Music of Canada in 19th Century

Starting from the 19^th century the Canadian musical groups had begun forming in a great numbers in writing, waltzes, quadrilles, polkas, and gallops. The first volumes of the music printed in the Canada’s were the Graduel roman in the 1800 which was followed by the Processional sic roman in 1801. The Canadian boat song was so famous that it was published many times over the next forty years in Boston, New York and Philadephia. The dancing likewise was tremendously famous form of entertainment as it is noted in 1807 by the Scottish travellers and artist George Hertiot from 1759 to 1839.

source of picture: breakingprojects.com

The earliest musical societies were Halifaxs New Union Singing Society of the 1809 and Quebec Harmonic Society of 1820. One of the first registered over all civilian musical groups was a religious sect prepared from the Upper Canada which is known as the Children of Peace in 1820. In 1833 a student group was prepared at the Seminaire de Quebec the Societe Ste-Cecile as it was known, one of the earliest bands of its type in Lower Canada. The first appearance of a piece of music in a newspaper that is in the page of the Montreal twice weekly newspaper, La Minerve on September 19, 1831, several settler during this period lived in relative isolation and music sometimes obtained through subscriptions to newspapers and magazines that provide entertainment and life line to civilization. One of the earliest lived publications in Canada of a song for the piano in sheet music way is the Merry Bells England by J.F Lehmann in 1840.

The great movement of Canada from1815 to 1850 was done largely by the Irish, British and Scottish settlers broadened considerably the Canadian musical culture. In 1844 Samual Nordheimer from 1824 to 1912 has opened a music store in Toronto that is selling pianos and soon thereafter started to publish carved sheet music. Samuel Nordheimer store was among the first and the largest specialized music maker in the Province of Canada. They initially had the one right to publish copies of Alexander Muirs the Maple Leaf Forever that for several years served as an unofficial Canadian national anthem.

At the time of Canadian Confederation (1867), song writing had become a favoured means of personal expression all over the land. In the society in which most middle class families now owned a piano, and standard education which included at least basics of music, the result was often an original song. Such cords frequently happened in response to important activities, and few local or national delights were allowed to pass without some of the musical comment.

In the 1870s many glasshouses opened their doors, providing their cord, woodwind and brass faculty, which lead to the opportunity for any class level of society to learn music. One sweetly solemn thought in 1876 led by Hamiton based Robert S. Ambrose who became one of the most famous composers to ever publish in the 19^th century. He fulfilled the aim of being an appropriate composer to sing in the parlours of homes that would not permit any non-sacred music to be performed on Sundays, at the same time it is sung in dance halls or on the stage along the operas.

‘O Canada was formerly commissioned by the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, the Honourable Theodore Robitaille from 1834 to 1887 for the 1880 St. Jean Baptiste Day ceremony. Calixa Lavallee from 1842 to 1891 who wrote the music which was a setting of the patriotic poem singer by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe Basile Routhier from 1839 to 1920, the text was firstly only in French, before it was translated to English in 1906.

Leo, the Royal Cadet light opera, with the music by Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann and a libretto by George Frederick Cameron, was the singer in Kingston, Ontario in 1889. The work centres on the Nellie’s harmony for Leo, a cadet at the Royal military College of Canada, who became a hero  that served during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, the operetta focussed on typical character kinds, events and concern of the Telgmann and Cameron’s period and area.