Musical Crossroads: Cajun and Inuit Music

Music has found a home in North America for the thousands of years that Native Americans and Inuit have lived on this continent. The music, however, enters recorded history in the early 17th-century. Since colonisation began in the 17th-century, the mainstream of Canadian musical development has been little affected by native music. The original settlers transplanted their songs, dances, and religious chants, and successive waves of immigrants reinforced old-world traditions. The import of printed music, of teachers and of touring star performers, followed later by recordings and broadcast music, have shaped taste and by its weight stifled or at least retarded original expression. Music in Canada has paralleled the basic European style periods from the baroque to the classical, romantic and contemporary, usually lagging behind a few decades. The attempt to translate old world patterns in a sparsely populated country with the widely-separated settlements could never be quite successful. However, the system of patronage and the professional resources for grand opera, symphony orchestras and other sophisticated manifestations of music were waiting; European-trained Canadian and immigrant musicians, settling down to their careers, were cut off from new developments in composition and therefore, stagnated.