Discursive Formations of Community Music and the Production of Canadian Citizens in Toronto's Settlement Movement, 1900s-1930s

This thesis examines the discursive formations of community music through the history of Toronto’s settlement house movement, from the opening of University Settlement House in 1910 to the onset of World War Two. Settlement houses created community-based educational and leisure programs for poor and immigrant residents with the objective of citizenship training, and music permeated settlement work, including the establishment of Canada’s first community music schools. Settlement organizers reconfigured music not as an end in itself, but as a tool in fostering ‘civic betterment’ of poor, working class, and immigrant neighborhoods. Using primarily Foucaultian archaeological methods, this study examines how settlement music practices contributed to the discursive formation of community music with two central arguments: first, the ways in which settlement organizers used and described music through its social purpose contributed to the discursive production of community music through an emerging social rationality; second, given the explicit focus on citizenship training, different kinds of musics articulated to different ideas of citizenship in a mutually conditioning relationship. The ensemble of music practices paradoxically challenged and reinforced musical and social hierarchies by emphasizing cultural uplift without social mobility. The dissertation comprises four studies that collectively explore the multiple, contingent, and often competing practices and rationales that contributed to the formation of inter-connected discourses of citizenship and community music. The first study examines how settlement movement proponents used culture and recreation as solutions to the social problems they saw emerging from Toronto’s urbanization. The second study focuses on specific music practices used within settlement democratic and social clubs to foster self-governing behaviours among participants differentiated by gender and age. The third study takes up the rationales and practices of the settlement music schools, analyzing how the trope of good music contributed to the repeatability of conservatory music training as a technique in the cultivation of citizens, while also exalting Western European Art Music within a musical hierarchy, articulated to a corresponding social hierarchy. The final study examines how settlement house workers began integrating musics of immigrant participants to construct the social rationality of music in terms of cultural difference.Ph.D.2018-02-19 00:00:0