Mary Ingraham
Faculty of Arts
History
Professor and Dean, Faculty of Arts
Office: MM218
Phone: 9027170446
Email: mary.ingraham@smu.ca
Mary Ingraham is a music historian and Professor of Musicology. Her research is interdisciplinary in nature, emphasizing cultural studies and considering issues of ethnicity, race, gender and spirituality in identity studies. Prior to joining Saint Mary's, she was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge.
Dr. Ingraham previously served as Director of the interdisciplinary Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta, where she was also a Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music, and Manager of UAlberta partnerships with the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta and the Cultures of Sound Network (with Smithsonian Folkways Records, the Canadian Museum of and the History, and Memorial University of Newfoundland). She is co-founder and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Music in Canada Research Group.
Her research appears in publications including Ars Lyrica, Intersections, University of Toronto Quarterly, Nineteenth-century Music Review, International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education, Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education and others, and with Ashgate, Routledge, Oxford University, University of Alberta, and University of Michigan presses. She is the author of multiple online resources for exploring culture in Canada, and has presented her research internationally in Denmark, Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, UK, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and across the USA and Canada.
Digital Archiving with the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA): ongong audio and film projects
The AMMSA Archives is home to over 2,000 separate audio items and over 5,000 items tagged as film, photographs, event documentation, and other ephemera archived from the Alberta Native Communications Society (in operation from the late 1960s until the early 1980s) and CFWE Radio (AMMSA). These include recordings of traditional knowledge in spoken and sung expressions as well as conversations and interviews with community leaders, culture bearers and Elders. The ANCS is one of the earliest Indigenous media corporations in Canada, and its archives are of national significance. These projects preserve materials through professional digitization in preservation and access formats and creates openly available metadata for each item to foster opportunities for discoverability and access within the guidelines for traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. Projects are designed to develop appropriate community protocols for assigning permissions to individual media following the OCAP guidelines, for ensuring high quality digital preservation and archiving, and to establish culturally-appropriate metadata of digital files to ensure the discoverability of content on community-approved platforms.
Principle Investigators: Bert Crowfoot, CEO of AMMSA; Dr. Mary Ingraham, Professor
Collaborative Team at the University of Alberta: Dr. Ben Tucker, Professor, Linguistics; Mr. Sean Luyk, Digital Initiatives Projects Librarian, Mr. Tom Merklinger, Research Associate; Research Assistants: Dr. Claudia Heinrich, Ms. Kayla Reddecliff, Mr. Christian Isbister, Ms. Emily Villanueva
Funding for these projects has been received from: Canadian Heritage Aboriginal Languages Initiative, National Heritage Digitization Strategy, Library and Archives Canada, Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA), Sound Studies Institute, Dean and Faculty of Arts and Fine Arts at the University of Alberta and the University of Lethbridge, and many other individual supporters and donors.
Resounding Culture: Recontextualizing resources for histories of music in Canada
The sheer diversity of musical activities that constitute the history of music in Canada—chronological and stylistic, but also social, cultural, and regional—creates enormous challenges for those seeking to communicate its development. Existing histories have often responded by explicitly or implicitly narrowing their scope, focusing on documentable works within the Western European ‘classical’ tradition, frequently ignoring or considering only peripherally music of oral or other folk traditions. They have often also linked their histories to a narrative of development that communicates a national musical identity. Although such approaches have come under close scrutiny in diverse cultural, literary, and anthropological studies, and although many music scholars recognize the need for more inclusive documentation, there exists a paucity of interdisciplinary materials available for studying Canada’s multicultural and multifaceted cultural past.
Building on both a reconceptualization of basic premises of national music histories and on the communicative potential of searchable knowledge networks, this project is designed to develop an accessible, searchable multimedia web portal for histories of music and music-making in Canada. The portal links digitized cultural resources across distinct collections, drawing on the multi- and intercultural nature of musical practices and the potential for innovative use of technology to create a viable alternative to traditional narrative – and often linear – approaches to history. The project proceeded through several interrelated and foundational strands of research to investigate experiences of music and musicians in Canada across approximately 500 years of social history to explore issues unique to Canada’s social and cultural histories, create a framework for ongoing research, and build an accessible web portal for researchers themselves to explore across multiple collections.
Collaborating researchers: Dr. Mary Ingraham, Professor and Principle Investigator, Dr. David Gramit, Professor
Collaborative Team: Mr. Sean Luyk, Digital Initiatives Projects Librarian, UA Libraries; Research Assistants Dr. Jamie Meyers-Riczu, Dr. Morteza Abedinifard, Ms. Caitlin MacRae, Ms. Holly Pickering. Funded by SSHRC Insight Grant
Related publications:
Gramit D., and M. Ingraham. 2017. “Music in Canadian Culture: A pedagogical alternative to the narrative of national development.” Teaching Canada – Enseigner le Canada. Ed. Martin Kuesler. Wissner-Verlag, 149-162
Creative Collaboration: The Social Efficacy of Music in Canada
The Social Efficacy of Music in Canada was a three-year research project with the goals of better understanding the processes, challenges, and results of musical collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists in Canada. The research was grouped around three case studies that are discrete in scope, location, and production protocols. Funded by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, this project examined intercultural music collaboration across Canada. Collaborating researchers included Dr. Mary Ingraham (PI), Dr. Robin Elliot, and Dr. Dylan Robinson with (then) graduate Research Assistant Brianna Wells, Caitlyn Triebel and Jeffrey Arsenault (Ingraham), Jeremy Strachan (Elliott), and Patrick Nickleson (Robinson). These scholars undertook mixed methods research including direct participation, observation of rehearsals and workshops, and interviews with artistic partners and participation in the First People’s Cultural Council forum on cultural protocols (E’nowkin Centre, Penticton). Dr. Ingraham and her research assistants participated in both the 2010 IMPRINT performance at UBC Museum of Anthropology, 2012 and “” at the Quails’ Gate Winery in the Okanagan Valley in 2014. Dr. Robin Elliot’s case study, “,” explored the creative collaborations behind the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Going Home Star production, which was supported by a grant linked to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools in Canada and premiered in Winnipeg in 2014. Dr. Dylan Robinsons’s case study, “” is both a creation and an exploration of collaborative response to the people, environment and spirit of the Bella Coola valley. The work was created by Anna Höstman (composer), Dylan Robinson, Patrick Nickleson and Marion Newman. The collaborators workshopped the 11-piece work with the Continuum Music Ensemble (Toronto) in December 2013. See for more details.
Related publications:
Ingraham, M., and B. Wells. 2018. “Listening to the Lake.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Fall 2018), pp. 102-119. DOI: 10.3138/UTQ.87.4.11
Ingraham, M. 2016. “The Other Within: Opera and culture in Canada,” 68-83. Ingraham, M., J. So, and R. Moodley, eds. Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, culture, performance. New York: Routledge.
Ingraham, M. 2014. “Noble Savage/Indigène Sauvage: Staging First Nations in early Canadian operas.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/2 (December), 255-72.
Ingraham, M. 2011. “Assimilation, Integration, and Individuation: The evolution of First Nations musical citizenship in Canadian opera.” In Opera Indigene, P. Karantonis and D. Robinson, eds. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 211-30.
Ingraham, M. 2007. “Something to Sing About: A preliminary list of Canadian staged dramatic music since 1867.” Intersections: A Canadian journal of music, 28/1, 14-77.
My current research focus is on music in Canada. As an interdisciplinary scholar, this research is grounded in cultural studies and spans the fields of musicology, human geography, and media studies. It further engages methodological and theoretical approaches of Indigenous communities, postcolonial, cultural and critical theories, and sound studies. My interests are historical and contemporary, critical and pedagogical. These are based on my understanding of Canada as a plurality of cultures and histories marked by a global flow of influences. In my research, I examine the discontinuities and unresolved tensions created by these multiple influences and across multiple communities of music-making. Research projects include studies in interculturality across Indigenous, Immigrant, and Settler populations, critiques of historical narratives, and the development of digital resources. Most recently I have been exploring the role that arts-based practices such as listening and collaborative creation can play in enhancing intercultural understanding.
1994 Ph.D. Musicology, University of Nottingham, UK - Dissertaion: “Brahms’s Rinaldo Op. 50: A Structural and Contextual Study” Supervisor: Prof. Robert Pascall
1987 M.A. Musicology, University of Victoria, Canada - Thesis: “Brahms and the Folk Ideal: His Poets and His Art Song” Supervisor: Prof. Gordana Lazarevich
1983 B.Mus. (with Distinction), Mount Allison University, Canada - Major: Piano Performance; Minor: German Literature