were got money, they got government money, to go record songs from the dying race of dying races of these Indians, right? They're all dying off. So we've got to protect this. And the idea was, we'll get their songs and then we're going to create we'll we'll turn them into art songs. And therefore now we are Indigenous to this land, by identifying ourselves with dead Indians, right? It's live Indians are never good thing, but dead Indians are great for cultural production. So and they, the thing is, is that they go out there. The NASS river Indians were engaged even then in a land claims battle. So they were not disappeared at all. But the narrative of course, is that they were primitive and and that these these people were civilized and therefore entitled and and doing a service somehow Okay, so that I'll tell you when I found that piece, it blew my mind. Because there was the story in its own nutshell. Now there's another piece here. Can I even find it? It's so tiny and it shouldn't be the Arts and Letters club of Toronto. It now admits women it now admits people who aren't white, but really it's the center of cultural colonialism. This is an illustration. There are two illustrations I'd like to show you and I'm sorry because we are getting it's getting very late. There you see Samuel de Champlain staking the land for France. And you see these Indians I use the word in the historical sense scurrying off in the distance, knowing that their time is up. And then the text itself is you know about the land of liberty the North man's home. God save this land we pray we're air we roam a land of liberty, the North man's home. So there you can see even in those few sentences, the idea of North and of the settler as being the natural ruler, and entitled to the land, as bringing civilization where none existed before. Now, holy cow, Where's all my stuff?

Okay, so some contemporary tunes, if I can show them. So my, my research got structured around a very specific concert. Here we go. This is Arts and Letters club. And you see a Viking ship with sails full spread before the rising sun to remind members of the open sea in the great adventure, which is how they think of colonization to themselves. Of course, it's not how Indigenous people think of it. So we have things like ghostliness. This piece, and you know what, I've got sound attached to some of these, but I suspect it's not going to work. Keep waiting. It's a beautiful piece. But what is it it's made up of? Ojibwe names that are essentially they're just for the sound it is a kind of a ghostly ghostliness that functions as code as you know, things of the past these are our this is a culture that's dead but but we can use it to create mystery. And I want to find one other thing. There's many, many others, but I'm going to just find one if I can find it, if you will. Let me do this please. Okay, here we go. This one might actually play Okay, so we're not all the same age Damian I'm not sure you're even you might be too young for this but in 1967 We had this the Canadian Centennial Bobby Gambi went around playing his trumpet and all the school kids were taught this song and what you're going to see one little two little three Canadians if you can see that. There's so much like one little two little three little Indians four and then five little six little Indians will you play? Let's see.

Okay, can I stop this? Yes, I still remember every word of that. Oh, now that I'm here, can I ever get back? Yes. Ah, so you see a narrative of strong emotional associations. And if I can find a one last thing, I will stop there. You If I can find it. It is a song by Paul Halley. Called song for Canada. Oh, my goodness, where is it gone? Well, doesn't matter. I will close this, if I can figure out how to do that. But the reason I had that song, the Paul Halley song for Canada, is that it? In the words, it always talks about land of tomorrow. So the narrative around Canada's that there was no history until, and no culture until a settlers came here. And that it is always building towards becoming a mature nation. Okay. So I don't know how, how many have hung in. But I hope that's a bit of an overview and a bit of a taste. We're all subject to narratives, write stories, stories and stories that we want to identify with. In no way, in deconstructing all of this do I want to say, oh, symphony orchestras are bad, classical music is bad. I mean, we love it for a reason. But it is also deeply embedded in this colonial structure. And in the, in the making invisible, making invisible the violence of colonization. And we see that violence all around us, but it gets rationalized away as well. They just couldn't cope with modernity. They're primitive, they're alcoholics, they naturally are alcoholics. And whatever it is, they want to say, and we, you know, we can't have too many Black people coming here, because their cultures are too different. We see that right now, where Canada is ready to embrace war refugees from the Ukraine, whereas people, there are horrific things happening in other parts of the world, with racialized refugees, who are not welcome. So the contradictions are very visible once you start to notice them. And what do we do with that, as musicians who who loves this thing that has, you know, has its history has has its limitations? It's not just a matter of bringing other people into our world, because our world was structured to be exclusionary. So why would why would somebody who has been excluded from this world want to be part of it or see themselves as as getting as being enjoying their lives through this? Now, it's not that you know, many people from other parts of the world do love classical music and play it and want to play it and enjoy listening to it. But, you know, embedded in our histories is this idea that what we do is civilized, and we can lift other people up to our level of civilization by introducing them to our way of making music and in fact, in many colonial settings, local musics were repressed were considered to be just low class. And they were only, you know, taught Western, either Western school music or Western classical music. The Thunderbay Symphony Orchestra has definitely been trying to like see people trying to figure out what the heck does it look like? To what would reconciliation look like? What kind of collaborations are possible that are respectful, that don't just replicate the same set of relationships?

And then all of this is embedded in, you know, a system of capitalism. And it's hierarchical and and based on you know, extracting wealth from workers as much as possible extracting wealth that's that's the idea. And, you know, sometimes you look at the society and say, well, the whole thing's a mess. Oh, climate change is with us. We can It seemed to get our governments or and the corporations to change their approach their set of values. And here we are. We play our instruments, how do we, you know, what's our role? How do we participate? And how do we become agents of change? In a system that, you know, we didn't make it, but we're definitely part of it, and it inhabits our psyches and our expectations, so I'm going to shut up, it's about time. And I would love it if people had something to say to ask comments, you can also say, you know, that was way too much. And I never want to hear about this again, whatever.

Well, I'm going to happen here and start and just first off, say, thank you. Thank you for the time your research your energy for for being part of this event, and letting us listen to what you have to say, I've been making notes this whole time. And I think there's just so much food, for thought, and so much to take away and reflect just on a personal level. There are like we were talking about a little bit before, there are some things in there that are just going oh, gosh, like that. That's something I've been, like putting around in my head, but in a different way. And I'm now connecting new ideas based on some of your research and the things that you've said. And I just one thing that resonated was when you said to more study, in the music, the use of music in residential schools, I think that needs to be examined. That's a national story. That I don't even know what I mean by that. But like that's an element that we have to look into more and just framing music as a colonial tool. We've got comments coming in here from Damien, thank you so important to reflect on all this? Yep.

Yeah, I was looking at, you know, you asked about, you know, things to a reading list and so on. And I actually wound up looking at an older paper of mind. I mean, there's my dissertation, which should be turned into a book, but I may never have time to do that. And, but there's also another paper about culture and colonization. And I'll I'll, in a second, pull them, pull up the references and just stick them in the chat. You know, I don't recommend I wouldn't recommend them for our high school students. Because just because academic language is such a pain, if you're not used to reading it. But I think that there are lots of bits, lots of pieces in those, even the shorter paper that I think people would find useful. And then plus, of course, you know, there's the bibliography at the end of every paper, which is always going to give people lots of room to go, Oh, hey, you know, and there's, there is also a literature about race and music. So if you try that, oh, did I just accidentally share my screen? I did. I did that. One of those weird things, in fact, okay. Sorry. Anyway. How can I get out of here? Not letting me get out. Okay, nevermind. Are you seeing my screen? Or is it just me? You are okay. Well, let's just pretend it's not there. Yeah,

I would love to still invite anyone who's in attendance, if you feel like it, type of question, whatever. It's all good. You're invited to do that. In the meantime, I would like to post another one too, which is one of the original intents for this project was to be for a much younger audience. Yes. Much, much younger. So how can we, in the music community, distill these ideas, translate these ideas, this message, the research for a younger audience? We're just scratching the surface. I feel right now on a lot of these so called equity subjects, for the younger people, but I would I think these are vital conversations and concepts and knowledge to be involving a much younger audience with how can we do that? And

I agree, and I think it's challenging. But it also, you know, and I have to say I was a little bit relieved when you said that, that the younger group was not coming, because I didn't know if I could pull it off. And I probably couldn't have at this point. But, you know, younger, I shouldn't generalize too much about younger people, right? Because a lot of people can be quite young and already be dealing with some very, very difficult stuff. You'll, and kids will be dealing with racism on a daily basis, or occasional racism or microaggressions. They may be dealing with violence in their home, they may be seeing, you know, confused about a million different things, they might be really worried about climate change. They might be incredibly privileged and happy. And I don't you know, that there's a whole range of, but I asked myself if young people aren't still closer to the idea of fairness. You know, we really notice when people are not fair to us, when it affects us. And I also think that I don't, you know, so I'll pose this more as a as a question when I was in high school. We definitely it was very cliquey. We had the band kids, there were the sports kids. There were the academic kids. Oh, Damien, interesting. Their friends at school are often sitting during the national anthem. Ha, yes, that's really interesting. To have my high school friends, we also stopped standing for the national anthem. And it was partly after we'd learned about Nazi Nazism. And the way music was used to, to seduce to, you know, bring people into believing in it. And so, you know, my two friends and I would go to public events, and we'd sit during the national anthem, I don't know that we had a huge depth of understanding, but we did understand that it was manipulative. Yes, yeah, understanding that blind power. And that emotional connection. I think that young people I found at the dinner table a couple of years ago with my nieces and nephews, and they are in a family that's quite well off. And so they always, you know, I said something about an Indigenouspeople in some context, they don't don't remember. And the two youngest kids piped up and said, yes, what happened at the residential schools was really bad. And that, you know, really blew me away, because it was the kids who were saying they had come to understand that something had happened. And it really wasn't right. It wasn't fair. You know, a place like Thunder Bay, there are a lot of Indigenous people here. And there's an enormous amount of racism here. In some respects, it's easier for people in a larger place like Toronto to not see necessarily see the effects and the violence as it has played out on people's bodies of colonialism. So it seems like something over there or something that happened in the past, it's not past it's very much in the present. And I do think that kids are capable of understanding pieces, the pieces about, about people, the stories now in terms of music, sometimes depends on what kind of teaching they're getting. Do they have a teacher who has really completely bought into this a civilization and, you know, we're raising other people up through our greatness. You also got some teachers who really work hard at trying to respect other kinds of music and respecting what the kids bring in with them themselves. And, you know, refusing that hierarchy and instead trying to bring a curiosity

we want that I think that curiosity is a really good starting place. I don't think it's the end place. because then you can valorize your ennoble yourself and say, Well I'm so open minded I love this music and that music is like going to all the the ethnic restaurants in Toronto, right? You're really forward looking because you do that. That doesn't actually change anything on the ground. Right? It doesn't change oppression, it doesn't take it away. So we have to get there. I think that there are many steps to coming to recognize. You know what, maybe the way it is to say it, it's like classical music has been weaponized to create a hierarchy. It's been weaponized, and it's been weaponized to rationalize violence and oppression. And it does not mean that the music itself is bad, right, but it is it can be used in that way. And and that's what we need to recognize the TBS Oh, did something that I felt was a big misstep. A while ago, came out and gave a really beautiful land acknowledgement. And then played Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, I think it was God saved the king. Well, can't be more colonial than that. You know, yeah, it's it's an exciting piece. But there are lots of exciting pieces. Why that one? So I do think that also, you know, we're taught to balance our programs and you have, you know, here's your exciting moment. Here's your thoughtful moment. And just to treat repertoires, it, it's neutral. And I think that we have to think of ourselves as making meaning. What did you choose to program? Why did you program that? What kind of meaning are you making together with the people in the audience and the other musicians here with what you're doing?

I think it is about community. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, no, no, no, please. Yeah, it is about community.

We all experienced this and produce it in, live in music together. And I think that that cannot be outside of our framework of understanding in these conversations, like music is, is an individual practice. And it's very much a community practice. And I'm not sure where those lines begin and end. So in all practices, symphonic practices, and even as an organization, like we are a community of people, animals land, all involved to gather in this practice. So I'm just I'm a community musician. So that's what it is. Relationships are key communities key. I do just want to do a quick time check here because we are at a quarter to nine, Eastern Standard Time, which is wonderful. But we have been on quite a journey tonight through all this. So I would I think if it's okay, I just want to put it out. There is welcome any other questions? And while if anyone in the audience wants to think about asking a question and pose a question, I'm going to take a moment here to just share my screen as well. Do here we go to, of course, I'm going to shift gears a little bit here. Okay, to just I think we are entering a pretty great arc of conversations here and food for thought. And so just for anybody here who's interested or anyone who's watching the recording of this session, here are the upcoming sessions. Just leave that on the screen for a second. And you'll see there Andrew Balfour's coming up, I just want to note for his session, he and I were interviewed on a podcast called Surviving classical music, which is co hosted by Andrew Burn, who was a historical bassoonist as to be played for press yesterday. And Andrew at the end of the podcast, has a great outlook and a great line on maestro, the word Maestro and what that means to him and where it should go. And so I'll just encourage you all to go take a listen to that. Again. The podcast is called Surviving classical music. And the episode is a few episodes back from today's date. So So Thanks. I just wanted to do a quick plug for the upcoming sessions because Oh, yes.

Question. So if we go to it's already happening. Can we find all those things listed? And that's where we can your interview with Andrew as well.

Yes, I do believe I haven't linked in the values page. So you'll have to kind of dig a little deep. It's not the most user friendly website. But it is there and I come to his session, of course, it's going to be amazing. Okay, so that's my little plug over. And I think I'm going to wrap it up. And I could just want to say thank you so much for your participation in this project, the conversations that we've had beforehand, the time and the energy that you've put into this, and I want to extend that to our audience and our attendees as well. Thank you so much. Again, we're all in this together as a community, and we've got a lot more to keep on exploring and learning to make change, take action. I'm not really sure what else to say to be honest. So thank you all, for joining in this and hopefully, we'll see you soon at some of these others or some of the other sessions. Okay. I'll come to you. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Or?

I think I've probably said more than that. But you know, what you said about community that like we have to figure these things out together? It's not there's no recipe. Nobody has solved these problems before we have to figure it out. And take our lumps

Yeah, all right. Well, thank you so much, everybody, and have a great night and hopefully see you soon in another session. Thanks. Take care. Bye Damien. Bye.