This page outlines the sources used throughout the research process for this website, and suggests further readings on the topic of music and war.  

 

Primary Sources:

 

The primary sources analyzed for this project include sheet music, sound recordings, newspaper articles, and magazines. Archival documents from Library and Archives Canada were also examined for details on the music played by regimental bands across Canada. These sources were gathered from the following:

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Library and Archives Canada:

 

RG9 Department of Militia and Defence

RG24 Department of National Defence

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These collections include files of correspondence between military leaders regarding the purchase of sheet music and instruments, the organization of band members, and requests for certain regimental bands to play at recruiting events.

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Periodicals:

 

Canadian Music Trades Journal, 1914-1918

Daily Times Journal, 1914-1918

Fort William Daily Times Journal, 1914-1918

Newmarket Era, 1914-1918

Northern Advance, 1914-1918

Porcupine Advance, 1914-1918

Port Arthur News Chronicle, 1914-1918

The Globe, 1914-1918

Toronto Daily Star, 1914-1918

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Websites:

 

For more recordings of popular songs from the First World War, see the following:

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CBC Music. "Vimy Ridge Centennial: Listen to 12 Songs from the Great War."

http://www.cbcmusic.ca/posts/18336/canadian-wartime-music-vimy-ridge-100-anniversary.

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Library and Archives Canada. "The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings."

www.collectionscanada.gc.ca

 

McMaster University. "World War I Songs: War Songs from the First Half of 20th Century."

https://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/exhibits/worldwar.

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Wartime Canada. "Music." wartimecanada.ca.

 

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Secondary Sources:

 

Canada:

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The number of studies on Canadian music and the First World War is quite limited, and has predominantly focused on music written and performed by soldiers in the trenches.

 

Cook, Tim. “The Singing War: Canadian Soldiers' Songs of the Great War.” American Review of Canadian Studies 39,

no. 3 (2009): 224-241. DOI: 10.1080/02722010903125740.

 

Norton, Wayne. “From British Columbia: Music of the Great War, 1914-1918.” BC Studies 182 (2014): 113-124.

http://ojs.library.ubc.ca.libproxy.wlu.ca/index.php/bcstudies/article/view/184583/184473.

 

Wilson, Jason. Soldiers of Song: the Dumbells and Other Canadian Concert Parties of the First World War. Waterloo:

Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

 

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The Allies:

 

The scholarship on music in other Allied countries during the First World War was useful to the research undertaken here, and provides points of comparison with Canada.

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Mullen, John. The Show Must Go On!: Popular Song in Britain during the First World War. New York: Routledge,

2015.

 

Shansky, Carol L. “Patriotism and the Skirl of the Pipes: The Scottish Highland Pipe Band and World War I British

Recruiting in New York, 1916-18.” Journal of Musicological Research 33 (2014): 241-267.

DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2014.877333.

 

Sweeney, Regina M. Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

 

Turner, Paul. “New Zealand Music during the First World War: the Songs of Miss Jane Morison.” Journal of New

Zealand Literature, 33 (2015): 72-88. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.wlu.ca/stable/43681963.

 

Tyler, Don. Music of the First World War. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016.

 

Watkins, Glen. Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War. Berkeley, California: University of California

Press, 2003.

 

Watt, Paul. “Music, Lyrics and Cultural Tropes in Australian Popular Songs of the First World War: Two Case Studies.”

Musicology Australia – Journal of the Musicological Society of Australia 36, no. 1 (2014): 90-105.

DOI: 10.1080/08145857.2014.896075.

 

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Culture and War:

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Many of these earliest studies of cultural history and the First World War make little to no mention of music, but focus on literary aspects of culture, especially poetry.

 

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Toronto: Lester and Orpen

Dennys Co., 1989.

 

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

 

Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum, 1991.

 

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995.

 

Vance, Jonathan F. Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War. Vancouver: University of British

Columbia Press, 1997.