Upcoming Event

Allyson Rogers, Post-doctoral Fellow, Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada

The transformative sociopolitical change that Québec underwent in the 1960s—known as the Quiet Revolution—and the militant politics of the burgeoning sovereignty movement was felt intensely within the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which had relocated from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956. Until the late-1950s, original music for NFB films was primarily derived from Western classical music idioms and scored using traditional methods. However, the turn toward verité-style filmmaking in the 1960s and a demand for greater artistic freedom within the NFB unsettled the classically based institutional style, and a more spontaneous approach to filmmaking was extended to the soundtrack. The newly formed French-language unit, which included many ardent separatists, began inviting small jazz ensembles to write and improvise soundtracks, and by the mid-1960s, it was commonplace to hear jazz—particularly cool jazz—accompanying a variety of topics illustrative of contemporary Québécois identity and society. In many ways, cool jazz became the new “house style” of the NFB’s French unit. Although many Québec sovereigntists were inspired by and adapted the political and cultural expressions of Black nationalism to their own struggle—including a keen interest in jazz and free improvisation—the NFB remained a predominantly white male-dominated space both behind and in front of its cameras despite the concurrent Black Renaissance underway in Montreal. Notwithstanding the engagement of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman for Le chat dans le sac (1964) and Population Explosion (1968) respectively, NFB filmmakers seemingly did not engage Black jazz musicians in Montreal or elsewhere despite sovereigntists’ well-publicized affinity for Black aesthetics and politics. This presentation examines the connections between the NFB and the Montreal jazz scene during the Quiet Revolution, and the complexity of race relations and linguistic divisions in Québec during this period.

Allyson Rogers is a musicologist whose research is situated at the intersection of music, media, and politics. She received her PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Music) at Carleton University. She is co-author of They Shot, He Scored: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), co-editor of a forthcoming volume, Music and Antifascism: Cultures of Resistance in Europe and North America (Routledge), and her chapter on music for the NFB’s Candid Eye television series will be published in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook for Music and Television.