 |
magazine / jf06
 |
January/February 2006 issue |
|
|
|
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
I wish I had a river I could skate away
on
Joni Mitchell’s simple but eloquent lyric, from her 1971 album Blue, contains
the seed for this special issue of Canadian Geographic. The song “River” long
ago captured the imagination of anyone who has ever loved, and of everyone who has ever
dreamed of gliding on blades across a clear expanse of smooth riverine ice. Its jingling
opening bars and striding melodic progressions carry a certain momentum, like having the
wind at your back. It is quintessentially Canadian and coincidently universal, and it has
been playing continuously in my mind’s iPod since our editorial team started developing
the stories for this issue a year ago, always asking, How is music influenced by our landscape
and how is the landscape represented in our music?
Someone who has given such questions a lot of thought is Elaine Keillor, an ethnomusicologist
at Carleton University in Ottawa.
"The more I study Canadian music, the more I feel there is a strong link with our
geography," she says. "Many musicians talk about the huge size of the country.
Undoubtedly, that is a major element."
It goes much deeper than that, of course. Look back to the music of our First Peoples
and see how rhythm, melody and structure vary from region to region. Keillor uses the lyrical
term "melodic contours" to show how music is linked to terrain.
"Melodies of the First Peoples of the British Columbia Interior tend to be fairly
narrow in range and sort of clustered. They live mainly in the river valleys, with huge
mountains around them," says Keillor. "Music of prairie peoples has generally
descending melodic contours, representing one of the things all prairie people talk about:
the endless horizon."
It is worth suggesting here that in "River," Mitchell’s chord progressions
also descend, through major to minor keys, in a way that conjures a wintry scene of a frozen
wheat field cut by an icy stream on a gentle downward gradient. But maybe that’s just my
imagination.
Look back also to our folk songs of the 19th century, many of them adapted from existing
tunes but with new words that reflect their Canadian settings — songs of the lumberjacks
of the eastern woods, for example, in which the central protagonist is, typically, one
of spring’s torrential flumes.
And look forward to the deluge of bhangra/hip-hop fusion beats flowing from the huge
speakers at Vancouver’s Atlantis nightclub, a couple of blocks away from the Pacific waters
of False Creek and a mere 22-hour flight from New Delhi.
Charles Foran, who wrote our story about the Lower Mainland’s break-out bhangra phenoms
Sanjay "San-J" Seran and Luv "LV" Randhawa on page 46, also wrote "No
More Solitudes," the chapter on Canadian music in the definitive The Rough Guide to
World Music, Volume 2. Foran reminds us that all music is world music, that our songs have
cultural significance far beyond last week’s top 10 and that Canadian music, like Canadian
society, is flourishing.
"If Canada was once a series of solitudes, it is now a cacophony," says Foran. "In
such a state, some art forms become restricted by language or convention, and they suffer.
Not music, though."
Some years ago, I was in the audience at a concert by Cape Breton’s Celtic rekindlers,
The Barra MacNeils. The set included, among others, songs from their second album, appropriately
titled Rock In The Stream. We were at the Astrolabe Theatre, an open-air amphitheatre
on a promontory near the confluence of the Ottawa, Rideau and Gatineau rivers. In the setting
sunlight above the stage, Samuel de Champlain’s statue glowed and cast a shadow on the
silver waterway below. It was a vivid moment, as if the geographic and historic symphony
of our land had crescendoed.
I do have a river. We all do.
— Eric Harris, Executive Editor
top
|
|
|
