Music of Vancouver

Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of the Canada's largest cities and foremost cultural centres.

The music of Vancouver reflects the diversity of the city's many peoples, traditions and cultures. It embodies the music of vastly different time periods, from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. It may be played by orchestras as diverse as the Javanese gamelan or one playing authentic replicas of 18th century instruments. Ensembles might be a jazz band or high school vocal jazz group. Or the monks of the Westminster Abbey in nearby Mission singing ancient Gregorian chant. Or an avant-garde ensemble from UBC's School of Music. It may be music notated or spontaneously improvised. It may be pop, rock, rap, jazz, world or country. It may be "fusion" mixing performers of classical and popular music backgrounds together or fusing performers of instruments used in Chinese, Hong Kong and Indian music. The musicians may hale from Vancouver or be be famous international music "stars." They may include pre-school children or seniors.

That music was for thousands of years an integral part of the culture of Vancouver's First Nations people is clear but was poorly documented when it flourished.

European arrivals in the nineteenth century established numerous amateur orchestras, sensembles, church and ethnocentric choirs. By the 1920s there existed local choral societies and orchestras that regularly presented the major works of European composers to Vancouverites.

The first known musical entertainments (other than those provided by First Nations residents, and informally by mill workers, sailors, loggers and tavern keepers) in what would later become Vancouver were Methodist church services led by a Mrs. Sullivan in Gastown, who was of West Indian origin. Her son Arthur became popular with Vancouver impresarios as a Master of Ceremonies and his career as a singer, actor and host bridged the pre-railway Gastown era with the glitter of Vancouver's nightlife in the '20s and '30s.

The city has had a sometimes-vibrant musical culture since the days it was on the worldwide circuit known as "Grand Tour", which included clubs in centres such as New York, London, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Cairo, Sydney, San Francisco and even Dawson City. Artists such as Caruso and Pavlova trod the boards in Vancouver. The city regularly feted musical notables, since the CPR terminus was on the main route from London, UK to the Orient. Attached to the Canadian Pacific's Hotel Vancouver (demolished) second Hotel Vancouver (now the location of the Toronto-Dominion Tower on Georgia Street) was an opera house in neo-Egyptian Art Deco styling fronting on Granville Street. When this theatre closed and was demolished to make way for the new Pacific Centre in the early 1970s its was known as the Lyric Theatre, but originally known as Orpheum Theatre. The current Orpheum is a restored vaudeville house a block farther down Granville, which houses one of the last large Wurlitzer theatre organs installed back in the silent movie era.

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