Performing North in Canadian music for solo voice composed between 1950 and 2000

The northern landscape has shaped the collective representation of the Canadian nation and has proven to be a major facet of this country's cultural distinctiveness. For decades, the "idea of North" has been central to the Canadian imagination, from the Group of Seven's paintings, to Harold Innis' economic history Fur Trade in Canada (1930), and "the true north strong and free" of the national anthem. In "Naturalizing the Nation: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada," Eric Kaufmann concludes, it is because of its abundance of unsettled landscape that Canadians channeled into naturalistic nationalism and went through both the process of nationalization of nature and of naturalization of the nation, which explains the importance of the northern landscape in Canadian culture and intellectual history.;This dissertation examines the representation of North in Canadian music for solo voice, regardless of the accompanying instrumentation, composed between 1950 and 2000. The choice of the second half of the twentieth century as the time frame of this research is motivated by the fact that by then, Canada had entered fully into the mainstream of Western art music: it is the era of the Massey Commission (1949-1951), the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts (1957) and of the Canadian Music Centre (1959). Accordingly, works examined in the context of this study were all written by composers affiliated with the Canadian Music Centre.;Repertoire chosen for this study is based on texts about the North and represents aspects of the northern wilderness within the musical language. Interestingly, when correlated with Schafer's description of the music of the Northerner, presented in Music in the Cold, the comprehensive musical analysis of this selected repertoire permits crossing the boundary beyond the simple identification of the musical idioms used by Canadian composers to represent northern wilderness or Canada-as-North, towards the definition of a Canadian musical style that is especially relevant to this northern context.;While there are a vast number of Canadian musical works inspired by the idea of North, to date there is no global research explaining the influence of nordicity in Canadian music. This detailed account of Canadian music representing the northern landscape, although limited to works for solo voice, is a ground breaking contribution to the subject as it provides broad applications to the discipline in general and to the larger field of Canadian cultural studies. It ultimately also offers the necessary aesthetic and theoretical underpinnings to undertake a comparative study approach with contemporary refined art music of other Nordic countries.;More than a geographical place, the North portrayed by authors and artists constitutes a captivating multilayered discourse. The sound of the North is a component of this collective myth. In music, three Canadian musicians have made an important contribution in shaping the national northern narrative by using various media that do not qualify as examples of Western art music: Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North (1967), R. Murray Schafer's literary work Music in the Cold (1977), and, finally, Christos Hatzis's radio documentary The Idea of Canada (1992) and radiophonic work Footprints in New Snow (1995). Through these works, this study traces how the notion of Canada-as-North has developed within the discipline of music.