Although only a minor conflict from today's perspective, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857–58 inspired a massive outpouring of popular culture responses in Victorian Britain. One of the most frequently used texts was the legend of Jessie Brown, a Scottish maiden who became a heroine during the siege of Lucknow. This fabulous tale was retold and memorialized throughout British theatres, music halls and private homes. Jessie Brown also inspired ‘Dinna You Hear It’, a little-known parlour song that was composed by James Ross and Louis Casseres and published by E.G. Fuller in Halifax, Nova Scotia, around 1858. This article examines the historical circumstances that led to this song's creation and the appeal that this text would have held for the residents of a small colonial city. Halifax may have been a remote corner of the Empire, far removed from the battlefields of India, but Nova Scotians nonetheless shared Britons’ horror and intrigue over the Mutiny – a fascination that was heightened by the fact that Nova Scotia could claim a distinct connection to the victory at Lucknow. By examining the creative and commercial factors that led the authors of ‘Dinna You Hear It’ to produce their own musical setting of the Jessie Brown legend for the Halifax public, this study of a rare Nova Scotian music publication asserts the important role sheet music played within the process of cultural exchange that bridged colony and metropole throughout the nineteenth century.

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.

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 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.

One of the most curious aspects about Canadian Chinese cultural history is the role of opera theatres. They served as the public face of the community, cultural ambassadors or even artistic curiosities, but at the same time provided Chinese audiences the intimate world of emotive musical drama. Because of their public role, they were often ambitious projects. Since first appearing in Victoria in the 1860s, Chinese theatres played an integral role in its community life. Featuring performance of Cantonese opera, the regional genre known to the majority of Chinese immigrants that came from the Pearl River Delta of southern China, these theatres provided crucial entertainment. Chinese theatres’ success in Victoria, and later in Vancouver, was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather closely connected to other cities along the Pacific coast. The opera business waxed and waned, in large part as a result of the Chinese exclusionist policy in Canada and United States. In the 1910s and 1920s, through joint ventures, Chinese in Canada and the United States succeeded in forming a network of opera performance and revived their fluidity of movement in the Pacific Northwest region. Because this network returned significant mobility to troupes and performers, Chinese theatres flourished again in North America. This article provides a preliminary overview of this body of troupes and performers in Canada, its impact and the national and transnational forces that shaped it. It addresses key issues related to this history: the effect of immigration control, the relevance of Chinese theatres to community life, and the transborder crossings.