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The Sound of Freedom: Fragmentation, Improvised Beings, and Canadian Multiculturalism

Paul Watkins

Published: 2012-06-08

In this paper, improvised music and identity are looked at in relation to the movement of multiculturalism in Canada. The paper is an idealization of what Canadian multiculturalism can aspire to be: a gesturing towards a more equal and free society for all its members. An improvised multiculturalism provides one possible template of how we can begin to think about change, and ultimately how we might work towards the notion of what Pierre Elliott Trudeau aptly termed The Just Society.

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So one of the things that improvisation has come to mean in the context of highly technological performance is that improvisation is the last claim to the legitimate presence of a human in the performance of music.

– Bob Ostertag