Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1976)

Foreword

Edith Fowke

We learned with sorrow of the death of François Brassard last February. The article which appears on pages 25 to 28 must have been one of the last pieces of writing he completed: it reached us on January 14.

Dr. Brassard was born in Metabetchouan, Quebec, on October 6, 1908. He studied composition with Claude Champagne in Montreal, Albert Bertelin in Paris, and Ralph Vaughan Williams in London. He received his B.A. degree from Laval University in 1928 and an honorary doctorate in 1961. He had a distinguished carrer as a researcher, composer, collector, and teacher. In 1946 he became a professor in Laval's School of Music, and since 1971 he worked in the Archives de Folklore, collecting traditional French songs from various Canadian provinces and also in New England, Illinois, and Louisinana. He published many of these in a five-volume collection, Chansons populaires de l'Amerique francaise, and presented some of them in a series of broadcasts on the CBC French radio network. In addition to arranging folk songs, he wrote several instrumental works employing folk material. He was a member of CAPAC and the International Folk Music Council, and we were fortunate to have him also as a member of the Canadian Folk Music Society. We will sorely miss his excellent contributions to our Journal.

Other Contributors

JAY RAHM is completing his doctoral dissertation in music at Columbia University, New York. A native of Canada, he is now living in Toronto, where he teaches part-time at the University of Toronto.

F. MARK MEALING, a native of Vancouver, received his Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 for a study of Doukhobor music. He has since been teaching at Selkirk College, Castlegar, B.C. and has carried on field research for the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies on the material culture of ethnic groups in western Canada.

JON BARTLETT is currently president of the Vancouver Folk Song Society and editor of its journal, Come All Ye. He is also a singer who has given concerts in many parts of Canada and the United States. He transcribed the music of the collection of B.C. songs which he describes in this issue.

GEOFFREY CLARFIELD and WENDY WITMIRE are both music students at York University. Their articles are condensed from projects which they prepared for York University's Music Department course, MU 352, "Introduction to Ethnomusicology."

DR. IDA HALPERN received a doctorate in musicology from the University of Vienna before coming to Vancouver in 1939. There she began to study and collect the music of the Pacific Coast Indian tribes, a work that has won her international recognition. She has produced two record sets of Indian music for Folkways records.

BEVERLEY CAVANAUGH has been the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Folk Music Society for the last three years and is currently teaching in the Music Department of Queen's University.