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The Transnational History of Settler Colonialism and the Music of the Urban West: Resituating a Local Music History

What role did music play in the settlement of edmonton, alberta, and why should anyone who lives outside that city care? The present essay developed as I realized that the second of these questions would almost inevitably arise as I pursued the first, and it became more pressing as I encountered the work of my predecessors in this area. There were indeed earlier studies of musical life in edmonton, to which I remain indebted, but they were largely and justifiably concerned with documenting the local rather than with linking it to external historiographical issues.1 This came as no great surprise; there was no particular reason to expect that the local history of a single city should have become the object of such reflection. more surprising, however, was that this phenomenon seemed to be widely replicated when I began looking for studies of other western Canadian or uS cities that might be comparable. again, studies of the early musical life of individual western cities certainly exist, but despite their often considerable level of accomplishment, they seemed curiously segregated from the academic field of american music studies. articles were more likely to appear in local history publications than in national or international musicological publications (indeed, they have been almost entirely absent from recent decades of both American Music and the Journal of the Society for American Music) and longer studies were dominated by either dissertations or books by nonmusicologists.2 I make these observations not to