不協和音的解放？加拿大音樂學論述中的第一民族和新移民

Abstract

“The emancipation of the dissonance,” according to Schoenberg, “has placed the tonal center of gravity in jeopardy” (Style and Idea, 258). Could it be the anxiety of decentering, to read Schoenberg’s metaphor into the context of musical scholarship, which drives those with institutional power to cling to the mainstream and suppress the inharmonious? In recent research on the historiographies of Austria and Taiwan (for example, 2004, 2009), this author indicated a similar trajectory of identification away from a shared and harmonious culture with their mightier neighbors, that is, German and Han Chinese respectively, and toward their rather dissonant self in its own time and space. However, these studies also indicated that this emancipating deed of the scholars involved seems to be more a product of political correctness than a genuine demonstration of academic integrity. In any case, music scholars tended to sacrifice harmony through fairness and justice to harmony through suppression. This paper aims to continue this transnational study of musical scholarship with Canada. At first sight, it seems absurd to compare apples with oranges, for Canada is obviously much open and multicultural then the other two countries examined. But Canada also began as “a child of nations, giant limbed” (Charles Robert, Canada, 1885), and has to construct an identity independent of its former French and British colonizers, and a powerful neighbor, the US. The sources included for this study will be the comprehensive music history books by Helmut Kallmann (1960), Clifford Ford (1982), and Timothy McGee (1985). To complete the picture, the two editions of Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (1981, 1992) and its online version (2001) are also examined. Besides several book reviews, there are only a few reflective and critical studies; in this regards, the anthology Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (1994) is a pioneering work that examines the political and power structure underneath musical knowledge. Nevertheless, the question of not only what is written, but also of who wrote what and why, is not yet fully scrutinized. Set in the postmodern/postcolonial discourse, this study will concentrate on the issue of representation of the First Nation and the newcomers, that is, the native and the naturalized, the two marginalized poles around the center. Exactly here is the scholar challenged to reflect on his/her role as mere chronologist and lexicographer of the harmonious center, and to listen to the dissonant periphery, and to give voice to the voiceless. The musicologist as an intellectual should be both the emancipated and the emancipator.