A Survey of Intercultural Music in Canada: Politics, Diversity, and Settler Colonialism in Performance
This article surveys recent examples of intercultural music-making in Canada, and interrogates the politics of intercultural music by examining how multilateral understandings of cultural identities are represented and circulated by sonic practices, and, importantly, how utopic narratives of social diversity in Canadian policy can become creatively unsettled. Ensembles such as the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra, Big World Band, and the New Canadian Global Music Orchestra have dedicated themselves to performing music that draws from a range of influences where interculturality is manifest in an aural aesthetic. Artists such as Yamantaka // Sonic Titan and Lido Pimienta respond to and critique racialization and marginalization in ways that are not explicitly represented in sound. Finally, collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians have taken on a particularly acute valence as a means of articulating resurgence and cultural sovereignty in Canada’s post-trc milieu.