HEART OF THE CITY:

MUSIC OF COMMUNITY CHANGE IN

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA'S DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

KLISALA R. HARRISON

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND MUSICOLOGY

YORK UNIVERSITY,

TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Abstract

This dissertation is a musical history of a North American inner city or centre city:

Vancouver, British Columbia's Downtown Eastside (the DTES). One of Canada's poorest urban communities, the DTES suffers from problems of gendered violence, drug and alcohol misuse, survival sex and related disease. The community is further stressed by shifts in the ethnocultural and class make-up of its population due to migration and gentrification.

In the 1990s and 2000s, music became a means of changing the DTES by initiating new opportunities for social interaction, public expression and wage earning.

Musical encounters between individuals and groups, and complex musical representations of their narratives, histories, emotions and experiences became ways to keep alive or catalyze additional shifts in the perceptions, possibilities, experiences and constitution of the community and its participants. DTES musical "activists" were artists; arts administrators; agents of municipal, provincial and federal governments; employees of local social service organizations; health and clinic workers; and community members themselves. The musical urban improvement involved formal arts programs of opera, classic rock, country music, musical theatre, Northwest Coast First Nations traditional song and pan-Aboriginal powwow drumming. Some programs were music therapy sessions, others offered performance practice or education, but all explicitly addressed the theme of individual or community healing from stressful situations of transition. V

Taking an applied ethnomusicology approach to research, I evaluate how musical initiatives, encounters and representations have negotiated well-being in the DTES. My ethnography reflects on the primary sociological influences on physiological health: the degree of control that one feels one has over one's life; one's status, particularly socioeconomic status in capitalist contexts; and the power dynamics of social connections in community or society. In the DTES, trying to shift community dynamics through musical encounters and representations turned out to be an enormously complex undertaking that lay bare sites of external and internal community control. My study reveals ways that musical encounters and representations may resist, nurture, negotiate, evade and drastically change social dynamics and human well-being in a situation of community transition. vi

A cknowledgements

My deepest appreciation to the people of Vancouver, British Columbia's

Downtown Eastside (DTES) who shared their stories, music and souls for this dissertation, especially the following musicians and artists: Joanne Moen, Brenda Wells, the late Francis McAllister, May Kossoff, Andy Kostyniuk, Rick Lavallee, Stan Hall,

Stewart Wilson, James Piche, Stephen Lytton, Priscillia Tait, Elwin Xie and Kat Norris.

Many thanks also to music therapists who, when working in the DTES, shared their medical practices: Carol Wiedemann, Jeff Smith, Jeffrey Hatcher and Stephanie

Swenson. Music jam and ensemble hosts including Peggy Smith and Ken Tabata were incredibly sweet and helpful consultants. Earle Peach, Brian Tate and others who direct ensembles associated with the neighbourhood contributed interviews and information, A very special thank you to Jay Hamburger, of Vancouver's Theatre in the Raw, who got me involved in the Downtown Eastside community play and in the fabric of the community. His spirit of generousity when teaching theatre in the DTES is an inspiration.

Different theatre artists associated with the DTES also supported my dissertation research in important ways, particularly James Fagan Tait, Marie Clements (Urban Ink

Productions), Donna Spencer (Artistic Producer, Firehall Arts Centre), and Savannah

Walling and Terry Hunter of Vancouver Moving Theatre. Savannah Walling shared some of her meticulous and brilliant historical research on the DTES. It has been a joy to play violin in community theatre with music professionals Joelysa Pankanea and Wyckham vii

Porteous, who gave interviews for this project. Still others, who have been involved in

Downtown Eastside music initiatives, supported and informed my research: administrators and evaluators Valerie Methot, jil p. weaving, Doreen Littlejohn (R.N.,

Vancouver Native Health Society), Ann Suddaby (First United Church), Sharon Kravitz

(President, Community Arts Council of Vancouver), Donna Wong-Juliani (General

Director, Opera Breve), Miko Hoffman (General Manager, Powell Street Festival

Society), Victoria Marie, Karen Lee-Morlang and Marlene George; First Nations elders

Fred John and Gerry Oleman; also musicians and theatre artists R. H. Maxwell, the late

"Rusty," Grant Chancey, Rosemary Collins, Naomi Narvey, Patrick Foley, the late

Wilhemina Munro, Fanna Yee, Dalannah Gail Bowen, Tom Pickett, Robyn Livingstone,

Caleb Johnston, Jim Sands, Susan Poshan Wong, Gena Thompson, Kuei-Ming Lin and many others.

This dissertation would have been impossible without the practical support of particular institutions, friends and family members. Staff at the City of Vancouver

Archives, Vancouver Public Library's Special Collections, and Chinese Cultural Centre

Museum and Archives gave of their time and historical research expertise. Thank you to

Jim Green, an anthropologist and politician, for his care and help regarding intellectual strategies, at a crucial time. The late Michael Ames, former director of the University of

British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology, gave me the research support of a

Research Associate position at the museum in 2003-2004. Edith Iglauer Daly (of The New

Yorker magazine) allowed me to write a Ph.D. comprehensive exam, which informed this viii monograph, in her charming boathouse suite. My grandmother, the late Ingeborg Bremer, ensured that I had some financial support to do a Ph.D. I also wrote some of this dissertation in her peaceful seaside home. I am appreciative of the funding bodies and institutions that also helped to fund this work: the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada; the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities; and York University. Particular thanks to the Media Studies Department of Malaspina

University-College on Vancouver Island, for four years of an amazingly friendly teaching environment while I researched this dissertation, and for all the research and professional development support.

Researching and writing a Ph.D. dissertation such as this one requires creativity, critical thinking, intellectual flexibility and academic breadth. To those from whom I have learned such skills: heartfelt thanks. You are the people who have freed me to do the work that I need to do as an emerging scholar. Thank you to Nicholas Gunther, who with love, helped me to see complexity in many things. He nurtured in me gifts of articulateness, social fluency and confidence without which this dissertation would have been very different. My parents, Joseph and Solveigh Harrison, never cease to remind me of the most beautiful aspects of doing socially difficult research. I appreciate their very deep support. Thanks to Dad for tipping me off on so many interesting ideas, as always.

Shendra Hanney, a filmmaker who has worked with the Lacandon Maya, shared her wisdom about interpersonal relations, and maintaining one's intent and strength of spirit.

Warmest thanks to my Ph.D. advisor, Beverley Diamond (Memorial University of ix

Newfoundland), for being an exceptionally supportive academic guide, mentor and

friend. I came to her in 1997 to do my M.A. in ethnomusicology. I was a classical

violinist with an eclectic and passionate mind, and particular social and political interests.

She has nurtured an incredible amount of personal and professional development, for

which I will always be extremely appreciative. Other academics have supported my

research and intellectual development during my Ph.D. studies, at different times, and in

diverse ways, notably: Robert Witmer (York University), Celia Haig-Brown (York

University), Judith Rudakoff (York University), Michael Tenzer (University of British

Columbia), Louise Wrazen (York University), Kati Szego (Memorial University), Rob

Bowman (York University), Ratiba Hadj-Moussa (York University), Trichy Sankaran

(York University), Liv Mjelde (Akershus College, Oslo), Richard Daly (Independent

Scholar), Salvador Ferreras (Vancouver Community College) and Adelaida Reyes

(formerly of Columbia University and CUNY). Special thanks to Jeff Todd Titon, at

Brown University, for his encouragement and mentorship as I wrote up my doctoral

research. Thanks also to students and faculty of the Center for Ethnomusicology at

Columbia University, particularly Dr. Aaron Fox, for offering enabling comments on

First Nations music content in this dissertation. Vancouver, British Columbia's

Downtown Eastside rests on traditional territory of Coast Salish groups including the

Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwu7mesh and Musqueam First Nations. To those who have

nurtured me to this point of finishing the Ph.D., as Coast Salish say, "Hay ych qua": "I

hold you up" and I honour you. Table of Contents

Abstract i

Acknowledgements >

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Prologue

Defining Vancouver's Downtown Eastside 2

Chapter 2. The DTES and its Music in Historical Perspective 3

Chapter 3. Control 6

Modifying Behaviour, Releasing Emotions and Changing Life Directions through Music Therapy 7

Reconfiguring Motherhood through Popular Music 7

Agency and Autonomy in Client-Therapist Communications 8

Client Experiences of Individual Agency and Autonomy through Expressing Emotional Reactions to Inner City Issues 8

Narrating Repertoire Choices and Musical Life Histories 9

"Mainstream" Popular Songs 9

Memorializing DTES Community Members and Events through Narratives about Repertoire S

Telling Imaginary Life Histories 11

Addictions, Depression and Music Making 11

Losing and Gaining Control (sometimes at the same time) 11 xi

Healing from Substance Misuse through pan-Indigenous Traditional Music 125

Hand Drumming at Positive Outlook: Brenda's Story 127

Francis' Story 130

Powwow Drumming at Aboriginal Front Door: Fred's Story 136

Conclusion 140

Chapter 4. Socioeconomic Status 145

Shifting SES through Music Initiatives at Health Programs 149

Generating Employment (Potential) 149

Community Attitudes towards Enhancing Educational and Occupational Status via Music 154

Enhancing Status of Education, Class and Occupation through "Capacity Building" in the Performing Arts 156

Directions in Arts Administration in the DTES 159

Directions in Arts and Humanities Pedagogy 165

Administering "Free University" Music Classes 165

Some Pedagogical Implications and Results 169

Directions in Theatre Production 174

Teaching and Presenting Skills in the Performing Arts 174

Changing Lives in the Downtown Eastside 181

Redistributing Economic Status in the DTES 187

To Sum Up 204

Chapter 5. Creating Community Connections 207 xii

1. In the Heart of a City, the Downtown Eastside community play 212

Building Social Capital through Communities of Practice 220

Observing Multiple Community Types with Different Constituencies Engaged in Single Performances 225

2. Condemned, a DTES pop opera 229

3. Health Contact Centre, popular music jam 239

Chapter Summary 244

Chapter 6. Afterword 247

Appendix A 254

References Cited 261 1

Chapter 1. Prologue

In this dissertation, I consider the musical life of an inner city community whose

social and cultural organization is stressed and eroded by social and health issues, and

diverse types of social and cultural transition. I analyze how human reactions to and

results of music may inform fluctuating social, cultural and economic realities of

individuals and groups, as they relate in and to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada's

inner city, the Downtown Eastside (the DTES).

I am particularly interested in how the creation, production and practice of

musical arts in the DTES have engaged the neighbourhood's social geographies and

social hierarchies as they change over time. After attempting to define the Downtown

Eastside's physical and social geography, I consider how musical encounters historically

have negotiated patterns of social struggle and marginalization that inform community

uses of largely amateur musical expression today. Since about 1980, numerous urban

development programs have used musical arts when addressing inner city issues such as

poverty, substance misuse, gendered violence, survival sex, related disease and untimely

death. These initiatives have included music therapy programs, popular music jams,

memorial ceremonies, First Nations gatherings, Asian gatherings, opera education events,

community theatre presentations, festival performances and other artistic presentations.

Almost all of the music activism programs aspire to nurture individual and community

health or well-being. 2

During the research period, the transitory nature of the neighbourhood shaped many of these musical encounters. Although there is a large resident population, DTES community members who make and experience musical expression, including artists and administrators who run arts programs, flow in and out of the Downtown Eastside.

Residents move in and out of life phases or out of life itself, in and out of poverty, in and out of addictions or illness, in and out of violent situations and illegal activities, in and out of music making contexts, and in and out of social relationships that create a sense of community, sometimes only momentarily. People in the Downtown Eastside also move in and out of cultural and sub-cultural constructs, unweaving and reweaving social patterns and senses of self as they interact musically and in everyday life. Almost no one is "from" the Downtown Eastside; people have migrated there from rural areas, from other urban areas, from First Nations reserves throughout Canada, and from diverse countries worldwide. Administrators, artists and community members use music to alleviate the intersecting oppressions of the inner city, and to manage social habits that seem undesirable or unhealthy. However, the way in which human hierarchies of power and control operate can influence the well-being of individuals involved. The primary sociological determinants of health include the degree of control that one experiences over life situations, one's experiences of socioeconomic status, and one's experiences of the hierarchy or egalitarianism of social configurations. The act of influencing human well-being through musical activity itself has health implications. 3

How does music influence and affect the social structuring and related well-being of a community in transition, such as Vancouver, British Columbia's Downtown

Eastside? How I answer this thesis question draws on recent paradigms from applied

(ethno)musicology research. While applied ethnomusicology has been defined in diverse ways,1 this work resonates most with parts of the definition posed by the International

Council for Traditional Music's Applied Ethnomusicology Study Group, of which I was surprised to be elected Vice-Chairperson in 2006, in part due to this Ph.D. research.2 In

2006, the study group's working definition read that applied ethnomusicology "guided by principles of social responsibility, extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems and toward working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts."3 While I would not claim that this dissertation solves any concrete problems, I do aim better to understand the role that music plays in attempts to improve social organization and human well-being. In turn, this aim enables me to understand how ethnomusicologists and performing artists might become more socially responsible in contexts of poverty and social instability. In this limited way, I understand myself as a producer of knowledge who tries to conduct empirical research on applications of music aimed at social change, in ways that

1 For example, the Applied Ethnomusicology Section for the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) states on its website that it "is devoted to work in ethnomusicology that falls outside of typical academic contexts and purposes" and points to the activities such as "festival and concert organization, museum exhibitions, apprenticeship programs, etc." while its members "work to organize panel sessions and displays at SEM conferences that showcase this kind of work and discuss the issues that surround it, as well as foster connections between individuals and institutions" (Applied Ethnomusicology Network 2005). 2 At the time of writing, the study group's Chairperson is Svanibor Pettan and the Secretary is Eric Usner. 3 This definition adapts a definition of applied anthropology in James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy's textbook Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (Spradley and McCurdy 2000,411). 4 potentially could inform social policy, politics on-the-ground and beliefs in society at large, in addition to contributing to (ethno)musicological understandings and debates on the role that music has in situations of transition and issues of health. Although one can never control the use of research results, I work to contribute to a social science academy whose knowledge engages directly the concerns of a civil society. In so doing, I contribute to a trend in applied musicology (see Cusick 2006), and in what I might call applied ethnomusicology writings such as Gage Averill's book on popular music and power in Haiti (1997), and Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier's work on music festivals and violence in Colombia (2004).4 Angel Impey contends in her seminal article on activist ethnomusicology that there has been a fissure between theoretical and applied fields in the human sciences, "the subtext being that academia is superior to the theoretically unsophisticated and ethically problematic wanderings of applied work" (Impey 2005,

404). However, in keeping with recent reconsideration in ethnomusicology and related fields, I view applied scholarship as a unified practical and theoretical pursuit.

As a contribution to applied ethnomusicology, this dissertation documents and theorizes how musical sounds and expressions may engage and influence human aspirations and predicaments that are typical of inner cities in North America. Such urban spaces tend not to be unified by one musical genre or culture, yet are unified by patterns

4 Other important writings in applied ethnomusicology include landmark articles by Charles Keil (1982), Jeff Todd Titon (1992), Daniel Sheehy (1992) and Daniel Avorgbedor (1992). Svanibor Pettan has made consistent contributions to applied ethnomusicology since the mid-1990s (Pettan 1995, 2007). Other significant contributions include articles by Erica Haskell (2006) and Ursula Hemetek (2006). A flourish of new work is emerging in conference presentations, for example by Tan Sooi Beng (Tan 2007), Patricia Opondo (2007), Samuel Araujo (2007), Jennifer Newsome (2007) and Maureen Loughran (2007). 5 of social issues that in turn are shaped by social hierarchies. I analyze, then, how music may engage specific social patterns that may be associated with specific human conditions in local urban environments. I intend this not as an incomplete method for studying musical expressions and cultures since I do not wish to document any coherent musical system, which does not exist in the culturally diverse Downtown Eastside. I intend my approach as a strategy for theorizing musical activity in a context of intercultural richness resulting from human migration and globalization. Worldwide, cities have been created through absorbing local, regional and global populations and cultures. Canadian inner cities like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are intensely transcultural. In such "hyphenated" urban environments, bounded notions of musical genre, performance and culture become fragmented and intensely hybridized, yet other patterned components of social organization, such as social class, remain intact. As

Beverley Diamond's work on transnational Saami music implies, the "bounded" nature of language and concepts of identity and cultural studies are not always relevant for transcultural musical realities in a globalizing world (Diamond forthcoming). Examining relatively stable social relationships in and among distinctive types of transcultural music contexts, I think, may lead to new insights and allow scholars to question incorrect assumptions about the basic questions of what music is, what music does, and how

"culture" and society may or may not include music. My discussion of music in

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, though, heeds historical notions of culture, ethnicity 6 and musical expression because they were important reference points in the individual and community change described.

Administrators and organizations that hosted the DTES urban development initiatives understood some events as grounded in Native Canadian or Chinese ethnicities, but did not conceptualize other events according to ethnicity. The initiatives spanned diverse music genres of popular music, classical, jazz, folk, First Nations traditional and popular song, hymnody and theatre soundscape. Although single ethnicities and music genres constituted organizational principles of events, participating in the events was not strictly bounded in terms of ethnicity or genre. DTES community members might be most likely to participate in First Nations or theatre events due to ethnicity or interest, but the same participants could and did take part in multiple genres or ethnic musics, some of which gained new meanings through intercultural blending. New patterns of social relationships and subjective experiences emerged as DTES musicians circulated through one or multiple types of musical expression in a highly fluid way. Again, this was one type of musical transition within the Downtown Eastside community. At the same time, some music program administrators and affiliated organizations formed mini-networks and alliances. By contrast, many others were often uncoordinated administratively. Such arts facilitators might not know each other personally, although they were accessed by some of the same community members who affiliated with multiple music initiatives, genres, styles and events. 7

Table 1. 1999-2007: Selected music events involving health and well-being in

Vancouver's economically depressed Downtown Eastside

The table below categorizes musical ensembles, performances and events that

Downtown Eastside community members participated in from 1999-2007. The chart

focuses largely on events that I explore in this dissertation, using research methods detailed below. In the table, the musical ensembles and events are categorized by

sponsoring organization (left panel), music or performance genre and its application (top

row). I have marked different ethnic focuses with distinctive font styles. Music events

with a First Nations focus appear in bold. A Chinese initiative appears underlined. In

regular text are events where ethnic or cultural difference was not an explicit focus.

Italics simply mark the titles of large-scale performances. While some of the events listed

below might seem to be non-music occasions, all included music as a central feature, as I

will describe. Some theatre productions verged on being musicals (e.g., In the Heart of a

City and Through the People's Voice); others were musicals (like The Shadows Project,

Condemned and Urinetown)\ still others were cabarets with a central music component

(e.g., / ¥ the DTES). Music took an important role in the listed memorial services,

protests, public education events (like "Night before the Opera") and university courses

(such as Music 101 and Humanities 101). Popular Popular music Music lessons Classical music Jazz, folk, Chinese Popular First Musical music therapy in popular education classical and music music and Nations soundscapes in jam music genres popular genres First traditional theatre song Nations song only productions amalgams traditional song Vancouver 1) Sheway Positive Native Health music therapy Outlook - Society 2) Residential music School Healing therapy Centre - music therapy Aboriginal Powwow Front Door drum woup Evelyne Evelyne Sailer Evelyne Sailer Sailer Centre Centre music Centre (music therapy therapy) Health Popular Contact music Centre (of the jam Vancouver- Richmond Health Board and historically, the Carnegie Community Centre Association)

00 Popular Popular music Music lessons Classical music Jazz, folk, Chinese Popular First Musical music therapy in popular education classical and music music and Nations soundscapes in jam music genres popular genres First traditional theatre song Nations song only productions amalgams traditional song Health Street Contact Music Centre and Program Carnegie Community Centre Association Carnegie Song 1) Street Chinese Women's First Condemned Community Circle Band Singing Memorial Nations Centre 2) Carnegie Class March Cultural Choir protest Sharing 3) memorial (1992- (arts services 2005) workshops and gatherings for Natives combined with public education) Downtown Women's Eastside Memorial Women's March Centre protest (2006-) Popular Popular music Music lessons Classical music Jazz, folk, Chinese Popular First Musical music therapy in popular education classical and music music and Nations soundscapes in jam music genres popular genres First traditional theatre song Nations song only productions amalgams traditional song Carnegie Downtown 1) In the Heart Community Eastside of a City, the Centre with Heart of the DTES Vancouver City community play Moving Festival 2) Through the Theatre People's Voice 3) The Shadows Project/We're all in this Together

Firehall Arts Urinetown Centre Savage God IV the DTES (theatre company) Vancouver 1) "Night before Opera the Opera" - opera education program University of 1) Music 101 British 2) musicology Columbia lessons in Humanities 101 11

In addition to the above events, there have been popular music jams at other organizations including the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre and Portland Hotel

Society residences, and popular music therapy at other venues including the Youth Action

Coalition. Popular music genres played at jams and music therapy sessions in the

Downtown Eastside typically centre on Billboard Top 40 hits of twenty years ago or earlier, in the industry-defined categories of country, pop and R&B/hip hop. Some

Downtown Eastside songwriters consciously resist these listening expectations and perform their own songs in jams or therapy. Many multi-genre expressions thrive, including dance performances and workshops offered by the Karen Jamieson Dance

Company, and First Nations plays about the neighbourhood, such as works produced by

Urban Ink Productions at the Firehall theatre and Injun'Nuity Theatre Productions at the

Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre. A Vancouver grassroots theatre company,

Theatre in the Raw, has hired DTES actors to produce stage and radio plays (with music), some written by DTES community members. Headlines Theatre has featured Downtown

Eastside actors and social issues in some of its productions. Numerous musical groups, from other locations, have volunteered performances in the inner city, for example: Opera

Breve, the Vancouver Bach Choir, the Universal Gospel Choir and the Pacific Bluegrass

& Heritage Music Society. Still other ensembles, like SWARM, The Carnival Band and

Katari Taiko, originated in the greater Downtown Eastside and perform occasionally in the neighbourhood. 12

Through the above musical presentations, events and expressions, Downtown

Eastside community members and affiliated organizations and employees have shaped, generated and conveyed, via musical expression, relationships and meanings of

Vancouver's inner city. This metaphorical web of relationships gives me the opportunity to study music's capacity for defining relationships, which as Beverley Diamond writes,

"may well be as significant in the 21st century as studying music's role in defining identities has been for the past few decades" (Diamond forthcoming). Diamond has proposed an "alliance studies" framework for understanding the capacity of music to define (or be defined by) relationships of artists who identify as Indigenous. Building on

Diamond's insightful model, I would argue that a framework that accommodates diverse social relationships, including relationships of conflict, is required for contexts where numerous ethnicities, (sub)cultures and other social groupings intermingle. In socially diverse contexts, for example in Canadian urban centres, social (or other) relationships that are negotiated through music may involve complex patterns of control and hierarchy in addition to alliances.

More specifically then, I will document and analyze what I call an associational network of music in a transcultural context where coalitions and divisiveness define and are defined by music(al activity). The term "associational network of music" implies a direction for analyzing relationships through emphasizing the act of associating, by virtue of music, with people (performers or administrators), styles, genres, organizations, government bodies and places, for example. Through borrowing the concept of "associational networks" from the social sciences, my framework emphasizes "the how," and so facilitates, for example, the analysis of social processes of music contexts, genres, scenes and events. In this way, it differs from most previous conceptualizations of music networks and musical networks, which have focussed on things that can be networked or connected, often in particular ways: concepts (Koskoff 1982), mass media businesses

(Botsch 2001), other music-related institutions (Noll 1994), electronic technologies used to produce music (Weinberg 2003), musical activities (Schulz 1996) and people (Bryant

1995; Ruff 1999). Associational networks of music may be interpreted as stressing the human processes that are involved in useful analytical concepts that emphasize "the who," as in Lundberg, Malm and Ronstrom's "Doers-Makers-Knowers" model

(Lundberg, Malm, and Ronstrom 2000), that highlight musical display, representation or place, as in Andy Bennett's notion of "music scenes" (Bennett 2004), or that interpret musical contexts, for example Mark Slobin's idea of "micromusics" (Slobin 1993), Bruno

Nettl's notion of the "total music" of a community (Nettl 1978), or J. Lawrence

Witzleben's understanding of a "musical system" (Witzleben 2000).5 How I define music networks echoes strongly emerging definitions of "networks" in social network theory, for example, that of Stephan Fuchs, who writes that networks "link not actions, but interactions and communications. Rather than connecting persons, networks link their encounters, both across space and over time" (Fuchs 2001, 191). In context of the

5 Witzleben's concept of a "musical system" refers to "the network of musical styles, genres, and performers" in "any community, village or city" (Witzleben 2000, 79). In this way, it is very similar to the idea of associational networks of music, which emphasizes the act of associating. 14 associational network of music in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, I examine music "in action" of encounters, and I begin to answer Tia DeNora's call for a focus on music as a

"dynamic material of structuration," particularly regarding "how music is used and works as an ordering material in social life," which in music scholarship "remains opaque"

(DeNora 2000, x).

I investigated the associational network of music in Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside from October 2000 to December 2005, in February and October 2006, and in

April, June, July and August 2007. My methods included performance attendance, participant observation, interviews and archival research, among other research strategies that are common in ethnomusicology (see Barz and Cooley 1997).

In 2000, I started by researching music in Aboriginal theatre in Vancouver, much of which was happening in the Downtown Eastside. This was a natural extension of my master's work on public presentations of ceremonial music and dance by

Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations living in Victoria, B.C. I gradually became more involved in the DTES after theatre director Jay Hamburger, of Theatre in the Raw, asked me to speak about First Nations plays on Vancouver's Co-op Radio in the DTES. By autumn

2003, Hamburger invited me to perform violin in the Downtown Eastside community play, In the Heart of a City. The production was sold out for its two-week run, received local and national media attention, and engaged approximately five hundred participants over eighteen months. The community play's artistic director, Savannah Walling, and 15 artistic producer, Terry Hunter (both of Vancouver Moving Theatre), warmly encouraged me to become further involved in the neighbourhood.

Subsequently, I was absorbed into the community as "the Downtown Eastside's violinist." I played violin in popular music jams at the Health Contact Centre, which met for several hours two nights per week. I regularly played violin and sang popular songs in music therapy at the Evelyne Sailer Centre, which happened on Wednesday afternoons. I played violin in weekly popular music jams held by the Residential School Healing

Centre at the First United Church, until these jams ended in March 2004. Through 2004 and 2005,1 took part in music therapy at the Positive Outlook Centre for Aboriginals with

HIV/AIDS. The therapy sessions happened for approximately two hours several days per week. Sometimes I was involved once per month and other times, every therapy session, for example, when I helped to create a popular music CD called The Circle of Song, for which I wrote liner notes and "comped" on fiddle. For this project, I also recorded violin tracks in Baker Studios in North Vancouver. Music therapist Carol Wiedemann took me into the private music therapy program at Sheway as a "special guest," and spent hours explaining her music therapy practice to me. I also performed violin in one-and-a-half hour meetings of the Carnegie Community Centre Street Band, each Thursday. I sang in a two-hour Carnegie Choir rehearsal that followed. I occasionally played violin and sang in the Carnegie's Song Circle for two hours on Fridays. I performed violin in a memorial service for a community member, Wilhemina Munro, at the Carnegie Community Centre. 16

Due to my musical contributions, I was invited to perform violin in the Heart of the City Festival, for example, a "Co-op Radio Cafe" that aired on Vancouver's co-op radio station, CFRO 102.7 FM, in October 2004. I played violin in new community theatre productions, for example, Through the People's Voice (2004), which for me required eighty five-and-a-half hours of rehearsal for two performances at the first annual

Heart of the City Festival. Together with two DTES community actors and a theatre producer from the neighbourhood, I performed in a professional musical theatre adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at the 2005 PuSh

International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver. Rehearsals took thirty-five hours per week for eight weeks (280 hours). I improvised soundscapes on violin within a musical score created by Joelysa Pankanea, who composed music for Through the

People's Voice and was assistant musical director for the Downtown Eastside community play. Crime and Punishment won five Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for professional theatre in Vancouver, including Outstanding Sound Design.

In the Downtown Eastside, I attended popular music jams outside of those discussed in this dissertation, at community organizations like the Gathering Place and the Living Room. To understand better the DTES music scene, I talked with employees at service organizations that hosted music such as the Portland Hotel Society, the Lifeskills

Centre and the Aboriginal Wellness Program of Vancouver Coastal Health; directors and employees of a theatre, the Firehall Arts Centre; and activists of church music programs at the First United Church and Saint Paul's Parish Roman Catholic Church. I attended 17 music performances given at no cost in the DTES by professional and semi-professional ensembles including SWARM, Katari Taiko, the Universal Gospel Choir, the Carnival

Band and the Aboriginal women's vocal trio M'girl. I enjoyed Vancouver Opera education evenings, "Night before the Opera," at the Carnegie Community Centre.

Together with DTES residents, I attended Vancouver Opera dress rehearsals. I met with several Vancouver Opera administrators and employees to better understand the opera program. I went to diverse performances including Shadows Project presentations at the annual Heart of the City Festival from 2004-2006. I also took part in initial theatre workshops that informed the content of theatre productions such as the Shadows Project and a DTES Romeo and Juliet that premiered in 2007. Many, many music and performing arts presentations in the Downtown Eastside caught my attention and I was there.

Although not a main focus of this dissertation, I continued to conduct in-depth fieldwork at Aboriginal theatre productions that involved Downtown Eastside themes, for example,

Marie Clements' Unnatural and Accidental Women (Firehall Arts Centre, 2000), the collaborative Rare Earth Arias (Firehall Arts Centre, 2002) and productions by the

Injun'Nuity Theatre Company at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre, especially

Eastside (2003) and The Lost One (2003), among other First Nations theatre shows.

I also continued my First Nations arts research by learning powwow drumming from elder Fred John (T'lt'q'et or Lillooet First Nation) at the DTES organization

Aboriginal Front Door. As a woman, I was welcomed to the powwow drum, where I learned songs, drumming technique and pan-Indigenous music epistemology. I took part 18 in First Nations hand drumming, which was folded into music therapy at Positive Outlook in spring 2005. In 2004, 2005 and 2006,1 was part of a committee that co-organized the

Women's Memorial March, which happens each February 14th. The committee met on

Saturdays in January and early February. Sometimes, I took the meeting minutes; at other times, I wrote formal letters inviting city officials to the event. At the 2006 march, I helped to manage crowd control together with other volunteers and Vancouver police.

While participating in First Nations contexts in the DTES, I was involved in Native culture contexts elsewhere. In Greater Vancouver, since the late 1990s, I had participated in sweat lodges on the Tsawwassen First Nation reserve, attended powwows in

Vancouver, attended ceremonial events (e.g., Sioux yuwipi ceremonies) and participated in another powwow drum group at East Vancouver's Hey-way'noqu' Healing Circle for

Addictions Society. Fred John also supervised the drum group at Hey-way'noqu'.

People tend to ask how I, a Caucasian, was accepted in hand drumming, powwow drumming and healing circle contexts. I was always well accepted and even loved. My race tended not to be an issue in the drumming contexts, which followed Medicine Wheel teachings of honouring the four "colours" of races: red, white, black and yellow. Some

First Nations friends suggested that I might not be as well accepted in Native music contexts were I not a musician. When helping to organize the Women's Memorial March, by contrast, I was accepted as an activist who had some understanding of Native-non-

Native race relations. Racial tensions ran high in the Women's Memorial March, which protested violence against women in the DTES—Aboriginal women in particular. 19

I embraced my DTES roles: The lived experience of the neighbourhood's associational network of music could be overwhelmingly supportive and comforting to me. As I became involved, I was grieving a death in my family, and nearly died myself from paralytic shellfish poisoning. Against a shocked personal landscape, I perceived loving community and humanitarian values emerging magically and hopefully through severe oppression and poverty. As well, I enjoyed learning to live with a sense of social ambivalence about the multiplicity of possible subject positions that constituted my experience of being in the culturally complex Downtown Eastside. A flexibility of being able to choose my identity from moment to moment—or even needing affirmatively to not choose a social or cultural position—played out in many aspects of my experience.

For example, having spent my childhood in a small fishing and logging town three hours north of Vancouver, I knew how to talk a rural labourer's "dialect" heard along the

British Columbia coast, and among migrants to the DTES from such areas. Yet having grown up in a social circle of some artistic and intellectual accomplishment, I had learned to converse in higher social classes, eventually pursuing an academic career. In the

Downtown Eastside, I used the fact that I could "class hop" when researching different classes invested in the DTES, but I did not have always to "be" one class or the other. On the other hand, when I played music with people who suffered from the poverty or health issues discussed in the dissertation—people with end stage HIV/AIDS, women who had been physically abused or people suffering acutely from drug addiction—I often felt self­ consciously ambivalent about making a social or culturally-based judgment of any sort, 20 about the music and especially about the suffering person. The most loving and least emotionally painful way that I could be with them was simply to connect with them through making music together. Social or cultural constructs of the music were vehicles, but not the focus of the human connection.

Academically, I was drawn most to the many musical instances in the DTES where one ethnicity, race or nation was not the main focus of musical expressions.

Ethnomusicology is a field that as Kofi Agawu writes, "traffics in and exploits" such differences (see Agawu 2003 on Stokes 2001). I wanted to resist engaging only difference of ethnicity, race or nationality, but attempt to analyze human sameness and difference where I actually found them—a strategy advocated by Agawu (Agawu 2003). I became particularly interested in how live musical expressions negotiated sameness and differences of power and control in human relationships. Aspects of such power differences involved ethnicity in some way, but many centred instead on differences of social and economic status, health status and gender.

Ethnicity was just one factor that distinguished the Chinese and some of the First

Nations musical events as part of the associational network of music in Vancouver's

Downtown Eastside, yet apart from it. If the reader looks again at Table 1, he or she may interpret the different genres of music events (jazz, classical, rock, musical theatre and so on) as "knots," nodes or encounters in other associational networks of music that focus on those genres or diverse types of social organization, for example, national government policies, music industry segments, formal music education and training centres or indeed other organizations, which all are factors or areas of activity that may contribute to everyday music life, as Roger Wallis and Krister Malm write (Wallis and Malm 1984).

Chinese and traditional First Nations music events in the Downtown Eastside arguably are more part of an associational network of music respectively of the Chinese diaspora and the pan-Indigenous cultural movement in Vancouver, but also elsewhere, than in any one neighbourhood. Because of my thesis question, I have defined the associational

network of music in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside according to the neighbourhood's

physical geography and social issues. The reader remembers that my question asks how

music influences and affects the social structures and related well-being of communities

in social and cultural transition, for instance Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Many

other possibilities exist for defining an associational network of music in the DTES. At

the end Chapter 3, though, I do highlight some traditional First Nations music practices

that, while part of the DTES' musical life, extend far into a pan-First Nations

associational network of music and culture. The music therapy involving popular music at

First Nations agencies, by contrast, followed patterns of musical practice that also

emerged in intercultural therapy sessions. At Native organizations, such music therapy

existed in tension, not in alliance, with associational networks of Native traditional

cultures because the therapy practices side-stepped Native traditions. Chinese-language

events, on the other hand, usually happened in Cantonese or Mandarin. Some were

inaccessible to me as a non-Chinese language speaker although I did attend musical

events publicized in English, such as the Chinese singing class at the Carnegie 22

Community Centre, and dragon dancing and Cantonese opera singing associated with an annual Chinese New Year's parade. Chinese music events were almost never specifically designated as urban poverty initiatives, which I study here.

As I attended and participated in musical performance events, I used participant- observer ethnographic strategies to document dialogues in and around performances in which I participated as a violinist, drummer or singer, and to explore musical sound as it was defined by repertoire choice, performance techniques and musical objectives. In some public performances, I simply observed. I frequently wrote jottings for mnemonic purposes as per Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz and Linda L. Shaw's model

(Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995), and then expanded them into fieldnotes in which I aspired to the high level of ethnographic detail propounded by James Spradley (Spradley

1980). Often, though, creating fieldnotes became a therapeutic activity that allowed me emotional release from what became very taxing research, and produced highly subjective writing for which I found inspiration in feminist ethnographies (see Abu-Lughod 1990) of an intimate and sensuous nature (e.g., Trinh 1991). I recorded musical expressions on

MiniDisc where possible and had access to some community-made video and CDs of musical performance, which I analyzed in detail and in dialogue with data in my fieldnotes. Individually, I interviewed about twenty participants in diverse music and theatre events in the DTES, and as mentioned, I visited informally with many, many others—often writing fieldnotes on my understandings of these relationships. This dissertation engages my musical relationships with some 200 individuals. Some of these consultants were music initiative coordinators or ensemble leaders; others, musicians with whom I maintain ongoing performance relations when I am in the DTES. Still others were politicians or long-time residents that have witnessed the flourishing of DTES arts.

Coordinators of theatre productions that involve music also shared their experiences and wisdom with me.6 In order to understand DTES music making in historical perspective, I consulted staff and exhibits at the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum and Vancouver

Museum. I conducted archival research in the City of Vancouver Archives and the

Vancouver Public Library's Historical Photographs Collection.7 I also did Internet research on web sites and blogs.

When writing up this research, I have been careful about naming people. With the exception of one person, every individual that I interviewed for this dissertation gave informed consent for me to use his or her legal name. I wanted to write honestly about my experiences in the DTES though, and there were places where I thought that my honesty about research participants' life situations, but also the stories told by my consultants, could potentially harm them in the future. In these cases, I chose to withhold names and to assign pseudonyms. Wherever I thought it safe, I used people's real names.

6 All individuals that I interviewed formally gave permission for me to use their names in this public document. However, I have withheld names and used pseudonyms in cases where consultants shared particularly difficult or painful stories, whose publication could make the tellers vulnerable to harm. My human research was completed in accordance with York University's Faculty of Graduate Studies Human Participants Research Procedures and the SSHRC/NSERC/CIHR Tri-Council Policy Statement Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. For First Nations contexts, I kept in mind the (de)colonizing research methods of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), and Celia Haig-Brown and Jo-ann Archibald (1996). 24

I cannot claim that my music research process has not been without fear and conflict. The scope of my research has in part been delimited by fear and safety concerns.

Being female, I risked suffering assault and violence that plagues women on Vancouver's

Downtown Eastside. Therefore I did not perform in obvious high-risk zones, for example bars or clubs where, historically, some assaults began (see Vancouver Sun, November 4,

2000). I felt that I could not document lively pub music practices in the Downtown

Eastside, which hosts the highest density of bars in Vancouver. I did not feel comfortable to conduct music research in people's homes, particularly Single Resident Occupancy hotel units, although my work sometimes took me there. A lot of music making happened in public spaces such as alleyways, park benches and sidewalks, but these also were spaces of intense drug trafficking and use where I did not feel comfortable. Such limitations did not affect my sample size and analysis of musical urban improvement programs, but resulted in work that is less centred on "indigenous" music practices of the

Downtown Eastside than on institutionalized music practices of the neighbourhood.

In the formal music contexts which I researched, and sometimes on the street, some of the community play's approximately one hundred performers watched for my safety. The DTES' associational network of music helped me to feel and be semi-safe.

Although I made strategic research decisions in attempt to protect my well-being, as

Jeffery Sluka remarks:

Researchers working in dangerous environments should, like professional gamblers, recognize that their enterprise is inherently a combination of both skill and luck. . . . What distinguishes the professional from the amateur, in both 25

gambling and anthropology, is the concerted effort always to maximize skilful handling of the situation, while recognizing that skill alone is no guarantee of success. (Sluka 1995, 290)

Defining Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is currently one of Canada's most economically depressed urban neighbourhoods. Its core, roughly the outlined area below, stretches about nineteen square blocks above the port of Vancouver. Residents call the nexus

"Main and Hastings," while academics and mass media venues have preferred

"Downtown Eastside."

Figure 1. Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

(City of Vancouver 2005; Reprinted with permission.) 26

Mapped names and physical geographies of the DTES are unstable and contested.

Statistics Canada publications split the nexus into "Oppenheimer," the "Hastings

Corridor" and an "Industrial Area." In contrast to Figure 1, other publications by

Vancouver City map Oppenheimer, the Hastings Corridor and the Industrial Area amidst other "Downtown Eastside Communities": well-worn Victory Square and Thornton Park, and the gentrifying Chinatown, gentrifying Strathcona and gentrified Gastown.

Figure 2. Other City of Vancouver publications locate the ghetto core within a larger geographic area of various "Downtown Eastside" communities.

(City of Vancouver 2007; Reprinted with permission.) 27

Some "Downtown Eastside" maps, then, do not call the inner city core the

Downtown Eastside. Different maps of Vancouver's downtown do not name the

Downtown Eastside at all.8 Shifting definitions of the area's physical geography are entangled in complex politics of community representation, gentrification and other urban development.

Histories of the name Downtown Eastside and the area's social geography are no less manipulated. The name Downtown Eastside was invented in 1973 by a low-income housing coalition, the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (henceforth DERA).

DERA had mapped Vancouver's Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms, 95% of which existed just east of downtown Vancouver in the locations in Figure 2 (Gereke

1991, 12). DERA then worked to provide SRO tenants with better housing in the same geographic area, which it named Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. While DERA zeroed in on Vancouver's urban poor, the DTES' social geography has been defined variously in different public representations of community identity.

However the social geography is (re)configured, it remains intensely transcultural or intercultural with sizeable First Nations and Chinese populations. A City of Vancouver collation of the 2001 Canada Census statistics for the areas in Figure 2 reported a total population of 15,995 that was 9% First Nations, 54% speaking English as home language,

27% speaking Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin), and 19% speaking another mother

8 Paul Taylor's book 77ie Heart of the Community reprints one such map, which originally appeared in the Vancouver Sun newspaper (Taylor 2003, 119). 28 tongue. In the economically depressed "Oppenheimer" area mapped above, a population of 4,805 reportedly was 14% Aboriginal, 66% speaking English as home language, 19% speaking Chinese and 15% speaking a different mother tongue. In Victory Square and

Thornton Park, 23% of residents were First Nations (City of Vancouver 2006, 70-77).

These demographics did not account for a substantial homeless population, which looks

disproportionately Aboriginal.9 Recent census categories of race may compress important

hybridities; there are complex language overlaps and cultural mixings. When the City of

Vancouver commissioned Statistics Canada to compile the 1999 Canada Census statistics

of language background, immigration status and ethnicity for the Downtown Eastside,10

52.7% of the population in the Downtown Eastside areas in Figure 2 claimed to be "non­

immigrant"—close to the statistic of 53.1% for the City of Vancouver. Of the 46.2% of

the DTES population that claimed immigrant status, 36.3% said that they were born in

Asia, 6.1% in Europe, 1.1% in the United States, 0.5% in "Oceania & other" areas, 1.3%

in Central or South America, 0.7% in Africa, and 0.2% in the Caribbean or Bermuda. In

the most economically depressed part of the DTES surveyed, Oppenheimer, a larger

60.6% of residents reported that they were not immigrants, but born in Canada. Of 37.9%

who self-identified as immigrants, 8.9% said that they were bom in Europe while 26.0%

named Asia as their birthplace (City of Vancouver 1999).

9 Dara Culhane has discussed the visibility of Aboriginals in Vancouver's DTES versus their invisibility in media coverage (Culhane 2003). 10 This is the most recent, comprehensive set of statistics available at the time of writing. 29

Currently, the Downtown Eastside's social geography also is powerfully sculpted by the oppressive social and economic realities of urban poverty. In Vancouver's

Downtown Eastside, there were 895 reported incidents of assault and sexual assault in

2002 (City of Vancouver 2006, 64). Overwhelming violence haunts women working an entrenched survival sex trade and other females. While a significant segment of the DTES population has no addiction problem, a drinking culture flourishes and there is extensive drug misuse.11 Largely resultant from injection drugs, the AIDS rate is among the highest in the Western world (Taylor 2003, 193), soaring over 50% in some Single Residency

Occupancy hotels.12 As anthropologist Dara Culhane writes, "in keeping with life expectancy levels in this neighborhood, anyone over 45 is designated as an Elder," particularly in Aboriginal circles (Culhane 2003, 603). The gendered violence, substance misuse, disease and related social chaos and suffering make Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside typical of inner cities in the West.

My analysis of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside takes seriously issues of socioeconomic status and oppression that have troubled the community (or intersecting communities) in the inner city, and my research conditions. After offering a musical history of the neighbourhood, I explain how the urban improvement projects that involve

11 The port of Vancouver, located immediately north of the DTES, is one of North America's main points of entry for drugs (MacPherson 2001, 8). According to a Vancouver Injection Drug User survey, 39% of DTES women and 18% of men who use injection drugs are First Nations (MacPherson 2001,40). 12 The DTES is home to about 20% of Vancouver's mental illness patients. The City of Vancouver asserts that since the mid-'80s, the DTES drug scene has been fuelled by "de-institutionalization of the mentally ill without adequate support structures" in Greater Vancouver, among other social, economic and environmental factors (MacPherson 2001, 8). 30 music have attempted to decrease poverty and marginalization of urban poor, within the

DTES' context of social and cultural fluidity, transition and erosion. My analytics focus on processes of exerting control, means of improving socioeconomic status, and ways of effecting community connection. They emerge from the logic for community change of health and well-being that I saw institutionalized through musical activism in the neighbourhood. 31

Chapter 2. The DTES and its Music in Historical Perspective

The Downtown Eastside community did not always suffer so much, but spiraled into extreme poverty. The area has long been a place of cultural flux and social tension.

Aboriginal peoples gradually moved into Burrard Inlet (see Figure 1) after the

Cordilleran Ice Sheet melted 11,500 to 11,300 years ago (Carlson 2001, 14), with environmental, geological and cultural stabilization occurring 5,000 to 4,000 years ago

(Carlson 2001, 18). As many as 62,580 Coast Salish First Nations lived in the Vancouver area until 1782, when smallpox spread from Spanish in Mexico City through intertribal trading networks, diminishing some Coast Salish populations by about two-thirds (see

Carlson 2001, 162).

When the first recorded European explorer, Don Jose Maria Narvaez, scouted

Burrard Inlet in 1791,13 the greater DTES was the site of two fishing and hunting camps called Q'umq'umal'ay' and Luq'luq'i. Coast Salish sub-groups, especially the Tsleil-

Waututh (or Burrard) First Nation, Skwxwu7mesh (or Squamish) First Nation and

Musqueam First Nation used the camps only in summer.14 An inlet, False Creek, existed south of Pender Street (see Figure 2), leaving only a 300-meter-deep isthmus of land that flooded during winter high tides.15 The temporary settlements housed complex, stratified societies with highly specific ground-stone technology, food gathering and preservation

13 Narvaez, who came from Spain, was followed in June 1792 by fellow Spaniard Don Dionosio Galiano and the English captain George Vancouver (McKee 1978, 2-3). 14 The Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwu7mesh and Musqueam First Nations claim the DTES as traditional territory. 15 Mud flats south of Pender Street were filled in by the City of Vancouver in 1918 (Burkinshaw 1984, 31). 32 knowledge, resource and land management, housing construction, and cedar bark weaving and textiles. Systems of cosmology and world view, politics and defense, visual art and music intertwined there in ceremonies and everyday life. Microtonal, descending

Salish song melodies, which might be harmonized in seconds and paired with skin drums, accompanied many daily activities of summer and the gambling game slahal (Meyers

1986; Stewart 1972). By contrast, in winter, sacred and hereditary songs catalyzed spirit dances, which served complex social, psychological, and spiritual functions (see Jilek

1974), and potlatch ceremonies that, by means of "legal" witnessing and property distribution, transferred rights to intangible property including songs, dances, names and social positions, thus transforming village relations.16

Thousands of Americans, Chinese and British plied the nearby Fraser River during a gold rush in 1858. Yet by 1859 when the British crown established the Colony of

British Columbia, only one non-Coast Salish, Julius Voight, lived in today's Vancouver.

In the wake of the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes, B.C.'s economy slowly awoke

(McKee 1978, 4). A coal discovery just west of Luq'luq'i by Captain George Richards of the H.M.S. Plumper (in 1859) combined with entrepreneurial interest in vast stands of giant timber that dominated the local landscape attracted in 1862-63 more White settlers to Burrard Inlet—miners, lumbermen and Oblate missionaries who visited the First

16 My observations about the Coast Salish potlatch draw on my M.A. research with Coast Salish singers and dancers, among other Northwest Coast First Nations artists, as well as archival research at the Royal British Columbia Museum, B.C. Archives and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in the late 1990s. Texts that address the social functions of Coast Salish potlatch music are authored by Linda Goodman (1978) and Helen Meyers (1986). 33

Nations (see McDonald 1996, 4). That winter, construction firm T. W. Graham and

Company built the first lumber mill on Burrard Inlet's north shore, in Moodyville. By

1865, Captain Edward Stamp started construction at the Q'umq'umal'ay' site, of the inlet's second mill, eventually known as Hastings Mill (O'Kiely 1970, 2). By 1884, two mills were exporting to Australia, the U.S., Mexico, China and South America over

24,000,000 board feet of knotless rough lumber per annum (McKee 1978, 6); beams 3 x

60 feet known colloquially as "Vancouver toothpicks" (Walling 2003a, 5-6).

Diverse settlements emerged or adapted to accommodate and supply mill labour.

In 1867, Yorkshireman Jack Deighton floated a whisky barrel to the shores of Luq'luq'i, and offered some mill hands the barrel's contents in return for building him a saloon

(Kluckner 1984, 15). Within twenty-four hours, the Globe Saloon was operational.

Thirsty mill hands drank there instead of trekking fifteen miles through bush to New

Westminster (Marlatt and Itter 1979, 2). Three years later, Luq'luq'i was surveyed as a settler townsite and named "Granville." By 1875, the town had ten commercial buildings, four of which were devoted to selling liquor (McDonald 1996, 13), and some half-dozen houses, including one "house of ill repute" (O'Kiely 1970). On Hastings Mill company land, or Q'umq'umal'ay', amid the now "incessant rattle of machinery and cloud of escaping steam" (see McDonald 1996, 16), cabins for married men sprang up, a bunkhouse for single men, the mill manager's residence, the Granville school and the

Hastings Mill store. 34

First Nations from around Burrard Inlet, though, commuted to work at the mill.

R. H. Alexander, mill manager from 1882, claimed that his transient mill hands "were largely composed of runaway sailors and Indians" (quoted in McDonald 1996, 8).

According to the 1881 Canada census, 75% of non-Natives were British or American, but

others included Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, West Indians, and Central and South

Americans. With their earnings, some Coast Salish men hosted potlatches at which they

distributed money and voluminous goods. Reverend George Grant, on expedition from

Central Canada in 1872, wrote:

An old fellow, big George [worked] industriously at the [nearby Moodyville] mill for years till he saved $2,000. Instead of putting this in a Savings Bank, he had spent it all on stores for a grand "Potlatch," summoning Siwashes17 from far and near to come, eat, drink, dance, be merry and receive gifts. Nearly a thousand assembled. [Once the potlatch ended, the penniless man] returned to the mill to carry slabs at $20 a month, (quoted in McDonald 1996,30)

Capitalism, brought by settlers, had a profound effect on Northwest Coast First

Nations systems of governance and economy during the early contact period. At

potlatches, Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwu7mesh and Musqueam men distributed the

considerable property that they gained through wage labour. The volume of property and

wealth available compared to pre-contact times meant that the men could effectively

"buy" social positions of nobility previously held by those deceased due to smallpox or

17 Thought to derive from the French sauvage or "wild," "Siwash" means "Indian" in Chinook jargon, a trading language that blends English, French and Salishan languages, among others, and was used in the early contact period on the Pacific Northwest Coast. In the 1800s and early 1900s, "Siwash" gained wide and diverse usage, becoming synonymous with the Chinook language, for example, and meaning to travel quickly over a period of time, sleeping in nature as a First Nations person might do. Today, "Siwash" usually is understood as a derogatory and offensive term for an Aboriginal person. 35 other epidemics. These positions carried with them privileges in Coast Salish society of governance, resource management, and music, dance, and visual art ownership. Despite the industry and settlement at Q'umq'umaray' and Luq'luq'i, Coast Salish still held potlatches deep in the woods behind Hastings in 1877. The ceremonials continued in

Burrard Inlet even after the Canadian confederation banned potlatching in 1884 (see

McDonald 1996, 29).

On Burrard Inlet, a predominantly male, non-Native lumbering culture was devoted to drinking, flirted with prostitution and reveled in popular songs. Polkas and schottisches were favourites for dancing for both men and women at a Dominion Day festival in the 1870s. The arrival of a piano in 1870s Granville was an historical but perhaps under-appreciated event. Mrs. Alice Crakanthorp (nee Patterson), resident wrote:

The first piano on the south side of Burrard Inlet was one which was part of the cabin furniture of the barque "Whittier"; Capt. and Mrs. Schwappe. . . . Mrs. Schwappe sold it to Mrs. Richards, school teacher; who lived in a little three-room cottage back of the Hastings Sawmill schoolhouse . . . (City of Vancouver Archives microfiche 3571; see Marlatt 1997, 29)

In February 1885, in return for extending the railway, the Smithe government offered the C.P.R. 6,458 acres of land. Historian Robert A. J. McDonald writes that the land included "'an immense tract. .. of largely untouched forest' south of False Creek, a smaller block of land behind and to the west of the old townsite of Granville, and 175 acres donated in small parcels to the east and west of Granville by private owners hoping to benefit from railway-stimulated growth" (McDonald 1996, 35). The C.P.R. replaced 36 two real estate tycoons, Charles Rand and David Oppenheimer of the Vancouver

Improvement Company, as the major landholding interest in Vancouver.

The land deal stimulated a furor of other land speculation and economic growth in and around Granville, while the C.P.R. engaged the 175-acre westside land in its most profitable landsite promotion in Canada.18 The C.P.R. spent enormous sums on clearing, constructing and grading streets; and building the $200,000 Hotel Vancouver and in 1890, a $100,000 Opera House of the finest brick and masonry block of the day. As the C.P.R. pursued its financial interests sometimes in collaboration and often in conflict with the

Burrard Inlet settler community, a complex struggle for control of space and culture ensued, which still today affects the Downtown Eastside or the original Granville townsite.

This struggle usually is represented poignantly through a description of a rush of historical events accompanied by various demographic facts. On April 6th, 1886, the City of Vancouver incorporated amidst a huge economic boom. In May, there were 600 buildings in Vancouver. By June, there were 800 buildings. However, on June 13th,

Vancouver burned to the ground (O'Kiely 1970, 2). Rebuilding in 1887 included a new residential neighbourhood that mushroomed south and west of Hastings Mill, along

Powell and Oppenheimer (or today's East Cordova) Streets, and Hastings and Princess

(or today's East Pender) Streets, essentially, between Luq'luq'i (or the town of Granville)

18 The landsite promotion generated $868,059 in returns from 1886-1888. Urban land sales were a main source of revenue for the financially insecure rail corporation. 37 and Q'umq'umal'ay' (which became the Hastings Mill site), on Vancouver's eastside

(Marlatt and Itter 1979, 2). Residents of the new neighbourhood included Vancouver's

Mayor McLean, R. H. Alexander and the Oppenheimer family. In short, as Daphne

Marlatt and Carole Itter write, the area was "the domain of the political and industrial elite of pre-railway Vancouver" (Marlatt and Itter 1979, 219). The C.P.R. had not fully established its monopoly and power.

The city population expanded dramatically from 4,000 in 1887 (Marlatt and Itter

1979, 2) to about 13,647 by 1891 and 100,000 by 1911 (McDonald 1996, 54, 121). The westside increasingly became a place of aristocracy and high art. The late Vancouver City

Archivist, J. S. Matthews, wrote that the 1000-seat Vancouver Opera House, managed by the C.P.R.'s Land Department, "accommodated the elite; it [had] a dress circle, parquet, stalls, and 'boiled shirts' were worn." It also boasted a "magnificent drop screen, one of the most beautiful in the world; painted in New York, and brought to Vancouver on two flat cars—one would not hold it" (City of Vancouver Archives microfiche 7326).

Anglican residents sponsored the construction of a fine, sandstone cathedral, which offered a similarly grand space for worship and performance, across the street from the

Hotel Vancouver. A key negotiator for the property's purchase from the C.P.R. was

Henry John Cambie, chief engineer of the C.P.R.'s Pacific Division. Scholars have argued that the C.P.R. "community" used "social status as an instrument of economic

19 Marlatt and Itter (1979, 2) incorrectly cite page 23 of Joseph Kahnan's Exploring Vancouver (1974) as the origin of this quote. 38 advantage [whereby] corporate executives encourage[d] . . . business leaders and wealthy citizens to settle [and mingle] on company property, thereby enhancing corporate prestige and profits" (McDonald 1996, 68). Yet eastside business leaders continued to vie for power and social control, and in fact dominated city council through the late 1880s and into the 1890s. By 1900, most "eastside" notables had moved out of the eastside and into prestige areas to the west; C.P.R. company men dominated city council. The Granville townsite area featured hotels used by transient workers in the logging and fishing industries, flanked by racialized ghettos that began to emerge in the 1890s: a Chinatown and Japantown (Kobayashi 1992, 12; Poon 1998, 22), and also Italian, Jewish,

Yugoslavian and Black quarters that were not static due to immigration and migration

(see Marlatt and Itter 1979, 4).20

Still in 1911, Vancouver was a very "male" place, with three men for every two women due to various immigration patterns and problematics. Perhaps understandably, the sex trade became substantial.21 It remained in the Downtown Eastside, but was pushed, by authorities at different times, into different parts of the neighbourhood. In

20 Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter write about the greater DTES that "waves of immigration brought, for instance, a lot of European and Russian Jews in the 1910s, a number of Yugoslavians in the 1920s, a lot of Blacks from the prairies during the Depression, and the great wave of Chinese families who were finally allowed to enter Canada after the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act in 1947. The desire of each of these groups to better themselves, to climb out of the ghetto, increased that sense of waves as first the Jews moved out in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Japanese during the war, and then the Blacks and Italians, with prosperity from wartime jobs, in the 1940s and 1950s as the newly arrived Chinese were coming in" (Marlatt and Itter 1979,4). 21 As early as the 1890s, a settler observed: You were never supposed to be in town after 5 o'clock because the "ladies of uncertain virtue" were walking up and down the street then. They wore satin and lots of feathers ... In the Opera House there was always a special place for them on the left hand side under the boxes. (O'Kiely 1970,33) 39

1912-13, brothels lined the 500 and 600 blocks of Alexander Street, along the waterfront between Luq'luq'i and Q'umq'umal'ay'. A particularly musical description of the district appeared in The Truth newspaper, in November 1912, where madam Ollie Gilbert's house sported "a rather sunburnt lady at the piano" while Ollie herself sat at the edge of a dance floor, stowing away money made (Kluckner 1984, 34). Piano rags drifted through the streets.

While these historical and demographic shifts demarcate tensions of gender, class and ethnicity/nationality that shaped the Downtown Eastside, music and theatre performances point to the social complexity of such tensions. At the same time that westside and eastside leaders struggled for social/spatial control, and the Downtown

Eastside increasingly became a working class and immigrant area, the first theatres in

Vancouver were built in the neighbourhood. In 1887, undertaker Frank W. Hart demolished a roller skating rink in Port Moody and resurrected it partly over the mud flat at False Creek. He called the building "Hart's Opera House." Its interior was lined with white cheesecloth (or calico [microfiche 7328]); it was given canvas roof, oil lamps, chairs and benches for seats, and a board floor (microfiche 2031). Vancouver resident

Mrs. H. E. Greatrex once strongly told archivist J. S. Matthews that "IT WAS MORE

LIKE A BARN THAN AN OPERA HOUSE" (caps in original). Hart's Opera House held perhaps 400 or 500 people (microfiche 7328). In 1888, the pioneer family Crickmay opened a competing venue, the Imperial Opera House, on the north side of West Pender

Street (microfiche 7329). 40

From 1888-90, the Imperial and Hart opera houses served as the main venues for amateur and professional "theatricals" and performances in Vancouver. In February 1888,

Hart's featured a fundraiser for the Royal Society of St. George, at which sang Mrs. Cecil

Edwards (a.k.a. Miss Martin or Madame Edvina), who eventually became a well-known singer in England and Canada (microfiche 7328). Also, Frank Hart hired a troupe of professional actors from Seattle, including the noted Frank Cleaves, for a run of "Davey

Crocket." During one of the shows, Cleaves forgot his lines. Another actor rescued the moment, but in American slang. The audience caught on to the language and there was great uproar. Consequently, only half a house attended the following night (microfiche

2031). Vancouver had developed a strong anti-American sentiment, which was manifest at public gatherings on the eastside.

On February 9, 1891, the C.P.R. opened the westside Vancouver Opera House, which supplanted the two eastside venues as desirable places for theatricals, and intensified the eastside-westside struggle already described. The opening for the Opera

House featured the Emma Juch Grand English Opera Company, and later, Sarah

Bernhardt (City of Vancouver Archives PAM 1891-7). It demanded so much respect that

Vancouver streetcars were held until the audience got out. By contrast, Eastside theatres disappeared then re-emerged, this time more "low brow." The Imperial Opera House had closed by 1890 (microfiche 7329); Hart's fell into disuse (microfiche 7338). Then in

1898, "Johnny Nash" operated the first silent movie house in Canada, for two weeks on 41

Cordova Street (Ackery 1980, 55-56). Also on Cordova, the Savoy Music Hall opened.

This venue became known for its burlesque shows. John Elliot wrote circa 1900:

If ever I dream of the streets of Heaven I see but Cordova Street in Ninety Seven What if no Wool worths five and ten We had Russell and Macdonalds then And listen you Festival folk and know We had a genuine burlesque show Ycleped [arch.] Savoy You could enter and enjoy The show, some said it was not nice But at least it cost but a very small price But if tired of May Ashley and old Jim Post Of low comedians they were themselves a host You might sit and enjoy sipping your ale Or in curtained booth With complaisant female ... (original punctuation; microfiche 1364)

In 1902, Johnny Nash bought the Savoy with profits from his silent movie theatre, which he had streamlined into a moveable operation that toured the north central United

States and southwestern Canada (Ackery 1980, 56). Like many theatres in North

America, the Savoy went through a series of name changes as business affiliations shifted. The Savoy became the Electric Theatre, the Grand Theatre and the Edison-Grand

(see City of Vancouver Archives photograph BUP229 N143).

By 1905, a typical night at the Grand featured an orchestral overture, such as

"Martha" by Flotow, "Apollo" by Bonnisseau, or some Bizet; an "illustrated song" where song performance accompanied projected images; five vaudeville and/or burlesque performances; and a closing motion picture. While the Grand advertised its shows as

"high class and refined vaudeville," individual performances tended to be sensationalist, including Hand-to-Hand Balancers, a Champion Monopede Acrobat and Dancer, the

Scheck Hadji Troupe of the Arabs and a Female Baritone, for example (Vancouver City

Archives PAM 1905-21; PAM Und. 57). The discriminating archivist J. S. Matthews wrote that the illustrated songs alternatively were "moaned by painted ladies to the accompaniment of bilious looking lantern slides, red and yellow. But the 'boys liked it"'

(microfiche 7326). In 1953, Matthews remembered the then defunct Grand as "another place where they sang ulcerated song, illustrated with bilious lantern slides, about

'Mother' and 'away down south.' Horrible stuff, but the 'boys' liked it, it was so 'rotten.'

. . . Let her rest. Who cares so long as we get a rest from Ulcerated Song" (microfiche

7325). Occasionally, more "arch" comedy appeared at the Grand; for example, in 1906

YUMA performed "The Mystery," an act presented before the Royal Family in England in December 1904 (PAM 1906-14). Johnny Nash sold the Grand Theatre in 1908 (Ackery

1980, 56).

The Grand opened at the same time as did venues for Chinese opera. In 1898, the

Sing Kew Theatre was established in Chinatown. In 1900, the Bijou Family Theatre opened near Pigeon Park in today's Main & Hastings area. The Bijou was a nickelodeon geared towards women and children. Nickelodeons essentially offered moving pictures shown on a sheet, and proliferated in North America from 1905-1908 (Ackery 1980, 57-

58; Moore 2004). Other theatre openings followed in the greater DTES: that of the

Pantages Theatre in 1906, the merged Columbia Theatre and National Theatre in 1907, the Empress Theatre in 1908, the Imperial Theatre in 1912, the Avenue Theatre in 1912, 43 the Rex Theatre in 1915, a second Pantages Theatre in 1918, and the Chung King Opera

House before World War II (Ackery 1980, 83-84; microfiche 7326; Walling 2003b). The

Downtown Eastside hosted Vancouver's "Great White Way."22 The DTES hosted theatre chains and touring performers that linked theatre districts across North America, from

New York's Tin Pan Alley westward, and that constituted the first mass distribution network of musical performance encounters on the continent.

The DTES theatre scene after 1905 is sometimes misunderstood as upper class or prestigious by people currently involved in Downtown Eastside music and arts projects. However, only the Empress, Avenue and Chung King showed "legitimate" theatre (Ackery 1980). The other seven venues focused on vaudeville, burlesque and sometimes minstrelsy.23 The initial Pantages theatre, for instance, programmed less formulaic cabarets than the Grand, but with similar components. A resident orchestra, directed for about 30 years by violinist Frank Marachi (Ackery 1980, 177), opened with popular tunes such as "Time, Place and the Girl" and "Take Me Out To the Ball Game"

(PAM 1908-26). Then, in various orders, a biograph (or cinematograph) showed a motion picture and there would be vaudeville acts including for example, a Pantomimic Cycling

Comedian (PAM 1916-9). A tenor or soprano might sing (PAM 1908-26). If the show was a revue, a performance format that frequently sexualized women through burlesque, a line-up of dancing and/or singing girls might appear, for instance, "'CLEOPATRA' A

22 "Great White Way" is a nickname for New York's Broadway that evokes a density of lights on theatre marquees and billboard advertisements. 23 The Imperial Theatre, initially home to the Orpheum circuit, hosted the 1912 commimity presentation "Moose in burnt cork," the first annual benefit of the freemason Loyal Order of Moose (PAM 1912-4). 44 spectacular dancing novelty with BOTHWELL BROWNE and a cast of Beauties"

(capitals in original; PAM 1916-10). By contrast, dancing beauties or burlesque should be absent in vaudeville, which was understood throughout North America as variety theatre

made acceptable to middle-class men, women and children through removing the

'Vulgarity" of burlesque and saloon theatricals. In practice, though, many Vancouver

theatres moved fluidly between vaudeville and revue formats, including burlesque, while

billing shows as "vaudeville."

Musicians employed for such popular theatricals made comfortable livings: in the

1930s, $45-50 for working six nights per week. This was a decrease from earlier wages

yet good money, considering that one week of room and board cost $5 (Ackery 1980,

180). Advertising directed at middle-class audiences partly funded the theatre wages and

performances. Performance programs featured ads for businesses such as the New York

Fur Co., Ltd., J. W. Kelly Piano Co., Ltd., the Cambrai Hairdressing «Parlor», English

Bay Bakery & Tea Rooms, R. C. Purdy chocolate company, Universal Auto Exchange &

Clearing House, the Boston Dentists, Canadian Cycles, the Pacific Coast Steamship

Company and Ranier Beer.24 In spite of, or perhaps because of, the focus on vaudeville

and burlesque, the theatre scene was given names and venues of "legitimacy." For

instance, when the second Vancouver Pantages was built for vaudeville in 1917, it had an

extravagant lobby and lounge of friezes, murals and fine dark woods, and an elegant

24 Business names are from the following City of Vancouver Archives pamphlets: PAM 1928-38, PAM 1930-16, PAM 1908-26, PAM 1909-38, PAM 1916-11, PAM 1905-16 and PAM Und. 57. 45 theatre interior beneath a luxurious inner dome (Vancouver Public Library photograph

21362). The interior surpasses any theatre in Vancouver today in terms of opulence.

The association of the upper class with DTES theatres came from programming at the Empress Theatre, in addition to other theatres' architecture and wages. Patrick C.

Keatly, who became a well-known London journalist, described costly performances at the Empress:

Its colorful career began one warm summer evening exactly forty years ago when Del S. Lawrence, the self-styled Beau Brummel of Vancouver, opened the fashionable theatre with the beautiful Jane Kelton playing opposite him in the western premiere of the Broadway hit "Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall."

The Empress then boasted the largest stage west of Chicago, and lavish productions called for sheep and horses on stage, as well as autos, blast furnaces, and even full-size locomotives made of papier-mache.

For "Faust," the stage crew built fire-breathing dragons twenty feet long; for "The Aviatrix" they constructed a copy of the new Wright Brothers' aeroplane and "flew" it on piano wire. Spectacular dining scenes called for huge trays of chicken and choice desserts, which actors and stagehands demolished in nightly orgies after the last curtain.

Those were the days when Vancouverites haunted the doorways of downtown cafes to watch the Empress stars in their offstage hours; when featherboas [sic.], button boots and Maxwell autos took up the advertising space in the programs; and when the management presented every orphan in the city with a ticket to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin." (quoted in Ackery 1980, 79-80)

Vancouver theatre manager Ivan Ackery elaborated on Keatly's description:

Many Vancouver people will remember the name of Walter Sanford, who was lessee of the Empress for five years after the partnership of Lawrence and Sandusky. His regime saw the appearances of Henry Mortimer, Virginia Brissac, George MacQuarrie and Isabelle Fletcher, and when Sanford left the city he was richer by almost a quarter of a million dollars. 46

By this time the prices had been raised, the Empress had a large pit orchestra and high royalties were paid to acquire the newest plays direct from Broadway. Stars demanded and got as much as $300 a week and the theatre rated tops on the Pacific coast.

Some of the major successes were "Raffles" and "Brewsters Millions," featuring Ashley Cooper, Charles Ayres and Chauncey Southern. There were morality plays too—such titles as "Wages of Sin," "Living That Kills" and "Dangers of Paris." (Ackery 1980, 80)

The Empress concentrated on spectacular theatre, and by 1940, serious plays like "Hedda

Gabler" and "The Master Builder," both starring Eva le Gallienne (PAM 1940-50).

The Avenue Theatre alternatively featured a wider selection of offerings: musicals including "H.M.S. Pinafore" (PAM Und. 478); instrumental virtuosi such as violinist

Albert Spalding (PAM Und. 480); lectures and fiindraising cabarets (PAM Und. 862;

PAM 1914-20); burlesque (see PAM 1915-49); and operas by the touring San Carlo

Grand Opera company—"Tales of Hoffman," "II Trovatore" and others (PAM 1919-26).

The Avenue also offered serious theatre productions, like "Julius Caesar" (PAM Und.

865), and light plays, like "The Passion Flower," which centres on a tune by the same name by Irving Berlin (PAM Und. 303).

The Downtown Eastside's theatre life vanished between the late 1920s to the early

1940s. By about 1930, the Pentecostal Emmanuel Temple inhabited the former Imperial

Theatre until the City of Vancouver bought the building in a tax sale. Walsh's Auto

Wrecking operated a junk yard there (microfiche 7330) from 1939 until the '60s, when the then refurbished building started showing mild pornographic videos. Today, the former Imperial is renamed the Venus and features X-rated films. Although the Empress 47

Theatre was renovated and reopened for September 1937, the City of Vancouver's

Building Department issued a demolition order on July 15,1940 (microfiche 7326).

The boom and bust of the Downtown Eastside theatre district paralleled changing attitudes of Vancouver society towards the neighbourhood. One way to observe this is through uses of public space for parades. As early as the late 1880s, the Dominion Day celebrations expanded to include a parade through the downtown streets of Granville.

Nineteenth-century parades are described by Mary Ryan as "an organized body, usually of men, [who] marched into the public streets to spell out a common social identity"

(Ryan 1989, 133). Through the 1900s to the present day, parades have still displayed

identity, but perhaps more complex configurations of social difference, with increasing

participation from women. Robert A. J. McDonald documents how 1887-1890 Dominion

Day parades, sponsored by Vancouver city council, "expressed both the boosterism of

town-promoting entrepreneurs and the pride of ordinary citizens in their achievements as

city builders"; while also "more generally reflect[ing] a unity of purpose that crossed

class lines and encouraged widespread acceptance of civic leadership by leading

businessmen" (McDonald 1996, 34). The 1889 parade, for instance, was led by R. H.

Alexander of Hastings Mill, who was followed closely by an impressive military band

and a 130-member garrison battery; the Westminster Fife-and-Drum Band piping along

political officials and prominent citizens; but also fire brigades; white-clothed women

representing Canadian provinces and territories, next to a woman dressed as Britannia;

various other voluntary associations; corporations and small businesses; fraternal 48 societies and trade unions; but notably, not the Canadian Pacific Railway (McDonald

1996,33-34).

If one examines Vancouver's rich archival resources of city photographs, one finds that until about 1906, parades happened exclusively in Granville or Downtown

Eastside streets. Such photos were taken by numerous settlers like P. T. Timms, who failing to strike it rich on B.C.'s primary resources, created a virtual lode of wealth in images of Vancouver (Mattison 1986, 17).25 The Eastside streets were the sites not only of Scottish pipers and dancers in parades (Vancouver Public Library photograph 9507), but by the 1890s, Han Chinese funeral processions with their suona (or shawms), drums, luo (or gongs) and dizi (transverse flutes) (Vancouver Public Library photograph 53). The

Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York processed through DTES streets in 1901. The exclusive use of DTES streets for parades identified the area as the "centre" of town or a desirable place to exhibit society, while the marches themselves displayed the changing ethnic makeup of Vancouver. Labour needs on the railroad and in sawmills brought many male Chinese labourers to British Columbia in the 1880s, and Vancouver's Chinatown emerged in the 1890s along the shores of False Creek, which flanked Granville (see Poon

1998, 21-22). As Huang Jinpei and Alan R. Thrasher write, rich Cantonese vocal and instrumental musics have dominated Chinese musical scenes in Vancouver almost consistently (Huang and Thrasher 1993).

25 Philip Thomas Timms (1874-1973) owned a commercial photography business, but became well known as a photographer of Vancouver street scenes. 49

By 1906, however, parades happened more often on West Hastings, Hornby,

Georgia and Burrard Streets: the C.P.R. townsite and what Vancouverites know today as

"downtown." A minority of parades still did grace the Downtown Eastside's streets, for example, the Historical Pageant Parade on June 12, 1914 and a military parade on June

30, 1924. The Dominion Day parades, the largest parades for the general public of

Vancouver, occupied an "ambivalent" position by the 1920s, taking place on the Georgia

Viaduct from 1925-27. The Georgia Viaduct variously has bridged the DTES with today's downtown Vancouver. Other parades also occupied such an ambivalent position.

In 1935, Vancouver's May Day parade traversed Georgia Street as well as Hastings,

Powell and Alexander Streets (see Figure 2).

While prominent members of Vancouver's settler society moved out of the

Downtown Eastside by 1900, parades in the neighbourhood show that it maintained its historical and social cachet until 1906. Until the 1940s, as I described, the social hierarchies of early Vancouver informed commercialized music and theatre performance in the DTES. Echoes of settler society—gendered social configurations and proximate pleasures that engaged diverse classes and stratified ethnicities—lived on via such performances. Such social patterns in musical performance were characteristic of period revue and vaudeville performances throughout North America.

The changing social attitudes towards the Downtown Eastside, especially the

Main and Hastings area, also show up in archival records about outbursts against prostitution, and drug and alcohol use. The first major crusade against "vice" happened 50 after prostitutes fled San Francisco's enormous 1906 earthquake for Vancouver. Sex work in Vancouver was blitzed with competition. Price wars ensued and authorities closed

Vancouver's red light district, which resulted in brothels sprouting up all over the city

(Walling 2003a, 15). By 1912, the Moral and Social reform Council of British Columbia

published a report titled "Social Vice in Vancouver," which praised another crackdown on prostitution in 1911, while condemning a new "area in Vancouver where social vice in its commercialized form is tolerated by the authorities" (PAM 1912-43). At the time of

publication, Alexander Street was undergoing a real estate boom where buildings were

erected for the sole purpose of prostitution, which aggravated fears of sexually

transmitted diseases, the sexual harassment of women and the "corruption" of children.

Then, as Vancouver historian Michael Kluckner writes,

[i]n August, 1912, the Police Commission ordered Chief Constable Rufus Chamberlin to clean up the area. Arrests of characters like Elsie Kelly, Alice Bernard, Eunice Longe and dozens of others were made in raids throughout the ensuing months, with the result that, by the end of 1913, the red light district was gone. Arrest statistics for 1912 showed that 19 "Frequenters of Bawdyhouses" were charged, plus 204 "Inmates" and 133 "Keepers of Bawdyhouses." Most of the women were sentenced to six months of hard labour, but given a suspended sentence in order to give them time to get out of town. (Kluckner 1984, 34)

Vancouver City Mayor McGreer closed again the resilient red light district in 1935

(Walling 2003a, 25). In 1939, Mayor Telford's policies outlawed new bordellos (Walling

2003a, 28).

Opium was legal and even encouraged in early Vancouver, with Chinese legally

manufacturing the drug by 1869-70, when imports of medicinal opiates doubled and 51 addiction to opiated tonics intensified in the middle and upper classes, particularly among women (Walling 2003a, 6). By 1885, opium smoking and opiated tonics spread across

North America—Granville boasted eight opium factories. Taxes on tea, opium, alcohol and tobacco made up approximately 50% of the British government's gross income (10-

11). By 1898, heroin became mass marketed by pharmacies as a safe type of opium and a cure for morphine abuse (13). However, by 1900, cocaine and heroin misuse spread in the

"underworld" and received unfavourable press. Due to a concentration of Chinese in

Main & Hastings and Chinatown, Vancouver's public linked opium to the greater

Downtown Eastside. The year following an anti-Asian riot in the DTES in 1907,

Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King took the opportunity to criminalize opium, the first drug prohibited in North America (16). The federal government prohibited cocaine in 1911, and made opium and cocaine use punishable by imprisonment (17). As legally available opium declined, criminal syndicates and heroin misuse proliferated.

Still in the 1920s, politicians tended to blame Vancouver drug problems on the

Chinese. White traffickers used Chinese as distributors of narcotics, and newspapers highlighted the arrests of various Chinese dealers (Yee 1988, 73). However, it was not the

Chinese population that made the DTES a centre of drug trade and consumption, but the

26 Vancouver Member of Parliament Leon Ladner said in the B.C. House of Commons in 1922, "Here we have a disease, one of many directly traceable to the Asiatic. Do away with the Asiatic and you have more than saved the souls and bodies of thousands of young men and women who are yearly being sent to a living hell" (Yee 1988, 71). Such statements against Asians can be viewed as part of a trend of discrimination against Chinese in British Columbia, including the often fatal working conditions on the Canadian railroad, and the head taxes against Chinese immigrants starting in 1885 (Poon 1998,21-23). 52 neighbourhood's proximity to the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus and the port of

Vancouver.

Alcohol use, especially during a liquor prohibition in British Columbia from

1917-1921, became conflated with other substance misuse and illegal activities. The era's speakeasies, rum running and bootlegging concentrated in Hogan's Alley, an African

North American neighbourhood that bridged Main & Hastings and immigrant-filled

Strathcona. The greater Downtown Eastside remained dense with saloons.

Arts administrator Lily Laverock called 1903-1914 "a golden period of theatre in

Vancouver" (Ackery 1980, 135), which in Main & Hastings was accompanied by the shifting, race-nuanced attitudes towards prostitution and substance misuse described above. In this neighbourhood of vaudeville, burlesque, theatre and illicit activities, hotels also thrived. Until the 1960s, they mostly were winter homes to men who worked the seasonal fishing and logging industries, but some hotels offered live music. In 1907, the then new Hotel Astor advertised an "orchestra in attendance" in their "finest grill room on the coast." In 1919, Willie Bowman opened the Patricia Cafe in the Patricia Hotel. This cafe hired prominent musicians, for example an eight-piece jazz band featuring Oscar

Holden, Jelly Roll Morton and Ada Bricktop-Smith (see Walling 2003a, 20). Later,

Morton returned to Vancouver, playing the Regent Hotel on Hastings.

As the larger Downtown Eastside included what was then only Black neighbourhood in Vancouver, Black jazz musicians played other hotels and cafes in Main

& Hastings. Some such musicians were the Mitchell brothers, Stan (on alto saxophone), 53

Elliott (piano), Lionel (drums and tenor saxophone) and Les (drums). Jazz historian Mark

Miller writes: "Their father, Greenwood Mitchell, a logging engineer, had arrived in

Vancouver as a traveling musician from Montgomery, Alabama, via Chicago; mindful of his sons' limited prospects in British Columbia outside of logging and, of course, the railroad, he encouraged their interest in music, providing instruments and some semblance of instruction" (Miller 1997, 163). The Mitchell boys added a fifth musician and sometimes a sixth. In the 1930s, they worked the Main & Hastings neighbourhood, for example the Regent Hotel. Other black musicians of the '30s included pianist Tommy

Thompson, who worked for white trumpeter Sandy De Santis at the Venice Cafe on Main

Street, and pianists Joe Wilson and Shebo. While Shebo played ragtime, Miller notes,

"Wilson, a former boxer, had a rough but exuberant style in one key and only one key, F- sharp, which used the piano's raised—and thus easily struck—black keys" (Miller 1997,

163). The two pianists performed in Main & Hastings, Strathcona and Hogan's Alley.

Strathcona resident and guitarist Austin Phillips remembers that Hogan's Alley burst with music and noise:

There was nothing but parties in Hogan's Alley—night time, anytime, and Sundays all day. You could go by at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning, and you could hear juke boxes going, you hear somebody hammering the piano, playing the guitar, or hear some fighting, or see some fighting, screams, and everybody carrying on. (Marlatt and Itter 1979,141)

At the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, many considered

Vancouver a wealthy city. During the Great Depression, jobless men from other Canadian settlements began to pour into Vancouver at the rate of forty to fifty per day. By 1931-32, 54 hobo "jungles" grew at the Hastings Mill site, under the Georgia Viaduct, at the Prior and

Heatley city dump, and on the shores of False Creek (Walling 2003 a, 24). A Vancouver

Sun newspaper reporter wrote:

I visited the "Jungle" below Georgia viaduct. . . . There are about 250 men there. Grounds are filthy and covered with decaying garbage, with open toilets. Flies swarm over everything and on all open food. (Vancouver Sun, September 4, 1931)

Fearing disease, the City of Vancouver burned the jungles after seven months and

sent migrants to government work relief camps located in British Columbia's interior

(Kloppenborg, Niwinski, and Johnson 1991, 101). Even so, each summer, thousands of

single, homeless, unemployed men flocked to Vancouver and camped in the DTES (PAM

Und. 271). Soup kitchens were opened by the Salvation Army, Chinese Benevolent

Society, St. James Anglican Church and First United Church (Walling 2003a, 24). At one

point, 1250 men were counted in the United Church breadline (Morley 1969, 178). If not

serving hobos, the kitchens fed people that needed relief, which Anne Kloppenborg, Alice

Niwinski and Eve Johnson claim included approximately 40,000 people or 15% of

Vancouver's population by the winter of 1932-33 (Kloppenborg, Niwinski, and Johnson

1991,101).

While churches helped the poor and itinerants in the 1930s, the Downtown

Eastside itself grew dilapidated. Drug and alcohol addiction problems intensified. First

United Church Reverend Andrew Roddan:

The windows of our church look down on many wretched buildings that house the most appalling vice. Emaciated Chinese and whites shuffle in and out twenty-four hours of the day. Disfigured, ugly, unkempt men and women stumble up the lane 55

behind our church to drink their canned heat. Those on relief sometimes carry a paper bag or a carton filled with bottles of liquor. In a little recess in the lane they sit down and drink. Often the lane is strewn with broken glass. Sometimes these same men who have squandered their relief check come banging at our office door demanding food and clothes. They have always got a stem reception. When they are beyond reason or persuasion the police van is soon backing up to our door. (PAMUnd. 271,20-21)

While the poor struggled with authorities (see Footprints Community Art Project

2003, 27), the Downtown Eastside became a stronghold of Vancouver's Union and Social movements, and a thoroughfare for protests against 1930s labour conditions and poverty.

One such march was a May Day parade in 1935. Parade signs included:

"North Burnaby, Workers of the World Awaken, The Dawn is Near"

"Are We Going Back to Camps! No."

"Greetings! We Welcome Labor's Support!"

Unemployed protesters walked past the Carnegie Centre singing "Hold the Fort for we are Coming." At the time of the march, different protesters from a Relief Camp Workers'

Union occupied the Carnegie building. "Hold the Fort" became the union's musical slogan when members subsequently attempted an "On-to-Ottawa" trek against unsatisfactory living conditions in government relief camps (Cameron 1996, 7-9).

In 1938, 1600 men protested their being cut off relief by occupying several buildings downtown, two of which police cleared using tear gas. The protesters did 56

$30,000 damage through the streets, and a huge anti-police protest ensued on the Powell

Street Grounds, today's Oppenheimer Park on the DTES (Morley 1969,182-183).27

In the 1940s, the social, musical and geographical landscape of the Downtown

Eastside changed dramatically. Integral to Main and Hastings since the 1890s had been

"Little Tokyo" on Powell Street, a vibrant Japanese neighbourhood of 9,000 people by

1941. In March 1942, following Pearl Harbor, British Columbia's 23,000 Japanese were

moved to internment camps, or to remote towns in B.C.'s interior and farther east.

Japanese Downtown Eastsiders permanently lost their homes and businesses,28 not to

mention their civil rights, their community and a sense of place (see Kobayashi 1992).

Silent became Powell Street's only night club and gambling joint, the Showa Club

(Kobayashi 1992, 42). A Honpa Canada Buddist Temple, which offered language and

music classes for children since 1910, closed. Shamisen and geisha songs performed in

"Little Tokyo" became only the rumours they are today. As mentioned, DTES theatres

fell into disuse. Also in the 1940s, the City of Vancouver zoned the greater Downtown

Eastside for heavy industrial purposes.

During the 1950s, '60s and early '70s, DTES housing deteriorated further, while

industrial and institutional land uses expanded. Concurrently, Downtown Eastside drug

27 Also, 2,000 men, who had spent one-and-a-half years at relief camps, marched on Vancouver in April 1935, demanding "work and wages." After smashing displays and merchandise at the Hudson's Bay store downtown, the men congregated in Victory Square, then sent a delegation to City Hall, which was located at Hastings Street and Main Street until 1936. 28 Canada's federal government resold Japanese properties at a fraction of their value in 1943. Under the Mulroney administration of the Canadian federal government, Japanese-Canadians received some financial compensation. 57 and alcohol culture became increasingly entrenched, and music events in Main and

Hastings primarily happened in two types of venues. First, music performances occurred in buildings that sold liquor, particularly bars in the hotels or in licensed restaurants. In the 1950s, for instance, Ernie King opened the restaurant and bar Harlem Nocturne. King, a trombonist himself, hired specifically rhythm and blues bands. Second, music events happened in churches. The First Church at Hastings and Gore streets had offered music in church services since 1885, as had St. James Anglican Church since 1936.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the City of Vancouver declared the greater Downtown

Eastside a slum, and planned to clear sections of Gastown, Strathcona and Chinatown for an eight-lane freeway extending downtown and over Burrard Inlet. Geographer Angus

Gunn wrote of the Downtown East, "The Skid Road of one city is not in any significant way different from the Skid Road of others. The population is almost exclusively male

[80%], the average income is extremely low, and the incidence of disease, handicaps and mental disability is high." At this point, the DTES had a remarkably low rate of indecent assaults by rape, but 34% of Vancouver robberies occurred in the neighbourhood and

66% of Vancouver incidents of intoxication in a public place (Gunn 1968, 21). By 1967, fifteen DTES blocks had been cleared for the freeway, but the initiative was stopped through public protest by residents from the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenant

Association, as well as merchants, action groups and professionals (Walling 2003a, 20,

32). These successful protests marked a pivotal moment in the larger Downtown 58

Eastside's history, when Vancouver's general public started to stand up for the place that birthed Vancouver, as it suffered social and economic crises.

This feeling for a need to improve the Downtown Eastside intensified both within the neighbourhood and outside. This resulted in the formation of new activist and service organizations, government initiatives and beautification projects. Many "improvement" projects involved the arts in some way. The Downtown Eastside Residents Association, for instance, published a newsletter starting in 1973 that mostly featured articles on

Downtown Eastside housing issues, daily life and addictions. The newsletter also acted as a "hub" for publicizing entertainment and recreation in the neighbourhood. This was where Downtown Eastsiders learned about the 1973 Central City Mission concert by the band of the 15th Field Artillery Regiment, then the only Army reserve concert band in

Vancouver (PAM 1973-174); or about 1974 live band and old time dancing events at St.

James Church (PAM 1974-223); or about a January 1974 dance played by the old- time/country band "Sunday Reign" (PAM 1974-224).

While DERA advertised music and arts events, the theatre group Actor's

Workshop actually created a new arts performance venue. In 1975, Actor's Workshop proposed to the City of Vancouver to renovate and run a repertory theatre in what was one of two 1909 fire stations for the first mechanized fire fighting service in North

America. The City had planned to demolish the building. Actor's Workshop successfully

"recycled" the fire hall into a theatre, absorbing all costs of reconstruction and operation

(PAM 1975-92). Yet instead of a repertory theatre, the group initially provided 59 performance and martial arts instruction. Some classes by 1979 included acting, taught by theatre venue founder Mallie Boman; corporal mime instructed by Dean Fogal; dance classes of Trudy Forrest; voice (Roger Norman); singing (Gary Zeller); and karate (PAM

1979-6). Fees for individual workshops were $45 plus a processing fee for adults, while yearly studio memberships ranged from $100 to $500, depending on length of affiliation with the school and degree of professionalism. This was not a performance venue for no- or low income DTES residents. By 1982, the envisioned repertory theatre, the Firehall

Arts Centre, was finally established.

Vancouver's Japanese residents were also active in arts-related revitalization. In

1977, the annual Powell Street Festival was founded as a symbol of the rebirth of

Vancouver's Japanese community after the forced relocation of Japanese living in "Little

Tokyo" during WWII. The festival was established deliberately in the DTES'

Oppenheimer Park or the Powell Street Grounds, a centre of community life in

Vancouver's pre-WWII Japantown. The Powell Street Festival since has developed into the largest Japanese-Canadian festival in Canada and the longest-running community celebration in Vancouver. Actual festival events, however, have not centred on present- day Downtown Eastside life, but as the Powell Street Festival Society's 2007 website explained,

provide a venue for Japanese Canadians to perform, display their work and gain publicity. They, in turn, inspire others to continue their pursuits and participate in the Festival [which fosters] community development. The Festival also allows the Japanese Canadian community to show the general public the diversity that exists 60

within our community and to share it with them. (Powell Street Festival Society 2007)

Festival events of the '70s and '80s included Japanese music, dance, massage, sumo wrestling and martial arts demonstrations, and literature readings. The festival had numerous benefits for the Japanese-Canadian community, then living largely in

Vancouver suburbs such as Burnaby. For example, as a result of seeing the San Jose

Taiko Drum Group at the 1979 festival, the first taiko group in Vancouver was formed.

Katari Taiko, as the group named itself, practised in Steveston (south of downtown

Vancouver) on used tires and a taiko drum borrowed from a Japanese community organization called Tonari Gumi, which was located on Powell Street (PAM 1984-17).29

The Powell Street Festival Society's current General Manager, Miko Hoffman, wrote to me in an email that "Katari Taiko debuted in 1980 at P.S.F. [and has] performed at every festival since. Most of the performers are also festival volunteers." Three members of

Katari Taiko formed Uzume Taiko, the first professional taiko drum group in Canada,

29 An article by John Greenaway in Vancouver's Japanese Bulletin explains that the formation of Katari Taiko gave expression to political and cultural trends among Japanese Canadians: In Vancouver, it was a time of emerging political consciousness for many sansei—third generation Japanese Canadians. Only belatedly learning of their parents' and grandparents' experiences during the Second World War, many of the newly politicized sansei were looking to express themselves in a way that would reflect their cultural duality. The traditional Japanese arts had little appeal for a generation raised on jazz, folk and rock music [at a time when] it seemed that the road to complete assimilation was inevitable. When the San Jose Taiko Group performed at Vancouver's Powell Street Festival, in 1979, it was a revelation for a group of young Asian Canadians. Dynamic, accessible, and loud—everything that Japanese culture was not supposed to be. It was rock and roll and martial arts rolled into one. [They] saw this fusion of movement and music as a way not only to access their Asian roots, but to break the stereotype of the passive Asian. It would turn out to be an experience that would transform their lives. . . . The ensemble was quickly adopted by the political left. (Greenaway 2002, 3-6) 61 which has performed at selected Powell Street Festivals. Economically depressed

Downtown Eastsiders became part of the festival's "general public."

Through the 1980s, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside became dominated by a still intensifying, ever changing and increasingly violent substance misuse subculture (see

PAM 1973-171). In a study on alcoholism in the Downtown Eastside, Jean Swanson wrote that in 1980, "[e]ighty-two percent of the licensed public house capacity of the entire city is located in the [DTES] area. Many blocks contain four to six beer parlours"

(Swanson, Davies, and McQueen 1980, 2-3). In 1980, police broke up large heroin syndicates and cocaine became the preferred drug (Walling 2003a, 32). Expo '86 was held along the shores of False Creek, which prompted experts in marijuana "grow-ops" and cocaine trafficking to move from the U.S.A. and elsewhere. By 1988, Savannah

Walling writes, the "Downtown Eastside drug scene spiral[ed] out of control as

Vancouver plug[ed] into global drug markets.. . . Crack cocaine enter[ed] street culture"

(Walling 2003a, 32). While Angus Gunn argues that gendered violence was all but absent in the 1960s (Gunn 1968), violence against women appeared in the '80s—female sex trade workers were murdered and disappeared. Currently, nearly 70 women are missing or dead, some alleged victims of Gilbert Paul Jordan (see Vancouver Sun, November 4,

2000) and Robert Pickton (see Vancouver Sun, September 10, 2006), who has been convicted of serial homicide. About half the dead or missing DTES women are

Aboriginal. Despite these changes, the greater DTES population remained more male than female, which was typical of B.C. settler cultures and North American inner cities. A 62

Statistics Canada analysis by the City of Vancouver reports that gender distribution averaged at 62% male and 38% female from 1991 to 2001. In sub-areas like Thorton

Park, though, the male population has been as high as 86% (in 2001). Victory Square was

71% male in 2001. The Main & Hastings area was 69% male in 2001 (City of Vancouver

2006, 8, 74, 76). Female community members usually insist that any violence against women is inflicted by men from outside the community.

Starting in the early 1990s, cocaine was much cheaper and in 1992, pure heroin became available. Consequently, the number of overdose deaths in British Columbia increased from 39 in 1988 to 331 in 1993. In the DTES drug subculture, survival sex and violence against women and sex trade workers remained prominent. The incidence of low income in the larger Downtown Eastside stayed constant at 68% from 1986-96, compared to a 31% city average (Carnegie Community Action Project 2001). Overall, individual and community health was fraught with problems, with a prevalence of suicide and depression, and epidemics of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and other addictions-related illness.

The proliferating "urban development programs" and associated performing arts expressions were intended as problem-solving responses to the devastating increases in the rates of ill health and death as class, ethnic make-up and social structures fluctuated in

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Through the musical encounters listed in Table 1, artists, activists, administrators and community members worked to enable individuals to have more control over their lives, moving into states of health, towards life instead of death, away from poverty, into states of higher socioeconomic status, and into a peaceful 63 community. Musical "urban improvement" in the DTES, I will argue, became a way of changing the direction of the social and cultural movement of individuals, and of fixing or stabilizing the nature of social relationships through musical interactions.

Because most musical initiatives that I studied during my seven years of research in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside attempted to steer social relationships towards well- being, I have chosen to frame my analysis using relevant observations from selected sociological literatures on health. Such an approach allows me to critique the effects of musical urban improvement in the DTES' situation of social and cultural flux. I am interested in whether, and under what circumstances, social and community changes through formalized musical encounters could have positive effects on the well-being of urban poor and the poor's roles in social fabrics.

I offer two chapters titled simply "Control" and "Socioeconomic Status." While hundreds of ethnomusicology writings consider control issues, and socioeconomic status has informed ethnomusicology studies grounded in sociology, I consider how the notions can be used to evaluate how music making influences human health and well- being. Chapter 5, "Creating Community Connections," raises questions about how music making may negotiate the hierarchy or egalitarianism of social configurations, which can protect human health. Although there is a limited literature that addresses music and

30 For example, see Hill (2006) and Scruggs (1998). The literature on music and socioeconomic status is more developed in music psychology (see e.g., Bailey and Davidson 2005) and especially music education (see Albert 2006, Fitzpatrick 2006, Phillips 2003). 64 poverty,31 no monograph yet has investigated how musicians and listeners navigate social control, socioeconomic status and such community connections as sociological determinants of health, for example in inner cities. In this way, my critical documentation of the Downtown Eastside and its music elaborates the literature of urban ethnomusicology pioneered by Adelaida Reyes (see Reyes 2007). I also contribute to a growing literature of "medical" ethnomusicology (see e.g., Barz 2003, Gioia 2006, Gouk

2000, Koen 2005, Roseman and Laderman 1996).

31 See Averill (1994), Marian-Balasa (1999), McLean (1997), Pacini Hernandez (1989), Reyes (1999) and Waterman (1982). 65

Chapter 3. Control

It is well established in sociology and epidemiology that the health of individuals and communities, in capitalist society, is powerfully influenced by several social factors:

1) the degree of control that one feels over one's life, usually in relation to other people;

2) one's socioeconomic status (henceforth also SES) as it compares to others';33 and 3) the intensity of one's experience of non-hierarchical social networks versus hierarchical social networks.34 It has been argued that depression, suicide and addictions of diverse types are prevalent in communities and societies undergoing dislocation and weakening of social bonds (the lack of #3).35 Powerful correlations have been found between murder rates, a lack of social trust (accomplished through non-hierarchical social networks in #3), and inequalities in material standard of living (associated with #2).36 Low SES (#2) may necessitate or perpetuate involvement in the drug and sex trades. As innumerable music scholars have demonstrated, music can involve individuals in community roles, articulate individual and group identities, manipulate social dynamics, and influence society in a myriad of other ways. Cognitive ethnomusicology and music therapy speak to music's psychological and physiological effects on health.

32 See my discussion of Kawachi and Kennedy (2002), Wilkinson (2000) and Marmot (2000) later in this chapter. 33 See my discussion of Sapolsky (2005), Kawachi and Kennedy (2002), and Adler et al. (1994) in Chapter 4. 34 In Chapter 5,1 summarize literature on community connections, social hierarchies and health. 35 See Durkheim (1897) and Alexander (2001). 36 See Szwarcwald et al. (1999), Wilkinson, Kawachi, and Kennedy (1998), and Hsieh and Pugh (1993). 66

The degree of control that one feels over one's life situations, like the other psychosocial influences on physical health listed in the paragraph above, is widely accepted as a potent determinant of human illness and longevity by epidemiologists, sociologists and other social scientists. The influence of such individual control on health has to do with how the body responds physiologically to psychological stress.

Experiencing lack of control of a life situation, which for example, may involve being in a subordinate power relation, precipitates the release of stress hormones into the body, including Cortisol, which then adversely affect the immune system. Resultant impacts on the body are complex and various, but include a faster build up of atherosclerotic plaque in coronary arteries (and thus increased risk of heart attack), a tendency to suffer from central obesity, more damaging levels of high-density blood fats and an increased likelihood to be immune to insulin, for example (see Wilkinson 2000, 36). Chronic stress negatively impacts the brain, thymus gland and other immune tissues, circulatory system, adrenal glands and reproductive organs.37

The "privilege" of feeling in control may be influenced in complex ways by social hierarchies of all sorts, so the amount of control that one feels as a result of human relationships becomes exceptionally important in determining health, illness and longevity. The degree to which people experience disempowerment compared to others correlates positively to the quantity of stress hormones in their bodies. Conversely, an

37 The negative physiological effects of not feeling in control are explained in sources that I discuss below, including writings by Marmot (2004) and Wilkinson (2000). 67 absence of damaging stress hormones correlates with being in control of life situations.

These facts inform what Michael Marmot calls the "status syndrome": the fact that where one stands in a social hierarchy is intimately related to one's chance of getting ill and one's length of life (see Marmot 2004). The higher up one is on the social "ladder," the healthier he or she will be; the less status he/she has, the greater the risk of disease and death. In the 1990s, standards of measurement developed for the health gradient, for example, the Robin Hood Index and the more widely used Gini coefficient (Kawachi and

Kennedy 2002, 102). This chapter examines music making in Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside as one means of achieving control.

In the musical moment, the possibilities for exercising control over one's life and other people, or being manipulated by others are as diverse and bounded as the musical experience itself. In this section, I could elaborate on instrument choices, musical experiences or musical representations already described, or evoke numerous others.

However, personal and interpersonal control may not always be the most appropriate frameworks for understanding the flow of the musical moment, which is so dependent on cooperative and harmonious social relationships, and processes within the body that necessitate unconscious or conscious flows of physical matter, emotions, thoughts and actions, which in turn survive on synthesized body processes. I therefore choose here to discuss specific instances in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where musical practice and performance may be seen as a reaction to loss, and music making becomes a means of reestablishing some sort of control over one's reality, which may be defined in 68 experiential terms, or parsed as mental, physical or spiritual, for example. Music becomes a means for experiencing new lived realities—the realities that one wants most to experience—and de-emphasizing less pleasant ones.

The types of loss that I explore are diverse, although I focus on the loss of human ability, and of individual people. I explore how music may change one's mental and visceral reality in ways that engage the loss of ability to feel good about (or in) one's self; the loss of a desired life direction; the loss of physical or mental control due to social factors or physiological ones, such as drug addiction; and the loss of opportunity for social relationship (or isolation) involved when one has HIV/AIDS. I consider music as a strategy for managing parenting situations of economically depressed mothers with drug or alcohol addictions problems. Until the early 1990s, B.C.'s Ministry of Children and

Family Development placed in foster care almost all babies of DTES mothers "at risk."

Losing custody continues to be an issue.

These various processes of transcendence, commemoration and healing all involve a reestablishment of individual control in response to loss. Such control is accomplished through diverse intensities, claims, denials or understandings of the agency and autonomy of inner city residents on the part of music therapists, community organizers, and arts facilitators or administrators. Some First Nations music initiatives struggle with interpersonal and societal power relationships that are associated with colonialism and post-colonialism. While individual control may be asserted through music making, individuals may be "controlled" by societal forces or other people in complex ways. 69

I have organized this chapter according to the nature of the musical response to specific losses. The first main section addresses the modification of behaviour, release of emotions and change of life directions through therapy that uses popular music. I focus on music therapy programs for First Nations at branches of the Vancouver Native Health

Society, particularly Sheway and Positive Outlook, while drawing attention to how music may address the custody issue. I consider flows of client-therapist agency in musical communications, and how clients experience individual autonomy through expressing emotional reactions to inner city problems, which may be evoked by popular music repertoire.

In a second section titled "Narrating Repertoire Choices and Musical Life

Histories," I discuss one music therapist's explanation of and approach to a widespread choice of Top 40 hits by participants in popular music jams with a First Nations focus, but also jams with no ethnic focus. "Mainstream" repertoire choice, the therapist argues, is a reaction to a loss of sense of self that results from multiple, intersecting oppressions. I explain how people, in culturally diverse contexts, use musical narrative to cope with human transience in the urban, postindustrial DTES where out-migration and early death are common. I also consider specific instances of fabricating one's musical life history, which, although a reaction to trauma (or the loss of psychological comfort), may be ways of asserting control over others.

For these first two sections, I worked closely with two music therapists, Jeffrey

Hatcher and Carol Wiedemann, to learn about the music therapy techniques used, and 70 their social and scientific relevance. I read the music therapy literature extensively. This literature borrows from psychological phenomenology and therefore presented

paradigmatic challenges for this non-psychologist. Fortunately, Jeffrey Hatcher (M.A.,

M.T.A.) is a registered counselling psychologist and a music therapist who, while

teaching at Capilano College in Vancouver, trained Carol Wiedemann and Jeff Smith, another music therapist with whom I worked. Jeffrey Hatcher was extremely helpful in offering insights on portions of this chapter. He generously shared his knowledge when

we shared coffee together, when I played violin in music therapy jams that he hosted at

the Residential School Healing Centre and outside the DTES, at the Dr. Peter Centre for

people with HIV/AIDS. I described in the introduction that I was most involved in music

therapy in the DTES through 2004 and 2005, for no less than ten hours per week,

depending on the schedules of particular programs. Carol Wiedemann's therapy practice,

however, was a private meeting, so I could attend only infrequently. Carol also invited me

to perform violin in other contexts where she hosted music therapy, including the B.C.

Women's Hospital & Health Centre Fir Square Combined Care Unit for substance-using

women and substance-exposed newborns, where I learned more about her therapeutic

approach.

I devote the final section of this chapter to the complex ways in which music may

manipulate debilitating experiences of addiction and psychological depression. I focus on

the use of pan-Indigenous hand drumming and powwow drumming in addictions

treatment at Positive Outlook and the Aboriginal Front Door. These traditional music 71 practices contribute to an associational network of pan-First Nations music, which extends far beyond the Downtown Eastside.

Modifying Behaviour, Releasing Emotions and Changing Life Directions through

Music Therapy

Reconfiguring Motherhood through Popular Music

Helping women have healthy pregnancies and positive early parenting experiences is the focus of music therapy at the Sheway centre for Aboriginal mothers with infants under eighteen months, and past or current addictions issues. These mothers often struggle to retain custody of their babies, which in some cases are "on visitation," meaning that the babies are in foster care but sometimes visit with their birth mothers.

Visitations that health professionals at Sheway supervise and document may be part of a mother's attempt to regain custody from the Ministry of Children and Family

Development. Peaceful and wholesome interactions between mother and baby are desirable if the visitations are to continue or if custody is to be regained. Reinstating custody might be recommended by Sheway if a mother demonstrates healthful parenting, abstains from drug and alcohol misuse, and accesses a range of social support services for low-income parents. 72

Sheway's music therapist Carol Wiedemann uses popular song to build relationships with clients so that she can lend appropriate support or attempt to change parenting, inside and outside of music therapy. This use of music is an extension of

Sheway's mandate, which the centre's 2003 annual report summarizes as follows:

The philosophy of Sheway services is based on the recognition that the health of women and their children is linked to the conditions of their lives and their ability to influence these conditions. Hence, Sheway staff work in partnership with the woman as she makes decisions regarding her health and the health of her child. (Vancouver Native Health Society 2003, 24)

Carol says, "One of my biggest goals is just having a relationship built with a lot of the women so from that place I can either support them from where they are or I can help them find the resources they need," for example, information about nutrition, counselling or medical assistance provided at Sheway. Carol continues:

So the songs that I have in [a Sheway popular song] book, a lot of them are songs that I've picked, but there are also songs that other people have said, "Hey, do you know this song?" And that to me is an opening. So if they say, "Hey do you know this song" then I'll say, "No, but if you'll teach me, next time ..." Or "Why do you like it?" It's a great way to start a dialogue as well as a relationship. (Interview l)38

Sometimes friends and male partners also take part in the therapy sessions. Not all participants are of Aboriginal descent.

38 Music making also helps to establish a-musical relationships of health care at the Evelyne Sailer Centre and Aboriginal Front Door, for example. Stephanie Swenson offers music therapy at the Evelyne Sailer Centre as well as crisis-based counselling. For Stephanie, music making can form the basis for a counselling relationship that extends to the hospital or the home. T'it'q'et (British Columbia Interior Salish) elder Fred John has taught powwow drumming at Aboriginal Front Door, while also working as a drug and alcohol counsellor at East Vancouver's Hey-way'noqu' Healing Circle for Addictions Society. He encouraged some powwow drummers to seek counselling at Hey-way'noqu'. 73

At the same time, Carol hopes that group music making contexts may help the

women to experience community at Sheway, to sense that they can express themselves,

and to feel encouragement and support for themselves and their family contexts. A

"community" dynamic, for example, may give Carol's clients a sense that they are not

alone and, she hopes, help them to feel more comfortable at Sheway. The women may

feel less alone, Carol suggests, if they notice that other music therapy clients have similar

experiences or if they identify with song lyrics. The women have had the following

objective: to sing with Carol songs about love relationships that are somehow sad, yet

express hope, like Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow's "Picture" or Celine Dion's "My Heart

Will Go On."

The music therapy techniques that Carol Wiedemann uses are neither unique in

the DTES nor in music therapy per se, but will serve here as examples of how client

agency and autonomy may be mediated in the DTES, and in music therapy generally.

Carol Wiedemann favours Behavioral Music Therapy techniques. BMT is a

dominant music therapy method worldwide and was established in the U.S.A. in the

1960s. Bruscia defines BMT as follows: "the use of music as a contingent reinforcement

or stimulus cue to increase or modify adaptive behaviours and extinguish maladaptive

[non-musical] behaviours" (Bruscia 1998 in Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 134). In

BMT, music is used as a cue, a time or body movement structure, a focus of attention, or

a reward. Music is also used in other complex ways in order to modify behaviour, and

reduce symptoms of pathology, rather than to explore the causes of behaviour (Wigram, 74

Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 134-135). BMT is an outgrowth of Burrhus Frederic

Skinner's controversial concept of behaviorism (see Smith and Woodward 1996).

Carol sometimes uses the BMT techniques sketched above in isolation. For example, Carol might use music as a cue to stimulate a mother or her partner to make healthy parenting choices outside or during music making. When I attended one music therapy session, Carol "cued" a father to sing to his baby girl simply by asking him to do so. "Cueing" parents to sing to their babies may be a means of encouraging parents to bond and interact productively with their children. Carol notes that when a parent sings to his or her baby, this can calm the dyad. Out of the songbook, Carol chose several songs for the man, who was African Canadian. Some songs included Van Morrison's composition "Brown Eyed Girl," Paul Simon's "Bridge over Troubled Water" and Bob

Marley's "Three Little Birds." The songs' lyrics reflected Carol's response to the parent and child's ethnicity, and to community context. In this instance, Carol intended the repertoire choice to be affirming and reassuring for the father so that he could interact calmly with his baby.39

39 When singing or instrumental music is combined with play, Carol added, music becomes involved in teaching information to the child. Sometimes she, parents or therapy "guests" engage in such education. On one occasion, I noticed that a toddler at Sheway was playing with a toy farm. The little boy started singing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," which inspired me to accompany him on violin. Then, through playing another tune, I attempted to evoke musical genres that are associated with farms and rural communities. I fiddled a bluegrass tune, "Bile them Cabbage Down," also known as "Boil them Cabbage Down" and "Bake them Hoecakes Brown." This song, sometimes characterized as a traditional old-time piece or an American breakdown, is particularly reminiscent of rural life in Oklahoma, Arkansas, southwestern Pennsylvania and northeast Alabama. Like "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," "Bile them Cabbage Down" stereotypically is associated with rural communities. Because my "education" played with the idea of a stereotype, which the toddler unknowingly transmitted, it became a joke that I shared with surrounding adults while they sincerely 75

Carol interprets her stimulation of healthy parenting as magnifying an intent to improve one's self that is implied by a client's presence in music therapy:

I kind of use the music on the very base level. It's a way for me to be in the space and to help create that space that the women[, their partners and friends] are already creating. So sometimes that's creating an atmosphere, when they're walking in, to kind of remind them what that space [involves] ... so just kind of going along with the mood of the day or what's going on, or even changing the mood of what's happening. (Interview 1)

Carol also uses BMT influenced strategies to "stabilize" interpersonal dynamics in instances where abundant aggressive energy could easily spin into conflict or fractious interactions. In the DTES, conflicts too frequently erupt over money, food, drugs, or even a stray gesture or word, particularly if someone is high on cocaine or crystal methamphetamine. In such cases, Carol might use song as a "cue" for relaxation that is articulated musically. BMT perhaps questionably assumes that "relaxing" music is rhythmically steady or harmonically simple music, for example a repeated I-IV-V chord cycle (Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 138-139; see Interview 1). On the other hand,

Carol explains, "if you just want to kind of catch people's attention or kind of cut through if there is a lot of energy in the room, you might use something that's got a really good rhythm because everyone kind of responds to that on a physical level." Music therapy research argues that when the mood of a piece of music is matched to that of an individual or group, then gradually changed, the person or people's mood can also be changed (Sutherland, Newman, and Rachman 1982). When a social context is already enjoyed the fiddling. Perhaps the musical moment had educational value for the adults as well. Teaching children about musical or non-musical contexts during music making is a version of educational music therapy, which I discuss below with further emphasis on adult learning. 76 relaxed, for example in the late afternoon when babies are sleeping, Carol strums her guitar with the intent of maintaining the mood in a way that she thinks is appropriate for the context. She notes, "I might just play some kind of chord progression that's got a lot of major sevenths so it feels very open. It doesn't really resolve, and so that way, it just feels kind of more relaxed." She prefers to play guitar at Sheway, although she plays keyboard, too. "The guitar just seems to have that softer sort of sound to me that fits in really well" (Interview 1). While BMT involves certain assumptions about how music will affect behaviour, a music therapist, like any musician, makes choices about how he or she wants music performance to shape social atmosphere. Of course, musical gestures may or may not be received by listeners as the musician intends.

At other times, Carol Wiedemann combines multiple BMT techniques. For example, Carol uses music as a time structure that shifts the focus of attention in a room to music performance, after conflict has occurred. This may help to change the mood of the therapy space from one of agitation to one more conducive of peaceful child-parent interactions. She discussed such a combination of techniques as follows:

Well, I know one time after something had happened, maybe somebody had been really unsettled or kind of aggressive in the environment or something, kind of, maybe there was a bit of conflict so you can maybe feel it in the room. Everyone has felt that but everyone is kind of quiet, but really unsettled, and a woman came in that I know really likes to sing. So she came in and I thought, "This is a good way to shift the focus, so that everyone is not focused on what just happened." So she came in and I said, "Okay, which song are we going to sing? Which song do you want to sing?" And she piped out a song right away and we started singing that song. I think it was "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, so "[Now here you] go again / You say you want your freedom." That kind of song. "[Well] who am I to [keep] you down." So it actually fits pretty well. It fits pretty well. I might have 77

even given her a couple of choices, knowing what she likes to sing and knowing what kind of might fit the space. So that's kind of a bit of an up tempo, kind of a moody song, so it had a lot of energy in it. So we started singing that and I noticed a couple people joined in and then also everybody else has something to focus on. [That] can kind of shift the mood a little bit. Either they had a space to cool down from what just happened or else they have something to focus on that's not that. It kind of shifts it quite quickly. But it had enough energy so it wasn't ... I wasn't going to play something that was really quiet right away or else it kind of irritates everybody because it's too quiet. And so we had that song going for a little while. (Interview 1)

On occasions such as this one, Carol combined one or more BMT techniques with self- reflexive music composition, which one also encounters in educational music therapy.40

Songwriting and improvisation have been theorized as therapeutic means of adjusting behaviour since they can reflect and engage client perceptions and experiences.41 Carol described how, in the same therapy session, she asked the women to

40 Herbert Bruhn (2000) and James Robertson (2000), among others, have theorized music therapy and music education as categories in different continuums concerning applications of music. Robertson, on his continuum, suggests four main categories that may be ranked in terms of process and behaviour: 1) clinical music therapy (surviving - coping - functioning - reacting); 2) educational music therapy, which combines music therapy and education (subconscious learning - contributing - growing - responding [aesthetic]); 3) music education (conscious learning - refining - focusing - responding [artistic]); 4) and music (as) profession (training - working - informing - performing). Bruhn, on the other hand, maps the relationship between music education and music therapy according to musical function, positing that "music is the purpose" of didactic and psychoprofylactic music therapy techniques that use music education, while "music is a means" of music therapy that primarily has clinical-therapeutical goals. Music tends to be both a purpose and a means in special education contexts that integrate music therapy. Bruhn further maps the "educational share" and "therapeutic share" of the music functions as well as the intensity of disturbance to the individual, the nature of composed music and the type of musical improvisation that may be used. 41 There are numerous, specific improvisation strategies in music therapy. Two schools of improvisational music therapy include the Nordoff-Robbins model of Creative Music Therapy, and the Alvin model for Free Improvisation Therapy. Both of these models require the therapist to improvise in response to client music making and as a form of therapeutic intervention. The Alvin model for Free Improvisation Therapy was developed between 1950 and 1980 by Juliette Alvin, an internationally-known cellist. Alvin's theory built on her belief that "Music is a creation of man, and therefore man can see himself in the music he creates" (Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 131). She understood music as a manifestation of a person's character and therefore a possible conduit for therapy. Alvin's paradigm allows almost any type of improvisation and instrumentation. Musical sound of clients is understood in particular theoretical and psychotherapeutic terms, with some emphasis on Freud. 78 improvise new lyrics to a blues pop song that they knew, and in a way that facilitated self- reflection, humour and emotional release.

And after that we kind of shifted into a blues song that she likes to sing. It's an old ... It was Tracey Chapman's "Give Me One Reason to Stay Here." So again the theme is that, too, like am I going to stay at Sheway or am I going to go? Am I going to screw everything up? Or am I going to keep working on my stuff, like when people are getting caught up in what else is going on, it is kind of that focus. And that is a great song for making up lyrics because it just kind of... So it's a little bit slower than "Dreams," not so moody, but "Give me one reason to stay here and I'll turn right back around." And you know, it has a little bit of the love aspect in it, too, that everybody likes. And then, I just started getting people [to sing new lyrics:] reasons about why they wanted to stay there or kind of what they thought about what was happening that day and kind of in a general sense. So there started to be a sense of humour involved. And people just started putting in their own experiences. So it [the song] became quite personal, but more created a sense of camaraderie. (Interview 1)

As the women improvised lyrics, Carol encouraged them to make jokes about why they might stay at Sheway, even though there had been conflict. One woman mentioned

Sheway's tasty lunches ("Karen makes really good lunch now / So we're all going to have us some"). Another mentioned the fun that she has "shopping" in a room of free clothes at Sheway. Carol explained that making music forces people into acting in the present moment rather than focusing on past conflict. She also said that after there has

The Nordoff-Robbins model developed between 1959 and 1976. It argues for the need of skilled musicians as therapists, and limits the client to structured improvisations of percussion and voice. Participants usually work in pairs, and the therapeutic relationship is formed in music making. Here too, clients' musical responses constitute the primarily material of analysis and interpretation (Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 126-134). The nature of a therapist's intervention depends on the representational link between music and a- musical reality that is activated or perceived in the improvisational moment. Different methods have emerged for interpreting the musical improvisations of clients, which in turn guides interventions of therapists using the particular therapy strategies. Some methods treat musical expression as analogous to human experience, and others, as metaphors for human experience (Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 97-111). been conflict, people experience the isolation that is part of emotions of aversion. The nature of the newly improvised lyrics made a joke of aversion, and released negative feelings, while group music making and personalized lyrics helped people relate to one another.

Carol's descriptions of how she shifts social atmosphere through making music

evokes the relationship between social spaces, moods and subjective experience, which

can be activated in musical behaviour modification. As Barbara Crowe writes, "Moods

are more muted and longer lasting results of an emotional state. Mood states alter

memories, thoughts, and behaviour." In Western culture, Crowe problematically

generalizes, people are culturally conditioned to assign moods to music whether or not the

music evokes a specific emotion (Crowe 2004, 245). Some types of music therapy

operate on the hypothesis that the mood state of music, which is communicated and

perceived, can shift thoughts or behaviour in an individual or group by virtue of the mood

state's formulation through music.

Facilitating clients' emotional expression through music making also can facilitate

change in parenting behaviour. Carol recognizes that the mothers may work through their

feelings about being parents when playing music. However, she sees her job as providing

a "safe container" for feelings, in musical expression. Feelings are emotions made

conscious (Crowe 2004, 244) and at Sheway, Carol says, they may concern mothers'

sense that they "have no right to know their children and be a parent to their child . . .

because they are poor"; "because they are single"; because they are "dealing with the 80 guilt of using [drugs] when they were pregnant." Women whose children are in foster care, and who work to "prove" their parenting skills to the Ministry, must convince themselves of their parenting capabilities before they can convince anybody else. "If they

can feel like they can have a place even to express some of those feelings in a safe way,

which is very often in music [at Sheway] ... If they have a way of maybe turning some

of those feelings around, too, just knowing that things can change," Carol believes, there

may be hope that custody can be reclaimed.

My conversations with Carol were conflicted regarding the question of whether

First Nations musical and cultural expressions are necessary for such changes at the

Aboriginal organization. In 2005, she noted:

Sometimes addiction starts in the places that are connected to one's [cultural] roots. ... If you're in the midst of addiction, I don't know if going back to your roots will get you [into recovery], it might just get you to the root of the pain, where the addiction is coming from. I've seen a lot of women that start to go back to that [at later stages of recovery] at Aurora Centre at the B.C. Women's Hospital. A lot of those women are curious and really looking forward to going back to their roots after treatment, connecting to it if they never have really. They have to be clean for about three months before they go in. At Sheway, people can be in the middle of their addiction. They can be accessing resources to detox, to go into treatment. (Interview 1)

By 2007, Carol emailed me that at Sheway, she saw

First Nations music and culture as being important, and even essential if the client believes it is important. All of my work at Sheway is client-centred, and focused on the empowerment of the individual. That being said, I do not believe I should force a First Nations agenda if that is not what the clients want. It is up to them.

In such ways, Carol Wiedemann uses and does not use her music therapy practice

at Sheway to build relationships with Aboriginal clients suffering from addiction, to 81 facilitate healthy life directions for them and their families, and to change destructive behaviours via BMT. Carol argued that Aboriginals may not want to connect to their cultural heritage, through music, when they are addicted. I will explain that I experienced the opposite at Positive Outlook and Aboriginal Front Door. By contrast, Sheway's administration remains open to special First Nations traditional drumming events, although some administrators express concern that loud sounds may push mothers with small children out of a small therapy space.

During my conversations with Carol, I felt confused as to whether she held a nuanced understanding of First Nations addictions recovery that I did not find elsewhere in the DTES, or whether I had witnessed what George Lipsitz calls "the possessive investment in Whiteness" (Lipsitz 2006) commonly occurring in postcolonial Native-non-

Native relations. After I presented some of my Ph.D. research to First Nations musicians at an Aboriginal music training program discussed in Chapter 6, the musicians reiterated

Carol Wiedemann's hypothesis that First Nations traditional culture can be entangled in the roots of addiction, particularly when a disconnection from traditional culture results from trauma. I discuss this point further later in the chapter.

Agency and Autonomy in Client-Therapist Communications

As Carol Wiedemann's comments suggest, an opportunity to refresh, transform or transcend one's internal state of being (e.g., emotional or mental) or life direction may be 82 desirable if one's internal or external life experience is burdensome. This may be true, for instance, if one has lost (or never had) positive emotional or mental attitudes towards one's self and one's life experience, or if one believes that one has "lost" one's life direction. In either case, it may be part of a healing process or coping mechanism to delve deeper into difficult emotions or experiences.

If a music therapist is to engage a client's individual emotional and mental world, with a view to transforming it, there must be communication of the client's particular life stories, or personal narratives or issues, to which the therapist responds. In one or more face-to-face interactions, the social exchange unfolds through words, collaborative musical process or body language, for example. As in any (series of) human interaction(s), the degree of agency can vary between individual communicative messages and gestures. Agency in client-therapist interactions also varies between different music therapy strategies, for example, BMT versus other techniques involving psychotherapy. While therapy goals tend to be discussed explicitly between therapist and client in music psychotherapy, in Behavioral Music Therapy, client behaviour is modified by a music therapist often with little discussion about the modification. At the Positive

Outlook centre for Aboriginals with HIV/AIDS, I observed a client-therapist communication of music psychotherapy, which generally allows clients more possibility for agency than BMT regarding defining therapy goals. On this occasion, I helped music therapist Jeff Smith collaborate musically with client Francis McAllister (Alberta Cree), who indicated his therapeutic needs through repertoire choice, which Jeff acknowledged by choosing topically related repertoire. Francis chose John Denver's "I'm Leavin' on a

Jet Plane" and then Jeff picked Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Francis responded by choosing Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door."

Why Francis chose the Denver song was something that Jeff and I decoded through lyrical and physical clues. The chorus of the Denver song evokes a departure with indeterminate return: "I'm leavin' on a jet plane /1 don't know when I'll be back again . .." Francis seemed particularly depressed that day, with dull, sullen eyes, a puffy, yellow face, greasy hair and dirt caked to his jeans and shoes. He smelled unwashed and of stale alcohol. Francis was homeless and struggling with drug addiction. Jeff and I guessed, correctly, that Francis was thinking of the possibility of his own death. I interviewed him formally after we played music together. He said, with pain in his voice, that he did not know what would happen if he did not conquer his addiction (Interview 2).

Francis also had HIV/AIDS.

Jeff then guided Francis and me through a musical interpretation of "Hallelujah" that pointed towards solace in Judeo-Christian spirituality. Jeff led us to sing softly, like a prayer, the chorus, which repeats the word "hallelujah." Jeff focussed on repeating the chorus, with the verses and without, but we did not attempt all of the lyrics, which deal with power and gender dynamics, and the potential exaltation and spirituality of sexuality and communication. An Internet search for "Hallelujah and Cohen and lyrics" should produce the lyrics. Jeff Smith was accustomed to dealing with issues of terminal illness in music therapy, as advocated by D. Aldridge (1995), Janet P. Gilbert (1977), Robert E. 84

Krout (2000), Jenny A. Martin (1991), and S. Munro and B. Mount (1978). Jeff often touched on spiritual tasks for a person facing death. These are listed by Kenneth J. Doka and John D. Morgan (1993): 1) to find meaning in life, usually drawing on spirituality, personal philosophy or significant relationships, and in so doing, to come to terms with one's life; 2) to make sense of death so that one may die with integrity; and 3) to find a hope that extends beyond death. Jeff Smith addressed terminal illness, in this instance, through evoking Judeo-Christian spirituality, which has problematic and positive associations with complex histories of the colonization of Indigenous people, including

the Alberta Cree group to which Francis belonged.

When a therapist's musical sound responds to a client's indication of his or her

needs, the intervention can be communicative and meaningful for the client. Francis

seemed to find meaning in Jeffs song choice, and to acknowledge the Christian content

through a third musical chorus. Francis started to sing Bob Dylan's "Knocking on

Heaven's Door," whose chorus repeats the song title four times, as follows: "Knock,

knock, knockin' on heaven's door." At once, Francis reasserted that he was going to die,

but through a Christian spiritual metaphor.

In music psychotherapy, the client may have more control over the therapeutic

process (or at least, more dialogue) than in BMT, although a therapist still may respond

with more or less authority, and with more or less sensitivity to interpersonal and cultural

hierarchies. By contrast, there exists a range of collaborative music therapy approaches

that stress client-designed music therapy initiatives as well as more equal power relations. In addition, there are music therapy contexts where emotional and mental transformations seem to emerge spontaneously in individuals and groups.42 While different approaches to music therapy emphasize different dynamics of agency during client-therapist communications, the content of the communications also can give or deny agency and autonomy, for example, the power to identify autonomously with First Nations spirituality or culture in one moment.

All of the popular music therapists that I worked with at Vancouver Native Health branches, at Sheway, Positive Outlook and the Residential School Healing Centre, were

White, but worked largely with First Nations clients. This reinforced uneven power relations of non-Natives over Natives. Most of the music therapists themselves were uncomfortable with how this power-over dynamic intersected with music therapy methods that manipulated clients' behaviours. Carol Wiedemann and Jeffrey Hatcher said that for all but one brief time, no qualified First Nations music therapists could be found to use the "mainstream" therapy methods at the Vancouver Native Health Society

(Interview 1; Interview 4).

42 Different music therapy approaches and analyses involve diverse attitudes towards the client-therapist relationship. One taxonomy, for example, maps music therapy approaches as opposites: artistic versus scientific; musical versus psychological; behavioral vs. psychotherapeutic; complementary vs. alternative; and rehabilitative vs. acute (Wigram, Pederson, and Bonde 2002, 30). The client-therapist relationship is not the fundamental basis for this categorization. 86

Client Experiences of Individual Agency and Autonomy through Expressing

Emotional Reactions to Inner City Issues

In the Evelyne Sailer Centre's music therapy program, which involves an ethnically and culturally "open" popular music jam, the use of music to negotiate emotion can be largely voluntary on the part of community members. Which emotions a song may express or evoke are almost never dictated by the music therapist, Stephanie Swenson. A

Metis participant from Winnipeg, who I will call Elizabeth Cole, indicated that making music allows her to choose to express "stressful" emotions:

Klisala What do you think the most important thing is about the jam [a music therapy session]?

Elizabeth Oh, gosh. For me, it allows myself to find new ways of expressing myself. You know, because sometimes conversation just doesn't do it. And you know, to be able to use your voice or song or an instrument to be able to express how you're feeling, right, and then the camaraderie, you know ... (Interview 3)

Elizabeth's non-Native husband, "Jean Paul Lucas" (pseud.), also a participant from

Winnipeg, added that making music "gives you more ideas, more relief because you can exert it [your feelings, yourself, your problems] into the music and it comes out."

Elizabeth summarized: "Stress relief' (Interview 3). Elizabeth evoked situations and memories that are difficult emotionally for her, for example: being diagnosed with

Hepatitis C; coping with memories of severe sexual abuse; fighting cancer. These health 87 concerns have been compounded by the difficulties Elizabeth has had getting adequate health care and counselling as a person of low socioeconomic status.

"Peter" (pseud.), a Chinese Canadian drummer who participates in the Evelyne

Sailer jam, told me that he also uses music to release emotional stress, but only when he

"drums to the melody":

Sometimes I drum to the lyrics and sometimes I drum to the tune. When I drum to the tune, I am using the song to express my emotions. I can't drum with everyone when I express my emotions. Sometimes my feelings don't match what other people are doing.

Peter thinks that he can experience less "groupness" and enough personal space to explore emotions if he directs his musical attention to the melody. Directing musical intent to the lyrics affords him less emotional safety while drumming in synch with the musical pulse affords him little safety because he feels connected to other participants' musical expressions. Peter found space to express himself during musical collaboration through resisting what he felt were the most active channels of musical connectivity.

Peter prefaced his explanation by saying that he played music at different jams in the neighbourhood starting in 2000 and with two friends. One friend, "Mike" (pseud.), committed suicide recently while in the U.S. The second was pushed through a window in a drug-related conflict. While Elizabeth released emotions through "voice, song or instrument," Peter expressed grief when drumming to tune rhythms. These were individual emotional responses in the music-making process that were not specifically prompted by music therapists, instructors or community outsiders. "Byron" (pseud.), on the other hand, is a Vancouver-born, White guitarist and poet whose mental or emotional ties to popular songs lie in part with extra-musical narratives, which he chooses to associate with repertoire performed at the Evelyne Sailer

Centre, Health Contact Centre and First United Church. After the Evelyne Sailer music therapy group plays a John Denver song, Byron often asks whether the group knows that

Denver died in a small plane. Playing "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd made Byron think about how some members of Skynyrd's band had died in a plane crash. Harry Chapin, who co-wrote "Cat's in the Cradle," died by driving into a ditch, Byron said. (According to numerous biographies on the Internet, a truck struck Chapin's car on the Long Island

Expressway.) Paul Simon's "Bridge over Troubled Water" reminded Byron that Simon has struggled with bipolar disorder (although Simon's ex-wife Carrie Fisher is perhaps the best known advocate for sufferers of the disease). Byron calls himself a "tortured soul," which relates to a painful childhood and his coping strategies of substance misuse.

He expresses this sentiment through reading publicly the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, where he feels that he "becomes the tortured poet." Byron has a gifted mind and is a repository of a wealth of popular music trivia. When Byron plays popular songs, music trivia that he associates with particular songs allows him to explore a fear of death and an investment in pain. This is not the only narrative in his song choice, but a predominant one.

At Jeff Smith's music therapy class in the Positive Outlook program (of the

Vancouver Native Health Society), a strategy for exploring and addressing social 89 isolation emerged spontaneously among male clients. Music therapy evolved there so that its participants were about 90% male. In group therapy sessions (unlike the individual session with Francis, described above), there tended to be equal numbers of First Nations and Caucasian men43 who played music as a means of exploring feelings of love and alienation through songs about failed relationships. The male clients, who were largely single and HIV positive, felt that other people protected themselves from them due to their health status, and like many DTES men, experienced difficulty in securing love relationships. The poorest areas of the DTES, where the men lived, were 69%-86% male in 2001, the latest year for which Statistics Canada information is available at the time of writing.

Over six months in 2004-2005, I recorded the repertoire choice at Positive

Outlook's popular music therapy sessions. Approximately half the songs that male clients chose to play addressed breakups, lost loves and missed loves. Common choices included

John Denver's composition "I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane," in which a lover is leaving his partner and feels lonely, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesdays Gone," where a man leaves

"his" woman. Other choices were The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin,"44 about missed love, or "Old Man" by Neil Young, where Young sings, "Love lost, such a cost" and "I need someone to love me the whole day through." Other songs at Positive Outlook that were not directly about loneliness addressed ill-fated love, and, especially in U2

43 I never saw an Asian participate in music therapy at Positive Outlook, although the centre employed at least one South Asian man. 44 A member of The Moody Blues, Justin Hayward, wrote the song. Other bands listed in this paragraph composed and recorded the listed songs. songs, painful or unsatisfying experiences of romance combined with a longing for another relationship or Christian spirituality (e.g., "With or Without You" or "Still

Haven't Found What I'm Lookin' For"). Through these song lyric choices, single men explored feelings of social alienation, and worked to understand and cope with the isolation of bachelor life. Again, in these important uses of popular music at a First

Nations organization, Native traditional music or culture did not have a central role. In the next sub-section, I consider possible reasons for the mainstream, non-Native popular music choices. As said, only half of the participants were First Nations. The music therapist, Jeff Smith, was non-Native. Francis McAllister, though, occasionally sang a song that he composed, "Creator," which references pan-Aboriginal traditional culture concepts.45 Jeff Smith worked hard to organize pan-Indigenous hand drumming, which punctuated the popular music jams for several months in early 2005. I discuss "Creator" and the hand drumming sessions towards the end of this chapter.

My point in engaging music and emotion at this time is not to theorize specifically what about music evokes emotion in the individual, although it is suggested that at

Positive Outlook, the object of emotion seems to be song lyrics; in the case of Byron, the emotional focus may be an "extra musical" event, trivia in particular. In the cases of

Elizabeth and Jean Paul, the object of emotion may well relate closely to lyric content, to musical sound and to the memory of similar styles and associated experiences. My aim is

45 Other participants shared original compositions as well, but the songs almost never referenced First Nations traditional culture. to identify some ways that emotional transcendence may be an "interpretive move" in

urban poverty contexts, which necessarily involve marginalization and associated psychic

burdens. Steven Feld has defined "interpretive moves" as the attentional shifts and

adjustments that one makes in the listening experience (which usually is integral to

performing music). Feld writes that as one listens, "one works through the dialectics by

developing choices and juxtaposing background knowledge" (Feld 1984, 8). I am

considering how the experience of making music, which I define broadly to include

musical sound, lyrics and actions, can analogize "background knowledge" of the inner

city, and become a means for musicians to explore or shift perspectives about such

knowledge. Background knowledge necessarily flows through memory,46 and so will

personal experiences or changes that result from one or multiple interpretive moves. At

the same time, the agency for change of DTES community members operates either

through popular music with a marginal First Nations focus, but for First Nations at Native

agencies, or through popular music at culturally "open" organizations. The popular music

practices at First Nations organizations evoke a struggling with cultural blindness that is

typical of post-colonialism, but also involve complex reactions to oppression and

hegemony, which I touch on in the next section.

46 There exists a developing ethnomusicological literature on music and memory. Ethnomusicologists have documented ways in which memory flows through specific cultural experiences including, for example, adaptation and collective histories in the diasporic context (Olsen 2004), memories of musical styles (Muller 2006), cultural transmission processes (Shelemay 1998) and performed cultural histories that elicit debate (Romero 2001). Caroline Bithell surveys how ethnomusicology, which privileges the present, has treated history as it operates through collective and individual memory, and recorded memories (Bithell 2006). 92

Yet at Native and intercultural agencies in the DTES, client-directed music therapy allows powerful types of emotional autonomy for individuals. Emotional responses that involve grappling with memories of inner city issues seem intentionally to be cultivated by DTES musicians. Elizabeth and Jean Paul know that playing music serves as emotion-related "stress relief," and Byron has some autonomy in choosing whether to think about death and suffering, and to recall related emotions. While a music therapist was present at Positive Outlook, the male clients chose songs that recalled their loneliness, which is associated with layered issues of poverty, health and substance misuse.47 These clients used musical expression as what Carol Wiedemann calls a "safe container" for the exploration of emotions. Behavioral, psychological and self-directed music therapy offered this way for DTES residents to exercise control over their emotional reactions to inner city issues.

47 This is not to say that different types of external influence cannot and do not catalyze, grant or shape emotional acts of autonomy and agency, at some levels of a multilayered, interpersonal group music making exercise. An important question is why particular topics of emotion arise at a certain moment. Is that because musicians are in a context where they feel comfortable to deal with personal problems or issues? Do clients consider loss of individual ability because they feel prompted to deal with personal issues by a music therapy context? Multiple influences on autonomy and agency (for example, of the music therapist, of clients, of the discipline of music therapy or of a place) may intersect in complex ways in a musical moment, and in a group interaction, will be interpreted differently by different participants. 93

Narrating Repertoire Choices and Musical Life Histories

"Mainstream" Popular Songs

Therapist Jeffrey Hatcher (M.A., M.T.A.) argued that popular music repertoire choice by Downtown Eastside participants in jams and music therapy sessions might indicate another way that DTES musicians experienced emotion-related transformations through making music. Hatcher did extensive music therapy work with inner city, street- involved adults in Vancouver. As he explained, he was particularly interested in a tendency of DTES jam participants to choose to perform popular songs that had commercial success "at the time of the [participants'] adolescence, childhood or young adulthood, a time when I would argue that most people, even survivors of abusive childhoods and street life, identify as their time of greatest strength and hopefulness"

(Interview 4).

In Appendix A, I sketch the commercial popularity of 120 songs chosen in 2004 by participants in selected popular music sessions at the Health Contact Centre, the

Evelyne Sailer Centre and a Residential School Healing Centre48 music therapy session.

48 From 1879 to 1986, Canadian First Nations and Inuit children were forced from their families to often distant residential schools, where they were forbidden to practice their Native cultures, including languages and spiritualities (Milloy 1999). The schools were loci of emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual abuse (Assembly of First Nations 1994, 2); a heavy handed attempt by Canada's federal government and various Christian churches to "civilize," and "assimilate" the Aboriginal into Euro-Canadian society. Christian denominations involved were Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian (Milloy 1999, xii). Important studies of residential schools in Canada include Celia Haig-Brown's Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the 94

As the reader knows from Chapter 1, the Health Contact Centre and Evelyne Sailer

Centre both were culturally "open" contexts. The Residential School Healing Centre jam that I analyze was a First Nations popular music event, which Hatcher developed into an intercultural jam at First United Church in the DTES.

I show in Appendix A that out of the 120 songs surveyed, 82 or 68.3% charted among Billboard magazine Pop Singles, Country Singles or R&B/Hip Hop Singles. Some songs were performed repeatedly. Out of 145 total performances, 106 or 73.1% were of

Billboard hit singles. At the Health Contact Centre, 30 out of 48 performed songs had charted (62.5%). At the Evelyne Sailer Centre, 59 out of 71 performed songs had charted

(83.1%).

At the Residential School Healing Centre jam, 17 of 26 performed songs had charted (65.4%). Jeffery Hatcher commented further on the repertoire choice at this facility:

Other songs chosen by participants were not widely known through commercial channels, but were "hits" in their own right, and popularized by other means. Clients at this and other similar facilities were in their youth during the 1950s and 60s when, by various means, they had learned songs like "Goodnight Irene," "Midnight Special," "You are My Sunshine," etcetera. Such songs were as popular to the mainstream listener as the charted hits of the day though they seldom found their way to the Top 40 charts. Nonetheless, these songs were loved, learned and sung by millions. Usually [the songs were] learned through singing at home or at school—both activities were much more common then than now. The important point is that the songs chosen were well-known to participants and they could reasonably expect others to know them, too. (Interview 4)

Indian Residential School (Haig-Brown 1988), the Assembly of First Nations' Breaking the Silence (Assembly of First Nations 1994) and John S. Milloy's A National Crime (Milloy 1999). 95

Hatcher added that when jam participants at the Residential School Healing Centre chose to sing the non-commercial popular songs, they served the same purpose as did singing the "official" hit songs: to unite people and allow them shared experience.

The Billboard charts are American, and of course the DTES is a Canadian context. However, analogous information for Canada has not yet been compiled in a comprehensive way. While the U.S. chart information can only be taken as a rough estimation of Canadian popularity, it signals the "mainstream" nature of the repertoire.

Jeffrey Hatcher noted that the more familiar a particular song was, the more attractive it was as a repertoire choice for jam participants. "The act of singing in a group setting, then, became a pleasurable bonding and communal experience, the likes of which participants seldom had otherwise" (Interview 4).

Hatcher theorized that commercially mainstream repertoire choices therefore could be potentially "healing" reactions to individual experiences of what I characterize as intersectionality. Musimbi Kanyoro writes that "[i]ntersectionality is where multiple forms of subordination interlink and compound to result in a multiple burden for victims"

(Kanyoro 2001). Hatcher recognized the psychological impact of intersecting oppressions and related social stigmas on his music therapy patients at organizations for First Nations like the Residential School Healing Centre, Sheway and Positive Outlook:

In the facilities mentioned, the experience of having survived an abusive background was ubiquitous, practically universal. The abuse backgrounds [of clients] had sent them off in various coping directions, many culminating in those "inner city" elements that we are speaking about: drug and alcohol abuse, the sex trade, poverty, poor health, and on and on. (Interview 4) 96

Hatcher was particularly concerned by the loss of connection to self and society that typically occurs when one experiences multiple types of marginalization due to a combination of more than one of the following factors: sexual and/or physical abuse, alcohol and/or drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, mental illness, survival sex work, criminal activity and prison experience.

The [jam participants] are people who, through a chain of actions and reactions, [exacerbated] by multiple environmental factors, do not feel very "at home" with themselves. Some are incredibly disconnected from their self of origin. Participation in music activities is an experience that bypasses cognitive brain function and is instead "felt" by the person—meaning all of us, of course—in the emotion and memory parts of the brain. (Interview 4)

Psychologists like Judith Herman have identified the multiple, intersecting psychological traumas as contributors to trauma disorders and specific asocial behaviours (Herman

1992).

In popular music jams at the Residential School Healing Centre, the frequent choice of commercial hits and non-commercial popular songs implied that participants connected to each other through first connecting to musical expressions of mainstream media and society. Jeffrey Hatcher interpreted the repertoire choice as satisfying a desire among the marginalized to be "mainstream" and "normal"—not outsiders to "legitimate" society:

One of the things that I see these [music therapy clients] long for is acceptance by the mainstream, and by that I mean very mainstream, even conservative. For example, most would describe themselves as Christians, or what is commonly thought of as ordinary church-going Christians, even if they [clients] don't attend services. Most would describe themselves as believing in the god of the Bible and being Christian, or at least having [Christian] beliefs. Spiritually, for them, that's 97

the mainstream and that's what they wish they were. Culturally and socially, that's [what] they'd like to be, too. They want to fit in, not to be cast out or marginalized. They want what they think we all have, which is not for people to point at us and stare at us in the street, or kick us out of their stores, which is common. People don't tell you and me, "Move on. You can't sit here. Get the hell out of here." We don't have the ragged look that marks us as not just different but also as having less social worth. (Interview 4)

If clients could feel "mainstream" through singing "hit singles," Hatcher thought, this also could reduce or counteract the social alienation that they experienced due to diverse types of oppression. He experimented with how facilitating DTES performances of hit singles in music therapy and assisting clients to compose music in commercialized styles might allow healing connections to "mainstreamness." Hatcher wrote a master's thesis on how popular songwriting aided psychological healing for one man who suffered sexual abuse, drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, survival sex work and prison experience as well as complex post traumatic stress disorder (Hatcher 2004).

My analysis of repertoire choice corroborates Jeffrey Hatcher's understanding that

Top 40 and familiar songs were chosen most frequently. However, did counteracting societal alienation through performing "mainstream" music contradict the politics of hegemonic resistance and political activism that permeated the Downtown Eastside's history? Did nurturing the "mainstream" undermine localized senses of self as they were expressed in popular music? My experience at the Health Contact Centre and Positive

Outlook music jams suggests perhaps not (always). In popular music sessions, "second choices" often were locally composed songs, many of which cited stylistic devices of popular music icons, but through lyrics about social justice or local lifestyles. DTES songwriters that were best respected in the community attempted to create individualized and distinctive musical sounds that departed from mass mediated musics while referencing DTES life. These composers included May Kossoff, Andy Kostynuik and

Mike Richter. Some choices of Top 40 hits expressed a localized "outlaw" or "rebel" identity. Primary choices of outlaw country songs by mass media stars Willie Nelson,

Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were widely considered "stereotypically" DTES in part because of their countercultural content.

Memorializing DTES Community Members and Events through Narratives

about Repertoire

In Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, social change and loss of individuals from the community now is the norm due to the transience of the working poor and the homeless, deaths due to substance misuse or disease, and the overlapping communities that circulate through the inner city, and any transcultural, industrialized community.

Through these channels, individuals may leave the community as quickly as they have entered it. However, music making provides an avenue for representing social fabrics, for example, through narrative. Creating musical narratives of memory and experience that challenge transience can be another way that DTES community members assert control over their mental and social worlds. This section documents how conMnunity members create such narratives about repertoire choice. I elaborate the understanding that, in 99

Carolyn Nordstrom's words, "[i]f people are defined by the world they inhabit, and the world is culturally constructed by the people who consider themselves part of it, people ultimately control the production of reality and their place in it" (Nordstrom 1995,136).

In the Evelyne Sailer Centre's music therapy program, where song selection is almost entirely client driven, chosen songs always stand for particular individuals or groups, and events associated with them, even as the music generates other meanings. In this way, the song repertoire preserves social contexts and relationships. Each song in the

Evelyne Sailer Centre's song book is included because it is important to a particular therapy participant, or honours community members involved at the centre in some other way.

Jam participants and the music therapist, Stephanie Swenson, add songs to the book. The number of jam participants at the Evelyne Sailer Centre can range from three or four to fifteen, although I usually jammed with five to ten others when I was most involved in 2004 and 2005.

Stephanie added the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" after she noticed that

Elizabeth had a nice voice and could sing all the lyrics to the song, as Elizabeth said:

And then the following week, that's when we put "Wild Horses" in the book because I was singing it, while helping Stephanie put things away that day and she says, "Holy smokes. Have you ever got a nice voice." She says, "You know all the words to that song." So I wrote them out very quickly for her on a paper towel and the next week it was in the book. (Interview 3)

Including the song could also be understood in terms of Behavioral Music Therapy

(BMT). Elizabeth sang during childhood, which was a difficult time when singing seemed 100 one of few positive experiences. Stephanie's comment and action reinforced Elizabeth's positive feelings towards singing. Stephanie aims to encourage healthful behaviour in all therapy participants. Elizabeth said that the gesture encouraged her to develop musically.

Another song in the book, "In the Cool of the Night," honours Stephanie and a senior staff member at the Evelyne Sailer Centre. Stephanie created the song's melody and chord chart, while the other employee wrote the lyrics. "In the Cool of the Night" is about a prostitute working the streets where the writer lives. It therefore engages memories of local history and social contexts. This song's inclusion also involved

Stephanie's nurturing of creative processes at the Evelyne Sailer Centre. The composition emerged after Stephanie asked to read the other employee's poetry and then, to put music to one poem.

Sometimes the music therapy group nurtures individual musicianship, too, by inserting a song that the person plays with facility or skill. Ron Score played tamboa, a tuned slit drum, with particular skill to Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Indian

Reservation," so that song was added to the book.

Many songs are added simply because particular individuals enjoy performing them. Stephanie included "Wild Horses" in part because it was a song that Elizabeth liked to sing, as described earlier. Elizabeth and Jean Paul provided other examples:

Elizabeth And then when this fellow, Mike Curtis, when he was with us in our crazy bunch that we were, right, that's when we started getting into doing a lot of Pink Floyd with him and Rolling Stones. [The Stones'] "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Get off my Cloud" and ... 101

Jean Paul "Jumping Jack Flash."

Elizabeth Yeah because he was into all of that, so Stephanie put that in the book for him, right? And [Peter,] he liked that song, "Unchained Melody," and he was into a lot of B. B. King, [Peter] was, right. So we put a couple of B. B. King, and "Unchained Melody," and a couple other songs into the book for Chris.

Jean Paul [The Blues Brothers'] "Flip, Flop and Fly."

Elizabeth That was Joanne's, grey-haired Joanne's. She loved that one. (Interview 3)

Stephanie or her clients have added different songs due to their popularity with the entire group. Two examples are Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" and the Eagles'

"Hotel California." Additions chosen by "the group" are associated with a collection of identifiable individuals because the jam is so intimate in size.

Elizabeth and Jean Paul have participated in the music therapy program since its inception in 1994. They are among several founding members that still attend regularly.

Most participants leave—relocate, go missing or die—after a period of months or years.

The degree to which participants remember individuals honoured by particular songs is highly variable.

Sometimes, established members like Elizabeth try to fill in recent group members. We see this in the following transcription of a conversation at a jam session in

September 2004:

Elizabeth - Yeah. So, what are we doing here. "Bye Bye Love," darlin'? Kli? Klisala - 8a. 102

Elizabeth announces the song's number in the songbook, which is sequenced. She gets everyone's attention and we almost proceed. She stops us. Elizabeth - R. C. used to like this song. Ron Charbonneau. He used to like this one. Klisala - Who was R. C.? Elizabeth - His name was Ron Charbonneau. He used to come years and years ago. Tall drink of water of a man, long hair, and he wore nothing but Montreal Canadiens clothes, like, everything. Klisala - Oh, yeah. That's funny. Elizabeth - I'm sure his underwear was even that, too. Klisala - Really? Elizabeth - Yes, everything he wore was in those colours ... red, blue and white. Klisala - Wow. Elizabeth - Oh yeah. Jean Paul - 8a. Elizabeth - He used to like this one.

In other cases, newer members share memories that the songs stir in them. In this way, they weave their stories into song meanings already known to the group. The new memories may contradict those that others articulated, and are topically diverse. Some address local problems such as drug and alcohol misuse. Others may be less contentious, such as learning how to play guitar. I noticed that therapy participants appear less interested in narratives that did not seem emotionally difficult or moving to recall.

Emotional release through narrative seemed important.

Fieldnote, August 18,2004 There was a powerful moment just after we sang Lennon's "Imagine," the last song of the day. One of the First Nations ladies said that "Imagine" brought back lots of memories for her. (This was not the one in the track suit, but the one who showed a black suede leather lighter holder to Elizabeth, with pride. She wore beaded jewelry.) She said that this was the song that her mother sang to commemorate her first coming clean. Someone asked when this was. The woman replied that it was in 1986, and that the whole family went to detox with the mother. The First Nations woman noted that her mom has been sober ever since. 103

This was met by impressed, positive astonishment from the rest of the musicians in the room. At least I think that was the reaction....

The man in the wheelchair said that "The House of the Rising Sun" had brought back memories for him, too. This was the first song that he played on the guitar. At age seven, he would strum the tune to other kids. Stephanie said that that was the first song she learned, too, but she was nine or ten.

Fieldnote, November 24,2004 "Hotel California" - This was my pick. The man who trained to be a minister said that this is the song he hates most, along with "Bye Bye Miss American Pie." "Hotel California" reminds him of a bad acid trip during which he listened to the song. Images of the bad trip flash in his mind when he hears the song. For Stephanie, the song brings back fond memories of the "Hotel California" tour in Calgary. About 4,000 people gathered outside for a show, she said.

The jam itself produces new meanings for songs, too, for example, when clients react to the song performances. One humourous reaction involved a colloquial- typographical error in the song book's lyrics. Elizabeth said,

I remember our little lady friend .. ., every time we did that song "Working Class Hero," Marianne Faithfull, right, she would just get so shy because in the book we mistyped it. It says "We're still fucking pheasants" instead of "peasants." . . . [She] would get so shy at the swearing word, right. And she would turn beet red and her little face, her hands would come up to her face. She would just be like a tiny little girl, shy, right? (Interview 3)

The process of creating musical memory at the Evelyne Sailer Centre is somewhat fluid because new songs are added to honour new jam members, and most participants— including new ones—contribute song meanings. Yet songs that honour older jam members continue to feature prominently. At the time of writing, the growing compilation of songs is crammed into black binders, which are seven inches thick and incredibly 104 heavy. The centre had to buy deep and sturdy aluminum music stands to replace fragile wire ones.

As I took part in the jam in 2004-2005, I experienced how the song book facilitated an imagined community that was more stable than the one I in fact experienced. Peter, Elizabeth, Jean Paul and Stephanie were still involved in the jam, but

"grey-haired" Joanne or "the lady friend," Ron Charbonneau, Ron Score and Mike Curtis no longer lived in the neighbourhood. The Evelyne Sailer Centre was a microcosm of the

DTES' social fabric, which continually shifts due to the migration, death and unstable roles of individuals in community—changes made more poignant by a sense in the DTES that people just disappear. If one does not meet an individual where or when one expects to, one may not know whether the person has moved, has died, has become ill, has lost interest in a given community context or is "partying." Many people circulate through the community anonymously or using pseudonyms for identity effect, to obscure difficult pasts or to protect themselves. This gives the impression of disappeared identities before people actually leave. The rapidity with which people come in and out of focus in one's individual experience is unsettling, as is the lack of dependability that one feels if one does not see someone, if one wants to know someone or indeed, if one thinks one knows someone. Elizabeth told me that her best friend in the DTES, who joined her and Jean

Paul on their honeymoon, disappeared only to re-emerge in Washington State several months later. The Evelyne Sailer Centre song book goes some way to ameliorating uneasiness about disappearances. 105

Memorializing individuals through song takes special importance, though, when someone disappears from the jam in a way that other therapy participants find traumatic, for example, due to illness, death or intensifying substance misuse. Elizabeth and Jean

Paul recalled songs associated with people who had come, but gone in tragic ways.

Elizabeth You know, there are so many songs that remind me of people that have come and gone. You know, there is there is this fellow. I think his name is Noah or something like that. Anyways, he liked Guns & Roses, right, so we put "Patience" and "November Rain" in there for him, right. And then there was another young fellow. What was his ... ? [Leo (pseud.),] tall [Leo] who is a crackhead now. He used to play a lot at Carnegie, in fact, years ago. Really, really tall fellow, Caucasian.

Klisala Ooohhh. Bald?

Elizabeth Kind of balding, yeah.

Klisala Guitar player.

Elizabeth Guitar player. He used to be a phenomenal guitar player. Now he's so cracked out

Klisala Is that what... ? He said he was doing crystal meth.

Elizabeth Same thing.

Jean Paul Yeah, that too. 106

Elizabeth But anyways, when he used to come to the group in '96, '97 and '98, he was into the country stuff. So we put [Kenny Rogers'] "Ruby" and [Willie Nelson's] "Momma Don't [Let] your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys."

Jean Paul [Kenny Rogers'] "Lucille." CCR [Creedence Clearwater Revival].

Elizabeth "Lucille." All them kind of songs . . . And then we had a Native fellow, well, Arnie was his name.

Jean Paul Arnie, guitar, electric guitar....

Jean Paul Blues: of course [CCR's] "Proud Mary" came in the book.49 "Sitting ...

Elizabeth "Sitting [on] the Dock of the Bay"—Otis Redding.

Jean Paul Oh man, he could play that guitar.

Elizabeth Yeah.

Jean Paul And he died of sclerosis of the liver.

Elizabeth And HIV complications. (Interview 3)

Memorializing the dead through song is common practice more generally in the

Downtown Eastside, for example, in the Carnegie Community Centre's Song Circle, the

Health Contact Centre jam session, and the street (music) program, which is co-sponsored

49 Creedence Clearwater Revival incorporated influences of the swamp blues of southern Louisiana in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s. 107 by the Carnegie and Health Contact Centre. In these popular music jams, participants play songs created or performed by deceased community members. Peggy Wilson, music facilitator for the Contact Centre and street program, described examples of this. Evoking a 2000 CD of original songs and arrangements performed at Carnegie,50 Peggy said

There the one fellow on there who has passed on and I mean, he's got originals, so. We were all good friends with him, but Mike [who frequents the Carnegie Centre] still plays some of his songs because they did a lot of music together. So that was Dave McConnell. . . . And when we all have memorials for [people who have died], we will do their songs. And there's, well, actually, there is quite a handful now [of] other musicians that are song writers, and once and awhile we will pull out songs [of] people that aren't with us anymore. (Interview 5)

In playing songs created or performed by deceased musicians, active community

members take on an activity and expression of the deceased. The songs do not only

signify an imagined social fabric, they also are performances that retain, in a very real

way, social actions and contributions to community of those who have died.

Like at the Evelyne Sailer Centre, these reenactments may reinforce or build new

meaning into musical syntax, which already exists in the neighbourhood. This process,

again, operates (in part) through commonly held memories. The memories may reside in

sectors of the community larger than a fifteen-person ensemble.

Musical memory resonated through a crowd of seventy and a song gained new

meanings at a memorial service for Wilhemina (Willie) Munro (1938-2004)—an

50 The CD title, These Are the Faces, comes from a song of the same name by Robert Doucette, a DTES community member. Cover art for the record used the following lyrics from the song: "These are the faces / These are what you look upon / We're calling all races / & Together we shall give / So that all of us may live / On & on." This use of the lyric emphasized the CD's function of memorializing musicians from the Downtown Eastside (Nikleva and Peach 2000). 108 education advocate, actor and feisty free spirit, originally from the Netherlands. I recall below how common (and different) memories emerged while musical meanings changed in this larger group.

Fieldnote, May 28,2004 The memorial took place in the Carnegie Community Centre theatre.51 Perhaps seventy people observed a First Nations smudge of the theatre space; family, friends and community members spoke memories of Willie while a machine emitted bubbles from the ceiling; others heaped roses on a table at the front of the room. Gena Thompson was one of the first community members to offer a testimonial, after Willie's family members from Ontario and Nova Scotia. Gena talked about Willie Munro singing Ralph Chaplin's "Solidarity Forever" as an actor in the DTES community play, In the Heart of a City. The song accompanied "Bloody Sunday," an historical scene that recounted labour movement resistance of the 1930s.

In the scene's performance, Willie and three other women brought food to ten men (representing 800), who advocated work and wages at a sit-in at the Carnegie Centre. In G Major, the men sang two verses and the chorus of "Solidarity Forever" in effect to signify political solidarity, but police gassed them and they lay motionless onstage. "What happened next?" a child asks. An activist answers, "Well, the women's emergency committee organized a big protest and sent a delegation to Victoria." At this point, Willie led the women in another verse of "Solidarity Forever," and then the chorus, in D Major.52 The women's singing resurrected the gassed men, who marched and sang with Willie, fists in the power sign. I played on violin an introduction before each group sang.

The DTES community play created common memories and meanings (also diverse ones) among the 500+ people involved in its production. Most people at the memorial had either seen or been part of the show. They likely associated "Solidarity Forever" with the Carnegie sit-in, 1930s labour resistance, left wing politics and Willie's leading role in "Bloody Sunday."

51 One of the services that the Carnegie Community Centre Association provides to the Downtown Eastside is to hold memorial services (for free) for community members who have died. 52 The different key had been chosen by assistant musical director Joelysa Pankanea in a rehearsal due to vocal range problems of the actors, all of whom were amateur singers. While D Major was a practical choice, it did distinguish the pitches of the female chorus and the male chorus. 109

Gena's words stirred still different memories in those who spoke after her, though. The term "solidarity" emerged again and again as speakers listed what Willie stood for: building solidarity in fights against oppression of diverse types, for example against the poor and against women. A First Nations woman who knew Willie ten years ago said that Willie taught her to fight for what you believe in.

Towards the end of the memorial, Gena sang the "women's" verse that Willie had led. I performed the introduction and melody on violin, in D. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, For the union makes us strong.

As we flowed into the chorus, the crowd joined in and rose to its feet in an honouring gesture. Solidarity forever Solidarity forever Solidarity forever For the union makes us strong (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 56) "One more time," Gena called out, and we repeated the chorus, simple harmonies weaving in the air above.

Terry Hunter, director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, announced immediately following the song that In the Heart of a City had been co-produced by Vancouver Moving Theatre with the Carnegie Community Centre. Terry also emphasized that the women serving lunch in "Bloody Sunday" were Ukrainians from Strathcona. Daughters of these women applauded the play's highlighting the roles of Ukrainian women in the 1930s labour movement in Vancouver.

The scene's performance never had announced that the women providing lunch were Ukrainian. The script mentioned "Ukrainian Hall" twice in reference to the women, but these references were cut for the performance. The female actors wore period clothing, but not Ukrainian dress. They did not mimic accents and the production used non-traditional casting. In fact, the performance implied that the actors serving lunch constituted the "women's emergency committee." Terry clarified the scene's ethnic history.

Commonly held meanings of music could circulate at this memorial because they were established through the community play's production and reception. "Bloody 110

Sunday" had recounted 1930s history, had enacted left-wing or "labour" political orientations of the DTES and had involved particular actors, like Willie. Performing

"Solidarity Forever" at Willie's memorial associated the song more strongly with her.

The performance made the song an emblem for Willie. Memorial speeches about Willie's activism, on the other hand, drew attention to Willie as an embodiment of feistiness,

politics and community spiritedness that are valued in the Downtown Eastside. Gena's

story about the song influenced these speeches. In such ways, musical discussion and

performance created new nuances of meaning through musical memory. When

community members reenacted the song performance of Willie in her memory, they also

reinforced the song's role in community politics, community artistic expression and the

neighbourhood itself.

Another common occurrence in the DTES is for musicians to compose songs in

memory of community members who have died. One example is "Three Dragons,"53 by

Carnegie staff member Earle Peach. This is a gentle folk ballad for guitar and voice,

which Earle recorded for These Are the Faces.

53 'Three Dragons" is a type of Chinese cooking wine. "Three Dragons," Earle Peach (Lyrics printed with permission.)

I drifted from my room to escape the walls My tongue was thick, my eyes filled with sand Outside the street was hot, the sun was beating me down As another Wednesday took me by the hand

I went down to Wing's like I do every day To put another breakfast on the tab Over coffee Billy had told me that they found Roy dead In his room with Three Dragons in his hand

Roy always denied that he drank that stuff But one look at his skin and you'd know He looked fifteen years older than his fifty-two years And he always thought he'd be the next to go

He was hard to get along with, but an easy man to love He'd argue over petty things, but when push came to shove He was true

Sometimes he'd show a wisdom that belied his foolish heart His anger and remorse were never very far apart There were many things he seemed to understand But he died with Three Dragons in his hand

Sue phoned to Toronto looking for his wife But the address in his wallet was too old Nor could she find the daughter he left behind in Winnipeg When he came out west where the winters aren't so cold

His false teeth and his glasses ended up in some drawer The hotel cleaned his room for the next guest The city fathers generously donated a grave And seven people carried him to rest

But a hundred people together paid their last respects At the place where he had volunteered for years And as each one told the crowd what Roy had meant to them There wasn't one eye in the room not blinking tears 112

He was just an epileptic drunk with a heart of foolish gold His strength was gone; his hips were bad; he was scared of being old But he was true

And there are many others like him in this town within a town They fly like wounded birds until the struggle brings them down They walk until they can no longer stand And some die with Three Dragons in their hand54

Newly composed songs, which memorialize the dead, also allow those who have died to become a re-experienced part of the present. This is especially the case if songwriters allow the departed to "speak through" the compositions. One feels that one gets to know Roy through the "Three Dragons" lyrics. The act of composing a song about a person who has died may be a still more intense experience of taking that person into oneself. Performances of such songs become enacted memories of the deceased, similar to re-performances of tunes previously sung or played by the departed. Other songs about women missing from the DTES, like "Missing" (words: Susan Musgrave; music: Brad

Prevedoros) and "The Streets Where You Live" (by Wyckham Porteous, Gary Durban and John Ellis), were composed by community outsiders but take significance in the

DTES as narrated memories of community members (see Downie et al. 2002). While memorializing the dead occurs in song expressions of diverse cultural contexts worldwide

(see Halpern 1967, Mazo 1994, Titon 1988, 247), the idea that whole social worlds can be

"remade" through creative acts, including the creation of music narrative, is particularly a feature of contexts of violence, disease epidemics, war or other situations where social

54 See the Carnegie Community Centre Association's CD, These Are the Faces (Nikleva and Peach 2000). 113 fabric decays with unusual rapidity. Music scholarship on the topic mostly has discussed music as a reaction to events of violence or trauma (see e.g., Araujo et al. 2006, Ceribasic

2000, Kimberlin 2000, Pettan 1998), while I have discussed music as a mechanism for coping with human casualties that may result from such events.

Telling Imaginary Life Histories

The intimate relationship between trauma or violence, and the remedial role of narrative became even clearer to me when working with DTES community members who led lives of violent crime, or had to cope with difficult pasts of abuse, profound alienation or forced institutionalization (e.g., jail or residential school). I found particularly striking and painful the multiple instances where individuals fictionalized their life stories. These fictions were ways of projecting imagined experience that was less traumatic than the real, or of describing actual lived experience metaphorically. Other stories manipulated reality for complex psychological reasons involving, for example, to get attention or feel valued.

Some musicians associated with the DTES told me fictional accounts of their life stories, which circulated publicly through their musical lives and performances. The tellers articulated imagined social worlds in which they controlled the memory of actual social relationships that had been painful, obliterated or desired. In these accounts, the 114 creative process of narration became a way to manage memory and assert control over reality.

A gifted Dene singer, drummer and flute player who had a prominent role in music for a 2002 theatre production allegorized the part of his life story featured in the play: supposed experiences of residential school abuse and musical narratives of family.

The production told a true story about five First Nations girls who attended residential school in the 1950s. The Native musician told his residential school "story" in a panel discussion that followed the performance, which was modelled on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and that powerfully promoted personal and societal reconciliation between Natives and non-Natives on residential school abuse issues.

Musical improvisations by the Dene musician and a Jewish performer (playing tambourine, triangle and clave) purportedly modelled Native - non-Native collaboration and exchange. So did the entire cast's rendition of a Coast Salish hand drumming song, the "Women's Warrior Song," at the show's end. The First Nations musician claimed that most songs he sang were Dene, used with permission from his maternal grandmother, while tunes that he played on a Mohawk flute (commercially manufactured for tourists) were peyote songs from the Native American Church. Cast and crew did not learn until

2006, when the musician died tragically and prematurely, that in fact he was adopted, and did not know his birth mother or birth grandmother, so the songs could not have come from her. He told cast members and audiences about the struggles his alleged birth mother had in court proceedings, which concerned her children's treatment in residential 115 school. He claimed that his blood sister had "broken down" in court. Surrounding the man's death, cast and crew met and talked with the man's adoptive family. In truth, his sister was struggling with AIDS. His stories of family and song were desires. His residential school tale allegorized a sense of profound alienation, anger and hurt

(Interview 6).

A non-Native guitarist and songwriter that I worked with at Vancouver Native

Health's Positive Outlook, "Ed Baxter" (pseud.), imagined a self-congratulatory and colourful musical history for himself. Music therapist Jeff Smith had charged me with soliciting such histories from his clients to publish in liner notes for The Circle of Song

CD. I interviewed six musicians, including Ed, who gave the following biography:

My father. My father, yeah. He was a sensational player. I don't know how many instruments he played. He played accordion, piano, guitar, the bagpipes, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, anything that would make music he played. And we all were stuck and hated it because we all knew ... I was the oldest boy in the family and I had five older sisters and one twin sister. I am a twin and I am a Gemini. It's sort of mixes in with all the other confusion. Dual personality, whatever. And so we all had to start on the accordion. And it was embarrassing when I was practicing the accordion in the music room downstairs because he had all of his instruments down there. And he built a music room downstairs, soundproofed it and everything. And he wrote some songs that made it fairly big: "Red Sails in the Sunset." He was using a cinema, uh, he was using the name Jean Lockhart. . . . "Red sails in the sunset / All day I've been blue / Carry my baby / It's carrying me to you /1 woke up at the dawning." [Ed starts to sing.] Yeah, you know. And that's basically what I write, ballads, too sort of because every song I write, it fits my personality or fits my tone of voice. I believe that's why, like I don't try and go up to "waaaa," up to hit a higher note or a low note. I just sing fairly monotone all the way through it and ah, but I tried to present in a way . . . The presentation is . . . another 50% of what makes the bite on it, is the way I present the song.... 116

I started my own blues band and too many people wanted to do too many different things, you know. Like, I was trying to do, like, um, straight blues like Mike Butterfield [Mike Bloomfield?], Paul Bloomfield [Paul Butterfield?], you know, down south blues, and ah, I didn't understand it and when bands like [the] Marshall Tucker [Band] came out, it was trying to do a copy of the southern style. And I think I turned out fairly successful. Now, we were backup at that time to The Collectors, who turned into Chilliwack. And we were also the opening band for Chilliwack for about 9 months. (Interview 7)

Some fictional elements of the musical biography distorted popular music trivia.

"Red Sails in the Sunset," of course, was made famous by Bing Crosby and the Beatles, and was written by Jimmy Kennedy. The Marshall Tucker Band did not copy blues of the southern United States, but introduced "Chicago style" blues to mainstream White audiences.

The fictionalization might be understood as an expression of desire or suppression of pain. Did Ed actually live with his father as a child? Elsewhere in the interview, Ed's father took diverse roles, in one instance, leaving for Vietnam during Ed's childhood; in another, rarely returning from the Distant Early Warning line in the Arctic. Were elements of Ed's musical story tales of disappointed dreams? Ed claimed on the one hand to have served twenty-two years in prison, and on the other, to be a well-known weight lifter, yet to have toured extensively with a blues band in

Montreal, New York, Charlotte, Carolina. I played in Miami. I played in Phoenix, Arizona. I played in Tijuana, Mexico City. I played in Galviston, Texas. I played in Houston, Texas. I played in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon and Seattle and many small towns in between. (Interview 7)

Ed's feeding me any mistruths was a way of playing and controlling me—an authority figure. For the interview, he was confined in an office alone with me. Ed's impetus to 117 control got out of hand, though, when he threatened to kill a Positive Outlook worker who interrupted our session. Subsequently, Ed was barred from the centre (Interview 7).

Addictions, Depression and Music Making

Losing and Gaining Control (sometimes at the same time)

Playing violin today at First United Church was a different experience than it has been in the past. I sort of was on a high because I am in love. A Native man fingered his purse on the table in front of me while I played—his eyes rolling back in his head, also high, also in a transcendent mental reality. My heart is in my throat. (Fieldnote, March 10, 2004)

When I play violin in the DTES, I am constantly reminded of the common human

experience and the diverse permutations of mental transcendence. The marvel of

transcending reality, and the pursuit of happiness or comfort are experiences that most

human beings share. Yet the creation of an alternative mental reality can happen in many

ways: biochemically, via drug or alcohol use, via other lived experience, or via narrative,

which evokes, creates or re-creates experience in various ways. Music making in the

DTES accommodates all of these possibilities, which may happen simultaneously. As

discussed above, when one consciously decides to achieve a new mental space, this can

be one way to take control of one's life. I turn now to examples of popular music making

in intercultural DTES contexts, where musical sound interpellates patterns of depression,

and shapes realities that have been altered through drugs and alcohol. Specifically, I 118 discuss instances where music mingles with or replaces substance misuse. Later, I will discuss some music programs that actively discourage drugs and alcohol by stimulating connections to culture and community, especially at organizations for First Nations like

Positive Outlook and Aboriginal Front Door.

The confluence of drug use and musical experience is a particularly confused nexus of self-management, loss of control, physiological change and acts of agency. Not infrequently at least one onlooker or participant in a popular music jam is under the influence of drugs or alcohol. In some cases, it took me months to realize that some well- functioning "users" are almost constantly high. It surprised me when a community facilitator of the Carnegie Song Circle dropped syringe packaging onto a cafeteria tray when we ate lunch together. As one gets familiar with the drug subculture, one starts to notice the sweating that precedes an individual's quick exit for a heroin fix and learns not to be alarmed when a lover drains a needle into his or her partner's jugular vein, several feet from the outdoor entrance to a music jam. (A humanitarian debate in the DTES asks:

Is this compassion?) One learns that "medicine" is code for "drugs" or "fix," and that individuals who complain about a lack of medicine actually want drugs. More obvious on the street is cocaine psychosis in which people may pick at cracks on the sidewalk.

When I play violin for or with people who are "high," sometimes they appear to take more pleasure or enjoyment than usual from the musical sound. One summer evening, a local songwriter came to the Health Contact Centre jam so high that he let his genitals hang out of his shorts for at least an hour. He strummed his guitar, eyes closed, 119 with a big smile on his face. When people are high in jams, community members generally react with compassion or dignity. No one teased or embarrassed this songwriter, and people tried to ignore his misfortune.

Recent quantitative studies in music psychology report that listening to music, or playing music, can be a way of enhancing a substance misuse experience. Jorg Fachner writes that this has to do with the fact that music and psychoactive drugs (including alcohol) have common forms of emotional processing in the limbic system. Psychoactive drugs alter the brain's evaluation parameters for emotions, which may be activated by sensory data that one perceives through one's limbic system (Fachner 2006, 82-84).

Emotional coping processes engaged in music listening may become more intense (90). A very small number of studies on the affect of specific psychoactive drugs on music listening have begun to show that cannabis changes auditory perception of frequency (93; see e.g., de Souza, Karniol, and Ventura 1974), and musical time-space (Fachner 2006,

94; see Jones and Stone 1970, Mathew et al. 1998, Tart 1971).

Drug and alcohol misuse typically is considered part of a destructive cycle of making oneself feel good, and then losing the biochemical ability to feel good. My data also suggest that musical experience is diverse for people who have addictions issues or actually are high—just as musical experience is diverse in any social group. People who attend music jams may be intoxicated, but their intent may be to develop their musical skill and contribute to the community. One day, I interviewed a local musician of Eastern

European descent, who I will call "Alice." This was one of the few times that I had seen 120 her sober. Alice struggled with cocaine addiction and usually was high in music jams, but

worked hard, nonetheless, to develop her skill and contribute to the ensemble.

This is not to say that her concentration on music making was not affected by drug

use. In Carnegie Choir, Alice and I often sang as a duo, sometimes sharing music, so I

tended to track her aptitude for concentration. It affected how easy or difficult singing

with her was. One day I evaluated, with apprehension, her entrance into a choir rehearsal:

Alice usually doesn't look people in the eyes and skulks, gracefully, into a room. She looked me in the eyes today. She was bending her extremely thin, rain-coated body in strange forty-five-degree contortions, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes talking to me. Her eyes kept moving upwards, as if to some distant realm. "Bad hair day," she whispered, keeping her crocheted black-and-pink hat on, removing her gloves (one of which she eventually could not locate, although it was next to her umbrella in plain view). Alice's eyes were dancing on the filigree on the ceiling. She was gone. (Fieldnote, March 27,2004)

Some DTES residents enter popular music jams or choir rehearsals, and then leave

mentally or physically after they are unable to focus easily on the musical line, or keep

accurate pitch or time. Stewart Wilson, a music therapy client at the Dr. Peter Centre,

says of his experience living on the streets of Vancouver and Montreal, "When you are

out there using, man, your mind's going a million miles an hour and the last thing you're

thinking about is writing a song. You can't even remember the chords, never mind the

melody line" (Interview 8). Psychoactive drug use affects mental performance, and also

concentration, in ways dependant on the specific substance.

Sometimes, people who have used drugs show no visible response to the music or

put themselves in a music context while fending off withdrawal from consciousness or 121

"passing out." In other instances, it may seem as if individuals under the influence derive

pleasure from a musical moment, but it is unclear whether the pleasure is enhanced or

enabled by psychoactive substances, or has anything to do with drugs or alcohol. One

unclear example involved a high man at the Evelyne Sailer music therapy jam, who

turned Stephanie Swenson's synthesizer into a party "toy," while simultaneously taking

musical instruction from Stephanie. The man was shaking, his eyeballs rolled back in his

head, his eyelids fluttered and his reflexes were very slow, so I was a little surprised when

he learned how to play diverse sampled sounds on the synthesizer and pre-programmed

melodies in order to be comedic. He commanded the attention of the room, improvising

mime to the various sounds and dancing to the melodies. The man was very thin, had no

teeth and looked extremely ill in addition to suffering from addiction. In that moment, he

seemed to defy sickness or death in a way that was hilarious for the group, but evidently

fun for him. I felt at the time that this was a small triumph of the human spirit, even

though its event had complex contributing factors. Our "comedian" took control of the

musical moment through physical movements at the same time that he was losing control

of his body.

There also is the possibility that playing music will be used as a substitute for

misusing drugs or alcohol, or using in large quantity. Elizabeth frequently tells people

that music is her "drug of choice." Alice says the same thing, even though she is high at

most music jams. Stewart Wilson told me about how a focus on drugs in his life was

replaced by a focus on teaching himself music theory, producing music in his home 122 studio, and learning guitar technique and "mainstream" songwriting from therapist Jeffrey

Hatcher. Stewart:

Before I got here [to the Dr. Peter Centre] I had a serious life of drug addiction and crime, and I was lost. I didn't have anything or know anything. I always wanted to be able to make melody lines, like, do what they were supposed to do, like make them talk; make a guitar talk. I had always wanted to be able to do that and finally when I got here somebody was there to teach me. And I never looked back, you know. My life has been music, music, music now. It has totally helped me to stay clean today. My focus is no longer on the bad habits. It's all good habits. And that is because of music. (Interview 8)

The possibility that music making can replace drug use is supported by studies

that show that hearing music can generate chemicals in the human brain that resemble

compounds in certain psychoactive drugs. In this way, music listening could compensate

for a biological inadequacy that drives addiction. Norris (2000) found that the brains of

people with substance abuse problems have difficulty producing naturally slow alpha and

theta brain waves, possibility due to genetics. Slow alpha and theta brain waves help the

brain to produce enodogenous opiates, endorphins and dopamine, which give people a

sense of happiness and well-being. Using drugs or alcohol generates such slow brain

waves, as can music listening and participating (Crowe 2004, 326-327). Music listening,

at least, also can stimulate endorphins (Prince 1982; Scarantino 1987).

One could debate further the complex relationship between pleasure, addiction

and substance misuse as it relates to controlling one's body and life reality. For

pragmatist arts facilitators like Ken Tabata, though, the pleasure of music making or

listening is undeniably positive because it literally saves lives in the Downtown Eastside. 123

Any pleasure that may be evoked by music, Tabata argues, goes some way to preventing suicide. Importantly, musical pleasure reconnects people with their emotions and their sense of self. Judith Herman notes that multiple psychological traumas of multiple types of marginalization or oppression can result in a subject feeling that she is "changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all" (Hatcher 2004, 14;

Herman 1992, 86). Ken Tabata:

If you are really playing music, if you are really in the zone and everything is connecting, it is nice, it's therapeutic. I think that's the importance of [music in the DTES]. If somebody comes in [to the Carnegie] and plays and feels good, right, just even if they're making tons of mistakes and whatever, they're just, it just feels so good to play for half an hour or an hour. And they go out and they are feeling good, rather than, if not, they would be feeling just shitty shitty shitty shitty. It just raises the level of how people feel. There's some hope. It's not all negative and despair. You might not kill yourself.

And that's real, that's just not saying that. I think there are people that go in there and they're just at that level where they just might kill themselves, right. If it wasn't for the music program, I think a lot more people would have.

Yeah. That's no joke. It's that real. And even people that don't go every week, but just some people come in off the street, right? And they go, "Can I just play? Can I just play?" And I go, "Yeah, yeah. Why don't you play guitar on this set here?" And they just play and they, and then it's like, "Oh, man." They might be in a bad situation right now, but you can just see where they had been at one point, right. In such a better situation or you can just see how connecting with their soul makes them feel like a whole human being again rather than all just chopped up or something. It makes a big difference. It makes a big difference. (Interview 9)

Ken Tabata's description of the importance of mental and emotional transformations through music making in Vancouver's inner city leaves open the possibility that musical emotion can have a biochemical component, a spiritual component or can be evoked through avenues of musical experience that I have not 124

explored yet. DTES musician and composer May Kossoff55 says: "I try to write [and play

locally] music that I feel also gives people some comforting—the music itself as opposed

to just the lyrics. [I] try to either awaken people spiritually or just to make them, their

spirit feel good, their sense of being . . (Interview 10). As James Lull writes, musical

communication that can elicit listener response that is diversely and synchronously

"physical (singing along, tapping, clapping, dancing, sexual arousal, and so on);

emotional ("feeling" the music, reminiscing, romanticizing, achieving a spiritual "high,"

and the like); and cognitive (processing information, learning, stimulating thought,

contributing to memory, framing perceptions, and so forth)" (Lull 1987, 141 ).56 The

pleasure and release provided by music has allowed popular music jams to become a life

focus for some Downtown Eastside residents. Ken Tabata jokingly mentions what he

calls "jam junkies," people who attend various popular music jams in the DTES for

therapeutic reasons. Knowledge that music can make one feel good, potentially in diverse

ways, seems to influence participation in multiple jams or indeed, at any jam at all.

55 This is a stage name. 56 Musical communication also involves diverse types of media, consumption, subcultural signification and learned information (Lull 1987, 143). Music may be used in diverse ways that involve aesthetic properties and technical attributes (Lull 1987, 147-148) as well as personal and social applications. 125

Healing from Substance Misuse through pan-Indigenous Traditional Music

While the above practices, meanings and repertoires characterize some music making at DTES organizations, First Nations traditional and popular music, practiced at some of the same agencies, link into pan-First Nations music trends throughout Canada and elsewhere. In Canada since at least the 1970s, pan-Aboriginal traditional music and culture purposefully have been used to activate individual change in Aboriginals who are engaged in criminal lifestyles, are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or are healing from other abuse issues. Culture driven change is a trend to which individuals respond particularly strongly (it works). It is articulated over and over in Native Canadian communities, popular songs, news stories, books, films and government policies. Individuals use the practice in unique ways, and Aboriginal communities encourage and engage it as part of cultural revivalist and Native pride movements. In Vancouver's DTES, the approach is used at First Nations music events including hand drumming at the Positive Outlook branch of the Vancouver Native Health Society, powwow drumming at Aboriginal Front

Door and Native community gatherings featuring diverse traditional musics at the

Carnegie Community Centre and occasionally, the First United Church.57 In this way, an

57 The approach also has been assimilated into theatre productions that centre on the Downtown Eastside and involve Aboriginal issues. The Firehall Arts Centre has hosted some such productions like Marie Clements' Unnatural and Accidental Women in 2000 and Rare Earth Arias in 2002. At the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre, Injun'Nuity Theatre Company produced other plays like Eastside (2003) and The Lost One (2003). 126

associational network of pan-First Nations music can touch the lives of Indigenous people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

With permission, I will share healing stories of three First Nations individuals

affiliated with DTES organizations: Brenda Wells, Francis McAllister and Fred John.

Brenda is a Cree from the Canadian province of Alberta who was a music therapy client

and hand drumming leader at Positive Outlook. Francis McAllister, also an Alberta Cree,

participated in music therapy at Positive Outlook. Fred John is a T'lt'q'et or Lillooet

(British Columbia Interior Salish) elder who has taught powwow drumming at Aboriginal

Front Door.

While the healing I will describe involves First Nations individuals attempting to

control destructive lifestyle patterns, the individual change itself may move through two

additional fields of sociocultural tension:

1) a tension between cultural practices of the community or communities affiliated

with pan-Indigenous music, dance, ceremony and other cultural practices, on the

one hand and on the other, communities or groups that may orientate around a

drugs or alcohol use, or a criminal lifestyle;

2) a tension between cultural revivalist attitudes of such pan-Indigenous community

or communities versus cross-cultural attitudes implied by histories of cultural

colonialism implemented by Canadian authorities, which include a Native music

and dance ban (through Canada's Indian Act legislation from 1884-1951),

provincial and territorial governments' placement of Indian children from troubled 127 homes in non-Native foster care, with limited credence to Native traditional family values, and other political actions affiliated with cultural assimilation. At the agencies that I discuss and elsewhere in Canada, governments sponsor musical activities when they are part of Aboriginal health programs because Native health is a responsibility of Canada's provincial, territorial and federal governments.

Hand Drumming at Positive Outlook: Brenda's Story

Brenda is stick thin, blind, with worn distinguished features and earrings that dangle, jeans, track marks on her arms. She is banging loudly on a hand drum, sitting on a faux leather sofa in the music room at Positive Outlook—a large apple green and sorbet yellow-walled room that usually smells like wieners and beans from the centre's free food canteen. Brenda loudly asks for drummers and continues banging on the drum. It's an impetuous signal with no particular rhythm. Francis McAllister, several other Aboriginals, myself and the centre's non-Native music therapist, Jeff Smith, gather around Brenda. She leads us in the "Women's Warrior Song," which is of Samahquam (or Mount Currie) Coast Salish origin, and a "Sunrise Song, " whose melodic pattern ascends, descends, ascends. Jeff asks for the "Rainbow Bridges Song, " associated with the Navajo myth; a non-Native friend that sweats with my cousin joins to sing a "Grandmother Song" used in Vancouver sweat lodges adapted from Plains traditions; a woman visiting from New Zealand contributes a Maori song, with which women traditionally conveyed blessing on people entering a ceremonial house. Like all of the songs above, this Maori song is embraced in an instance of the semi-public, open Indigenous cultural practice of hand drumming in urban British Columbia. Pan-Indigenous music in the Downtown Eastside engages Indigenous song genres and individuals from diverse Aboriginal groups that have increasingly flowed to Canadian cities since the 1960s. Another Native woman, an AIDS patient at Positive Outlook like Brenda, picks up a frame drum that belongs to the centre, and starts to drum and sing. Her voice is really scratchy, soft and shaky. Brenda sits quietly, closely and lovingly with her. 128

Brenda was employed by Positive Outlook to host hand drumming in 2005. A

2004 policy change instigated by Jeff Smith, and at the Canadian federal department agency Health Canada allowed Health Canada grant money to be used to hire clients.

Health Canada provides the core funding for Positive Outlook branch of the Vancouver

Native Health Society; Brenda was hired. Employment gave Brenda respite from hustling for drug money and from a street life that she said she no longer wanted to live.

Employment also gave Brenda the time to focus on what she called a personal "healing journey" of cultural connection that she began twenty years ago. By healing, Brenda meant psychological, emotional and spiritual restitution, and especially addictions treatment.

Brenda started learning about her traditional culture in jail in the 1980s. She received her First Nations name, Little Eagle Drummer, at the Ferndale Institution in

Mission, B.C. in 1995. The Ferndale Institution is a minimum security prison that is operated by the Correctional Service of Canada, a Canadian federal government agency.

Brenda learned hand drumming in jail, and in Aboriginal operated contexts, for example, a protest against gendered violence in the Downtown Eastside called the Women's

Memorial March, and a B.C. Indian Traditional Parenting Skills Program, which is sponsored primarily by Canadian federal and provincial governments, and which facilitates singing, drum making, regalia making and sweat lodge ceremonies. Brenda told me that her involvement in traditional drumming and culture coincided with some major changes in the way that she had lived her life since she was thirteen. Brenda became more 129 intensely involved in First Nations traditional culture when she gave birth to her son, thirteen years ago. She said,

I was in and around [non-Native] foster homes around my home town for quite some time when I was growing up. And when I was about thirteen, I guess, I was taken back to my parents and I left home when I was thirteen. And I am forty-two. I've been on my own ever since. I mean, I didn't feel safe at home, but I felt safe on the streets and that's where I stayed, was on the streets, right. I've been off the streets now for ... You see, my [youngest] son is thirteen. About thirteen years, I've been off the street. Since my son had been bom [when I also started traditional drumming more often], I straightened out quite a bit. I don't know how much, but quite a bit, I have. I don't get in trouble. I don't do a lot of the lifestyle that I used to do before, like sell drugs and sell guns and all that other stuff. I don't do that anymore. I used to prostitute for a long time on the streets, over twenty years of my life. I don't do that anymore either. (Interview 11)

Brenda had very little involvement in her Native Cree culture while in non-Native foster homes. In Canada, child welfare is administered by provincial governments in cooperation with federal governments, and sometimes in partnership with private children's aid societies.

Brenda's move from an experience of cultural disassociation to becoming a hand drummer went hand-in-hand with an intensifying involvement in Aboriginal and non-

Native community. The latter process has a causal relationship to the former, which one often sees in this type of musical reconnecting in Native Canadian contexts, but also in arts and humanities education of Northern American urban poor more generally.

Eventually, Brenda became a motivational speaker at conferences across Canada for

Aboriginals facing addictions, poverty issues or HIV/AIDS. 130

For Brenda, enhancing personal functionality and contributions through hand drumming was not a conventional, Western medical process, although it happened through a music therapy program. It was not inseparable from an Aboriginal healing ritual

(like the sweat lodge or yupiwi), although Brenda had attended sweats. Brenda's

"healing" was a process of investing herself in Aboriginal cultural constructs that provided her with an alternate framework for living and being. Brenda equated "healing" with "Native drumming"; making life changes, with reclaiming Native traditions that were not taught to her as a child. When I asked Brenda whether there was a difference between connecting to Aboriginal traditional culture and connecting to the "culture" or social configurations of the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, she responded:

Yeah. Yes! Yeah, there is a huge difference! The difference is that, well, connecting with my culture in the Downtown Eastside. Well, the Downtown Eastside, the only culture that is down here is rock and crack cocaine. That's the culture. Everybody is so connected to it. (Interview 11)

The process of self-reflection that Brenda described involved the evaluation of her experience within a new cultural framework and planning to make the appropriate changes to adapt to that framework.

Francis' Story

As with Brenda, Francis' decision to undertake a healing journey by using traditional cultural activities at Positive Outlook was a decision to continue a cultural 131 process that had benefited him in the past. It also was in jail that Francis became intensely involved in First Nations traditional culture, but also where he learned to play guitar.

Francis lived "in penitentiaries mostly" starting at age seventeen before coming to the

Downtown Eastside. As a child, Francis was juggled between fifteen foster homes in

Alberta that again, were administered by that province. Francis contrasted his childhood experiences singing in non-Native Christian contexts with other musical experience in a medium security prison run by the Correctional Service of Canada. Then he explained:

The first time I ever heard the drum was in a penitentiary, a Native drum. In Drumheller [Institution], I was twenty years old. That was the first time I ever smelled sweetgrass or anything, you know. The first time I ever heard people speak in Cree, which is what I am, was in the penitentiary. So that gives an idea of where I'm coming from. I was left to my own devices, basically. I've been on my own since I was three years old. I'm thirty-seven years old now and I am still searching for who I am, you know, for my roots. (Interview 2)

Francis added that that hand drumming at Positive Outlook gave him opportunity to

"come to grips with [and] let go" of painful experiences that he felt triggered his problems with drug and alcohol addiction. For Francis, embracing a First Nations cultural system (outside of a "culture" of substance misuse) was the only way that he felt that he could fight addiction. He told me about the first time he committed to a First Nations ontology:

I was involved in Drumheller [penitentiary] with the Native Brotherhood [an Aboriginal volunteer service organization],5 but in Grande Cache [prison], I remember getting involved. And I remember different things happening during our ceremonies where I really started, you know, I knew who I was. I was a

58 Branches of the Native Brotherhood exist across Canada, but may have different focuses of service. The Drumheller Native Brotherhood for First Nations and Metis aims to promote the "betterment" of Aboriginal inmates. 132

Native and this was the way, this was our only, this was my way. But yet, that was over ten years ago, and here I am, still fighting addiction and fighting myself, basically.

In the Grande Cache provincial prison, Francis wrote a popular song titled

"Creator," which represents how his life priorities changed to the "way" evoked above.

While "Creator" was not a powwow or hand drumming song, it incorporated powwow

type vocables. In 2005, Francis sang the song for The Circle of Song CD that featured

compositions by clients of Positive Outlook and the Dr. Peter Centre. Francis previously

recorded a longer version of "Creator" with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Verse one of the 2005 "Creator" track states Francis' intent to find "a better way

to go," while the chorus and verse two explain that this "way" is the Creator's "path":

There's a fire burning down, deep in my soul I'm just a child in Daly Grove Thirty-seven years now, nothing to show Oh, there's got to be a better way to go Sick and I'm tired of looking out at your world From inside of these prison walls

CHORUS I know in my heart and my spirit are true Follow your path, straight and true I can be a warrior in your band Spreading your love, lending a helping hand Across your land, to any man

Spent too much time in my short life Puttin' my troubles on my brothers, mothers and others It's time I started looking in the mirror There's only myself, can't blame no others here Please show me the way, show me your path I've been long gone, but I want to come back... (The Circle of Song 2005) 133

Both the chorus and second verse hint at a process of self-reflection that following the Creator's "path" mobilized for Francis. Francis talked to me about the unusual self- confidence that he felt when he put his "heart," "spirit" and past experience in dialogue with the pan-First Nations spirituality with which he first identified in ceremonies at

Grande Cache prison. He noticed this courage in small ways. For example, he was able to

"put himself out in front of people" to perform guitar, which earlier he did not feel he could. "I feel better about myself," Francis said,

That's a hard thing to explain. Today I know that the Creator is with me. I know that he has been watching and guiding my path and he is the reason that I am still here because I have been through a lot of things that, you know. I shouldn't really be here. ... I believe that there is a reason that I'm here and hopefully, singing is one of them. And I think that if you just try to be kind and spread love and be a good man, that is a good thing. And I have always, despite what I've done in the past, I've always been a good person. Today, I am being that person. I am not afraid to be that person. In the past, it was put in the back type of thing. (Interview 2)

On the 2005 "Creator" track, Francis' First Nations life direction was represented with vocables that followed the second iteration of the chorus:

"Way hey hey hey, hey hey hey Hey hey hey hey, hey hey hey"

Francis repeated these syllables in a rough, rock timbre over two complete cycles of harmonic material from the chorus. Metis popular musician Sandy Scofield volunteered a

"powwow style" overdub of the syllables, which have been used in other Native Canadian 134 popular songs about addictions.59 These were musical choices that indexed "Nativeness" through iconic syllables. I mean "iconic" in the Peircean sense, where the icon presents limited information that may be read as being representative of a larger trend or pattern.

In "Creator," the vocables could be read as being iconic of Aboriginal singing because innumerable Aboriginal songs in North America feature vocables. Francis particularized the iconic content somewhat by inserting, between the vocables, two lines of English lyrics during the final repetition of the chorus harmonies:

"You're a calm, loving Creator Yes, I'm coming home to you"

This was a First Nations spiritual path.

Both Francis and Brenda's stories were marked with contradictions. While Francis enjoyed a First Nations spiritual path and new confidence, he continued to struggle with addictions. This struggle took particular poignancy in early 2005, when I visited most intensely with him. He told me,

It is something that I know I have to get on top of here soon because I'm tempting fate. If it continues much longer, who knows. So I have to get real, basically, get on with life, basically. (Interview 2)

In January 2005, Francis was in "rehab," but he left early and did not get his

February rent back. By late February, he had lived at two different shelters and had spent several cold nights on the street. He had an addictions relapse and was suffering from lung disease. Francis died on the streets of Vancouver in December 2005. He had felt

59 One example is Bufify Sainte Marie's "Starwalker," which is a 1976 tribute to the role of traditional Aboriginal culture in healing from addictions (Sainte Marie 1976). 135 passionately about being involved in traditional Aboriginal and popular music making because he understood cultural involvement as a route to improved health. Similarly,

Brenda remained invested and involved in drug culture, and continued to struggle with addictions. However, she claimed that as she became more involved in musical and civic community, her drug use declined from an over 300-Canadian-dollar habit per day.

Brenda and Francis might be dismissed as dysfunctional save the many, many parallel stories of personal struggle between drug (community or culture) involvement and pan-First Nations musical "healing" that recur in Native Canadian communities, and comprise narrative themes in Canadian Native contemporary theatre, dance and popular song. As well, there are stories of successful recovery from lives of addiction in

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Natives who I have met at sweat lodges, other ceremonials and culture oriented healing groups in Vancouver may have a history in the inner city, but have integrated successfully into the Aboriginal community, and use culture and music as ways to maintain a healthy life direction. A more productive response to the contradictions may be to ask whether learning traditional music expressions in contexts funded by Canadian governments by virtue of legislation that has complex colonial histories, or in prison or urban poverty contexts that support different, difficult relationships of social power, control and hierarchy, problematizes the creation of meaningful connections to pan-Indigenous expressions and community. Why is

Aboriginal traditional music unevenly effective as a "healing agent"? Although much further research is needed, the answer may lie in the fact that healing is attempted through 136

(post)colonial relationships that some First Nations perceive as traumatic. As Carol

Wiedemann said, difficult entanglements of well-being with Native tradition also can hinder "healing" through Aboriginal music traditions. This point began to seem important to me when I shared the above stories with First Nations musicians who were at Canada's

Aboriginal Music Lab in 2007. The lab is a week-long workshop that prepares Aboriginal

Canadian musicians to produce and perform popular music for international markets and audiences. My sharing precipitated a "healing circle" in which the musicians offered an outpouring of their memories and experiences of how individuals' connections to

Aboriginal tradition had been severed through traumatic relationships, for example, rape and other forms of abuse. The musicians described instances where people's senses of self were so shattered that they could neither connect to culture nor express themselves through music or dance any more. The question of which painful encounters stopped an ability to connect seemed more important to the musicians than the argument that painful interactions hindered a reconnection to First Nations musical traditions.

Powwow Drumming at Aboriginal Front Door: Fred's Story

I enter the plainly decorated, cement storefront. Fred John warmly asks me to "sign in, " that is, to write my name, address and phone number in a table that allows him to track the number of powwow drumming participants for renewal of the federal and provincial government funding that runs Aboriginal Front Door. Fred hands me and several Native women and men drum sticks. A tall, slump- shouldered man introduces himself as Kenny—Cree, English, Irish and Scottish, "Take your pick," he says, but is slightly drunk and knows not to violate powwow 137

drum protocol by sitting at the drum, which has been built and gifted by Native prisoners at a local penitentiary. Fred asks us to sing song after song for Kenny. Repertoire includes a Crow Hop, a Northwest Coast paddle song with characteristic irregular drumbeats, and a hunting song in which a steady drumbeat signals a hunter and a tremolo, a deer. The first beat changes speed as the hunter chases the deer. I am a novice singer, and my timbre comes out nasal, which is met by gentle chiding that I sound like a powwow singer from the Dakotas in the United States or from southwestern Ontario in eastern Canada. I should evoke the chest voice customary for Northwest Coast songs, while using vocal distortion as a type of timbral embellishment and improvisation.

T'lt'q'et elder Fred John, the powwow teacher at Aboriginal Front Door,

"doctors" individuals by singing powwow songs that resonate with their tribal backgrounds. He says, at Aboriginal Front Door,

[w]e try to do songs from all directions. What we don't do is say that "this is your song," you know, "this is my song," "that is your song." We put that [i.e., intellectual property issues] aside, but we will say, "I will give you . . . I've got this song in my dream and this song is for my child that went to the hospital, or something like that, or is in need of help. But I want you to go ahead and use this song." But whatever song we're using will benefit where the song came from. (Interview 12)

Fred John explained that Northwest Coast First Nations may find individual meaning and identification in regional aspects of powwow songs. While songs of the

"powwow trail" form the bulk of the powwow repertoire on the Northwest Coast, such music also incorporates Northwest Coast First Nations drum protocols, songs, vocal ranges and timbres, melodic structures, vocables and drum rhythms, but also musical influences from other pan-Aboriginal and tribal sources. As a woman, I was welcome at the powwow drum at Aboriginal Front Door. Women playing the powwow drum is 138 controversial among other First Nations in other places, and in some intertribal contexts in British Columbia, but reflects Pacific Northwest Coast gender roles for non-ceremonial singing. As Tara Browner observes, much scholarship on powwows has "posited a loss of individual tribal identity in favor of a kind of culturally homogenized 'super-Indian'," yet

"all pow-wows have a larger, underlying tribal or regional framework, and by either

merging with or deviating from it participants reinforce personal tribal affiliations"

(Browner 2002, 4). Fred John suggested that personal tribal affiliations were manipulated

or accented in his healing application of the Northwest Coast powwow style.

Fred John believes that the significance of local musical elements to Northwest

Coast First Nations hinges in part on processes of cultural memory and cultural

identification. Musical elements from the Northwest Coast, or from other Aboriginal

contexts for that matter, incorporate sonic identity markers that may remind individuals of

their cultural heritage, and enable them to revive their "spirit of identity." Fred John sees

a relationship between such identity revival, and Canadian government policies and laws

that fostered cultural assimilation, and suppressed Native music and dance expressions:

So the songs also represent, maybe . . . Now, each nation throughout North America, they recognize a song that maybe happened when they're a baby or when they were little. It revives that spirit again. It brings it back. So any song they hear will automatically trigger that memory and say, "Oh, I like that sound. Where's that drum coming from? Where's that drum coming from?" They'll go. They'll look for that sound. And it makes them feel good. They'll feel like it's bringing them back to the purification time when they were little or when they've been raised before the hardship started. And they understand the condition that their parents were in, grandparents maybe did those kinds of ceremonies or they had big gatherings and always included the songs of their area. So what I was teaching down there [in the Downtown Eastside] was for them to, the ones who 139

came in really and [were] interested in singing and learning, and then would be to revive their spirit of identity, it makes them feel good and they enjoy and lifts a lot of hard things that was bothering them [when] they are that weak, that made them feel really bad. But after that, singing and hearing the songs, it lifts that. . . . And the people that come here, some of them went home and did singing with their family, you know, where they come from, and before too long their grandmother and their mother [were] singing. They were singing their songs they haven't sang I guess because that is because they weren't allowed to sing [due to laws and government policies of cultural assimilation]. They were not allowed to use any of their songs or ceremonies. And it was given back to them to go ahead. It wouldn't disturb them anymore if they went ahead and did, but they still, it was too far forgotten that a lot of them would not go there anymore. (Interview 12)

Fred John, Brenda Wells and Francis McAllister's stories of "healing" attested to how traditional pan-Indigenous hand drumming and powwow drumming could be a possible means of controlling addictions problems that, for example, decreased the amount of drugs used or released painful memories that triggered substance misuse. In the

Downtown Eastside, instances where I experienced music as an agent of such life change occurred through an associational network of pan-Indigenous hand drumming and powwow drumming that incorporates sounds, songs and protocols of diverse Indigenous groups, which meet in the urban setting. The Indigenous associational network, part of a

North American and intercontinental phenomenon, looped into the music network of the

Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. This sometimes allowed Aboriginals like Francis and Brenda to connect meaningfully to a pan-Indigenous cultural system instead of a

(sub)culture of substance misuse in the DTES.

Fred John, Brenda Wells and Francis McAllister's stories interpreted the points of tension involving community orientation (around drugs versus pan-Indigenous cultural 140 expressions) and cultural attitudes (of cultural colonialism versus revival) as journeyed points during a revival of Native cultural life ways, in individuals or groups. Such revival involved taking control of and changing the cultural destructiveness of cultural assimilationist policies through musical activity, and according to narratives in Canadian

First Nations communities and artistic expressions, seems to correlate positively with addictions recovery. When I have attended sweat lodge ceremonies on the Tsawwassen reserve near Vancouver and when I learned powwow drumming at East Vancouver's

Hey-way'noqu' Healing Circle for Addictions Society, I met many First Nations people who had recovered or were recovering from addictions. The stories of such survivors and the importance of musical expressions in their lives deserve much more documentation.

In the Downtown Eastside, "healing" cultural revival was signaled in different musical expressions of pan-First Nations powwow drumming, as Francis and Fred explained, although I questioned whether the tensions have some role in the uneven success of controlling addictions through pan-Indigenous music.

Conclusion

What are the musical factors that enable and diminish individual control in situations of loss that affect Downtown Eastside community members? The above chapter offered a broad array of musical incidents and moments that demonstrate the (reclaiming of the control of one's self and one's reality, including emotional and psychological 141 perceptions, through musical expression, including narratives about music. The documentation of seemingly disparate genres and types of musical encounter reveals that they share a larger social network or cultural context. The individual types and situations of musical encounter can be understood to constitute nodes or "knots" in a larger associational network of music. The goal of my ethnography has been to map social, cultural and musical relationships among diverse sorts of musical encounter as an avenue towards understanding the associational network of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The first question of the last paragraph signals common musical issues of control that touched music therapy sessions, popular music jams and First Nations traditional drumming that I examined in Chapter 3. Between these distinct types of musical encounter, all of which occurred in music programs run by urban improvement agencies in Vancouver, British Columbia's Downtown Eastside, I found the following social, cultural and musical relationships. As I explained in the section titled "Modifying

Behaviour, Releasing Emotions and Changing Life Directions through Music Therapy," I encountered popular music therapy techniques that modified behaviour of clients with greater frequency in First Nations health agencies as compared to transcultural contexts.

Ethnically "open" community centres more frequently involved community directed uses of popular music. Problematic histories of race resonated in some music making. By contrast, therapists, arts facilitators and community members also used music in ingenious ways to manage experiences and realities of urban poverty and related social issues. Inner city residents, who lived with extreme stress and powerlessness, 142

(re)experienced control through popular music expressions, including music-related histories, repertoires and lyrics, which sometimes enabled psychological effects, physiological experiences and actions of control. In most instances, musical expression became a potent coping mechanism in face of intersecting and debilitating types of social oppression. I documented this phenomenon, in part, in a section titled "Narrating

Repertoire Choices and Musical Life Histories." In other cases, individuals' narratives of music subjugated others. Several practitioners of First Nations traditional music, or popular music that incorporated traditional elements, asserted that (re)connecting with

Aboriginal tradition served "healing" purposes during addictions recovery. I described this through oral histories in the last subsection titled "Healing from Substance Misuse through pan-Indigenous Traditional Music."

Participants in these various music initiatives consciously negotiated the theme of well-being, through a series of control issues, which is significant because the degree of control that a person feels over his or her life experience, compared to others, is an important sociological determinant of health and community well-being. These gestures of healing through social control intriguingly occurred in a community that is a place of social and cultural transition, as described earlier. In the Downtown Eastside, people move, for example, into and out of poverty, in and out of disease or life itself, in and out of violence, in and out of the neighborhood, in and out of substance misuse, in and out of survival sex work or criminal lifestyles, and in and out of meaningful communications that music sometimes helps to facilitate. While some musical actions fixed or stabilized 143 social or cultural transitions that seemed harmful or "unhealthy," other musical moves of control managed or controlled the flow of individuals and groups within the larger associational network of music.

A distinction can and should be drawn between the roles of different types of musical interactions and musical representations in the social structuring and related well- being of communities and societies. In the associational network of music in Vancouver's

Downtown Eastside, some musical repertoires and performances, for example at the

Evelyne Sailer Centre and at Willie Munro's funeral, fixed or stopped "unhealthy"

transitions of individuals out of life and out of the neighbourhood using musical

representations and narratives. Musical "coping" with inner city issues often operated

through the creation of musical representations and narratives. On the other hand, musical

encounters that seemed to shape the direction or nature of social and cultural movement

in and out of the neighbourhood functioned hierarchically as in Behaviour Modification

Music Therapy, or through the (sometimes guided) reception of particular social and

cultural signifiers present in musical expressions, for example, meanings of pan-First

Nations spirituality in powwow drumming and hand drumming.

Acts of control that unfold through narrative, and that help people cope with

change undoubtedly are important to understand since they can be a means of reducing

any discomfort and harm associated with change. Acts of control though, must be

examined critically and carefully because they can create or reiterate social and cultural 144 hierarchies of socioeconomic class, ethnicity, culture, health status or gender, which may make people feel a loss of possibility and power relative to people with greater privilege.

Chapter 4 explores still other musical encounters that created new directions of social movement in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. These encounters, which also had health implications, can be understood as shifting individuals' socioeconomic status, and their social rank, roles or positions within the community. 145

Chapter 4. Socioeconomic Status

Socioeconomic status (or SES) is understood in the social sciences as a concept and measure of up to four types of status experienced by people: status gained from income, occupational status, educational status and status of class background.60 A way to understand social rank, the notion of SES allows contemplation and analysis of people's positions in particular social hierarchies, which can inform individual health in ways that

I described above. Socioeconomic status in particular has strong causal relationships to human health in capitalist societies. Like the experience of lack of control, the human experience of low SES precipitates the release into the body of stress hormones, which are triggered by psychosocial stressors. That said, any type of asymmetrical power relationship that discriminates according to social rank catalyzes a "hard wired" reaction in humans that can have devastating effects on health. Socioeconomic status is not the root of the problem, social rank is (Marmot 2004; Wilkinson 2000).

Many scholarly writings examine the socioeconomic status of the individual in relation to health (e.g., Adler et al. 1994, Kawachi and Kennedy 2002, Marmot 2004).

Socioeconomic status must not only be understood as a statistical measure based on data from large groups, or as a problem of groups, but also as an individual experience of how

60 Quoting from Dutton and Levine (1989, 30), Adler et al. define socioeconomic status as "a composite measure that typically incorporates economic status, measured by income; social status, measured by education; and work status, measured by occupation" (Adler et al. 1994). British definitions also include social class (see Marmot 2004), which I think is important to include here given the context of poverty discussed. 146 others perceive one's rank. Since in capitalist society, one's income, occupation, education and socioeconomic class inform others' perceptions of one's social position, the increase or decrease of one's income, occupational prestige, education or class is generally understood to change one's socioeconomic status.

The relationship between socioeconomic status and human health has specific relevance for situations of economic inequity. As Robert Sapolsky writes,

Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. (Sapolsky 2005,96)61

Recent research demonstrates that the degree to which one feels deprived of status and status indicators, compared to other people, informs the severity of an individual's physiological response to psychological stressors (see e.g., Adler et al. 1994).

61 He continues: Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. (Sapolsky 2005,96) 62 In this way, how one's SES compares to others' affects one's health. Is one's SES better or worse, and in which regards? This explanation, when applied to economic status, has been called the "relative income hypothesis" (Kawachi and Kennedy 2002, 50-54). Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy write: A corollary of the relative income hypothesis is that, if people's health is responsive to their relative position in society, then one would expect to observe differences in well-being within societies comparing individuals with more or less income relative to others (Wilkinson 1997). This is exactly the pattern that has been reported in study after study within different countries (Adler et al. 1994). Even though there is no relationship between aggregate income and life expectancy across industrialized countries, differences have been found in the health status of individuals within societies according to their relative position in the economic hierarchy. (Kawachi and Kennedy 2002, 57) 147

This chapter documents musical efforts that changed individuals' experiences of indicators of socioeconomic status or indeed, their socioeconomic rank. These musical moves shifted income levels, education levels, occupational status and socioeconomic class in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and in understandings of the community. I compare efforts to increase education and income of individuals through musical initiatives at health programs versus programs with urban development and education objectives, which often intertwined. Some theatrical and musical representations shifted a focus on low class and poverty through artistic representations. I frame my discussion with an ethnographic account of a music therapy initiative by Stephanie Swenson at the

Evelyne Sailer Centre. The program offered employment (i.e., status of occupation and income), while providing musical training. At other health-related music programs in the

DTES, I document some participants' attitudes towards increasing their musical capability.

Urban development or education projects exploited what I identify as specific relationships between the performing arts, and the enhancement of artistic skill sets, knowledge, experience and employment. In Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, such initiatives proliferated starting in the late 1990s. They included /V the DTES, Rare Earth

Arias, In the Heart of a City, Through the People's Voice, The Shadows Project, We 're

All in this Together, the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, and classical

Furthermore, poorer health usually seems caused by lower SES although of course chronic illness can compromise employment options (Sapolsky 2005, 94). 148 music education projects by Vancouver Opera and the University of British Columbia, for example. I document methods used in the DTES that increased individuals' education, occupation and income. Some projects, initiated by applied anthropologists and anthropology students, were informed by Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural transmission and Earl Shorris' pedagogy for educating the poor in the United States. A conjoined application of Gramsci and Shorris' ideas led to an evocative hypothesis about the possible influence of musical expressions on the speed of student learning in the humanities. As mentioned earlier, all of the above performances dealt with urban health in some way. Many artistically represented inner city issues of substance misuse and gendered violence, while changing individuals' education, employment and income.

These opportunities became available to diverse ethnocultural groups. I recount some of many empowering success stories as people's capabilities and occupational status as artists improved. Downtown Eastside community members started "new lives" as musicians and actors, benefited financially and socially, and (re)claimed personal strength and pride.

Concurrently, the DTES faced gentrification, which has been understood in the neighbourhood as the displacement of the lower socioeconomic classes by the upper socioeconomic classes. In the Downtown Eastside, distributions of socioeconomic class and understandings of the neighbourhood's social geography began to shift. Some public performances of music and theatre, like the 2003 community play In the Heart of a City, posed and disseminated one new understanding of the Downtown Eastside. Compared to 149 the initial definition of the neighbourhood by the Downtown Eastside Residents

Association, the new definition gave less prominence to poverty and low socioeconomic class. In the Heart of a City aspired to a non-confrontational aesthetic regarding poverty issues, but included people as performers from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds in efforts to build social networks through the changing DTES community membership. The community play also provided DTES community members, especially urban poor who performed the representations, with valuable instruction and education, which Stephanie Swenson nurtured in a health context of music therapy.

Shifting SES through Music Initiatives at Health Programs

Generating Employment (Potential)

In 1995, at the Evelyne Sailer Centre, Stephanie Swenson developed a music therapy strategy that would provide musicians with an employment option. She started a busking program. The busking program shifted the occupation and income status of music therapy participants, who largely were unemployed.63

63 The possibility of improving one's income through musical employment (such as busking) was not pursued independently by these music therapy clients. However, busking was a leisure or employment activity for music therapy clients at the Dr. Peter Centre for people with HIV/AIDS in Vancouver's West End. Many such clients have light or past involvement in the drug culture of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. For the CD project The Circle of Song, I worked with three music clients at the Dr. Peter Centre, none of whom were homeless and all of whom had incomes. Stewart Wilson, a singer-songwriter, used 150

While busking did not become a full-time job for participants, it did make them some money, which could have therapeutic consequence. The health effects of being employed versus being unemployed are well documented. A study of the 1971 British census, for example, demonstrated that people who became unemployed had 20% higher mortality than people who remained employed at the same social class level. This mortality rate is continuing and has been proven in various societal contexts. It does not die down as people die off (Marmot 2004, 136). While it is debatable whether busking could be considered employment for census purposes, there is no doubt that busking would make money for an individual, which would enhance his/her income status and therefore health. Downtown Eastside musicians with whom I have jammed consider busking to be employment of a sort.

Stephanie explained that she took responsibility for securing a busking license.

She would perform on the street with participants (who were largely guitarists), but they took home any money earned. Stephanie Swenson:

busking as a way to encourage his wife "Michelle" (pseud.) to maintain her musical skill. He noticed that Michelle was spending less time playing her guitar and singing: Her music has been on the back burner lately. But this summer, I really kicked her in the butt and we are going to be doing a lot of busking on the street together. I told her, I says, it's no longer a game, I says, it's going to be our job, right? [He laughs.] You know, I don't want you to look at it as entertainment and fun, we are going to do it for a living, right, from now on. To make some extra money. So if we've got that in our head, at least we won't be thinking of it as just a leisure thing, we will be getting our butts out there and thinking, "Well, we are going to make some money today." (Interview 8) Michelle had busked in the past, while she struggled with itinerancy and addictions. She explained with pride how music performance, including busking, had allowed her to survive: "I have been on the road since I was twelve and that is how I survived on the street, playing guitar and singing. And then I played with some bands and I traveled all over California, supporting myself on the road, playing, you know, on the street" (Interview 13). 151

I started a busking program and so, people would come in and we would work on pieces of music together, on a one-to-one basis at the centre, and then we would choose a place to go out and busk at, and there [were] rules around that. The rules around the busking was that the person who was involved had to show up clean and sober, and they got to take the money home with them. (Interview 14)

While the program primarily aimed to give participants a work opportunity, it also encouraged them to make life decisions so that they would be able to reintegrate into the work force. For drug addicts and alcoholics, this meant confronting their addictions and perhaps even working to stop psychoactive substance misuse.

Stephanie had long observed that the act of making music could be therapeutic for people with addictions, and this was evident too in the act of busking. Relief provided by making music gave Stephanie an opening, she said, to form a positive relationship with addicts. Stephanie then worked with these participants to formulate goals of lifestyle change in her capacity as a certified drug and alcohol counselor. While the broader goal of Stephanie's busking program could be understood as behaviour modification, the act of making music and busking together integrated individuals into a social activity that was not entrenched in substance misuse subcultures and activities. Stephanie emphasized how reinvigorating such re-socialization through musical interactions could be:

I do remember working with someone and it did work really well in terms of helping to motivate people in their addictions—they have a before and after. How they were before they were in their addiction and how they are in their addiction, is two different lives. And so, it was a good way to sort of motivate people to re­ engage ... as opposed to being in their addiction. [For example], if you are stuck in a place and someone says, "You are really tired. Let's go up and play beach ball on the beach," that could be really refreshing and re-energize someone. If there's a goal like, "Okay, let's get together and work on these tunes and we'll see where we're at" . . . And so, you can start to build a relationship with someone. [When] 152

the person show[s] up, you start off with a dialogue and a relationship and you build it. You can offer and design goals from there. (Interview 14)

In addition to enhancing income, the busking program nurtured healthy mindsets.

Whether the busking program changed participants' socioeconomic class status

(as different from income and occupational status) is open for interpretation. In Canada, busking may be an activity of professional musicians who have not had corporate success or semi-professionals who are trying to "break in" to the music business. However, busking is associated with joblessness and itinerancy around the world.64 In Canadian cities or incorporated municipalities, buskers usually must be licensed, but money made through busking easily may not be declared as taxable income to the Canada Revenue

Agency. Busking can be a way for students, new immigrants or lower socioeconomic classes to make ends meet "under the table." Whether busking is understood as a way to practice and promote musical talent, a form of begging, a source of untaxed or taxable income, or something else entirely is up to the beholder.

Stephanie Swenson also enhanced participants' education by coaching musicians on songs before busking. This may be understood as part of Stephanie's larger effort at the Evelyne Sailer Centre to provide music instruction.65 The Evelyne Sailer Centre paid

64 For example, Marin Marian-Balasa documents the musical lives of gypsies playing the subways in Romania and France (Marian-Balasa 1999). 65 Stephanie Swenson's educational approach emerged partly from her initial employment in the DTES as a music educator, and partly due to her choices of music therapy methods. Stephanie first worked as a guitar teacher at the Evelyne Sailer Centre and in Oppenheimer Park, in the early 1990s. In 1993, the Evelyne Sailer Centre hired her as a counsellor and music therapist. When Stephanie assumed roles of a health care professional, she continued to offer guitar lessons after music therapy jams at the centre (Interview 14). 153

Stephanie to give free lessons to DTES residents. Into music therapy (also free),66

Stephanie incorporated group music instruction on improvisation, scale practice, guitar chording and fingering, electric guitar or bass operation, and other aspects of musicianship. The Evelyne Sailer Centre's music program was the only music therapy initiative in the Downtown Eastside that offered formal music instruction from 2003-

2005, when I played violin regularly in the neighbourhood.

Stephanie Swenson's busking scheme and music instruction were two music strategies that successfully (if subtly) shifted individuals' SES, and occurred in the context of a health program located in the DTES. Although SES change via music happened rarely at health programs, involved musicians nonetheless perceived a causal relationship between creating music, and enhancing their education levels and occupational status as performers.

66 Music therapy was free of charge for clients at the Evelyne Sailer Centre, Positive Outlook, Sheway and the Residential School Healing Centre. Most other community music making and music classes, for example through Aboriginal Front Door and the Carnegie Community Centre, were free as well. By contrast, some community theatre rehearsals and performances, and arts festival presentations paid community members. In 2006, community members had to pay very modest fees (e.g., $7 per day including lunch) in order to participate in performing arts workshops of the annual Heart of the City Festival (est. 2004). 154

Community Attitudes towards Enhancing Educational and Occupational

Status via Music

Perhaps not surprisingly, participants in the Evelyne Sailer Centre music therapy program most frequently say that they are motivated to participate because they want to improve their musical skill, a factor which informs a musician's educational status. This was Elizabeth and Jean Paul's position, although they used their skill to facilitate personal mental and emotional transformations, and to narrate imagined social worlds, which helped them to cope with issues of poverty. Elizabeth and Jean Paul described their motivation to learn with profound appreciation for Stephanie's modeling of music technique and expression, and for the musical opportunities and inspiration that she provided:

Elizabeth The first day I ever walked into the music group Stephanie [and others] were just playing Cat Stevens' "Wild World," right. And that one part of the song, there is a real cool guitar riff in there that Stephanie does, right? And that hooked me to her the first minute I ever heard that coming from her guitar. I was like, "I've got to get to know this woman. I want to know what makes her tick," right....

Jean Paul If I can see or even hear the way that she's playing, the strumming, the beat, that's how I started to play with the bass.

Klisala Had you ever played music before?

Jean Paul The only musical instrument that I had ever played and I really loved playing then was congas and bongos, the big drums. . . . That's all she had at that time was 155

those two drums. The black one ... and then the two congas and that was it. And then, later on, [the program bought] the bass and an extra guitar. She says, "What do you want to play?" And I says, "I'd like to learn the bass." And then [Elizabeth] said, "I want to learn guitar." So ...

Elizabeth It was this year I picked up the guitar. And we found out that Stephanie was coming back in January. [She had taken a leave due to eyesight problems.] . . . Yeah, the last week of February is when I first actually tried to play a note on the guitar and it was at the end of April when I bought my guitar. . . . But it was that Cat Stevens song Stephanie was playing, "Wild World." I heard her play that and that hooked me to her. I think I'll love that woman forever just because of that. (Interview 3)

More generally, though, enhancing educational status, self-esteem and musical prestige

(occupational status) are the dominant reasons that DTES musicians participate in music making at neighbourhood health programs.

Ed Baxter gave the impression that he played guitar in Positive Outlook contexts because it was a forum for him to work on his musical skills and compositions. He contributed one original song to The Circle of Song CD and agreed to an interview with me for the liner notes and my dissertation because, he said, "I would greatly appreciate any kind of publicity, anywhere I can get my name out" (Interview 7). Ed's reason for participating in Positive Outlook's music therapy and The Circle of Song CD project was supposedly to enhance his musical capability, and to generate publicity and occupational status as part of the fiction he created about his career. Another participant in The Circle of Song project, Dale Dismone, also said that he donated a song in order to enhance his musical prestige. At the Health Contact Centre, Danny and Gordy really wanted to learn 156 and play the violin. For them, too, enhancing musical skill drove their involvement in music making at a DTES health centre.

The urban development programs that I will discuss fed musicians' hunger for musical knowledge and experience, and the related desire among the urban poor for music performance knowledge and occupational status as artists. Development administrators almost invariably discussed musical performance in terms of the "health" of the Downtown Eastside community, and intended to improve the general wellness of individuals through performing arts activities. Understandings of scientific relationships between socioeconomic status and health remained vague among administrators although the science behind the relationships became perhaps more relevant. Compared to the health initiatives, the arts development programs increased socioeconomic status to a much greater extent.

Enhancing Status of Education, Class and Occupation through "Capacity Building"

In the Performing Arts

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many DTES development initiatives, including musical ones, were tied to philosophies, terminologies or funding for "capacity building," or "community capacity development," which is an umbrella term that subsumes capacity building and community development. "Capacity building" or "capacity raising" is a term that came into vogue in the early 1990s in international development agencies, like the 157

World Bank and United Nations Development Program. By the late '90s, the term spread to agencies that stimulated economic, social or institutional development in countries and communities. Canadian federal government departments like Human Resources

Development, and Indian Affairs and Northern Development, used "capacity building" to describe their relationship to the communities with which they worked (Schacter 2000).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, "capacity building" was part of the rhetoric of social and cultural development of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The meaning of "capacity building" for international development agencies such as the United Nations Development Program, for example, involved "the process by which individuals, organizations, institutions and societies develop abilities (individually and collectively) to perform functions, solve problems and set and achieve objectives"

(United Nations Development Program 1997, quoted in Schacter 2000). The term inevitably took on national and local meanings as it spread to national and local social arenas. "Capacity building," in the language of DTES administrators, urban planners, developers, applied academics and arts activists referred to the cultivation of a certain human function, ability to perform or produce, or power to learn or retain knowledge.

I discuss here initiatives that had mandates of capacity building through music and theatre, and musical projects whose initiatives were influenced by "capacity building" performances. Some were large-scale performances that involved instruction over a period of months or years. Arts professionals from outside the DTES core (Main & 158

Hastings) taught tens or hundreds of community members. Other projects were educational programs in the performing arts.

In many cases, administrators and organizers used urban development language like "capacity building" strategically in attempts to attract grants and gain government support. However, as politician, activist and anthropologist Jim Green said, the manner in which "people in the community defined themselves and defined their needs was very different from the way that funders, governments, social workers or ministers [defined the needs]" (Interview 15). Green gave the example of "Ship Shape," a program sponsored by Health Canada that he administered in the late 1980s. The program was designed to raise the health standards of DTES seniors, living in social housing. The seniors, who were largely seamen, marine workers and shipyard workers, identified the following needs: to have a place to buy food staples for reasonable prices, to enjoy street safety, to see the DTES from a boat and to be able to attend performing arts events, particularly opera and other classical music concerts. The seniors' actual needs differed from what

DTES workers or funders, including Green, had thought their needs were. Yet Green designed Ship Shape so that the seniors directed how the program would improve their lives. Green commented that it was his experience with Ship Shape that interested him in how one could use culture to "bring up people's well-being, health and political stability"

(Interview 15).

Initiatives of capacity building through music usually have worked to enhance community members' levels of education, occupation or class. Changing such indices has 159 implications for socioeconomic status. When one gains new skills or capacities, one may have new or different freedom to choose employment, and to work towards promotions or job specializations; to choose further education or job retraining; or to otherwise improve one's position in society. Increased capability and knowledge thus may have consequence for income, socioeconomic status and therefore human well-being. Such increase also may give one the freedom to make decisions that may change one's status in the future.

New intellectual capabilities can allow one to make life decisions based on new perspectives, for example (Marmot 2004).

Directions in Arts Administration in the DTES

Jim Green initiated numerous performing arts projects that built individual capacities in music and the performing arts. It was Green's idea, for example, to hold so- called "Singing Bank" concerts in a bank that he founded in 1996, Four Corners

Community Savings.67 From 1999-2000, four such concerts featured Opera Breve,

Vancouver's micro-opera company directed by Donna Wong-Juliani. The four shows Aft raised awareness about opera, in the DTES.

67 The bank's financial backing came from British Columbia's governing New Democratic Party, but was withdrawn in 2000 when the B.C. Liberals came to power. 68 A fifth concert was planned after Rideau Hall had phoned Jim Green. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband, John Ralston Saul, had heard that opera was bringing a space of musical appreciation and transformation of spirit to one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods. Clarkson and Saul were coming to Vancouver. Could they attend an opera concert in the DTES? 160

Learning about opera allowed people to mentally and emotionally transcend the struggles and hopelessness of poverty, Green suggested. A Canadian Broadcasting

Corporation special televised DTES community members shouting "Opera! Opera!

Opera!" after a "Singing Bank" Opera Breve show. The same special included an interview with two Downtown Eastside residents, Andrew Sharpe and Melissa Eror, in

Andrew's hotel room and home. He had decorated the room like a stage set, in black

floor-length curtains, and fashioned candelabras from pieces of plumbing. Andrew had

been a stage manager in theatre before living in the DTES. He and Melissa were writing

their own opera, Refraction of Light, which adapted the simile of the cave from Plato's

The Republic to the contemporary context of the Downtown Eastside (Interview 15). The

DTES interest in opera was not parodic, but sincere.

In 2000, Jim Green raised funds for a performing arts project under the acronym

D.E.M.O.C.R.A.C.E., Downtown Eastside Moves on Capacity Raising through Arts and

Cultural Experience. D.E.M.O.C.R.A.C.E. was "a pilot project designed to articulate the

possibilities of laying the foundation for a permanent performing arts training facility in

the Downtown Eastside" (Savage God and D.E.M.O.C.R.A.C.E. 2002). Green hired the

theatre company Savage God, directed by John Juliani, former National President of the

Directors Guild of Canada, who was assisted by Donna Wong-Juliani, his wife. The

Julianis collaborated with over sixteen Downtown Eastside community members to

Opera Breve organized a show during Governor General Clarkson's visit. Clarkson ultimately could not attend, however. Saul, as vice-regal consort, attended the show and was impressed enormously by the possibility that he sensed in the musical moment (Interview 16). 161 produce a cabaret, IV the DTES, which was performed throughout 2002. Donna Wong-

Juliani said that the production process drew "on the particular talents of the particular people who were chosen, encouraging them to explore [their talents] deeply with guidance from mentors and then, coming up material, some of it original and some of it not that would seem to fit into the overall theme, which was love, love of the Downtown

Eastside" (Interview 16).

Furthermore, it was Jim Green's idea for Vancouver Opera, Vancouver's largest opera company, to offer opera education events in the Downtown Eastside. Green taught anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where with Michael Ames, he co- directed the UBC Anthropology-Sociology Urban Field School and a course titled

"Imagining Vancouver's Inner City," Anthropology 303A. Green convinced one of his

303 students, Meg Kwasnicki, to start the Carnegie Community Centre Street Band.69

Carnegie music staff member Earle Peach supported the band initiative and directed the ensemble (Interview 17). No stage band performance opportunities existed previously in the Downtown Eastside. The types of capacity building in Jim Green's initiatives ranged from educating DTES residents about opera, to facilitating their transcendence of poverty issues through artistic expression, to building their skills in the performing arts.

As an anthropologist, Jim Green brought a savvy understanding of culture to his politicized arts fundraising and administration. Through "capacity building" or educational performing arts projects, Green hoped to apply Antonio Gramsci's notion of

69 Kwasnicki later did an M.A. in ethnomusicology at York University in Toronto. 162 culture. A Marxist, writing from 1930s Italy, Gramsci viewed the circulation of cultural and artistic expression in society as cyclical: transmitted cultural expression will reinforce, question or otherwise negotiate the "feelings," cosmologies, tastes, ideologies, pleasures, interests, politics and cultural "tones" of lived experience, which a subject (or audience) then will reify, question or otherwise negotiate in real life, and articulate through cultural and artistic expression (Gramsci 2000a, 365). Gramsci was interested primarily in how quiescent, Italian proletariat artistic expression might be stimulated, and then "raised" into the dominant artistic literature (Gramsci 2000a, 364; Gramsci 2000b,

70-71). His interest was part of his larger dream to reconfigure socioeconomic relationships in Italy from being capitalist (also fascist and authoritarian) to being more

Marxist and egalitarian. The culture of a more "egalitarian" society in Italy would imply greater valuing of interests and expressions of the working class, which formed the bulk of the national population.

Similar to Gramsci, Green and arts activists affiliated with him wanted a) to develop the artistic expression of the socio-economically oppressed so that it became a more dominant or frequently voiced expression throughout society; and b) to allow the currently subaltern to speak beyond the subaltern classes, to classes that currently have more power in society. Green's application of the cultural approach advocated by

Gramsci was perhaps less "revolutionary" than Gramsci's recommendations for Italy.

Green primarily aimed to help the very poor to articulate their perspectives and needs through the performing arts. Exposure to musical performance and skill building in 163 artistic disciplines helped to facilitate that. Jim Green arguably increased the educational status of DTES community members through helping to build performance skills.

Green sometimes articulated this process in terms of "capacity building" and community development. He talked to me about how exposure to musical performance might address a question that drove the missions of his various arts projects: "What is happening in the Downtown Eastside to bring up the capacity of the community and individuals within it?" (Interview 15). Jim Green:

There are two or three different ways that we have to look at the definition of arts and culture in what we're doing. One is: What have you got? Right, well, I play guitar, and I sing [Hank Williams'] "Your Cheatin' Heart." Well, great. I'm a country music fanatic, so let's do that. On the other hand, what other influences can we bring in, without trying in any way to say that this is better than the indigenous cultural component. If people haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to certain things, they will never, ever know about it. They will never understand it. So, they have lost the opportunity. So, the idea is: How do you make this exposure so people can have an opportunity? They may say, "I hate opera" or "The ballet really sucks." Right, but they hadn't had an opportunity in any case....

So you can open yourself so you can receive these new things. It is a very difficult and hard thing to do, especially when people have told you all your life that you're dumb, that this art form is not for you, that it belongs to an elite group of people and even if you were exposed to it, you would think it was silly or you wouldn't understand it or you would be embarrassed around it. It would be frightening. You would make a fool of yourself because basically, you're an idiot. That is the message in different coded forms that low end people and marginalized people get every day. So, actually being able to go to an opera and say, "I understand why Tosca killed that prick," this is a big, cathartic step forward. (Interview 15)

I discuss further Green's approach to "re-defining" DTES musical culture in the section on pedagogy below. 164

Subsequent, unrelated performing arts projects in the DTES aimed to achieve the two objectives that Green articulated in terms of "capacity building," but by different means. Such educational projects included the theatre company Urban Ink's Rare Earth

Arias (2002), the Carnegie Community Centre's pop opera Condemned (2006, 2007) and

DTES community theatre productions by Vancouver Moving Theatre in collaboration with the Carnegie Community Centre, especially Through the People's Voice (2004). The goals were attempted to a lesser extent for In the Heart of a City (the DTES community play, 2003), and The Shadows Project (2005-2007), which culminated in the pop opera production We 're All in This Together in April 2007.

These projects were unrelated to Jim Green's approach in that their administrators did not collaborate with Green and did not consciously use Gramsci's ideas to frame their objectives. Simply, Green proposed two performing arts objectives to which the DTES community responded very strongly and very positively.

Why the two goals initially advocated by Green became a point of inspiration for some future projects may have to do with how the aims resonated with sociopolitical attitudes in the greater Downtown Eastside. Different from Jeffrey Hatcher, poet and

Strathcona resident Sandy Cameron writes that a sense of socioeconomic injustice undergirds three of the four main themes of the community dynamic, which are resistance, alienation, radical possibility and sanctuary. Resistance, Cameron says, arises from "100 years of struggles for dignity and human rights, homes and jobs" in the DTES

(also see Ley 1994); alienation, from "experiences of marginalization and exclusion" that 165 relate to hegemonic forces and policies. Radical possibility speaks to "the right of a community to say who they are, and change their image and dream of a better Canada"

rather than being told by community outsiders or authorities what to do and think (Methot

2004, 50). The proposition to communicate through performing arts to other socioeconomic classes and to society at large resonated particularly with this third

theme.70 In this way, capacity building, music education and raising educational status

through performing arts projects in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside resonated with community attitudes towards activism.

Directions in Arts and Humanities Pedagogy

Administering "Free University" Music Classes

In 1998, through the University of British Columbia, Green also helped to

facilitate a free, not-for-credit university course in the DTES: Humanities 101. Another of

Green's Anthropology 303A students, Am Johal, together with Allison Dunnet, secured

initial funding for the project. Johal's inspiration came from an article in the 303A course readings by Earl Shorris, a former editor of Harper's Magazine (Shorris 1997a).

70 Cameron means the fourth theme, "sanctuary," as "the feeling of a small town and human scale and belonging to a community." 166

Green taught in the first 101 courses, together with up to 24 other accomplished humanities professors (Pfeiff 2003). Green's 101 classes introduced the anthropology of music through musicology and opera history lessons, but also "fieldtrips" to opera performances. Students, all of whom were DTES community members, received free tickets to performances and dress rehearsals of Vancouver Opera's mainstage productions.

This approach to performing arts was inspired by Earl Shorris' pedagogical work on cultural transmission. Shorris developed and promoted the well known "Clemente course" in which humanities are taught to people of low socioeconomic status.

Humanities 101 was a Clemente course. As I will insinuate, Shorris' pedagogy involves the negotiation and manipulation of systems of knowledge acquisition in First World capitalist society, and concomitant hierarchies of socioeconomic privilege.

Shorris advocated giving American urban poor a first-rate humanities education.

Shorris argued that the poor, to gain income and associated social power and socioeconomic status, needed thorough knowledge of the humanities. He found, after conducting over 600 interviews with American urban poor for his book New American

Blues (see Shorris 1997b), that a major difference between "rich" and "poor" in the

United States is that the rich have intellectual skills that help them to negotiate the interpersonal politics of socioeconomic power relations and in so doing, to cultivate individual power, status and wealth. In the U.S., the affluent have most access to a first- rate humanities education, while the poor have less access. Parallels exist in other 167 countries. Knowledge of the humanities, through which one can critically examine human constructs and concerns, facilitates and builds skills for analyzing and understanding human interactions that are valued in the capitalist class system in North America.

Humanities education makes one aware of relevant and diverse ideological frameworks useful for reflecting and acting on life situations, instead of simply reacting to circumstances. In this way, the humanities can inform effective mental methods for negotiating politics and elevating one's socioeconomic status (see Shorris 2000). Of course, people who are classified as socioeconomically "oppressed" have important areas of knowledge that may not be validated within the narrow bounds of "socioeconomic status" that I am discussing. Such knowledge areas are at least equally meaningful and the

"poor" can articulate them powerfully.

Earl Shorris' first Clemente course, which he pioneered in 1995 in New York

City, educated students with incomes of "less than 150 percent of the [U.S.] Census

Bureau's Official Poverty Threshold" via instruction from "faculty with the same knowledge and prestige that students might encounter in their first year at Harvard, Yale,

Princeton, or Chicago." Novelist Charles Simmons, former assistant editor of The New

York Times Book Review and former Columbia University instructor, taught poetry. Grace

Glueck, an arts critic who wrote for the New York Times, taught visual art. Timothy

Koranda, who did graduate work in mathematical logic at MIT, instructed a course segment as did Earl Shorris, who taught American history (Shorris 1997a, 52). This choice of faculty, as one can see, engaged American ideas about the superiority of 168 particular intellectual institutions and therefore reinforced certain hierarchies of educational status. Students who completed the Clemente course received credit from

Bard College. The most profound benefits were in students' lives, however. Shorris writes that

...the students' self-esteem had significantly increased; their use of verbal aggression as a tactic for resolving conflicts had significantly decreased. And they all had notably more appreciation for the concepts of benevolence, spirituality, universalism, and collectivism.... A year after graduation, ten of the first sixteen Clemente Course graduates were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bard College. [Most of t]he other graduates were attending community college or working full-time. (Shorris 1997a, 59)

In Vancouver, topics covered in Humanities 101 have included the philosophy of

Plato and Aristotle, First Nations anthropology, Canadian literature, and architecture, in addition to Western art music, for example. Media articles on the Vancouver Clemente course also documented radical transformations in individuals' education levels, career prospects and participation in society. A Reader's Digest (Canada) column, for example, stated that of the one hundred Humanities 101 alumni in 2003, three "now attend UBC, and many more are enrolled in community and technical colleges. Others have become self-employed or taken up volunteerism, community activism, acting careers; one even ran for mayor" (Pfeiff 2003). These results reinforced problematic hierarchies of education and class in Canada, i.e., the more education and "respectable" social roles one has, the better off one is. As the following section demonstrates, media reports missed the role that music and the performing arts played in such life changes. 169

So far, this section has considered the role of capacity building discourse, particular academic theories, and arts and humanities education in changing an individuals' socioeconomic status. I now will explore how experiences of musical sound interfaced with efforts to raise capacity and change educational status of urban poor through the DTES' Humanities 101 program.

Some Pedagogical Implications and Results

Two of the three Humanities 101 graduates who subsequently enrolled at UBC,

Andrew Sharpe and Lou Parsons, gave interviews for the Reader's Digest column. They became frequently cited success stories for the Vancouver Clemente course, by Canadian media and in the DTES. Andrew and Lou also were students who took Jim Green's

Humanities 101 classes in the anthropology of music, and attended Vancouver Opera productions.

Green argued that the largest life changes happened in individuals like Lou and

Andrew who took Humanities 101 and simultaneously were exposed to opera. He even brought Earl Shorris to Vancouver on the proposition that music instruction and humanities education together could catalyze more rapid change in SES than exposure to humanities education alone. As many studies in ethnomusicology and new musicology attest, musical expressions give performers and audiences opportunity to reflect on representations of human constructs and concerns (see Georgina Born and David 170

Hesmondhalgh's extensive survey of literature on musical representation [Born and

Hesmondhalgh 2000]). Green hypothesized that music and performing arts expressions potentially could give students opportunity to practice and develop skills of reflection and social analysis that they learn in humanities education. It is through such thinking processes, as Shorris asserts, that the poor can develop mental tools useful for acquiring

personal wealth, and associated social power and socioeconomic status. For audiences,

contemplation is nurtured and to some extent guided by artistic products (although the

level of individual interpretation required of the beholder differs between art forms,

genres and cultural contexts). Much more research is needed, Green emphasized, to test

this hypothesis about how music exposure may accelerate any change in SES for low

status adults being educated in the humanities.

Jim Green had a version of the success stories for Humanities 101 that differed

from the amusical accounts in Canadian media. Green gave music a transformative role.

He talked about one woman who sat in on a third-year university anthropology class that

he taught at the University of British Columbia. The student also attended Humanities

101.

She never said anything, hair in her face. Her glasses, the lenses were taped over with scotch tape. I guess they had been shattered. So, I couldn't see her eyes or anything. She wore a raincoat up like this. And I was very worried about her. Her, him, I didn't know, right. She never said anything, never.

And they [the 303 students] had to write a piece on Louis Althusser. It's on ideology and it's there specifically because it is an incredibly correct article on 171

ideology and how it works, but it is extremely difficult.71 . . . [F]or students who haven't been involved in [French intellectual] culture and tradition, it's very off- putting; it's very difficult. But it was to challenge them to step up a little bit higher than they normally would. This would be a graduate level article, rather than third year. So, I told them, they all have to write. "It's only a two-pager. Just tell me what Althusser is saying here." I would spend two or three classes on it after that. And so this woman came up to me and she whispered. I had to [strain to hear her]: like this. She'd whisper in myear and she'd go, "My paper is going to belate. I.. ." "It's okay, I just want whatever you get down."

And she turned in this paper, about a week late and it was on a yellow pad and it was crumbly and it was written in pencil and it was very difficult to read. I was heartbroken because I didn't know how I was going to respond to her about this thing. So, I didn't read it for several days. I just couldn't get myself to do it. And then I read it and I have to say, to this day, there has never been anyone who got it better than her. It was unbelievable. Blew me away. So I took her outside, and still, I can't even see this person, right, I mean, it's like a person in costume. She was so shy and had so many difficulties. I told her that this is an extremely good paper: "I am so impressed. It's better than any ... You are the best in the class, here, kiddo." And she kind of started cleaning up a little bit and acting a little bit differently. Not in huge ways, but I could see that she was a little bit more prideful. (Interview 15)

A turning point in this woman's self growth was when Green took the Humanities

101 class to a production of Puccini's Tosca by Vancouver Opera. Green said,

The woman came afterwards and hugged me and started crying. This was the most beautiful thing she had ever experienced and the story was so huge [universally applicable].

I think that is a big part of why opera is such a key to a neighbourhood like the Downtown Eastside. It's so huge. It's so pulsating. It's like it's all there in front of you, and it's put in these strange packages that make it so that you can really get it, you know. You can get that this may have happened in another time and another place, but my god in heaven, this is our lives, and we go through the desperation and we might have mistakes and we try to do the right thing and you know ... And from that moment on, I knew.

71 The article to which Green refers is Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (Althusser 1971). 172

I saw this woman. I saw her change. She ended up going through all of that, right. She did my 510 course where she wrote another paper with a graduate student. She got on methadone. She was on methadone for years, and ended up on the [Vancouver] Coastal Health board for the Downtown Eastside.

Now, none of that was part of my target. My target was simply to get the people to have the opportunity to have influences from arts and culture that they wouldn't have otherwise. That's all. It went way further than I ever thought. Lou [Parsons, another Humanities 101 student] ... has just been accepted into graduate school [at Simon Fraser University].

And then it [opera] became more and more [transformative]. I became more and more aware that somehow by accident almost, that we had tapped onto an art form that really could fit people in the community. This was something that they could get. In one step, they would become another person. They would become a person that has mastered something. At one time in their lives, they never really believed. They didn't even think about it [opera], right, because it was out of reach. It wasn't theirs. It was antagonistic to them.

They can talk about it [now]. They can go out and have an important discussion. When I took Jim Wright from the opera on a tour [of the DTES] one day, we ran into Andrew Sharpe, one of these guys from Humanities 101 and all. And he started telling Jim about the importance of redoing The Republic, Plato's part about the idols of the cave, to put that into contemporary context of the Downtown Eastside in terms of the struggles that people are going through for enlightenment and knowledge and getting beyond the icons and into the reality of things. You know, and he's standing there talking to the director of the god damn Vancouver Opera as a complete and utter equal, right, and leading the discussion and without even thinking, "My god, this is weird," right. A whole new level of knowledge and self-containment and just, essentially [I think], a new person is born out of this. (Interview 15)

Some of Jim Green's recollections also suggest that DTES residents appreciated opera simply for its aesthetics or artistic beauty, devoid of education or SES implications.

At the time of writing, Humanities 101 is still taught by up to twenty-four academics, but the course no longer offers performing arts instruction. In 2001, a separate

Music Appreciation 101 class evolved. It offered musicology lessons given by volunteer 173

Ty instructors, and free tickets to Vancouver Opera dress rehearsals. Music Appreciation

101 lasted until Spring 2004, when it lost funding.

Humanities 101 and Music Appreciation 101 have been overseen by the

University of British Columbia Learning Exchange,73 which on the 2007 version of its website, professed to bring "volunteers from the UBC community—students, staff, faculty, and alumni—to inner city schools and non-profit organizations where they contribute to community programs while learning about inner city issues. As much as possible, the volunteer work of students is integrated into academic course work—an approach called Community Service-Learning" (UBC Learning Exchange 2007b). Also on the website, Learning Exchange facilitators observed that the "experience in the program reinforces the results of research done elsewhere—the opportunity for critical reflection is crucial to maximizing learning outcomes for students" (UBC Learning

Exchange 2007a). However, which students have most opportunity for critical reflection through Learning Exchange programs: learners in the DTES or the 800 UBC students that participated annually in Learning Exchange programs by 2006? DTES students in 101 courses no longer have opportunity to reflect critically on performing arts presentations in contexts of the UBC Learning Exchange.

72 The instructors were performing musicians, opera administrators and very occasionally, graduate students in musicology. 73 Music Appreciation 101 was part of a move by the UBC Learning Exchange to diversify course offerings. The initial 101 course in Vancouver's inner city was Humanities 101. Subsequent 101 classes offered by UBC in the DTES included Science 101, Self-advocacy 101, Writing 101 and Entrepreneurship 101. 174

Directions in Theatre Production

Teaching and Presenting Skills in the Performing Arts

Other initiatives cultivated participants' skills in specific performing arts occupations, also teamwork and communication skills, through training or practice in the disciplines. These initiatives included / V the DTES, Rare Earth Arias, In the Heart of a

City (the DTES community play), Through the People's Voice, The Shadows Project and the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival. This subsection explains that such initiatives enhanced participants' education, income and occupational status as performance artists.

The I y the DTES cabaret mentored about sixteen DTES artists between the ages of eleven and sixty in areas of theatre (e.g., mask work, voice, acting skills for character development and auditions), music (especially songwriting and classical voice), storytelling, physical theatre, dance and writing. The mentored artists then performed stories or songs, some original, some not, which communicated their love for the DTES and their convictions about what could be done to improve the neighbourhood. As I discussed with Jeffrey Hatcher, DTES residents don't uniformly love the DTES, but have diverse reactions to the neighbourhood's strengths and problems, including the profound discomforts of extreme poverty. Hatcher commented that some community members 175

"even say they deserve [suffering], especially the long term junkies who really feel down on themselves. Many feel like they don't deserve any better, and some of that anger comes out, as it should, in the Carnegie Newsletter or in the music groups or in [other] places where they feel safe" (Interview 4). IV the DTES channeled diverse reactions to the DTES by community members into creative learning and activity within a frame of

"love." The cabaret was initially intended as a Valentine's Day gift to the city of

Vancouver in 2002.

Rare Earth Arias asked six female DTES writers to write six theatrical scenes that documented rarely heard perspectives of inner city women of African, First Nations,

Anglo-Canadian and Chinese descent. The scenes, which considered issues of poverty, survival sex, addiction, immigration and (sub)cultural "in betweenness," were workshopped by six professional (female) dramaturges and performed by six (female)

professional actors. Two community writers, Muriel Williams and Leith Harris, created

song lyrics, which were incorporated into a score by composer and opera singer Katherine

Harris. Mentoring and skill-building through artistic practice for Rare Earth Arias, IV the

DTES and other productions raised artistic skill and education levels. For community

participants working towards careers in the arts, the performances enhanced their

visibility and status as developing artists within their chosen disciplines.

Through the People's Voice featured three one act plays by DTES writers who

placed in a 2004 DTES playwriting competition sponsored by Vancouver Moving

Theatre, Theatre in the Raw and the Carnegie Community Centre. Community actors 176 performed a reading of the trio of plays, Patrick Foley's Sinners Anonymous, Leith

Harris' Fit the Description and Dora Sanders' Our Dinner Motto, which respectively addressed an addiction to dumpster diving, inappropriate persecution by police, and enjoyment of food and shelter gained through limited means. The actors prepared the performance with guidance theatre professionals, director James Fagan Tait and acting coach Jay Hamburger.

In 2005, Vancouver Moving Theatre began a series of workshops and forums with people from the Downtown Eastside area exploring the roots of addiction. The initiative was called The Shadows Project. Emerging from the recollections of over a thousand people, a pop musical-cum-shadow puppet production titled We 're All in this Together was written by Savannah Walling and Rosemary Georgeson with over a dozen other writers. We 're All in This Together premiered in 2007. The performances engaged two creative teams of twenty-five professional and emerging artists, and over fifty community performers and crew. Performers had taken part in workshops held over a two-year period in shadow theatre, image theatre, writing, collage, puppet building, digital media, performance practice and other training. The performances dealt with diverse types of addiction in society at large, using the DTES drug scene as a focal point. Two families from diverse social backgrounds encounter humanity's struggle with addiction. Following each show, panel discussions led by medical professionals, community spokespeople, artists and city bureaucrats allowed a different learning experience about addiction. Ill

Pre-production for In the Heart of a City (2003), which chronicled a cultural history of the greater Downtown Eastside area, involved workshops in puppet making, choreography, acting, popular theatre, theatre sports, theatre games, singing, Metis dancing, hand drumming, flag making, banner creation and mural making (Marie 2004,

5). Professionals provided guidance during rehearsals in disciplines of set building, theatre lighting, costume and prop creation, singing, music ensemble performance, acting techniques, stage managing, choreography and shadow puppetry.

Some of these performing arts initiatives paid community participants to reflect artistically on their neighbourhood, thereby increasing their income (status). The community writers for Rare Earth Arias were commissioned. Participants received modest honouraria for performing in IV the DTES, The Shadows Project and Through the

People's Voice. For community members, In the Heart of a City offered several paid positions, such as assistant stage manager. The number of participants who were inner city poor varied from project to project, with most of the actors being urban poor in I ¥ the DTES, Through the People's Voice, and the DTES community play, In the Heart of a

City. As the DTES increasingly faced gentrification through the 2000s, certain productions featured fewer urban poor in favour of including people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Some artists in 2007 performances of We're All in This

Together had middle class jobs like at a college while others fell under the poverty line or were comparatively affluent. Producers felt that it was essential to include all socioeconomic classes present in the Downtown Eastside in order to build meaningful 178 social connections across diverse and separate social groups that frequented the neighbourhood.

An aim to create the artistically "best" piece possible also affected the economic aspects of these productions. For all of these projects, theatre experts were paid union rates to take leadership roles as producers, directors, choreographers, musical directors and composers, set and costume designers, acting coaches and stage managers. Four established theatre artists from East Vancouver communities were hired to write the script for In the Heart of a City, guided by input and feedback by hundreds of DTES community members.

In this way, the various performances aspired to professional production values more than any DTES context that I have analyzed so far. The shows enhanced production values through professional lighting design, stage management, administration, and musical directorships and composition. The performances were for neighbourhood residents and the general public.

For Rare Earth Arias, hiring a professional opera singer, Katherine Harris, was part of a directorial decision to professionalize all production values. Subaltern voices of community writers were raised to the "dominant discourse" through the mentoring process I described, and were staged in ways that satisfied expectations of professionalism of paying theatre audiences. Professional and semi-professional musicianship for the Vancouver Moving Theatre and Carnegie Centre productions emerged differently, and due to communication difficulties that I will now describe. 179

For In the Heart of a City, DTES participants including musicians were solicited through word of mouth and a glossy brochure, which asked interested community members to circle a skill that they could contribute. Second on a list of twenty "theatre" skills was: "Music: Instrumentalists, singers. What instruments do you play?" In addition, the play's musical director, Wyckham Porteous, scouted and auditioned local musicians with help from a community outreach coordinator, Leith Harris. The band would accompany thirteen tunes sung by the company, and individually perform numerous soundscapes and transitional music numbers. Musical styles to be performed involved

1860s-style violin, First Nations drumming, marching band music, sentimental music hall ballads, Ukrainian folk, Japanese folksong, 1930s labour tunes, modern DTES compositions, improvised soundscapes and urban blues, among other genres (see

Interview 18, Morrisseau et al. 2003).

Wyckham Porteous bemoaned a lack of response to his outreach from skilled instrumentalists who could perform the ambitious musical program.

[At] the auditions, there was nobody that really showed up that was into music. A few people, but it was either drummers, or . . . Like, there wasn't any real musicians. So then I phoned Earle [Peach at the Carnegie Community Centre] and I said, "Is there anyone?" He said, "Come to the [Street Band] rehearsal and talk to them." So, I went there and there literally was three people there. None of them could play. Like, none of them. Like it wasn't even they sort of could play. They were lucky to hold a note....

And I went, "That's kind of tough." . . . And then I spoke to someone who said, "Oh, I do a Friday night coffee house type thing, [a] jam session, maybe you should come to that and listen to some of the people." So I did and they said, "Well, maybe you should perform." So I did a forty-five minute set, just did a 180

little concert, introduced myself, kept telling everybody, "Please come to the rehearsals dah-dah-dah-dah-dah."

At the beginning, a couple of people came and then they didn't come. It was partly because of the rehearsals, that we weren't rehearsing every night, and we weren't rehearsing the same thing every night. It was just one scene. So the people that came really had to go, "Okay, it's Thursday at 6 that I come, then I don't come again 'til next Wednesday at..It was too irregular for them to really fit in because a lot of them, just, they hit the street and then they're gone, right. So there'd be people that would come for one or two rehearsals and then they'd disappear....

They'd come and bring their guitars. One guy came. He was hammered all the time, and he wanted to play Santana and the Beatles.74 And [he] refused to tune his guitar to A440. He wanted it, you know, like at 325 or something. So there'd be those kind of people and you kind of have to be nice and friendly, but basically say no. And after that, after about three weeks of that, I just went, "Fuck it. If people come, they come. If they don't, they don't." You know. Because I was having way too much work just actually doing the play rehearsals.

The volunteer coordinator . . . kept calling me, "Talk to this person." ... I did. I phoned a whole list of people and ... most of the people on that list personally did not want to have any participation . . . [e]ither because they felt that they should have gotten paid or you know, whatever. ... I kept saying to Savannah [Walling, the artistic director]: I'm going to have problems because anyone I know that's any good will have to get paid. (Interview 19)

Savannah Walling noted that from her perspective and from director James Fagan Tait's perspective, "anyone who showed up to rehearsals was qualified for the play—the challenge was to find the appropriate musical or acting or singing role for that person"

(Interview 18). In the end, though, community members that made music at the Evelyne

Sailer Centre, the Health Contact Centre, Positive Outlook, Sheway, First United Church and the Carnegie Community Centre did not participate in the play as instrumentalists.

74 This is a reference to "classic rock" repertoires of popular music jams in the Downtown Eastside. 181

Four of the seven musicians who were selected to play In the Heart of a City, including myself, were professional or semi-professional players. The three others had considerable musical training. None of us were homeless or from the inner city underclass.

Given that some productions have hired performing arts professionals and included participants from diverse socioeconomic classes, it becomes important to ask the following question: Who benefits most in terms of income, education, class and occupational status from musical health projects and urban development initiatives in

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside? Is it the poorest of the urban poor—the homeless, the drug and alcohol addicted, survival sex workers, and the wageless? Since 2003, these poor have argued vociferously that it is not them through a petition against one large- scale performing arts project, on Internet blogs and through words spoken publicly against DTES administrators. I address some such arguments in the next chapter.

Changing Lives in the Downtown Eastside

When performing arts projects boosted income, education and occupational status, the projects affected people's lives diversely. Income or other material assistance sometimes did and sometimes did not have positive impact. DTES amateur actors clustered appreciatively to wait for cheques at Through the People's Voice rehearsals in

2004. Small honourariums helped them to survive. I received such honourariums for playing violin in the production's semi-professional band, which helped me to have 182 enough money to eat healthfully, as a graduate student. Over time, I became conflicted about accepting money that could have gone to DTES musicians, but at the time, I did not understand my role in arts development as problematic. Like other artists involved such projects, I was trying to do "the right thing" for the Downtown Eastside community.

A story about a 2004 theatre production will serve as an example of income and material assistance that was problematic and had complex ethical implications. This project provided amateur actors, many of whom were on welfare and some of whom were homeless, with stipends and sometimes housing during production workshops, rehearsals and performances.75 For a week-long workshop, for example, participants received a $500 honourarium in two payments over two months. This fit into B.C. welfare recipients' ability to earn up to $300 per month without losing welfare entirely. Actors in the production, however, received $500 per week for seven weeks, were informed of their legal responsibilities, and were advised to sort any problems out with their Social Service workers. Under new law at the time, welfare recipients could lose benefits and become unable to apply for welfare for two years if they accepted employment. However, not all such actors were able to transition to the work force after production. Some actors who were given free housing for the seven-week production period could not secure housing after the show. While some DTES residents advocated the payment of "volunteers" in performing arts projects as "improving" and "dignifying,"76 financial compensation, in

75 This show, too, strove to develop artistic expression of the oppressed and to allow the urban underclass to communicate to other classes. The performance focussed on housing issues in the inner city. 76 See Methot (2004, 116-117). 183 some cases, might do long-term damage or have no long-term benefit. Short-term material assistance implied no long-term solution. This theatre production could not overcome a structural problem of classism in British Columbia, and did not affect sustainable social change.

Offering experience or education in specific performing arts occupations sometimes opened new opportunities for employment and developing performance skills.

Such benefits were enjoyed by people of different ethnicities and cultural groups.

Corinthian Clark, an African Canadian security guard at a DTES hotel, discovered that she could sing while participating in / V the DTES. She became an accomplished jazz singer, performing at the Strathcona Artist at Home Festival, the Heart of the City

Festival and a 2006 World Peace Forum in Vancouver, for example. Actors in I V the

DTES, like Grant Chancey and Paul Decarie, developed their talents in community and semi-professional theatre. Grant Chancey acted in the professional musical theatre production of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at the 2005 PuSh

International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver. Singer-songwriters like Andy

Kostynuik (a Ukrainian Canadian) and "Luka" became respected folk and popular musicians in the DTES community. Andy Kostynuik recorded his first CD in 2004.

Occupational and employment opportunities likewise emerged for some members of the 100-plus cast for In the Heart of a City. Particular participants felt moved to pursue acting and singing at amateur, semi-professional or professional levels. Employment in 184 the arts also resulted in some cases. Dalannah Gail Bowen felt inspired to revive her career as a professional blues singer. She acted in the production where she sang with the company, and improvised an introduction to the 1902 vaudeville hit "In the City of Sighs and Tears" (lyrics by Andrew Sterling; melody by Kerry Mills). Just before the play,

Dalannah was homeless, having suffered depression after being diagnosed with a

potentially terminal illness. Afterwards, she found housing and used her singing skills in a

process of self-healing. She created a one-woman musical play about her "life journey [as an African Canadian] from abusive childhood through depression and addiction to living

with and in spirit; a celebration of life and the story of overcoming the seen and unseen obstacles we encounter every day" (Carnegie Community Centre, Vancouver Moving

Theatre, and Association of United Ukrainian Canadians 2006). The Firehall Arts Centre

(a professional venue) hosted her show in 2007.77 The Firehall Theatre also hired

Dalannah Bowen and community play participant Luke Day in two productions of the

musical Urinetown in 2006. Luke Day also acted in the Firehall's production of George

Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and won the 2006-2007 Community Theatre Award for

Best Male Actor in a leading role with the Vagabond Players in Moon over Buffalo. Elwin

Xie, who grew up in Vancouver's Chinatown, emailed me about how his involvement in

the DTES community play opened up paid opportunities as a live performer in historical

settings:

77 The 2006 Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival featured excerpts from the 2007 show. 185

My involvement with In the Heart of a City gave me the experience and self- confidence to audition forStoryeum, a multi-media re-enactment of British Columbia's history. There, I was working side-by-side with performers who work in professional theatres across Canada.

I have subsequently been able to parlay that experience into a new job as a costumed museum interpreter at the Bumaby Village Museum. It all started by me taking a chance in life and somebody taking a chance on me.

Still others, as a result of their involvement in the community play, began to participate differently in civic community and family. The play's male lead, Stephen

Lytton (of the Lytton First Nation, an Interior Salish group), began to see himself as a leader and spokesperson in DTES politics and social forums. Stephen started to take on this role in play rehearsals.78 In the play itself, he acted the role of a wise Native elder,

"the Old One," who offered sage advice. After the play, Stephen successfully stood for election as one of eleven Members at Large on the Carnegie Community Centre

Association's Board of Directors.79 When Stephen now speaks at community events, he thanks play producers for enabling his leadership. A Northwest Coast First Nations female actor said that the self-esteem given to her by acting and singing in the play changed how she behaved as a mother and in turn, how her son acted towards her. Before the play, she said, she had been expelled from a University of British Columbia degree

78 For example, in the second technical rehearsal, he thanked Director James Fagan Tait, on behalf of cast and crew, for "building bridges" in the community and for facilitating new friendships. 79 Individuals like Stephen experienced a change in their community roles, occupational status and employment status. In 2006, Stephen co-starred with Kat Norris in heart and home: inner city, a television documentary of DTES perspectives of life in the neighbourhood (director: Anne Marie Slater). This enhanced his prestige as an actor and community spokesperson. Like Grant Chancey, Stephen Lytton was hired to act in Crime and Punishment at the 2005 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Crime and Punishment won five Jessie Richardson awards for professional theatre in Vancouver. These accomplishments benefited DTES participants' status of employment and occupation. 186 program because she delayed completion of two years of required English courses. She enrolled in Langara College, but she said, "I guess [I] fell down, like, depression. I was

OA taking some pills or whatever, medication." She continued,

I was stuck on that until I went to this play. It boosted my energy. I lost weight. My son, I guess, noticed a difference, you know, yup, too. The behavior: I'm not as crabby to him. [laughter] So ... So it was Jimmy [the director] who encouraged me and the cast, especially Steve [Lytton] and Sandra [Pronteau, another Indigenous actor] . . . and the children [in the play]. So, yeah. And my son gave me, I guess, encouragement in his own level way. [My son] he didn't snap at me. He didn't hit me as much, spit on me, um ... (Interview 20)81

Tangible benefits of the performing arts projects included the increase of occupation, education and employment opportunities, but also an increase in responsible behaviour towards one's self, family and community. The reader may recall that similar benefits were described by Earl Shorris, as outcomes of education in the humanities.

Administrators encouraged participation from a diversity that reflected the social make-up of the DTES neighbourhood. Producers of Vancouver Moving Theatre and the

Carnegie Centre solicited participation from diverse ethnicities and cultures. In the Heart of a City's Outreach Coordinator, Leith Harris, reported

Because other theatrical productions have been too [W]hite there was particular attention paid to reaching out to the Asian and the First Nations population and

80 "Medication" usually means "drugs" or (less often) "alcohol" in the Downtown Eastside. 81 Luke Day, who subsequently acted professionally in Urinetown, also experienced a boost in self-esteem that released him from depression. He shared the following in a media interview: Getting involved in this play has been really beneficial for me. I don't know if I want to wax metaphorically on that, but there's a song that's repeated through this play called ["Outta] the Rain." Personally speaking, the early part of this year was difficult for me—most of the year, in fact. Getting involved in this was my own personal "coming out of the rain." It's really helped me get out of, essentially a depression—just meeting people and watching people, and seeing how much effort goes into something like this. (Zillich 2003) 187

Spanish and Black, everyone in the community. That was quite a focus in what I was trying to do. (Marie 2004, 8-9)

The play's artistic producer, Terry Hunter, said that in particular, Vancouver Moving

Theatre sought to create a cross-section "that had women in leadership roles, that had minority women involved who were from the neighbourhood" (Marie 2004, 8). In ways described above, performing arts initiatives with capacity building missions re-integrated immigrants, First Nations and Caucasians into social fabrics through catalyzing changes in female and male participants' performance skills, their occupational status as performers and their social attitudes. It also was important to producers to involve community members of diverse socioeconomic classes, however, the individuals that I listed as benefitting socioeconomically might be called a mix of working class, working poor and unemployed.

Redistributing Economic Status in the DTES

While different ethnicities, cultures and genders benefited from instruction and inclusion in the projects discussed above, arts initiatives such as In the Heart of a City

(2003), We 're All in This Together (2007) and the Heart of the City Festival (est. 2004) also have been inclusive in terms of how they have represented the economic status and social space of both individual artists and groups. These representations have not changed 188 the roles or ranks of individuals, but have downplayed low economic status compared to other definitions of the Downtown Eastside community.

The reader remembers that all of these productions have been produced by

Vancouver Moving Theatre in collaboration with the Carnegie Community Centre, and sometimes other organizations. Savannah Walling, artistic director of Vancouver Moving

Theatre, explained why producers took such an inclusive approach with In the Heart of a

City, the Downtown Eastside community play. Show producers adopted the Collway

Theatre Trust model for community theatre, which she said, asks

a small core of experienced theatre professionals to work with as many community members as they care to, to participate and to create the strongest artistic work of which they're capable to express and celebrate their community. The artists are responsible to relate to the whole community, to work in partnership with existing systems, and to refrain from taking sides on divisive issues. Their job is not to tell people what to think, but to listen and learn from the community and look for opportunities for people to create, perform and get involved. Creating this kind of a play experience means operating in a non- adversarial style in order to express a kaleidoscope of perspectives within a collective vision—rather than competing perspectives or the perspective of a small portion of an area's demographic. Because there was a lot of fracturing and polarizing in the DTES community in 2002 [when the playtext was written], with groups not readily interacting because of mistrust, fear and differences stemming from language, cultural and socioeconomic differences (badly polarized [further] over the open-air drug market)—the group of people who had coalesced around the Carnegie Community Centre felt that a community building experience was a priority. Therefore they directed the artistic team to mobilize DTES residents to celebrate their community's past, to portray its present in all its variety, and to share visions for its future. They wanted an experience that would develop capacity in the arts, break down barriers in a divided community and give voice to those who lived there. (Interview 18)

What complicated the politics of being inclusive at this particular time, I believe, was that the various performances unfolded when Vancouver's Downtown Eastside 189 increasingly faced gentrification. As I mentioned, gentrification has been understood in

the DTES as the displacement of the lower socioeconomic classes by upper socioeconomic classes, a process that may transform social and physical geographies

(Blackwell et al. 2006). In the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, however defined, the

presence of inner city poor is diminishing as the poor move to suburbs of Vancouver or out of the city altogether.

Theatre producers, in an effort to be inclusive and non-adversarial in this troubling

context, artistically represented a DTES social geography that was much broader than that

posed by the Downtown Eastside Resident's Association. The reader will recall that

DERA centred its original definition of the "Downtown Eastside" around inadequate

housing for urban poor, especially problems with ill-maintained residential hotels.82

DERA's social geography highlighted poverty, as David Ley writes, in efforts "to

translate a past of activism [in the DTES] over labour rights into a present of activism

over neighbourhood rights, while maintaining the protest model in the course of

community mobilization" (Ley 1994, 173).

By contrast, the Heart of the City Festival (est. 2004), The Shadows Project

(2005-2007) and In the Heart of a City (2003) defined the Downtown Eastside

community to include all individuals that have inhabited (i.e., frequented, resided in,

82 Kent Gereke summarizes DERA's definition of the neighbourhood's physical geography: [The Downtown Eastside's] boundaries are essentially defined by wherever people live in the residential hotels (SRO's), and 95% of those hotels in Vancouver, some 350 of them, are in the Downtown Eastside. The area surroimds Chinatown and includes Gastown, B.C. Place stadium, and Simon Fraser [University's] downtown campus. (Gereke 1991,12) 190 worked on) the site of the original Downtown Vancouver yet share histories of marginalization or struggle for survival. Vancouver Moving Theatre and the Carnegie co- produced these performances that adopted the broader definition of the DTES, but were written by theatre professionals after extensive interviews in the community. What producers said they were trying to do was to reflect the existing diversity of DTES neighbourhood life day-to-day, as they experienced it. Social struggle has long agitated the transcultural Downtown Eastside, as I described in Chapter 2. I discuss the community play in detail here.

In the Heart of a City chronicled local struggles, such as: Vancouver residents who suffered the "Great Fire" that burned the city to the ground in 1886; residents who endured an anti-Asian riot in Vancouver's Chinatown and Japantown in 1907; Chinese families that faced hardships or deaths as a result of discriminatory work conditions for

Chinese men who helped to build Canada's railroads; "militant moms" in Strathcona who won a safe railway crossing for 360 schoolchildren in a 1971 fight with the Canadian

National Railway and U.S. Railway Burlington North; those of surviving healthfully when one is homeless and broke in Vancouver's inner city, which is addictions infused and sometimes violent; prostitutes' survival through selling sex in the red light district around Hastings and Princess Streets in the early 1900s. Through artistic representation, definitions of the Downtown Eastside's constituency expanded far beyond a focus on the inner city poor. Community roles of the inner city poor were expanded further through a focus on ethnically diverse populations. 191

In publicity for the community play and in the playtext, Vancouver Moving

Theatre and the Carnegie Community Centre newly mapped sub-areas in the DTES. In performances, the subareas were affiliated with the diverse social struggles evoked above and also the diverse constituencies. On play brochures, websites and media releases, the

"Downtown Eastside" subareas included Main & Hastings, Chinatown, Gastown,

Japantown, Hogan 's Alley, Luk'luk'i, Strathcona and Victory Square. Names of the sub- neighbourhoods flagged in italics were historical place names no longer in use, but affiliated with ethnic populations and struggles, respectively those of Japanese, Blacks and First Nations. This DTES social geography in the community play was reiterated in the Heart of the City Festival and in performances for The Shadows Project, including

We 're All in This Together.

Savannah Walling, the community play's artistic director, pointed out that the production's definition of the DTES' social geography emerged due to pressures on the community to which DERA responded differently:

There are indeed important similarities between DERA and the DTES community play's [approaches to activism]. Both have risen under similar conditions with related external pressures. . . . Both emerged in reaction to threats of displacement and immense rapid change. Both emerged in reaction to indifference, neglect and stigmatizing from a larger community. (Interview 18)

As Walling recalled, DERA is "an advocacy organization formed in 1973 by residents of the DTES to demand official recognition of the area as a residential community." DERA also demanded "the right to change [the community's] name from Skid Road (as it was labeled in the press since the 1950s) to the Downtown Eastside" (Interview 18). DTES 192 artistic expressions and academic writings also focused on urban poverty issues for purposes of political engagement and social responsibility. I f the DTES, Rare Earth

Arias and two plays in Through the People's Voice featured stories about people living in residential hotels. Some music for these productions explicated the focus on housing issues and dislocation, while other compositions underscored the theme.83 Yet a less adversarial concept of the Downtown Eastside was required if the neighbourhood was to retain a coherent sense of community as community members negotiated the socioeconomic class conflict of gentrification.

In the Heart of a City used music to underscore its notion of a DTES of various socioeconomic classes and cultures that had touched the Downtown Eastside, but endured diverse social struggles. The music also nuanced characters' participation in histories of struggle. Music used included seven pre-1950 "period" songs.84 As I will describe, Renae

Morrisseau contributed song ideas that specifically engaged First Nations histories. Lead script writer Savannah Walling contributed most ideas for other melodies and lyrics.

James Fagan Tait also wrote lyrics while Adrienne Wong specified soundscapes.

Together with writing decisions about music, production decisions by music performers

83 Recent academic writings that emphasize inner city poor in the DTES include: Benoit, Carroll and Chaudhry's essay on the health of Aboriginal women clients at DTES Vancouver Native Health centres (Benoit, Carroll, and Chaudhry 2003); Pratt and Johnston's article on the relevance of a DTES legislative theatre project for cultural geographies (Pratt and Johnston 2007); and Culhane and Robertson's book In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (Culhane and Robertson 2005), which publishes stories of seven female residents as they negotiate health and housing. By pre-1950 "period" song, I mean a song that either was composed before 1950, or a song that evokes a historical period before 1950 through musical style or lyric content. 193 and theatre directors informed the manner in which music represented community

participants and economic status in a new community concept.

The development of a First Nations song idea by one actor illustrates that

performance decisions richly elaborated the scripted ideas about music and community

"inclusiveness." In the script, Renae Morrisseau called for a Paddle Song that Squamish

Coast Salish sang while rescuing victims of the Great Fire by canoe. Morrisseau wrote:

Four canoes with Squamish people enter. They paddle in synch and stop in synch. They are singing a traditional song about the fire. They get out of their canoes while people run around them. Shouting is still heard. (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 18)

In the 2003 production, Coast Salish singer Siamtenaut (Sheryl-lin Rivers) sang such a

song, "You Are the Only One," in accordance with traditional protocol.85 She also

incorporated Northwest Coast First Nations practices of microtonal variation (see Halpern

1967) through nuancing specific pitches by an audible fraction of a semitone, for

example, within one repetition of the song and then changing pitches' microtonal nuance

during other repetitions. The song actually does not mention the fire, though. Rather,

using four notes (do, re, ri and mi, which Siamtenaut nuanced microtonally) and double

dotted quarter notes in (approximately) a major key, the song asks the "Mother of Christ"

to have mercy on all human beings. Sheryl-lin's mother, elder Audrey Rivers, explained

that Coast Salish attending St. Paul's Anglican Church paddled across Burrard Inlet to

help victims of the fire. The story of Anglican worshippers contextualized a song with

85 Her family "owns" the song according to Coast Salish, sui generis concepts of arts ownership. In Northwest Coast First Nations culture groups, sui generis concepts of song ownership tend to restrict use based on family, extended family/clan or tribal (or intertribal) rites, or according to a combination of such kinship affiliations evoked by the history of a particular song or song genre. 194

Catholic references, yet Sheryl-lin grounded her performance in dance traditions of the

Coast Salish spirit dance and potlatch, which enact contrasting mythological and

cosmological beliefs. She struck together traditional clappers while wearing paddle

dancer regalia, which is edged with tiny wooden paddles that chime together during

movement. In this way, the performance honoured diverse Coast Salish approaches to

spirituality that deal in different ways with larger realities of harm and death, which

DTES residents suffered after the Great Fire, for example.

In other cases, musical choices made by the play writers carried rich historical

meanings while nuancing character development in the DTES community constituencies.

In an effort to underscore histories of itinerancy and unemployment, Savaimah Walling

called for what Richard Phelps calls an American "hobo song" (Phelps 1983, 2),

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," specifically with lyrics by Henry McClintock sung to the tune

of "Revive Us Again" (first published in 1890). "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" gave humour

and period atmosphere to a scene about a dramatic 1938 post office strike during which

hungry strikers occupied the Carnegie Centre. Self-deprecating humour burst from the

following lyrics, which were sung in three-four time as the play's orchestra accented

beats two and three in a "boom-chuck" rhythm:

Why don't you work like other men do? How the hell can I work when there's no work to do? Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again; Hallelujah, give us a hand-out To revive us again! (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 52) 195

Other musical contributions by Walling included song lyrics that she wrote, and titled "My Young Wife." The lyrics concern male Chinese in Vancouver, who were isolated from their wives in the early 1900s. Due to the head tax and other restrictions on

Chinese immigrants by Canada's federal and provincial governments, Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women in Vancouver forty to one, from 1907 until WWII (Walling

2003a, 26). "My Young Wife" expresses beautifully the sadness of separation from family:

Canada, I wait here - all alone I wait here. (2x) Over there my young wife - cries for me a river. Hey-ja-hey - cries for me a river.

Canada deceived me - parted me from my wife. (2x) Cut off from my children - waste my life with waiting. Hey-ja-hey - wash myself with tears. (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 25)

For the 2003 show, Walling adapted the lyrics to a Ukrainian Canadian melody that with every phrase of text, rocked up in pitch and then, after the hyphens above, down again

(with the exception of the repetition of line one).

Walling also suggested "In the City of Sighs and Tears," a vaudeville hit that was popular in 1902 theatres in Vancouver and that contextualized the scene about early 20th century prostitutes. Like "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" and "My Young Wife," the vaudeville lyrics commented on a predicament of vulnerable populations. Here, the topic was not the homeless or lonely men, but a child who asks her father where her mother is. Actors who played prostitutes sang the father's answer in a way that implied the mother also engaged in survival sex work. 196

Writers' inclusion of period songs and plots intentionally historicized community issues of homelessness, prostitution, dislocation, marginalization and other suffering, in addition to expanding DTES constituencies. Savannah Walling said the following about the play writers' perspective:

[W]e knew that some of the issues that we wanted to touch into in the play were so polarizing and divisive within the neighbourhood that we knew that we wanted to get some way of distancing them or taking another take upon them. So then we thought, we'll see if there are certain historical eras in which the Downtown Eastside had faced some of these types of problems at other times. History can lend distance to bitter political arguments and polarizations while resonating deeply with references to contemporary concerns. (Interview 18)

While poverty issues are not necessarily divisive among the urban poor, they may be contentious among lower middle (economic) class in Strathcona or upper middle

(economic) class in Gastown, and among residents of other areas in Vancouver. Such diverse populations attended the public performances of the community play. The show's producers wanted the play to be accessible to audiences and for spectators to be able to identify with characters while feeling an interest in their humanity. In this way, aesthetics might allow a socioeconomically inclusive viewing and listening experience.

While nine out of the play's twenty scenes were historical, eleven scenes gravitated towards the present. Contemporary scenes and eight associated music numbers more explicitly addressed struggles of urban poverty. For such scenes, assistant musical director Joelysa Pankanea created two evocative soundscapes. James Fagan Tait wrote one set of song lyrics and Savannah Walling, two sets, for which musical director

Wyckham Porteous composed music. Porteous also wrote chord charts for two poems by 197

DTES writers Sheila Baxter and Joe Ziegler. The folk ballad "Sandstone Lady" featured music by Earle Peach and words by Patrick Foley.

Musical performances of these contemporary pieces presented fun or imaginary elements that softened harsh realities of suffering associated with inner city life. Some such distancing involved combining campy visual aesthetics and sonic cues, for example, in a musical theatre song about finding shelter: "Outta the Rain" (by James Fagan Tait and Wyckham Porteous). Actors opened the play with this song, walking in street clothes and twirling umbrellas under mauve light swirling with crisscrossing, clear patches. They sang do-re-mi in a syncopated rhythm (dotted quarter note, dotted quarter, quarter) in four-four meter. This was part "Mary Poppins" and part11 The Sound of Music."

Other musical distancing involved deliberately tacky choreography or humour in song performance. The 2003 performance of "Outta the Rain" developed into a soft shoe number with a camp aesthetic that ended with affectedly humourous dialogue. The final chorus and ending read:

Lookin' for the day, lookin' for the night Lookin' for a way, lookin' for the light Lookin' for a place to staay

On a rainy day

Outta the... Outta the... n Outta the... [song pauses on V ] Nicole: Hey! Hey! Where am I? 198

DSR:86 Main.

USR:87 and Hastings.

Nicole: Thanks, [song resolves to tonic chord] (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 3-4)

Song lyrics that essentially addressed serious issues sometimes combined regional jokes with humour that could be understood more widely. A case in point is the words for

Sheila Baxter's "Balmoral Cockroach" in the scene about the Raycam Housing Project mothers (who managed to convince authorities to build a railway crossing). This music evoked housing issues in a SRO, the Balmoral Hotel, but its 2003 performance was nothing short of hilarious. Visual, dialogic and musical humour interfaced while a local joke in the song lyrics provided a punch line. Four Raycam moms appeared in fluorescent orange and pink '70s garb to conduct a highly choreographed scene, filled with one liners.

The scene ended with each mother croaking on one of the four pitches C, G, B or D:

In a Balmoral room a cockroach creeps in and out of cracks. She's sniffing around for a place to lay her hundreds of tiny eggs. She crawls out of the sheets into the pocket of a John who's getting tricked, jtfl Goes home to him in Shaughnessy to live with his wife and kids. (Morrisseau et al. 2003,43)

Joelysa Pankanea played the C9 chord (with no third) broken and then in a solid chord while I played a G tremolo on violin. We then moved to a "Welfare Mother's Song" in G major.

86 Downstage Right 87 Upstage Right 88 An upper (middle) class neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. 199

Sometimes in the same performances, music underscored poverty issues while also withholding or obscuring controversial information. For example, some music featured incomplete or imprecise lyrics. As said, "Outta the Rain" ultimately was about housing, but the opening do-re-mi teased, tentatively:

Loo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-Lookin' Loo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-Lookin'

The lyrics suggested many intentions. One might be looking at the time, at a face, at my bus, for a place to stay, to get home, for some tea, for a person, for the strength, for some dope, for a buzz, for some hope, like I'm lost, like I'm new, like I'm brave, for my aunt, for some work, or to forget some good looking jerk, for example. The underlying theme, homelessness, was indicated through a repeated V7 - I chord progression to lyrics that reappeared almost verbatim in lines three and four of each of six verses:89

Lookin' at the time, lookin' at a face Lookin' for my bus, lookin' outta place Lookin' for a place to staay Outta the raain, outta the raain ... [sic. in original] (Morrisseau et al. 2003, 3)

In this way, "Outta the Rain" foreshadowed many themes in many of the contemporary scenes, while underplaying tensions of poverty that drove the themes. The song functioned to introduce the play's lead male and female characters (the "Old One," a

First Nations spirit, and "Nicole," a Native woman from Bella Bella, B.C.), who are extremely poor and have no stable housing. Nicole's Aunt Rita has gone missing, which raises the issue of gendered violence.

89 The one exception was that"craash" was substituted for "staay" in the fourth verse (sic. in original). 200

At different times, music together with dialogue metaphorized inner city problems and suffering. Stage directions for a "Japanese"-style shadow play, which informed an accompanying soundscape, allegorized class relationships of consumerism in the contemporary inner city. Drug or alcohol consumption was conveyed metaphorically, as the playscript requested:

A fox lady arrives, a demon disguised as a friendly, elderly lady. She helps up the little birds, then kindly offers a deep sack full of "candy." The little birds take some of the candy and taste. Their eyes open wide in astonished delight. They think only of reaching for more. The fox lady's eyes gleam, her tail wags impatiently under her long skirt. She watches the young birds flutter away, absorbed by eating.

Nattily dressed fat suburban pigs waddle up with bulging bags of candy, tempting the young birds with more and more "candy." One of the little birds eagerly gobbles one candy after another, barely tasting it, until she slowly sickens. As the pigs lead her away, her bird's body bends and twists in a slow dance. She allows them to draw her away into darkness. (Morrisseau et al. 2003,66)

As shadows of the fox, pig and birds played around a tree represented on a large, white drop screen, Joelysa Pankanea sustained various inversions of A minor chords on marimba. I improvised on violin an ascending melody in A minor, which I grounded on the7 of V while emphasizing a V7 chord with no third. I sustained harmonic tension in my improvisation by only occasionally moving to the tonic chord. Perhaps appropriate of my training as a classical musician, I intended the resistance to harmonic resolution to reinforce social tensions in the addictions narrative.

However, in the performed shadow puppetry, the "candy" (drugs or alcohol) and illness were absent. The fox mimed the feeding, while the pig captured one bird instead of 201 giving it candy. Instead of falling sick, the birds scattered as they became hunted by wolves, represented by faux Northwest Coast First Nations northern formline masks. As the program read, Chinese dragon dancers arrived "to frighten away the evil spirits" of the wolves to the accompaniment of Chinese dragon dance percussion rhythms. I changed instruments to gamelan bonang (small gongs), on which I and another musician, Gregory

Maxedon, played two series of interlocking quarter note and eighth note rhythms. Joelysa accompanied us on tambourine and powwow drum. In the playscript, the wolves clearly signified the perils of addiction and eventually chase Nicole, a Native woman. There was no dragon in the script. Production decisions for the shadow puppet performance weakened the connections in the script to addiction, related illness and Aboriginals who disproportionately suffer from substance misuse and related disease in Vancouver's

Downtown Eastside.

Savannah Walling commented that this omission constituted a motivation for

Vancouver Moving Theatre to initiate The Shadows Project:

I was very frustrated at the decision made by the director to make the material less explicit. I felt very badly that that scene—as played—had weakened the connections in the script to addiction. I felt so strongly about this—in fact I was haunted by memories of the "undone." [That is] at the heart of why I was so strongly driven to undertake The Shadows Project [as artistic director of Vancouver Moving Theatre]. Because of what had been left undone. (Interview 18)

Another scene of the play, though, retained a very clear connection to addiction through comedic treatment of an opiated tonic in the early 1900s, jokingly named "Dr. Wizard's

Miracle Cure for all Life's Heartaches and Pains." 202

In sum, the DTES community play performances distanced difficult inner city issues by historicizing the issues, creating "entertaining" aesthetics, and deleting or withholding information that could be considered too painful and polarizing. Some lyrics about homelessness teased the listener with only a verb ("Lookin"') and no object, which was shelter. In the two previous paragraphs, I described how directors deleted visual references to substance misuse in a final, musical performance. Sometimes, but not always, producers deleted references to inner city issues to such an extent that their presence was no longer clear. Musical expressions of the imaginary and of humour (of a regional or more universal nature) arguably created a sense of levity within musical numbers about inner city issues. Other devices of entertainment during such music included camp visual aesthetics, dance movements and sonic cues.

Distancing the audience from inner city issues and historicizing such problems allowed In the Heart of a City to be less politically contentious than had there been no distancing or historicizing. Producers understood these techniques of lightness as means to facilitate social connections between diverse socioeconomic, political and cultural groups. The inclusion of different ethnic and cultural histories in the play welcomed members of various ethnicities and cultures as community participants. I described how

First Nations performers exercised autonomy as they chose to represent multiple spiritual beliefs of the Coast Salish. Inclusion of different socioeconomic groups seemed to be particularly important at a time when gentrification meant that financially comfortable home and business owners were entering into the community. The community play 203 worked to strengthen a realistic and extant community fabric. Yet values and aesthetics of inclusion also resonated with politics of gentrification, through which the presence of urban poor decreased, by giving low economic status and poverty issues a limited role in a community concept that was conveyed through dramatic and musical performance.

Performance tasks for In the Heart of a City increased the arts education levels, and the visibility and occupational status of performers who belonged to different socioeconomic groups, including the urban poor, while increasing the overall SES of the DTES in a new concept of the community that contrasted those posed by DERA, the media and scholarship.

Physical spaces undergoing an increase in economic and class status became an explicit topic in musical performance by 2006, when the pop opera Condemned presented protagonists who become homeless due to demolition of SROs for the construction of new condominiums. At the 2006 Heart of the City Festival, the relationship between artistic representations and gentrification was analyzed in two, two-hour panels. As the festival's artistic producer, Terry Hunter, said, the entire arts festival had become about

"giving voice [to] . . . who we are and who we want to be." Involved arts producers including Terry Hunter and Savannah Walling, a couple, are thinking carefully and creatively about how the Downtown Eastside can retain its core values and histories through reimagining itself while the neighbourhood's social and physical geography, and the socioeconomic status of people who live there, (may) change rapidly. Savannah

Walling worries that the socioeconomic change could be fast and extreme, creating 204 problems even for the middle class: "We are also wondering how the people who live here—including us—can continue to afford living here. . . . These are big issues for us personally. We don't own a home." (Interview 18)

To Sum Up

This chapter has explored how DTES artists, arts producers, music therapists and community members have addressed and responded to a particular type of disempowerment: low socioeconomic status. As I described, socioeconomic status is usually conceived in the social sciences as a concept and measure of up to four status sub­ types experienced by people: status of income, education, class and occupation (Adler et al. 1994; Marmot 2004). Distinguishing people or discriminating against others based on socioeconomic status occurs most intensely in social groups that value how much income one has, how much education one has, one's class position and how well regarded one's occupation is in society. Resisting SES as a way of distinguishing interpersonal power relationships can be an effective way to avoid the negative health effects of that type of power asymmetry, which like any sort of low social rank, is "hard wired" to cause psychological stress reactions that catalyze declining physiological health.

I have argued that performing arts initiatives in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside worked with notions of SES asymmetries, and negotiated them in specific ways. I presented a case study of how musical activities enhanced education, occupation and 205 income for individuals in the DTES, where the socioeconomic status of community members historically had been quite low. These activities enabled DTES individuals to experience higher education levels, income levels, employment possibilities and occupational prestige. For individuals who were experiencing transitions into poverty and away from steady employment, musical encounters provided opportunities for education, income and sometimes, paid work.

I examined diverse administrative approaches to such projects, and some community attitudes and testimonials. I considered music education and employment as music therapy, although changing SES indicators through music was rare at health agencies in the DTES. I provided a history of the substantial interest of educators and community development project managers, in changing residents' capabilities through performing arts experience and instruction. Community arts development gave inner city residents valuable knowledge and experience in music and theatre; most productions aspired to professional production values. In Vancouver's DTES, Antonio Gramsci's ideas about cultural transmission and change informed certain community performances of music and theatre, and allowed community members to acquire roles, jobs and respect in specific artistic disciplines after necessary preparation, instruction and practice. Earl

Shorris' pedagogy of the urban poor informed Western art music lessons and exposure, which instructors sometimes combined with Gramscian approaches and humanities education. One professor hypothesized that opera exposure and education increased the speed of education and class change when combined with humanities education, for 206

complex reasons involving student practice of cultural decoding, critique and comprehension. Inner city community members spoke movingly about how gaining

education and performing arts practice resulted in future instruction and performance

opportunities or in their willingness to assume greater social responsibility.

At the same time, the Downtown Eastside increasingly faced gentrification, which

implied a diversification of socioeconomic classes as upper classes displaced the poor.

The neighbourhood was pressured by a different socioeconomic transition. Some recent

musical theatre productions represented Vancouver's inner city as socially, economically

and culturally diverse, and worked to represent poverty issues in a non-controversial way,

creating a performance aesthetic meant to welcome diverse socioeconomic classes,

sociocultural groups and political contingents into the artistic viewing experience. This

approach challenged the definition of the Downtown Eastside as a place of urban poor,

which had dominated media, scholarship and political activism about the neighbourhood

for thirty-five years. Recent performances and festivals are starting to address

gentrification and socioeconomic status explicitly and critically. 207

Chapter 5. Creating Community Connections

This chapter is more about opening up possibilities for further research and music practice rather than presenting conclusive analysis on the creation of community connections through music making. Issues of control and socioeconomic status described in Chapters 3 and 4 can be thought of as sites of human change or struggle within larger scenes of musical experience that map, cut, forge or sustain social relationships that tie together an associational network of music in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Although such relationships are undeniably fraught in the DTES, it is in the potential of the musical experience to connect people that I put the most hope for applied music praxis and for applied ethnomusicology research on improving community well-being, especially in inner cities. My hope emerges for two, related reasons:

1) While the amount of control that one feels one has over one's life, and one's

socioeconomic status may affect one's health and longevity particularly in

capitalist societies, social connections can protect health when they are largely

horizontal (fairly egalitarian) rather than vertical (or hierarchical). This

phenomenon is sometimes called the "Roseto Effect,"90 and can been understood

90 The Roseto Effect takes its name from a small town of Italian immigrants in Pennsylvania, which posed a medical mystery in the 1950s. Despite having the same intensity of risk factors for heart disease as surrounding communities (smoking, eating animal fat, lack of exercise and being overweight), Roseto residents suffered less than half the number of heart attacks than people of surrounding communities. Medical researchers found only one difference in Roseto compared to surrounding areas: The townspeople expressed a remarkable amount of solidarity with their community. Friends helped friends and the community emphasized interdependence, mutual aid and cooperation. Powerful community norms against 208

to operate on social trust and social capital as it is defined by Robert Putnam, for

instance. As Kawachi and Kennedy write, such social capital refers to "aspects of

social relationships—such as the levels of trust among citizens, norms of

reciprocity, and mutual aid—which act as resources for individuals and facilitate

collective action for mutual benefit" (Kawachi and Kennedy 2002, 173). Robert

Putnam differently nuances the social outcomes: "Social capital . . . refers to

features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can

improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions" (Putnam

1993, 167). Putnam proceeds to quote James S. Coleman, from whom Putnam

borrows his notion of social capital:

Like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that would not be attainable in its absence. . . . For example, a group whose members manifest trustworthiness and place extensive trust in one another will be able to accomplish much more than a comparable group lacking that trustworthiness and trust. ... In a farming community.. . where tools are extensively borrowed and lent, the social capital allows each farmer to get his work done with less physical capital in the form of tools and equipment. (Coleman 1990 in Putnam 1993,167)

Putnam, a political scientist, demonstrated how the generation of social

capital has been essential to effective democracy in Italy (Putnam 1993), and how

the deterioration of social capital in the United States since the late 1960s and

early 1970s negatively has affected health and happiness, education and children's conspicuous consumption existed, and socioeconomic status was not important for evaluating one's worth. Towards the end of the 1960s, Roseto residents started to manifest materialistic values in conspicuous consumption. The priorities of social capital and egalitarianism eroded. Heart attacks occurred with equal frequency in Roseto and the neighbouring communities (Kawachi and Kennedy 2002, 155-158). 209

welfare, safe and productive neighbourhoods, economic prosperity and democracy

(Putnam 2000). One of his narrower points is that social capital often is a

byproduct of group activities (see Putnam 1993,170), for instance choral societies

in northern Italy (his example), or collaborating musically for the Downtown

Eastside community play (my example). In particular, "light" social acquaintances

that are not hierarchical, yet are cooperative, can protect one's health. Light social

affiliations could include those made through non-profit societies, performing arts

rehearsals and music ensembles.91 Such affiliations benefit human health to a

much greater extent than intimate relationships with close friends or family

members.

2) Health and crime issues of inner cities correlate with low levels of social capital

and horizontal social affiliation. The "father of sociology," Emile Durkheim,

demonstrated that an excess of suicides occurred in societies undergoing

dislocation and weakening of social bonds (Durkheim 1897). Psychologist Bruce

Alexander, who has offered workshops and lectures in the Downtown Eastside,

makes the same argument of social dislocation in relation to addictions of diverse

types (Alexander 2001). One observes weakened social bonds in the Downtown

Eastside and other (transcultural) Canadian inner cities where connections to

origin cultures, communities and families break down. Depression is linked to a

91 Other ways that psychosocial stressors and their effects on health can be avoided include removing the stressors altogether, or replacing social connections that may contribute to psychosocial stressors with more supportive relationships. 210 lack of social integration and social capital. Powerful correlations have been found between lack of social trust, inequalities in material standard of living (associated with SES) and high murder rates in Brazil by Celia Szwarcwald (Szwarcwald et al. 1999), and in the U.S. in Hsieh and Pugh (1993), and Wilkinson, Kawachi, and

Kennedy (1998). In view of these interrelated social and health problems, the generation and maintenance of social capital and horizontal social affiliation becomes especially important.

Music making is just one type of cooperative activity among human acquaintances that can produce social capital, which is not to say that it always does. Because making music is a cooperative activity that easily incorporates diverse cultural signifiers and systems, in addition to communicating new ones, it is a means of producing social capital that can be culturally and ethnically inclusive. This makes musical collaboration extremely useful for culturally and ethnically diverse or divisive contexts of scant social capital yet related social and health issues. If one wants seriously to consider the sociological determinants that affect human health and well-being in poly-cultural or poly-ethnic settings, as they may be negotiated through the cooperative activity of making music, it becomes essential, not optional, to approach musical activity in terms of social connections between different groups "on-the-ground," not only in terms of single ethnicities, cultures, genres, events, scenes or performers. We must consider music making as 211

a connective and potentially divisive process92 that flows through associational

networks.

Throughout this chapter, I intersperse "thick descriptions" (Geertz 1973) and fieldnotes of performances and performance-related events with analysis of social capital in the performance events. Fieldnotes and thick descriptions appear in italics directly under chapter sub-headings. My fieldnotes about the community play In the Heart of a

City illustrate occasions and processes through which social capital was demonstrated and generated. This performance ethnography explains how Robert Putnam's notion of social capital (Putnam 1993, 167) translates into the musical process, but also documents the most important element of the community play to Downtown Eastside performers: creating community connections. Through elaborating Etienne Wenger's notion of

"communities of practice" (Wenger 1998, 86, 124), I identify one type of social focus that is most efficient for generating and demonstrating social capital through music performance.

I also describe different social foci that may be co-present in performance, and highlight examples in the community play and the DTES pop opera Condemned. Because musical performance, including theatre and dance, can facilitate, stop or communicate multiple social connections at the same time in different aspects of the musical expression, how music produces and maintains social capital is a complex and sometimes

92 In considering music making as an interaction, we must admit that human interactions can enact and produce social divisions. 212 vexed process. This is especially true of a place such as Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where power hierarchies of control and socioeconomic status are at play in different aspects of musical expressions. In my discussion of the community play and the opera

Condemned, I show that how the artistic and administrative intent of community

(capacity) building actually unfolds in such DTES projects becomes a fragmented process that in some ways stays outside the control of facilitators and is tied up in socioeconomic change of gentrification. I contrast such fragmented artistic cooperation with a thick description of popular music jams at the Health Contact Centre, which nurture social capital within one social focus and one constituency. By asking specific questions about how different configurations of community coagulate in musical performance, I theorize how social factionalism and conflict may be enacted and healed through music making. In so doing, I build on the scholarly accounts of music and conflictive events mentioned in the last paragraph of the sub-section titled "Memorializing DTES Community Members and Events through Narratives about Repertoire."

1. In the Heart of a City, the Downtown Eastside community play

Japanese Hall, December 9,2003

Kat Norris and I are changing into our costumes before a performance. I compliment Kat again on her singing technique for a song from her Coast Salish ancestry, particularly the Lyackson First Nation on Valdez Island, which is one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. Her father was from the Nez Perce people based on the Columbia River Plateau in Washington State. In the play, the song is meant to convey Northwest Coast peoples respect for the cedar tree which provided raw materials for clothing, containers, housing and rope before 213

European contact. Kat's singing is "solid"—her voice strong, timing, always impeccable. I explain that I am writing about the play and can I ask her about the song?

The song, she says, is especially significant for her. It is a healing song and was sung by her great-grandmother. Kat has lupus. She offers empowering insights about her health struggles in a newsletter column that she writes for the Kahtou Newspaper, an Aboriginal newspaper based in Sechelt, B. C. "One night," Kat explained, "I felt so tired, even breathing was tiring. The lights in my apartment seemed so bright and hazy, and I felt like I was dying!" She called a friend on the phone. He asked her whether she had a medicine song to help her. "I couldn't remember any songs at all and then all of a sudden, to my right side I could hear a woman singing a song!" Her friend said to sing the song and do something that would help her to feel normal. She did. She sang the song and did some dishes. Soon the heaviness and fatigue lifted, and she felt better. Later, Kat's mom told her that this was a song that was sung by her great-grandmother when Kat's mom, siblings or grandfather was sick. (Story printed with permission.)

During this dressing room conversation, Kat Norris and I built social trust that evolved into friendship and mutual respect that we share today. When cast and crew were asked, in a play evaluation survey, what they liked most about taking part in In the Heart of a City, many mentioned elements of social relationships that implied social trust:

"camaraderie," "being loved" and having a chance to "be listened to" or "included."

Often participants accompanied such statements with comments about how the play allowed them to learn, experience or reinforce new roles in community or society, which as I discussed, may affect socioeconomic status.

Cast and crew described how social trust was created and expressed among participants from diverse social, cultural and economic backgrounds. As play artists and administrators welcomed participants from different genders, cultures and ethnicities, 214 they also tried to include performers from different socioeconomic backgrounds who had some connection to the DTES. Some participants lived in the DTES while others worked, socialized, volunteered or had relatives in the neighbourhood. Remarkably, actors who volunteered for the community play were disproportionately urban poor, even though participants in the play who attended thirty-two outreach workshops were from diverse segments of the community (see Marie 2004, 5-7). Trust also was experienced by musicians, directors and other theatre professionals who brought artistic training, expertise and a variety of socioeconomic histories to the production. A consulting firm,

MarieCo, distributed the survey, then compiled and analyzed survey results in dialogue with the play's aims, interviews with play artists, administrators and writers as well as documentation of the writing, rehearsal and performance process, publishing them in an evaluation for the City of Vancouver Parks Board, the municipal government body that oversees the Carnegie Community Centre. The reader remembers that the Carnegie co- produced the community play with Vancouver Moving Theatre.

One actor, who responded to the survey, said that she found meaningfulness in the process of building social affiliations of trust:

The acting, the camaraderie with all the other members, the rehearsals were fun. Our scene developed a close connection as we worked together. . . . [The scene was called "City of Sighs & Tears."] I really enjoyed my costume and singing and dancing on stage.

Another participant mentioned, in particular, receiving love and kindness from others during rehearsals. For her, such approaches to relationship paralleled the spirit with which 215 the play's writers and directors included diverse communities in artistic representations.

The participant said:

I like the beauty in this play, so full of love, kindness and creativity. Things that happen in this project takes a lot of courage. I also enjoy making friends with the wonderful artists and being loved. I like the music and how the directors in the play never yelled or scolded anyone. And I like being part of a historical project that is so moving, [sic.]

Demonstrations of trust in interpersonal relations were important to others who needed to feel listened to. A First Nations actor wrote that the most import thing for her was:

Meeting people and having to express myself without judgment. As a First Nations woman I feel many barriers that affects my journey. (Marie 2004, 22-23)

A City of Vancouver employee, Valerie Methot, also documented the production for a comprehensive monograph funded by the Vancouver Parks Board, and Vancouver's

Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. Sue Blue, a First Nations woman, said the following to Methot about her community play experience:

Everyone listened to me. I'm not used to that. I love acting; I can be someone else. Some of the story reminded me of my family. I feel lost now that it's over. (Methot 2004, 100)

Methot summarized the process through which still other manifestations of trust emerged during rehearsals and performances:

For [some,] the most magical part was meeting new people and how they worked together—friends and strangers coming together, nationalities coming together to create something special. They talked about the solidarity of the players, the acceptance between people—trust, respect, support, group spirit, and discovery— like a society of the fiiture. (Methot 2004, 107) 216

Stephen Lytton, who played the Old One character, spoke to the relevance of what he called "building bridges":

I want to nourish that we, as a people, came together and succeeded in that mandate of building bridges. The weight of that production, I realized, was an enormous task to fill for the entire production—being where it's coming from— the Downtown Eastside. And the failure of it would have been far more damaging because of where it's come from. And that we built trust with one another without realizing, as time went on—we learned to trust one another." (Methot 2004, 109, 135)

Such demonstrations of social trust, cooperation and building bridges might also accurately be called instances of social capital, which includes intangible social outcomes of cooperative interactions, because interactions between community play participants on the whole, were continuing within the community. The cooperative interactions produced social resources that many of us used and experienced. After the production, for example,

I was and felt safer in Downtown Eastside because I had the presence and guidance of friends and acquaintances who I met during the play, as mentioned in Chapter 1. Steven

Lytton took special care to teach me how to protect myself on the streets through the manner in which I walked; numerous play participants walked me to my car in efforts to ensure my safety after evening music events unrelated to the play. I contributed to such social capital shared between play collaborators when I drove former play participants and other DTES residents home from community gatherings. I stored the belongings of homeless people in the trunk of my car while we were played music together. In such ways, participants in the community play used intangible outcomes of musical and theatrical interactions to accomplish efficiently goals of safety. There are many other 217 examples of how collaborating artistically for the play produced the sort of acquaintanceship or friendship in which the participants helped each other to do things in the future (See footnote 93).

Social capital initially emerged in the DTES community play, for instance, when I and other orchestra members sang along with cast members, who were amateur vocalists, in order to help them to sound better onstage. During In the Heart of a City, I described in a fieldnote how I contributed artistically to actors. I assisted female actors to sing a harmony to the Ukrainian Canadian melody that Savannah Walling adapted to her lyrics titled "My Young Wife":

I was not at rehearsals for the anti-Asian riot scene until the rehearsal before tech, so I didn't hear the music for "My Young Wife" until the technical rehearsals and performances. On the third or fourth show, I started singing along very softly. The melody is quite beautiful; singing helped me to focus my energy on the play and to release any emotional heaviness that I was feeling due to the playtext. By mid- run, I was singing strongly a harmony performed by some female actors. I felt that I could support the women, who usually could not sing on pitch. I could. Joelysa [the assistant musical director] was the only woman in the orchestra singing strongly, but she sang a melody performed by men. The women's harmony needed vocal support, too. (Fieldnote, December 9,2003)

In this gesture, Joelysa and I gave musically to the actors through performance relationships, in which I was not explicitly ranked as a volunteer, but Joelysa was as a musical director. Performance collaboration through ranked social roles raises the question of how such vertical flows of information may affect experiences and sustenance of social trust. Robert Putnam comments that a "vertical network, no matter how dense and no matter how important to its participants, cannot sustain social trust and 218 cooperation. Vertical flows of information are often less reliable than horizontal flows, in

part because the subordinate husbands information as a hedge against exploitation"

(Putnam 1993, 174). Hierarchical and egalitarian types of interactions intermingle in the

creation of theatre music in Canada. Although such creation typically is collaborative and

a haven of individual musical agency, the director of a theatre production will typically

direct the musical director(s), who in turn, direct(s) any musicians. What balance of

"hierarchical" and "vertical" social exchanges allows social trust to be sustained?

If the actors reciprocated my and Joelysa's contributions to them, the interaction

became mutual aid and created social trust, at very least. Putnam notes that reciprocity is

one of the important social norms that undergirds trust. As Putnam writes:

Reciprocity is of two sorts, sometimes called "balanced" (or "specific") and "generalized" (or "diffuse"). Balanced reciprocity refers to a simultaneous exchange of items of equivalent value . . . Generalized reciprocity refers to a continuing relationship of exchange that is at any given time unrequited or unbalanced, but that involves mutual expectations that a benefit granted now should be repaid in the future. (Putnam 1993,172)93

Of course, the reciprocation of artistic ideas normally is essential to collaboration and

performance communication between musicians, actors, dancers and other artists who

93 The actors who reciprocated my musical help or humour did not necessarily "give back" musically or in the performance context (if they always perceived my contribution). I noticed most their generalized reciprocity as they collaborated with me in the future, or cared for me offstage, for example. An actor called R. H., I and several others tried to start a grassroots theatre company after the community play. Unfortunately, the initiative failed. After the play, R. H. always gave me a big hug when he saw me in the DTES. He looked out for me and made me feel safe, along with many other collaborators for the play. Elwin Xie and his wife Fanna Yee, actors in the anti-Asian riot scene, were always kind and courteous when I saw them in the neighbourhood. Susan Poshan Wong, a "Chinese Mother" in the riot scene, helped me to find some Chinese history resources for this monograph. Other collaborators cared for me by bringing me food, chocolates, cards, CDs or flowers of encouragement during rehearsals or performance breaks. Although I can most accurately write of my experience, many other participants experienced generalized reciprocity and social support, some of which I detailed in the previous chapter. 219 perform together (although as noted, communications between directors and performers may be more hierarchical). In this way, social trust has been one possible byproduct of artistic collaboration for many DTES group performances, such as IV the DTES, Rare

Earth Arias, In the Heart of a City, Through the People's Voice, The Shadows Project and the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival. Social trust also was an important byproduct of popular music jams such as those at the Health Contact Centre, Carnegie

Community Centre and music therapy programs.

Musical gifts that were reciprocated musically or non-musically, and in a balanced or generalized fashion demonstrated mutual aid while generating social trust in the group.

Some such social capital buoyed me and other community play participants through rehearsals or performances. For example, during one performance intermission

Jim Sands, who played guitar, dulcimer and slide whistle, said that he liked best my "Jimi Hendrix" violin playing, sul ponticello94 and very distorted, in the shadow puppet scene that illustrated a nightmare. I challenged Jim to play his slide whistle "Jimi Hendrix" style so as to extend the compliment in jest. (This was locally appropriate as Jimi Hendrix's grandmother and aunt had lived in the DTES. As a child, Jimi Hendrix often visited them and sometimes went to school in Vancouver's East End.) After intermission, Jim played the slide whistle with renewed energy and extremely loudly in a scene that required much concentration. Jim had to coordinate dips and rises in pitch on his slide whistle with many, specific onstage cues (i.e., bottle throwing by certain characters only in a scene about opiated tonics in the early 1900s). Jim and I built energy of cooperation, and social capital, as he responded verbally to my musicianship, I commented on his observations and he responded musically to my comments. (Fieldnote, December 2003)

94 As the reader may know, sul ponticello means playing near the bridge of a bowed string instrument. 220

Other musical aid or exchange made the performances perhaps more musically successful, fun, or easy to execute. Social capital meant resources of social trust and partnerships that facilitated safety and security for myself and others, but also enabled future artistic collaborations with DTES residents, as mentioned in footnote 93.

Cooperating musically and dramatically for the community play enabled future cooperation because as Putnam writes:

Trust lubricates cooperation. The greater the level of trust within a community, the greater the likelihood of cooperation. And cooperation itself breeds trust. (Putnam 1993,171)95

The conversation between Kat and me, and the reported sense of "camaraderie," "being loved" and having a chance to "be listened to" were all evidence of the social capital, particularly social trust that resulted from cooperative interactions.

Building Social Capital through Communities of Practice

In DTES projects that have developed community and capacity through education in the performing arts, for example In the Heart of a City, participants built and expressed trust amongst themselves during artistic collaboration, and through a "community" that

95 Putnam notes that "[s]ocial networks allow trust to become transitive and spread: I trust you, because I trust her and she assures me that she trusts you" (Putnam 1993, 168). See Putnam's Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy for a comparative discussion on how personal trust becomes social trust in small, close-knit communities versus larger, more complex settings (Putnam 1993, 163-185). In small communities, social trust is generated through what Bernard Williams calls "thick trust"—trust based on intimate familiarity with one individual. In larger social groups, social trust emerges through more indirect channels, particularly norms of reciprocity and civic engagement. 221 organized around a common project where participants shared histories of learning. In other words, social trust and social capital emerged through a "community of practice" in its original meaning forged by Etienne Wenger. Wenger defined a "community of practice" as a mid-level analytical category in which community is defined according to practice or shared histories of learning rather than a social configuration, institution, organization or moment (Wenger 1998, 86, 124). The DTES arts development projects that I discuss were not momentary communities, as participants met together over a period of weeks or months for rehearsals and in preparation for collaborative performances. Wenger's theoretical foundation can inform different "community types" that have diverse philosophical roots, but also may be understood as types of communities of practice, for example: communities of action, communities of purpose, communities of circumstance, communities of interest and communities of position. Each such community type is defined as being organized around the action or adjective used to describe it. In the same spirit, we could invent many other community types described by the main organizing feature of their associational networks.

Especially important to generating social trust and capital, I argue, are action- oriented communities of practice. Social capital is generated through action-oriented communities of practice in which largely horizontal (or egalitarian) social exchanges enable the action. In the Heart of a City generated social capital and trust through a community of action that emerged among volunteer community performers who together engaged in the learning activity of rehearsing and performing musical theatre over a 222 period of nine weeks. By contrast, non-action-oriented communities of practice are less efficient in generating social capital because the action of cooperating is not at their heart.

To extend Putnam's observations about "vertical" flows of information: different community types also may be less efficient in sustaining social capital when they involve hierarchical social relationships, for example of gender, ethnicity, age, health status or socioeconomic status. Because musical arts (including theatre, dance and other musical expressions) so often represent social configurations, and contemporary capitalist society is intrinsically hierarchical, artistic representations may well project a community type that, when compared to a group of people collaborating artistically, cannot generate social capital as easily.96 Multiple community types may be present in different facets of the rehearsal and presentation of music and other performing arts.

Although these observations pertain to performing arts in general, they have special significance for DTES music initiatives that struggle with the destructive effects of social hierarchies on the urban poor. Since issues that affect the well-being of the urban poor, for instance, depression, suicide, homicide, addictions and related disease, are powerfully influenced by the lack of social capital (i.e., social trust, norms and networks) and egalitarianism, it becomes essential to question whether communities of musical performance action are able to produce social capital via horizontal social exchanges or not. A community of performance action will be present. We need to ask the following

96 This is not to say, though, that a community type represented or otherwise engaged in musical performance will not or is not intended to produce social capital through a community of action in the future. 223 six interrelated questions, and perhaps others, about musical collaborations that take place through the community of performance action, over a period of time and in situations of low social capital:

a) Are one or more community types present that are not primarily organized

around the actions of rehearsing and performing? In other words, are there

community focuses other than the community of action, which generates social

capital as a by-product? Additional community types may diminish or increase the

amount of social capital generated, depending on how they distract or support the

creation of cooperative social connections during artistic collaboration.

b) If more than one type of community of practice is present in the performance,

who are the constituents of those multiple community types? Because musical

performance can engage and represent different social groups during the

preparation and presentation of one performance project, it is possible that

multiple constituencies and multiple community types are active in one

performance. Conflicting notions of social affiliation may well be played out in a

single performance. This does not necessarily affect the intensity of social capital

produced through the act of rehearsing and performing, but it may affect concepts

and realities of a social group in the future.

c) Do community types other than the community of action "compete" for the

attention of performance participants in ways that detract from a community of

action and the creation of social capital? 224

d) Are social hierarchies strongly connected to the community of action, and do

they frustrate the creation of social trust and social capital? Social hierarchies

may infuse a community of performance action in many ways, not least through

additional community types that are co-present in rehearsals and performances.

e) Since health and crime issues associated with inner cities primarily involve the

urban poor, it becomes especially important to question who makes up a

community of action during musical rehearsals and performances. Is it the most

oppressed inner city residents who suffer such issues, or not?

These questions may help to determine whether social capital is generated through rehearsing and performing music, for instance among inner city residents who suffer health issues that correlate positively with low amounts of social capital and horizontal social affiliation. The questions also may highlight community agendas that conflict.

While an associational network of music is formed through individual and multiple musical encounters, the type of action and actions that form the main focus or foci of the encounters, and who is involved in these actions, will indicate something about the ability of the encounters to generate social capital and related well-being among specific social groups.

I have organized the remainder of this chapter around the above questions, which I ask variously in view of 1) In the Heart of a City, 2) Condemned and 3) some popular music initiatives in the Downtown Eastside, particularly jams at the Health Contact 225

Centre. In the first two examples, but not the third, I observed multiple community types with different constituencies that were engaged in single performances.

Observing Multiple Community Types with Different Constituencies

Engaged in Single Performances

a) In the performance, are one or more community types present that are not primarily organized around the actions of rehearsing and performing?

Upon examining more closely In the Heart of a City, one sees that at the same time that social capital was generated through a community of action, the play's artistic representations portrayed a community of circumstance, which I defined in the first paragraph of this section as referring to a community driven by social position, circumstance or life experiences. Yes, in the DTES community play's performance, at least one community type was present that was not primarily organized around the actions of rehearsing and performing. Other community types existed outside of the actual rehearsals and performances, such as a community of writing for the research and writing of the playscript. I distinguish these groups because they involved distinct groups of people and distinct collaborative tasks that sometimes did and sometimes did not overlap.

Distinctions between groups involved in making the production also were made by play producers. Savannah Walling, artistic director of In the Heart of a City, noted 226

There was also a community of workshop participants (forty-three workshops for 1195 participants). There was a community of actors for public readings of the play-in-process (thirty volunteers). There was a community of parade participants who performed in two Chinese New Year's parades and the Carnegie Heart of the City parade (fifty volunteers) [which generated interest in the play]. There was a community of builders who worked on the set, and makers who worked on the puppets and costumes. (Interview 18)

b) If more than one type of community of practice is present in the performance, who are the constituents of those multiple community types?

In Chapter 4, I described how circumstances of suffering defined new social geographies of the Downtown Eastside, which were represented artistically in the

Downtown Eastside community play, the Heart of the City Festival and other DTES performances. Such a community of circumstance defined the Downtown Eastside community to include all individuals that have inhabited (i.e., frequented, resided in, worked on) the site of the original Downtown Vancouver yet share histories of marginalization or struggle for survival. In this definition of the DTES, urban poor took a smaller role than in the initial definition posed by the Downtown Eastside Residents

Association, which centred on inadequately housed people. The community of circumstance represented in the community play, which I detailed in the previous chapter, could be considered a community of practice because the play's characters "learned" as they developed.

Contrasting constituencies were involved in each of the two community types present in the community play. There was a difference between a) all of the different 227 ethnic groups, political groups and sub-communities that made up the "Downtown

Eastside community" represented artistically in the play's community of circumstance; and b) who made up the living community of performance action in rehearsals and performances (i.e., cast and crew). For example, the actors, who comprised the bulk of performers in the play, were over 90% urban poor or residents of the greater DTES, although only three of the eight musicians in the play lived in the neighbourhood. Most of the comments excerpted above from the play evaluation survey were made by urban poor.

They valued the creation of social capital, trust and intimacy through the act of making musical theatre together. By contrast, the community of circumstance represented artistically involved fewer poor people, proportionally speaking.

c) Do community types other than the community of action "compete "for the attention of performance participants in ways that detract from a community of action and the creation of social capital?

As described, the social geography represented artistically in the play resonated with a future, gentrified Downtown Eastside through imagining a community that was socioeconomically diverse and somewhat emotionally distanced from inner city problems such as addictions and homelessness. Some community performers argued that aesthetic distancing in the performances allowed social connections between themselves and audiences from different communities. Above, I have been discussing "bonding" social capital, which is "inward" looking and reinforces exclusive identities and homogeneous 228 groups. The community members, on the other hand, hoped to create "bridging" social capital through the artistic representation. Bridging social capital is "outward" looking and brings together people of diverse social factions. (But when can performance actually create bridging social capital? The community play was not overtly collaborative for audience members, excluding one celebrity guest in each show.97 Play producers felt that creating bridging social capital was beyond the scope of the production.)

Although artists and administrators had control over artistic representations of the

Downtown Eastside community, they did not have much control over the community constituencies developed by volunteer performers since the actors (e.g., urban poor who wanted performing arts experience and education) self-selected, to some extent. In the

Heart of a City ended up being an event where different types of communities of practice developed different community constituencies that in some ways were conceptually opposed given the questions of gentrification at hand. However, the community of action was the main community type in which urban poor participated, therefore generating social capital in the "indigenous" DTES community fabric. The community of circumstance present in the play did not meaningfully distract living participants from collaborating artistically, but through artistic imagination, the play nurtured a contrasting community membership that could have future influence.

97 The character Shill, who is addicted to a "miracle cure" for life's heartaches and pains, actually early 20th-century opiates, was played in different performances by different politicians, media personalities and cultural brokers: Larry Campbell, Jim Green, Libby Davies, Heather Deal, Jennie Kwan, Bill Richardson and Ellen Woods worth. 229 d) Are social hierarchies or associated community types strongly connected to the community of performance action, and do they frustrate the creation of social trust and social capital?

As I described in Chapter 4, many music presentations in Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside have reconfigured individuals' socioeconomic status or indicators of individuals' socioeconomic status. I now consider question (c) in relation to the local pop opera

Condemned. Rehearsals and performances of Condemned involved at least four types of communities of practice with variously defined constituencies.

2. Condemned, a DTES pop opera

Firehall Arts Centre, June 24, 2007

Professionalized remount of 2006 premiere

This is the first semi-professional musical theatre production promoted as being performed entirely by actors of the Downtown Eastside community. Lights dim over a black proscenium stage, highlighting documentary video footage of a housing meeting at Vancouver City Hall, projected on a scrim, centre stage rear. The documentary shows a meeting at Vancouver's City Hall and associated protests about low-income housing, which introduce the musical's message that the poor are being evicted from their homes in a "shady deal" between politicians and developers. The City is building fewer new units of low-income housing than the number promised by city politicians. "Jimmy the Binner, " played by Mike Richter, introduces and closes the forty-five-minute show with a sung perspective of the homeless. Dramatic conflict centres around Joe, played by Luke Day, finding himself homeless. The apartment building where he lives has been condemned for razing and redevelopment. Anna, a prostitute (acted by Lu Davika [formerly Lou Parsons]), comforts him only to find herself in the same situation. A researcher, Annika (played by Rachel Davis), videotapes evidence that a real estate agent (Sophia Friegang) and developer (Rosemary Collins) have fabricated a story about a crystal methamphetamine lab in Joe's building in order to justify 230

condemning it. Urban poor and their supporters collaborate in efforts to protest such housing issues, expressing excitement that they may be able to use the video in court. However, bulldozers are already destroying Joe's home. This story is conveyed through sung text accompanied by a band featuring piano, electric bass, flute, trumpet, tenor sax, euphonium, violin and clarinet.

What impresses me is how entertaining and celebratory this tragic narrative is rendered through an upbeat musical aesthetic. While scenes of conflict unfold at a slower tempo, all but one scene makes use of dotted rhythms, syncopations, jazz bass, marches (complete with fanfares), quick waltzes or a variety of other sonic elements that lend an "upbeat" musical atmosphere. I am impressed, too, by the increased professionalism of this musical compared to its first production by most of the same fourteen cast members, in October 2006. Lu Davika's singing voice has improved dramatically. Her rhythm and pitch are very precise; her vibrato steadily undulates; her voice never seems strained; her voice seems to have more diaphragm support. It had always projected well. Rosemary Collins' singing voice also is markedly better. It also has more support. Her diction is good; her pitch is good. With Earle Peach, Mike Richter has co-written his final vocal solo, which neither has a diatonic tonality nor employs many of the "upbeat" musical elements listed above. He executes extremely angular melodies against a harmonically disjunct jazz bassline with admirable precision, as the rest of the cast snaps its fingers.

By 2006, a group of DTES community artists had continued to build around the purpose to professionalize their singing and acting skills through rehearsing and performing musical theatre and plays that heavily use music. As described in Chapter 4, skill building can be interpreted as a way of enhancing educational status, which informs socioeconomic status. The reader will remember that local performers improved their singing and acting skills as they volunteered to perform in multiple musical theatre productions like In the Heart of a City (2003), Through the People's Voice (2004) and 231

The Shadows Project (2005-2007). In an email to me, Savannah Walling listed the DTES musical theatre productions in which singers in Condemned previously had participated:

Singers for Condemned include Lou Davika ([formerly Parsons] she performed in Through the People's Voice); Sophia Freigang (The Shadow's Project), Gena Thompson (DTES community play); Rosemary Collins (DTES community play); Naomi Narvey (Through the People's Voice and The Shadow's Project); Diane Le Clair (The Shadow's Project); Joan Morelli (DTES community play; Through the People's Voice; The Shadow's Project); Wendy Chew (DTES community play; Rare Earth Arias [writer]; The Shadow's Project); Luke Day (DTES community play); Tom Quirk (Through the People's Voice and The Shadow's Project)-, Mike Richter. Mike has performed as musician in all the Heart of the City Festivals and sang and played music for The Shadows Project?*

The above musicians formed part of a community of purpose—a social group oriented around achieving a shared objective (of skill improvement and to produce a "good" piece). Others important to this community of purpose were the arts administrators that nurtured the professionalization of artistic skills in the Downtown Eastside. Some artists and administrators included Savannah Walling and Terry Hunter (of Vancouver Moving

Theatre), Michael Clague (director of the Carnegie Community Centre from 1999-2005),

Ethel Whitty (director of the Carnegie Community Centre, 2005- ) and Sharon Kravitz

(president of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver). Still others could include the directors for the productions listed above, whose job it was to frame community performance and writing in ways that often insisted on a certain skill level (as described for the DTES community play). The director of the first production of Condemned was

Susanna Uchatius. As noted, the director of the second production was John Cooper.

98 Some singers, such as Debbie Gosselin (a participant in the Carnegie Choir and Street Band), performed in the 2006 production, but not in the 2007 production. Jason Logan (/ V the DTES) performed in the 2006 production and wrote the libretto with six others, yet was replaced by Luke Day in 2007. 232

Earle Peach served as musical director for all performances, coaching the singers, conducting the band, selecting the band musicians and composing the musical score.

Community writers, who created the lyrics and storyline, linked into the community of professional purpose if rehearsals required reworking of their texts. The writers included

Jason Logan, Patrick Foley, Leith Harris, James Elmore, Grant Chancey and Mike

Richter, who were mentored by playwright Joan Skogan.

The community of (professional performance) purpose became a community of action as performers, directors, administrators and other collaborators variously worked together in order to create the first production and edit the second production for remounting. Both productions were sponsored by the Carnegie Community Centre, but not Vancouver Moving Theatre. Through the community of action, the performers pursued individual interests in ways that essentially extended and developed the goal of professionalism. One participant told me, proudly, that she had always wanted to act and sing at a professional or semi-professional level, and that she seemed to be achieving her goal. Savannah Walling mentioned that in part to facilitate such dreams, more time was spent rehearsing the music for Condemned than for any other musical theatre production in the Downtown Eastside so far.

When performers in Condemned pursued skill building through a community of action, especially in 2006, this created social tensions that deterred the generation of social capital. Actors, who lacked experience and familiarity with professional performance protocols, complained that artistic collaboration became fraught with 233 arguments over proper "professional" procedure, attitudes and behaviour. An ability to develop social capital in the group was diminished by in-fighting over how and whether to take on stratified performance roles, which were perceived as differently necessary or not necessary by the performers, directors and administrators. While hierarchy in the community of action may have frustrated the creation of social capital, especially the creation of social trust, an equally valid interpretation of the opera production process is that it allowed participants who had performed or worked together previously to use social capital that they had gained together in the past, in order to build professional skills, even as doing so frayed the group's potential to build social trust. Inversely, characters represented artistically in Condemned collaborate to resist the demolition of low-income housing via a community of action that might produce social capital in real life. As the fictional characters collaborate, they demonstrate social capital (social trust, norms and networks) by showing care and support for one another. However, they fail to stop the demolition of one building and seem condemned to homelessness.

Still other types of communities of practice were articulated through the performance of Condemned. The opera's writers chose to represent a community of circumstance through characters who suffered low-income housing issues related to the intensifying gentrification of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The opera's director, musical director and community writers chose to represent a community of (political) interest. Through the documentary film excerpt and the gentrification protest scene described above, these directors and writers underscored and framed the story's anti- 234

gentrification politics. At the Firehall Arts centre, audience members cheered, clapped, booed or hissed if they agreed or disagreed with the opera narrative's clear political

message.

Yet the "upbeat" musical arrangement detracted from difficult emotions of the

painful and sad narrative about losing one's home. Earle Peach, who wrote most of the

musical setting, inserted catchy and feisty choruses, for example, the recurrent "Rise up

people rise up / Join us in our fight / We believe that to have a home is a fundamental

right..." Another ensemble number featured the text, "Stop the war on the poor / Stop

the war on the poor / Gives us back our homes / Open up your door . . ." The singers

enunciated each line of text on one pitch, yet the final word of each phrase moved up in

pitch to cumulatively outline a minor chord. As the cast forms a chorus of protest and

political solidarity, the harmony and melody created a powerful sense of levity. Did this

musical distancing give less (emotional) voice to the urban poor, or did it appropriately

celebrate the musical accomplishments of people in the cast? Did catchy choruses like

"Stop the War on the Poor" build solidarity around DTES issues, and the potential for

social capital and cooperation between different communities in the audience and cast?

Was this music an attempt to build "bridging" social capital?

Compared to rehearsals and performances of the DTES community play (in 2003),

which engaged DTES community artists in creating one main type of community of

practice, particularly a community of action, rehearsals and performances of Condemned

(2006-2007) engaged community artists in creating four community types: a community 235 of action, a community of purpose, a community of circumstance and a community of interest. In the community of action, performers rehearsed and performed Condemned. A community of purpose to improve performing arts skills involved the same people over nearly four years. The show represented artistically a community of circumstance of people suffering due to inadequate and condemned housing, while performer-audience relationships potentially encouraged a community of political interest regarding the housing problem. DTES community members differently participated in these same four community types during performances of The Shadows Project (2005-2007). During

Condemned, though, a quest for acting and singing skills, which imply increased status of education and occupation, was important to all of the community types including the community of action, community of circumstance and community of interest that were activated through the performances. Socioeconomic hierarchy took increased importance in a community of performance action, and in the non-action-oriented communities.

e) Since health and crime issues associated with inner cities primarily involve the urban poor, it also becomes important to question who makes up a community of action during musical performance. Does the community of action consist of the most oppressed inner city residents who suffer such issues, or not?

During rehearsals and performances of Condemned, were the community participants extremely socioeconomically depressed? The status of performers in

Condemned became a topic of a heated debate on two Internet blogs. The following 236 statement agitated the debate: The cast of Condemned is mainly homeless and low income people, with little or no experience on stage. The statement came from a Canadian

Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article. According to an online publication, the

Downtown Eastside Enquirer, the article "duped" readers into believing the statement through misrepresenting who performed Condemned. Bloggers responded angrily. One blogger wrote,

I disagree with your statement: "all of us are low income." Do you really consider these people to be low income? The lead actor/singer who, in her other life, is dog trainer and lives with her physician husband and two kids. The woman who owns a home in Burnaby, where she lives with her child and long term steady, stable husband. The woman who owns a condo in Kits[ilano, a middle class neighbourhood] and has stashed her inheritance in a trust. The woman who works as a welfare advocate for a local church, [sic.] (NowPublic Blog 2006)

Another rebuttal to the CBC article began:

Don't believe everything you read. Particularly what you read about Condemned: A work in progress, musical theatre about tenants evicted from a rooming house slated for demolition, which had a three day run at Carnegie Hall last weekend. Whether you're reading the CBC website, the Vancouver Courier newspaper, the glossy catalogue for the Heart of the City Festival of which Condemned was a part, or even the Program you were handed as you walked into the performance, be skeptical....

[The] Condemned program notes: "The presentation of Condemned - a work in progress is the first time that community members actually took it upon themselves to create their own opera." A reader is left with the impression that most of the participants in the opera are Downtown Eastside residents.

Sucker.

This same blogger insisted that only one homeless person sang in the opera, although it agreed with the CBC article that actors were low income: 237

There is only one performer in the cast who is homeless and he is homeless by choice. He is a man who reportedly has a Bachelor of Science degree and has held down decent jobs. But he's now on a sort of spiritual quest and has detached himself from material things, including money. DTES residents talk about him as though he's one of the wonders of the world: "He doesn't get welfare. He lives without money." He eats at free places. He sleeps in shelters.

The CBC is accurate in claiming that many in the cast are low income. Certainly the DTES residents who acted and sang in the opera are low income, with the exception of one who works as a welfare advocate for a church. But they are the upper crust of the welfare poor, what an organizer at End Legislated Poverty referred to as "the high-functioning poor"—the better educated poor with the social skills to negotiate their way through bureaucracy to get the highest welfare rates and to network themselves into social housing. In fact, all of these actors, with the exception of the welfare-free man, are securely ensconced in social housing apartments. (Reliable Sources 2006)

A third blogger critiqued the above representation of performers' housing status:

Depends on who you ask, but there's more than one homeless person in the opera. ... It is not true that no band members have an address in the [DTES]. At least two [of eight] do....

I count a community member as someone who participates in the community, not necessarily someone with an address in the city-defined boundaries of the [DTES], What about people who grew up here, but who no longer have an address? Do they cease to be community members the day they move out?

A fourth blogger also vouched for an inclusive definition of community, typing "ALL the cast, musicians, director of music, writers & the writer/mentor[s], ARE members of this community and part of our extended family." A fifth respondent remarked that performers of higher socioeconomic status were "pimp[s] living off the avails of impoverishment" (NowPublic Blog 2006). All of the show's performers and directors were paid honourariums. While the fifth blogger's statement may seem classist and mean- spirited, it is part of a larger argument heard frequently among the poor and homeless in 238 the Downtown Eastside. Many feel that social activities, health services, food programs and temporary housing for the very poor, while important to their day-to-day life quality and survival, benefit economically the employees of urban improvement initiatives, but rarely lift the poor out of impoverishment, therefore reinforcing class hierarchies.

The bloggers' statements together make clear that the socioeconomic status of community participants and beneficiaries of music initiatives had become a sensitive topic by 2006. After all, gentrification is not just a geographical process, but also a social one whereby lower class roles and social processes (for example, artistic and musical ones, with associated hierarchies or lack thereof) are replaced by social roles and processes (including associated hierarchies or lack thereof) that normally correspond with socioeconomic privilege.

Sometimes permanent enhancement of socioeconomic status took a prominent role in the communities of practice involved in Condemned, but also in many other music initiatives in the DTES, as documented in Chapter 4. Such class transformation has not been counterbalanced by an equal number of music jams, rehearsals or performances that solely develop the "indigenous" community fabric of the Downtown Eastside, complete with its markers and difficulties of low socioeconomic status. In light of the health benefits of building social capital and horizontal affiliation, I must argue that there is great value in doing so, particularly for urban poor. 239

At least three music contexts have built and sustained social capital among urban poor while not providing training:99 the Health Contact Centre's popular music jam, and jams at the Carnegie Community Centre's cabaret and street music program. I consider below the Health Contact Centre's popular music jam and cabaret evenings at the

Carnegie Community Centre. For these events, I must answer "No" to question (a) about whether one or more different community types are present during music making, in addition to a community of action. The focus has been on connecting urban poor with each other.

3. Health Contact Centre, popular music jam

October 8, 2004

As usual, the room is jammed full of about thirteen men, gaggling, gabbing, shouting, getting excited over the songs that will be played. They, sweaty, kind of smelly, one man making sure that one of three women there doesn't fall over. This hunched over lady with a cane who wears a lot of turquoise eyeliner and is on a trip, tips her head closer and closer to the ground. I also help her: "Sweetie, can you sit up? " "Oh, sorry." She tilts over again. On a flit of alertness, says, "Where is my cane? " "On the chair beside you." She cannot locate the chair.

Leo (pseud.) is there, high on crystal meth, negative, excessively negative and more violent than I have ever seen him. He is skinny, his skin is really red and chapped, and he has cut off the cloth toes of his somewhat expensive runners. He comes in and starts yelling at "Dean" (pseud.). Dean is a fairly experienced guitarist who semi-commands the room. Dean knows almost every chord, is not high, seems responsible, yet he wears memories of hardship: a marked lack of teeth in an otherwise healthy middle-aged face.

99 Not providing training usually disappoints participants, as noted earlier. 240

Leo screams, "I don't like your face!!" Dean kind of sits back, doesn't say much. "Fuckyou!!!" Ray screams. Later to "Luke" (pseud.), "You just about knocked me over. FUCKING IDIOT!" Luke laughs, "Yes, the fucking idiot is going to leave the room now. I'm glad that I'm a fucking idiot. " People in the room seem to know how to defuse this sort of confrontation. Peggy has to leave when Leo spits in her eyes, though.

Andy produces his new CD. I am welcomed into this room of many men like I am one of them. I am kind of glorified actually. I must be shown the CD. I receive direction in triplicate or quadruplicate: "Look on the back!!!" On the front is Andy walking naked through some woods. There is a censorship sticker on his penis. But on the back is his ass! Same view, but Andy buck naked from behind. I wanted to see the playlist.

I curl up in a fit of embarrassment as twenty-six eyes watch amusedly. "She's as red as your shirt." I want to ask Andy if I can buy the CD, but I'm too embarrassed, and anyway, with this crowd, I can't look like I carry that sort of cash.

Amidst the gaggling and squabbling, we play Joan Baez ("Candle in the Wind"), and "Memphis. " Dean picks "Eleanor Rigby " because I play a violin adaptation of the string part on the Beatles' recording and this really thrills the guys. They sing ultra loud when I play the descending pedals over an E minor chord. . . . Andy, Dean and Luke play a song of Andy's that the three are rehearsing for a radio show. There is a lick that Andy had taught Dean, but Dean seemingly hasn't rehearsed it and keeps playing it in the wrong place. Andy keeps yelling, "No! No!!!" . . . One of the guys has been waiting for an hour to ask me to play "Annie's Song" while he sings. He seems delighted about there being a violin—he points his cell phone receiver at me, so that I can serenade a call recipient. Anyway, "you know, Annie's Song, that cheesy one," as he describes it, is my last performance before leaving. The high woman continues to tip towards the floor, at angles dramatized by her earrings: vintage, ornate gold-coloured hearts that dangle with frosted, elegant green beads.

The Health Contact Centre jam is facilitated by Peggy Wilson, who is rarely controlling in her administration, but nurtures what Jim Green called the "indigenous music" component of the Downtown Eastside, which as I described, involves a 241 community group that is interested in recording albums of locally composed popular songs, and practicing pop, rock and country songs that have made the Billboard Top

40.100 Peggy says that the most important thing about nurturing the flow of local musical expressions, as DTES residents want them to emerge, is that it allows social capital— social trust, norms and networks—to be created and maintained among the most socioeconomically oppressed people in Vancouver. Peggy talked to me about people making social connections through popular music jams that she facilitates at the Health

Contact Centre, but also in the Carnegie street program:

That is one good thing about these sort of social programs starting, like I've seen people make friends that... You just know they haven't had a friend and so . . . I'm going to cry now. Like at the Contact Centre, you know that people have just been going around . . . [She's crying.] It's funny because I never cry. But I was just thinking of some people in particular, I guess because I never really, I rarely sit down and analyze what I'm doing.

I love it because you see people build social structures that you know they haven't done maybe since they were in a really low grade in school. Because the majority of people that are coming to the jams haven't graduated from high school, like even the people who are so smart.

[Within that context where social connections are built, I can] watch people work their "stuff' out with each other. I kind of try and let people work it out, but sometimes you have to step in and draw the line. That's hard.

But I love it that people have made friends and people that would never really talk to each other, they now call each other by name. Even when the music jams aren't going on, they might go out into the main room in the Contact Centre or wherever and do other things together and start sort of forming sort of sub-groups from the main music group. I think it's relieved a lot of loneliness for people.

100 In this context, Peggy developed skills as a guitarist, singer and bass guitarist, before enrolling in the Music program at Vancouver Community College. 242

I know how I was on to how many people haven't finished or even started high school, some of the really great self-taught musicians, too. I found out one of the musicians who just released a CD has got all his songs written on the staff with harmonies and everything. That's all self-taught, somehow. I have some First Nations regulars who don't read [and the jam is also welcoming to them]. (Interview 5)

Peggy Wilson noted that as social connections and friendships emerge through musical cooperation, enough social trust is created to allow collaborators to work out social tensions. Even though collaborators like Leo may be verbally or even physically abusive, social connections created through making music can allow enough social support for compassionate and inclusive treatment of the troubled individual—to a point.

Peggy and Luke did leave the room when Leo's interactions violated them, although they did not fight with him.

Ken Tabata, when on staff at the Carnegie Community Centre, noted that a local and unusual form of stage etiquette developed at Carnegie popular music cabaret nights, which, each Tuesday, offer another venue for performing cover songs and local compositions. Ken explained that this etiquette likewise allowed individuals to work out

"personal power issues" within a larger context of social trust in a group of community members who performed popular music together. The cabaret is organized into fifteen- minute sets for which performers (individuals and groups) sign up beforehand, however,

Ken said, "Other people take over their sets ... intentionally and unconsciously." I asked

Ken, "Why would you want to do that?" Ken answered with an explanation of how the etiquette operated: 243

You got what you want to do and there's this other person there and you really have the stuff you want to do and you just sort of, you just kind of do it. You just kind of take over their set.... Sometimes the person hadn't even been asked to be up on stage. It's pretty common at the jams for people to just come up and grab an instrument and play along, right. And that was almost, that was okay if they knew what they were doing or something like that. So the Carnegie and the citizens, they have actually really bad kind of manners. . . . It's almost accepted that if somebody's playing something, you could go up and grab an instrument and just start playing. Go up on stage and start playing. So if some other band, some outside band comes, some people think it's okay to go up and start playing along, right, whereas . .. Usually you'll say something, right? You'll say, "Hey, can I sit in? This is my name and I've playing this and I know your stuff." You take the time to sort of introduce yourself, but it's sort of a different tradition that is going to develop there. Yeah. Sometimes it is seen as rude, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's seen as, "Oh good. You can play the keyboard on that. That's great." You know. See, it's not always seen as rude and it's not always seen as an awesome contribution, right. It all depends on what that person wanted. Sometimes, the person onstage wants as many people to play as possible and they're upset that only one person is playing with them, you know. Like that happens all the time, too. No one wants to play with somebody so, and when somebody else comes and sits down, they are overjoyed that somebody has come to join them.... [The Downtown Eastside] is its own place and it has its own, you know, etiquette. It's usually a different etiquette that then is used if you were going to go play somewhere else. (Interview 9)

While Ken's explanation centred on musical decisions, he emphasized that certain individual actions could be interpreted as assertions of power concerning other individuals or groups.

The people that always are trying to take over sets and [are] very aggressive about that: it's not an accident and it's kind of a power play, too, right. There is a power struggle that goes on, too, right. So if they're not there, then the dynamic changes, you know. It's not all music in there. . . . Earle Peach, in 2000, when they were doing this CD project and we were going to play at the [Vancouver] Folk Festival, Earle Peach, he was interviewed and he said, "It's all about, uh ... It's a place for people to figure out the power dynamics, you know, in some sort of way. To work out their power dynamics." He said something like that. That's how he saw the Carnegie music program. (Interview 9) 244

Individuals have become able to act out their power issues through stage etiquette at the same time as social capital has increased among amateur popular musicians in the

DTES. Ken noted that in the 1980s, when popular music jam sessions were newly established at the Carnegie, participants were much more competitive. Not enough social trust existed for enactments of personal power to be received without offense: "[I]t was very competitive and there were different groups of people [competing against each other]. There was more of a war going on" (Interview 9). As individuals collaborated to make music together, power plays became stylized in the new stage etiquette.

Chapter Summary

Chapter 5 presented a set of questions about creating community connections via live music making in contexts that suffer the destructive health consequences of low social capital. I explored the questions in relation to musical initiatives in Vancouver's inner city that have education or urban improvement agendas. The questions ask the reader to distinguish how one or more focuses about community operate in performance, and who are the constituencies and beneficiaries of those communities, with the understanding that one type of community focus more efficiently generates social capital than others.

In this chapter, in the subsection titled "Building Social Capital through

Communities of Practice," I defined different community focuses in terms of Etienne 245

Wenger's notion of communities of practice, which adequately accommodates the process of learning through a community that focuses on an action, a "community of action."101 I explained that a community of rehearsal or performance action (e.g., collaborating to create music) is the site where social capital—intangible outcomes of human collaboration, such as trust, social norms and networks—is generated or maintained through performing arts. Other community types and focuses that I discussed were communities of interest, communities of circumstance and communities of position.

As I noted, there are many other potential focuses of community. I documented cases where multiple community types distracted the generation of social capital through a community of action, but the presence of multiple community types could expedite or enrich the creation of social trust, norms, networks and other energetic gifts that result from human collaboration.

The generation of social capital through human collaboration, for example making music, can potentially salve negative health effects of low social capital. At the beginning of this chapter, I outlined correlations between low social capital and the presence of health problems in inner cities, particularly substance misuse, murder, depression and suicide. Higher amounts of social capital usually correlate negatively with these health issues.

101 In Chapters 3 and 4,1 described how DTES community members learned and gained types of control and roles of socioeconomic rank through different acts of rehearsing and performing music and theatre. 246

Within an associational network of music, such as that of Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside, then, it is the focus or foci that organize a given artistic collaboration that may distinguish one or more "communities of practice" present in a musical encounter. The degree to which an action-oriented community of musical practice can generate social capital and associated health benefits depends on how any additional types of community encounter, which have different organizational focuses, interact with, complement or distract from the action-oriented community (engaged to create musical expressions).

Musical encounters can be situations that, through multidimensional musical action, create social capital and human connections that build a sense of community, and engage multiple social agendas and community types in conflict that may destabilize the community in the future. 247

Chapter 6. Afterword

In August 2007,1 was hired as faculty at Canada's first Aboriginal Music Lab, a week-long workshop that prepares Aboriginal Canadian musicians to produce and perform popular music for international markets and audiences. Musicians trained at the

2007 lab to present their musical product at the 2008 North American Indigenous Games in Cowichan, B.C., and at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Cultural

Olympiad and Arts Festival in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C. Part of my job at the

Aboriginal Music Lab was to present results of my Aboriginal music research on

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside on a panel that I shared with Saulteaux/Cree actor, singer and filmmaker Renae Morrisseau, and Kwakwaka'wakw master singer William

Wasden Jr. The first lab was hosted by Dr. Salvador Fererras at Vancouver Community

College, whose campuses border the DTES. After hearing my presentation, one of the lab participants, Gerry Oleman, invited me to participate in an Aboriginal hand drumming and healing circle that he had started in the Downtown Eastside. He hoped that the experience would inform my research perspective.102

August 24, 2007

I arrive at Aboriginal Front Door at 10:15 a.m. and the centre's red curtains are closed. The front door is locked. I peek through one side of the curtains. Some people notice me and signal to the staff that they should let me in. A staff woman opens the door, blocking it with her knee and clipboard. "Gerry Oleman invited

102 Although healing circle work is sometimes considered private, Gerry Oleman and I both feel that this description is important as it teaches First Nations values that are helpful to people in the difficult contexts I discuss. 248 me for 10:00, " I say. In 2006, Gerry took over for Fred John at Aboriginal Front Door. The staff woman opens the door.

I am welcomed into a healing circle of about twenty First Nations and Metis. Usually thirty to forty people sit in the circle, but Gerry has been away for two weeks. I sit too and close my eyes. The room's energy is kind of crazy, but calming in swirls above. I listen. Gerry is singing a song to a rattle. "The rattle, " he said yesterday, "attracts the spirits. They come right to it."

Sage burns in an abalone shell, which is passed around the circle, counterclockwise. I chat with the woman on my left and the man on my right. Both are Native street people, maybe in their late thirties or early forties, with skin charred by scar tissue. They are good-hearted people. The woman passes me the shell, and I smudge my feet, asking for blessing on the path that I walk. Gerry still sings and shakes the rattle.

Out of a medicine bag, he picks a talking stick carved from elk horn. His medicine bag (bright red) lies on a buffalo skin, on which rests fifteen drums. Gerry introduces a special event, a short film on residential schools, which we watch. Then each person speaks, in counterclockwise order. The first speaker says that a man from the Mount Currie (Coast Salish) reserve, known as Rusty, died violently in Pigeon Park at the corner of Hastings and Carroll Streets. I am sad and a little shocked. I sang powwow songs with Rusty at East Vancouver's Hey-way 'noqu' Healing Circle for Addictions Society.

When it is my turn to talk, I need to say who I am first. I tell about my role in witnessing music in the Downtown Eastside. People nod in approval and one man holds up his hands to me. For Coast Salish, this means, "I hold you up" and "I honour you." I honour Rusty too by saying that he was becoming an excellent lead powwow singer, and that he was on a "good path." Rusty was kind, bright spirited, intelligent, funny, sensitive and proud of his new day job.

As the circle progresses, there is a lot of talk about feeling controlled by other people in colonial context, for example, in residential school or by family with military backgrounds or residential school histories. There is a lot of information to support the hypothesis that being controlled by others disassociates a person from feeling able to act on their own intent, or even having a sense of self. Prayer, though, is an acknowledgement of self-intent and expression to the Creator; a way of retrieving that sort of internal connection. The woman next to me says that when Gerry sang and shook his rattle, prayer came through her like the wind; it was like God was speaking through her; she "doesn 't know how to say it"; it was 249

so "beautiful, so spiritual. " She then talks about being beaten up by five people last night, about how angry she is that her sister was "cheating" while in addictions recovery. The woman asserts that she is ready to go into recovery at the same time she is clearly high, tweaking, tipping towards the ground in drug induced slumber. Reality blends into fiction here, too.

Gerry leads us in singing another song. As the music swells in volume, he calls out, "For all the little boys who went to residential school, man" and "for all the little girls who went to residential school." People sing with more gusto and volume after these words that identified the intent of the singing—to heal those hard experiences through loving people who suffered. Participants pick up all of the drums and drum along. The man who spoke about Rusty asks us to sing the "Coast Salish national anthem" for Mabel, who is finishing a drug and alcohol counselling practicum at Aboriginal Front Door. I served on the Women's Memorial March organizing committee with Mabel, who has trained to help this community that she loves. As this ritual happens, people flow in and out of the circle as they connect to spirit and tradition. A few cannot connect and must leave. There are no rules about who can access singing and drumming traditions based on tribal membership, menstruation, or the use of drugs or alcohol.

The associational network of music in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is always changing, as is the Aboriginal music network that loops into the neighbourhood's network. At the Aboriginal Front Door, pan-Indigenous hand drumming practices are emerging in a healing circle of prayer and participatory singing, which is guided by the teaching that we should "love people not power." Individuals expressing self-intent and thinking about harmful patterns of control over them is important to healing in the circle—and is a type of critique very different from that nurtured through Earl Shorris'

Clemente courses in humanities education. While Music 101 classes, Humanities 101 courses and many musical theatre initiatives have enhanced music and humanities education, and therefore enriched individuals' educational and socioeconomic status, the healing circle stresses relatively egalitarian or horizontal social relationships. The circle, a new music encounter of the DTES, allows people to work through issues of being controlled in a musical situation that downplays socioeconomic status and rank. The event, then, exists in conceptual tension with music therapy methodologies that modify the behaviour of clients in hierarchical institutional environments. It contrasts with popular music jams at the Health Contact Centre or Carnegie Centre that build trust enough so that people can act out their personal power issues, instead of thinking and talking about them. At Aboriginal Front Door, the constituents of a community of action, which is mobilized through participatory hand drumming, talking and smudging, are the same as those who will benefit from the healing activity, and any social trust, networks and norms that emerge. In this respect, the hand drumming differs from the musical urban improvement initiatives, for example Condemned or The Shadows Project, which develop multiple types of community with different constituencies.

The changing associational network of music in the Downtown Eastside, and any community or societal context, involves a changing geometry of control, socioeconomic status or rank, and/or community connections that are nuanced by degrees of horizontal and vertical, or hierarchical, social relationships. Different "knots" or musical encounters in the associational network may manifest different configurations of control, rank or community connections that exist in tension with other "knots," or are attached to other musical or cultural networks by virtue of their geometries, which itself can produce tension. In DTES urban improvement projects such as the pop opera Condemned, starring 251 performers who are "high-functioning poor" and do not live in the Downtown Eastside has generated anger and debate, as I explained in a sub-section titled "Condemned, a

DTES pop opera," in Chapter 5. The tensions between the different constituencies and between manifestations of control, socioeconomic status and power (as)symmetries in community connections are what give an associational network of music, or a series of linked associational networks, "shape" and overall dimensions, at least in terms of how the network can influence and protect human health. The reader remembers that the degree of control that one feels one has over one's life affects one's physiological well- being because the sense of a lack of control triggers adverse stress reactions. Quantitative studies teach us that high socioeconomic status correlates positively with good health and long length of life in capitalist society where one's worth is evaluated by others, in part, depending on one's socioeconomic status. Low socioeconomic status alternatively triggers adverse stress reactions in the body, which negatively affect the immune system in complex ways. A prevalence of egalitarian or horizontal social interactions in one's life, and in community or society, by contrast, can protect human health against psychosocial stressors that are aggravated by more hierarchical social encounters. My qualitative study demonstrates, however, that these processes are complex ones, cross-cut by many contingencies including transformative "moments" of music making.

This dissertation has explored how issues of control, socioeconomic status and community connections flow through many types of musical interactions in the

Downtown Eastside involving: popular music (rock, pop, blues, country, First Nations 252 popular song); classical music (opera); theatre soundscapes and musical theatre; jazz, folk, popular and classical song amalgams; and First Nations traditional song including powwow drumming and hand drumming genres. Across groups and communities of single and multiple ethnicities or cultural identities, these three issues can inform individual reactions to social relationships that literally determine human health. Thus, music making contributes to health and well-being in the heart of transcultural

Vancouver, and becomes a site of struggle for moments of agency, wholeness, power, social connections, social roles, trust, inner peace and/or self-realization even as DTES community members' health, ethnicities, identities, bank accounts and self worth "break down" in a context of poverty.

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a community in social and cultural transition.

Music negotiates various transitions in relation to questions of control, socioeconomic status, and the hierarchy or egalitarianism of community connections. As I described in

Chapter 1, Downtown Eastside artists, administrators and community members, through formal musical initiatives, instigated change concerning intersecting oppressions of inner city issues, some of them health related, but also tried to manage social and cultural transitions that seemed "unhealthy" and informed inner city health issues. I found that musical representations in diverse music genres stabilized, contained or expressed situations of transition that community members found traumatic and that they wanted to control, or that they desired, sometimes due to a perceived lack of control over present life circumstances. The social relationships created through musical encounters, by 253 contrast, engaged and stimulated various social and cultural transitions in the community fabric, through musical discourses, and through moves of control and socioeconomic status. Musical training and education shifted indicators of socioeconomic status, specifically education, occupation, income and class, as well as community members' experiences of socioeconomic rank. Community connections created through musical interactions at rehearsals and performances could build horizontal social relations of social capital, particularly social trust, norms and networks, in a collaborative group.

Because musical expressions, including theatre and dance, are multi-layered, possibly involving diverse processes of preparation and performance, and different means of representation, social and cultural transition could be represented using music, and stabilized through the formation of social relationships and networks. Simultaneously, social and cultural transition could be initiated anew through fostering multiple social factions and agendas through diverse collaborative activities of musical expression and performance. In these highly specific and sometimes contradictory ways, human experiences of control, socioeconomic status, and power dynamics in the community were changed through musical representations and encounters. In identifying and documenting such processes, this dissertation contributes to an understanding of how associational networks of music can influence the social structure and related health and well-being among people living in communities of social and cultural transition. 254

Appendix A: Tables 2,3 and 4

Below, Tables 2, 3 and 4 roughly map whether repertoire practised at selected popular music jams at the Health Contact Centre, Evelyne Sailer Centre and Residential School

Healing Centre in 2004 ranked on record charts in the United States. I use Joel

Whitburn's classifications of American chart positions that were published in cooperation with Billboard magazine (see Whitburn 1994, 2003, 2004, 2005). Whitburn's categories are delimited by music genre, but all of his categories are composites of multiple charts published by Billboard. At the bottom of Table 2, 3 and 4,1 tally the number of songs in the table, and the number and percentage of songs that charted. I also tally the number of performances (as some songs are performed repeatedly), and the number and percentage of performances of charted songs. Cumulative totals for all three tables follow Table 4. Table 2. Repertoire played at the Health Contact Centre

2004 survey dates: March 26, June 11, August 13, September 15, September 30

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 1 Act Naturally The Beatles 1965 1 Yes 2 All I Wanna Do Sheryl Crow 1994 1 Yes 3 And I Love Her The Beatles 1964 1 Yes 4 Annie's Song John Denver 1974 1 Yes 5 Behind Blue Eyes The Who 1971 1 Yes 6 Big Yellow Taxi Joni Mitchell 1970 Yes 7 Blackbird The Beatles 1968 1 No 8 Blowin' in the Wind Bob Dylan 1962 1 No 9 Blue Suede Shoes Carl Perkins 1953 1 Yes 10 Bye Bye Love Everly Brothers 1957 1 Yes 11 (They Long to Be) Close to The Carpenters 1970 1 Yes You 12 Don't Pass Me By The Beatles 1968 1 No 13 Eleanor Rigby The Beatles 1966 1 Yes 14 Fixing a Hole The Beatles 1967 1 No 15 Fox on the Run N/A N/A 1 N/A 16 Help Me Rhonda The Beach Boys 1965 1 Yes 17 Hey Jude The Beatles 1968 1 Yes 18 I Call Your Name John Lennon 1964 1 No 19 I Only Want to Be with You Dusty 1964 1 Yes Springfield 20 Jambalaya (On the Bayou) Hank Williams 1952 1 Yes 21 Let it Be The Beatles 1970 1 Yes 22 Loaded and Laid Andy Kostynuik 2004 1 No (local) 23 Mellow Yellow Donovan 1966 1 Yes 24 Memphis, Tennessee N/A N/A 1 N/A 25 Monday Monday The Mamas & 1966 1 Yes the Papas 26 More Money Andy Kostynuik 2004 1 No (local) 27 Mrs. Robinson Simon & 1968 1 Yes Garfunkel 28 Norwegian Wood (This Bird The Beatles 1965 1 No Has Flown) 256

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 29 0 Butterfly May Kossoff N/A 1 No (local) 30 Ohio Crosby, Stills, 1970 1 Yes Nash & Young 31 Put another Nickel in the Teresa Brewer 1950 1 Yes Nickelodeon with the Dixieland All Stars 32 Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's N/A N/A 1 N/A Arms 33 Rubber Dollie N/A N/A 1 N/A 34 Seven Spanish Angels Ray 1984 1 Yes Charles/Willie Nelson 35 She Loves You The Beatles 1963 1 Yes 36 Song of Never Ending Love Delaney and 1971 1 Yes Bonnie and Friends 37 Surfin' U.S.A. The Beach Boys 1963 1 Yes 38 Take it Easy The Eagles 1972 1 Yes 39 Taxman The Beatles 1966 1 No 40 The Times They Are a- Bob Dylan 1964 1 No Changin' 41 To Know Him Is to Love Him The Teddy 1958 1 Yes Bears 42 Universal Soldier Bufify Sainte- 1964 1 No Marie 43 Wild Horses The Rolling 1971 1 Yes Stones 44 Wouldn't it Be Nice The Beach Boys 1966 1 Yes 45 You Never Give Me Your The Beatles 1969 1 No Money 46 You've Got to Hide Your The Beatles 1965 1 No Love Away 47 Your Cheatin' Heart Hank Williams 1953 1 Yes

47 songs played 29 charted songs (61.7%)

48 song performances 30 of charted songs (62.5%) 257

Table 3. Repertoire played at the Evelyne Sailer Centre

2004 survey dates: February 24, June 3, June 16, August 18, August 25, September 15,

September 29, November 24

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 1 A Hard Day's Night The Beatles 1964 1 Yes 2 A Horse with No Name America 1972 Yes 3 All My Loving The Beatles 1963 1 Yes 4 And it Stoned Me Van Morrison 1970 No 5 As Tears Go By The Rolling 1965 1 Yes Stones 6 Bad Moon Rising Creedence 1969 1 Yes Clearwater Revival 7 Behind Blue Eyes The Who 1971 1 Yes 8 Black Magic Woman Santana 1970 1 No 9 Bridge over Troubled Water Simon & 1970 1 Yes Garfiinkel 10 Cat's in the Cradle Sandy and 1974 1 Yes Harry Chapin 11 Comfortably Numb Pink Floyd 1979 1 No 12 Drift Away Doby Gray 1973 Yes 13 Everybody Hurts R.E.M. 1992, 1 Yes 1993 14 Flip, Flop and Fly Big Joe Turner 1972 1 Yes 15 Folsom Prison Blues Johnny Cash 1956 1 Yes 16 Hand in My Pocket Alanis 1995 Yes Morissette 17 Have You Ever Seen the Creedence 1971 1 Yes Rain? Clearwater Revival 18 Help Me Make it through Sammi Smith 1971 1 Yes the Night 19 Help! The Beatles 1965 1 Yes 20 Here Comes the Sun The Beatles 1969 1 No 21 Homeward Bound Simon & 1966 1 Yes Garfiinkel 22 Hotel California The Eagles 1976 2 Yes 258

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 23 House of the Rising Sun The Animals 1964 1 Yes 24 I Can See Clearly Now Johnny Nash 1972 1 Yes 25 I Should Have Known Better The Beatles 1964, 1 Yes 1976 26 Imagine John Lennon 1971 2 Yes 27 Kansas City Blues Janis Joplin 1964 1 No 28 Knockin' on Heaven's Door Bob Dylan 1973 2 Yes 29 Lean on Me Bill Withers 1972 1 Yes 30 Let it Be John Denver 1971 1 No 31 Lookin' Out My Back Door Creedence 1970 1 Yes Clearwater Revival 32 Moon Shadow Cat Sevens 1971 2 Yes 33 Mr. Bojangles Bob Dylan 1973 1 No 34 Mr. Tambourine Man The Byrds 1965 1 Yes 35 My Sweet Lord George Harrison 1970 1 Yes 36 No Woman No Cry Bob Marley 1974 1 No 37 Norwegian Wood (This Bird The Beatles 1965 1 No Has Flown) 38 O Siem Susan Aglukark 1995 1 No 39 Oh My Darling Clementine N/A N/A 1 N/A 40 Something The Beatles 1969 2 Yes 41 Sweet Home Alabama Lynyrd Skynyrd 1974 1 Yes 42 The Rose Bette Midler 1979 5 Yes 43 These Boots Are Made for Nancy Sinatra 1966 1 Yes Walkin' 44 Unchained Melody The Righteous 1965 1 Yes Brothers 45 Walkin' After Midnight Patsy Cline 1957 1 Yes 46 What's Up 4 Non Blondes 1992 2 Yes 47 Wild Horses The Rolling 1971 6 Yes Stones 48 With or Without You U2 1987 2 Yes 49 Your Cheatin' Heart Hank Williams 1953 3 Yes

49 songs played 38 charted songs (77.6%)

71 song performances 59 of charted songs (83.1%) Table 4. Repertoire played at Residential School Healing Centre music jams

2004 survey dates: March 3, March 10

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 1 All Around the Water Tank Jimmie Rogers 1929 1 No Waitin' for a Train 2 Amazing Grace N/A N/A 1 No 3 Blue Canadian Rockies The Byrds 1968 1 No 4 Blue Moon of Kentucky The Bluegrass 1945 2 Yes Boys 5 Bile them Cabbage Down N/A N/A 1 N/A 6 Cotton Fields N/A N/A 1 N/A 7 Don't Be Cruel Elvis Presley 1956 1 Yes 8 Four Strong Winds Ian & Sylvia 1964 1 No 9 He's Got the Whole World in N/A N/A 1 N/A His Hands 10 Help! The Beatles 1965 1 Yes 11 Hey Good Lookin' Hank Williams 1951 1 Yes 12 I Just Called to Say I Love Stevie Wonder 1984 1 Yes You 13 I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry Hank Williams 1949 1 Yes 14 Jambalaya (On the Bayou) Hank Williams 1952 1 Yes 15 Lookin' Out My Back Door Creedence 1970 1 Yes Clearwater Revival 16 Midnight Special Creedence 1969 1 No Clearwater Revival 17 New San Antonio Rose Bob Wills, and 1944 1 Yes His Texas Playboys 18 Old Time Rock and Roll Bob Seger 1978 1 Yes 19 Peggy Sue Buddy Holly 1957 2 Yes and the Crickets 20 Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy N/A N/A 1 N/A Legend) 21 Six Days on the Road Dave Dudley 1963 1 Yes 260

Song Recording Artist Release Performances Charted? by DTES group 22 Take Me Home, Country John Denver 1971 1 Yes Roads 23 Yellow Rose of Texas Mitch Miller 1955 1 Yes 24 Your Cheatin' Heart Hank Williams 1953 1 Yes

24 songs played 15 charted songs (62.5 %)

26 song performances 17 of charted songs (65.4 %)

Cumulative totals: Tables 2. 3 and 4

120 songs played

82 charted songs (68.3 %)

145 song performances

106 of charted songs (73.1 %) 261

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Archival Materials: Mircofiche, Pamphlets and Photographs

City of Vancouver Archives

Microfiche

N.B. Only the last four digits of each number are cited in the dissertation text.

AM0054.013.01364. Elliott, John. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.02031. Hart, F. W -Hart's Opera House. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.03571. Patterson, J. P. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.07325. Theatres - Electric Theatre. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.07326. Theatres - Empress Theatre. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.07328. Theatres - Hart's Opera House. Major Matthews Collection

AM0054.013.07329. Theatres - Imperial Opera House. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.07330. Theatres - Imperial Theatre. Major Matthews Collection.

AM0054.013.07338. Theatres - People's Theatre, first Orpheum Theatre. Major Matthews Collection. 280

Pamphlets

PAM 1891-7. Vancouver Opera House. 1891. Programme, Monday and Tuesday, September 21 and 22, 1891 [Tuesday evening, September 22nd, 1891: La ToscaJ.

PAM 1905-16. Dorr, E. G. 1905. Grand theatre [program?].

PAM 1905-21. Ely, W. W. 1905. The Edison-Grand theatre [program?].

PAM 1906-14. Grand Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1906. Grand theatre [programs].

PAM 1908-26. Pantages Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1908. Pantages Theatre [program].

PAM 1909-38. Empress Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1909. Empress Theatre program.

PAM 1912-4. Loyal Order of Moose (Fraternal order). Vancouver Lodge, No. 888. 1912. Moose in burnt cork: first annual minstrel: Imperial Theatre: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Dec. 9th, 10th and 11th, 1912 /presented by Vancouver Lodge No. 888, Loyal Order of Moose.

PAM 1912-43. Moral and Social Reform Council of British Columbia. 1912. Social vice in Vancouver / report issued by the Moral and Social Reform Council of British Columbia.

PAM 1914-20. Anon. 1914. French cabaret, in aid of Women's Employment League.

PAM 1915-49. Henry W. Savage Inc. 1915. Everywoman: her pilgrimage in quest for love: [program] / [offered by] Henry W. Savage, Inc.

PAM 1916-9. Pantages Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1916. Pantages Theatre: unequalled Vaudeville: [program for week of July 17th, 1916].

PAM 1916-10. Pantages Theatre. 1916. Pantages Theatre: unequalled Vaudeville: [program for week of May 29th, 1916].

PAM 1916-11. Pantages Theatre. 1916. Pantages Theatre: unequalled Vaudeville, week commencing Monday, July 24, 1916.

PAM 1919-26. Ellison-White Musical Bureau (Portland, Ore.). 1919. Vancouver 281

engagement: San Carlo Grand Opera company, Avenue Theatre, January 27th, 28th, 29th, 1919: [program] / Management for Western Territory: Ellison-White Musical Bureau.

PAM 1928-38. Nelson Shaw Dramatic Club (Vancouver, B.C.). 1923. B.P.O.E., South Vancouver Lodge, no. 55. Under the auspices of the above Lodge, the Nelson Shaw Dramatic Club presents: Barbara / Jerome K. Jerome; The bishop's candlestickes / Victor Hugo; A kiss for Cinderella / J. M. Barrie, at John Oliver High School, 45th Ave. and Fraser Street, Wednesday, May 16th, 1923, in aid of V.O.N., South Vancouver Branch: [program].

PAM 1930-16. Empress Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1930. The British Guild Players present "andso to bed": a comedy in three acts: [programme].

PAM 1940-50. Empress Theatre. 1940. Programme.

PAM 1973-171. 1973. Downtown East (newsletter), vol. 1, no. 5.

PAM 1973-174. 1973. Downtown East (newsletter), vol. 1, no. 11.

PAM 1974-223. 1974. The Downtown East: a community paper published by DERA, vol. 1, no. 3.

PAM 1974-224. 1974. Downtown East (newsletter), vol. 1, no. 2.

PAM 1975-92. 1975. Fire Hall no. 2.

PAM 1979-6. 1979. Actor's workshop.

PAM 1984-17. 1984. Programmes - Music -1984.

PAM Und. 57. Edison Grand Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1904. Edison Grand Theatre: [programme].

PAM Und. 271. Roddan, Andrew, Rev. 1940. Church in action: the story of ten years active service in First United Church.

PAM Und. 303. Avenue Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1921. Richard G. Herndon presents Nance O'Neil in "The Passion Flower" [La Malquerida] by Jacinto Benavente.

PAM Und. 478. Avenue Theatre (Vancouver, B.C.). 1920. Fortune Gall and Bradford 282

Mills offer the Gallo English Opera Co.: [programmes].

PAM Und. 480. Kent Bell Concert Bureau (Vancouver, B.C.). 1919. Albert Spalding, violin virtuoso, assisted by Andre Benoist, pianist... in concert. . . Friday, Nov. 28th.

PAM Und. 862. Evans, Commander. 1914. Capt. Scott's discovery of the South Pole: [advertisement for a lecture] /by Commander Evans.

PAM Und. 865. Avenue Theatre. 1919. Mr. William Faversham presents Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar": [programme].

Photographs

BUP229 N143 or Add.MSS 54. Jan. 31, 1940. Cars parked in front of building at 129 Cordova Street. Major Matthews Collection.

Vancouver Public Library: Historical Photographs Collection

53. c. 1895. Hastings Street, Chinese parade —funeral. Vancouver.

9507. c. 1900. City Grocery Company float. Vancouver.

21362. Oct. 7, 1922. Pantages Theatre interior stalls, balcony. Vancouver.