Music: Music, Identity and Innovation

Remember from Grade 6

In Grade 6 you looked at how culture and the media shape what you hear, including streaming algorithms and Canadian content rules, and you compared music from different cultures and times.

This year you'll analyse two big questions: How does music shape who we are? And how have history, culture and technology shaped music?

Part 1: Music, the media and identity

Your preferences. Much of the music you like is music you've heard again and again: on streaming playlists, videos, games, ads, radio and at home. Hearing a song many times makes it familiar, and familiar music is often easier to like. Algorithms suggest more of what you already play, so the media can widen your taste (new discoveries) or narrow it (more of the same).

Your identity. Music can show who you are and where you belong: the songs your family sings at celebrations, music in your language, the style your friends share. Listening to and making music from your own culture can strengthen cultural identity.

Music and First Nations, Métis and Inuit identity

For many First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, music is a strong source of pride and connection to language, land and community:

• Powwow drum groups sing and drum for dancers at powwows across Ontario and Canada. Drum groups such as Northern Cree, from Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, are known far beyond their communities.
• Inuit throat singing (katajjaq), which you learned about in Grade 6, is taught to young people by Elders and performed proudly today.
• Métis fiddling carries tunes like the Red River Jig from generation to generation.
• Jeremy Dutcher, a Wolastoqiyik musician from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, sings in the Wolastoqey language. He brings his ancestors' songs back to life, and his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa won the Polaris Music Prize in 2018.

When young people hear their own languages and traditions in music, it can say: Your culture is alive, strong and valued.

Oral tradition

Not all music is written down. In an oral tradition, music is learned by listening and copying, from person to person: children's clapping and skipping songs on the playground, folk songs sung in families, and many First Nations, Métis and Inuit songs, which are taught by singers, Elders and family members. Some Indigenous songs belong to particular families, nations or ceremonies, and are shared only with permission.

Oral tradition keeps music flexible (it can change a little with each singer) and personal (it is tied to the people who taught it). Today, many musicians mix both: they learn by ear and read notation.

Part 2: Innovation changes music

The piano. Around 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence, Italy, built an instrument whose hammers struck the strings. Unlike the harpsichord, which plucks strings at about the same loudness every time, it could play soft or loud depending on how hard you pressed the keys. Its early name, pianoforte, means "soft-loud". Composers began writing music full of dynamics and expression, and the piano became central to home music-making, concerts and later jazz and pop.

The electric guitar. In the 1930s, musicians began amplifying guitars with electric pickups so they could be heard over big bands. Solid-body electric guitars became popular in the 1950s. Players discovered new sounds like distortion and long sustain, and the electric guitar became the voice of rock and roll, electric blues and many later genres.

Other innovations. Recording (the phonograph, 1877) let music be heard far from where it was played. Synthesizers created brand-new sounds. In the 1970s, DJs in the Bronx used two turntables to loop the drum breaks of records, which helped start hip hop. Streaming now gives listeners millions of songs instantly.