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In an emerging history of music scholars in Canada, Ida Halpem (1910-87) figures paradoxically as a high-profile yet virtually invisible ethnomusicologist of First Nations British Columbian musics.1 Her research derived from, but only partially resembles, an Austro-German school of comparative musicology incompatible with the research praxes of North American ethnomusicology, anthropology, and folklore-a clash of four paradigms, which left her unduly ostracized. Her approach furthermore contravenes certain canonic precepts of First Nations Peoples, voices of primary authority whose calls for accountability differ from those practiced traditionally by scholars. An historical visualization of her "voice" is consequently modulated not only by what she might have "said"-the contents of her life's work-but also by frames of reception or means through which her scholarship was, and continues to be, largely set, filtered, and received.
Halpern in Canadian Music History
Ida Halpern is to date scarcely accounted for in standard textbooks of Canadian music history. This is not surprising insofar as music scholars themselves are rarely the subjects of historical documentation. Reflexive music history, defined by Neuman2 as "the history of music history [in which t]he authors of such histories are also, in an extended sense, its subjects," is still a recent development in musicology. Older texts such as Music in Canada, 1600-18003 and A History of Music in Canada, 1534-J9144 moreover pre-date Halpern's major debut as a scholar of First Nations musics by some seven and two years, respectively; her absences here are for this reason understandable. In other monographs such as Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century,5 which primarily documents the developments of Euro-Canadian art music, she is excluded from consideration by design. The Music of Canada devotes an entire chapter to describing the "Music of the Original Canadians," but as its sub-section on the "Pacific Coast" is poorly referenced, she appears buried in the appendix under a discography of First Nations musics only.6
Of three textbooks that actually include Halpern within their discourse, Canada's Music: An Historical Survey merely mentions her once in passing: "other collectors of aboriginal music included Laura Bolton and Ida Halpern."7 The "most substantial" textbook description of her ethnomusicological activities is a 108-word summary written by Peacock in Aspects of Music in Canada, an anthology edited by Walter.8 A different aspect...