Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1988)

Review of Barbeau's Last Book

Gordon Smith

Le Roi Boit. Troisième partie du Repertoire de la chanson folklorique française au Canada par Marius Barbeau. Edité par Lucien Ouellet.

Ottawa: Musée canadien des civilisations, Musées nationaux du Canada, 1987.

The recent publication of Le Roi Boit by the National Museum of Civilization marks the completion of Marius Barbeau's "Repertoire de la chanson folklorique française au Canada." Planned by the late Dr. Bar-beau early in his career, the projected series of four collections was intended to provide a sizable sampling of the French-Canadian folksong repertory gathered by himself and others from oral tradition. At the time of Barbeau's death in 1969 only one of the "Repertoire" volumes had been published: Le Rossignol y chante (1962). This collection was republished by the National Museum of Man in 1979 followed by En roulant ma boule in 1982. Barbeau intended the fourth volume, entitled Envoyons d'l'avant, nos gens!, to include "compositions du terroir canadien." (p. xix) Unfortunately he did not pursue this project beyond its preliminary stages; on information received from the editor of Le Roi Boit, the fourth collection will therefore not be published.

Certain songs in the collection are given with variants and/or annotations concerning textual and musical characteristics. These commentaries variously include information about informants, shedding additional light on the fieldwork experiences of Barbeau and the other collectors represented in the book. There are also over sixty photographs of informants, collaborators, and collectors which are strategically positioned so as to correspond to particular items.

The collection is concluded by a classification of the repertory with the Catalogue de la chanson folkiorique francaise. Compiled by the author of the Catalogue, Conrad Laforte, this appendix is a valuable part of the book in that it facilitates comparisons of the song texts in Le Roi Boit with the large number of texts classified in the Catalogue. The inclusion of this appendix confirms the strength of the Catalogue as a tool for the study of song texts in the French folk repertory, but also serves to underline the lack of a corresponding classification system based on musical considerations.

Le Roi Boit is a welcome addition to French-Canadian folksong literature and, as the final volume in the "Repertoire" series, it serves as further confirmation of Marius Barbeau's exemplary scholarship.

Queen's University,
Kinngston, Ontario

Résumé: Ann Osborn- Seyffert raconte comment elle a essayé de développer un programme d'enseignement musical base sur le système Kodaly qu'elle avait étudié en Hongrie. En se servant des collections Creighton et Fowke, aussi bien que des résultats de ses propres recherches sur le terrain, elle décrit comment analyser a l'aide de l'ordinateur les melodies communes des chansons d'enfants courantes au Canada.