Hello,

This is a huge question, of course, so I may have to answer it over several messages. My specialty is secular song in the US to 1865, so I have an American perspective. From my experiences at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto and attending some conferences on music of North America, research on music in Canada (as in the US) concentrates on the 20th century. That does not mean that there has not been some excellent research on music of earlier centuries, but the emphasis has been more on recent music and musicians. I suspect that more work on the 19th century has been accomplished on music in the US, but this will have to be confirmed by a search of secondary sources.

Upper Canada, like the US, would have drawn much of its mainstream music traditions from the British Isles. In the US, it was not until the period of the 1820s-1840s one sees that secular song was developing an independent style, although that literature is still heavily indebted to British styles. The popularization of blackface performance (songs, dances, jokes, sketches) during that period lead to the publication of songs ("Jump Jim Crow", "Old Zip Coon") which were the first to be considered truly American in style. The birth of the minstrel show in 1843, the increasing success of American performers (not just minstrels), the growing success of singing schools, and the spurt in the growth of the music publishing industry during the 1840s further supported the development and popularization of a body of songs considered "American". So, by the 1860s, the US had been experiencing a 20-year boom (with some economic interruptions) in the composition, performance, and publication of music by its citizens.

Since performers from Britain, the Continent, and the US followed the same general touring routes in North America, one has to realize that an opera troupe, a violin virtuoso, minstrel troupe, or singing family, and other types of professionals routinely crossed north and south of the Candian border as part of a tour. So, Upper Canadians in towns and cities on or close to this route could have seen American and European performers well before 1860. I am not sure about Canadian performers, although I know Calixa Lavallee toured with an American minstrel troupe before and after the American Civil War.

From seeing a bound collection of sheet music in Toronto, I know that at least one Toronto publisher imported American sheet music. The works of both British and Americans, as well as a few local pieces would have been on the shelves of sheet-music retailers in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, I would want to see more Ontario collections and know more of the relationships of the local publishers and retailers with non-Canadian publishers before making any any real judgments about what was widely available to Ontario's sheet-music consumers.

Knowing when and where immigrants arrived and where they settled should give you a physical sense of what musical influences were present and able to interact with each other. When did the Germans (or Irish, Scots, or any group) come? Were they Catholics or Protestants? Where did they settle? Did they integrate quickly with the British settlers, isolate themselves from them, or do something in between the two extremes? Were most wealthy, or poor, or somewhere in between? Would you be musically literate (able to read music and therefore able to use sheet music and similar publications), or musically-illiterate (either able to read and therefore use text-only publications like broadsides and songsters, or illiterate and relying only on oral transmission)

Developing your historical persona would help you decide what music that person might have been reasonably been exposed to, from friends and family, to seeing public performances. It would help you decide what type of instrument you might be expected to own, or whether you would own one at all.

Well, this is already quite long, so although I feel I have barely scratched the surface on this topic, I will end this message.

Cheers,

Kirsten