Ida Halpern

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Ida Halpern 1943

Ida Halpern (born Ida Ruhdörfer ; born July 17, 1910 in Vienna , Austria ; died February 7, 1987 in Vancouver , Canada ) was an Austrian-Canadian ethnomusicologist .

biography

Ida Halpern's parents were Sabine Ruhdörfer born. Weinstock and Heinrich (actually Hersch Meilech) Ruhdörfer, owners of a silk tie factory. The family lived in the Jewish quarter in Vienna's Leopoldstadt . The parents separated when Ida was very young. Sabine Ruhdörfer moved with her bedridden mother and little Ida into a two-room apartment on Kettenbrückengasse in the Margareten district of Vienna . Sabine Ruhdörfer devotedly took care of her sick mother and spoiled her daughter. Although money was tight, she sent her to a private school and made her music lessons possible. Ida began to learn the piano at the age of six and was immediately fascinated by this instrument. From 1916 she went to a public elementary school and from 1921 to a private reform school for girls . There she studied Greek, Latin, French and German literature, played sports and developed her interest in music. In 1929 she obtained her Matura . She survived the five-day exams with a severe fever that turned into a rheumatic fever . She had to spend almost a year in the hospital. Her heart never fully recovered, and since playing the piano beyond normal was too strenuous for her, she turned her attention to musicology instead. After being released from the hospital, she began to study at the Musicological Institute of the University of Vienna in the winter semester of 1929/1930 , where she studied with Robert Lach , Egon Wellesz and Robert Haas .

In 1933 she met Georg Halpern (born 1912), who had obtained his doctorate in chemistry at the same university in 1925. Since Georg did not have a permanent position at the Austrian Medicines Agency, they waited with the wedding. Through a friend, Georg Halpern finally got a permanent position in Milan , where he was supposed to set up and manage a pharmaceutical factory. On November 19, 1936, they married in a synagogue in Vienna and moved to Italy, where Ida Halpern finished her dissertation. Georg lost his job and the couple returned to Vienna after a year. Since Georg couldn't find a job, the couple had to decide where to settle. The couple considered going to Palestine, but then chose Buenos Aires, where Ida had an uncle. The couple learned Spanish when the Nazis invaded Austria on March 12, 1938 . It was clear to them that their life was threatened because of their Jewish descent. They tried one after the other to get visas for Argentina, Chile and Australia, but were not lucky. As soon as Ida Halpern defended her dissertation in 1938 and received her doctorate in musicology, the couple fled to Shanghai . Not only because it was one of the few places in the world that didn't require a visa, but also because Georg Halpern's older sister, Fanny G. Halpern, taught neurology and psychiatry at the National Medical College there. Shanghai had its own troubles because of the Second Sino-Japanese War . That is why the Halperns had to leave for Canada after a short work stay at the University of Shanghai . They were assisted by Robert D. Murray, Branch Manager of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in Shanghai. He spoke for her with Frederick Winslow Taylor , who was District Superintendent for Immigration at the time. Eventually they got tourist visas. The Halperns booked the next ship and left on July 24, 1939 with the Empress of Asia .

They arrived in Vancouver in August 1939. Since they were not farmers (the education the Canadian government was demanding for most immigrants at the time) and immigration officials were suspicious of £ 1,000 the Halperns borrowed from Robert D. Murray for the crossing, their situation was precarious at the time. Germany was now at war with Canada and the Halperns could not communicate with their relatives. Murray met with immigration and assured that the money was given out in good faith. The Halperns were allowed to stay. They settled in British Columbia and made Vancouver their home. In 1944, Ida Halpern received Canadian citizenship.

Upon arriving in Canada, Ida Halpern became the first woman in the country to earn a PhD in musicology. She was slowly able to build a career in music. In the fall of 1940 she opened her own music studio where she could give piano lessons. She took every opportunity and eventually she was able to give a distance learning course on the fundamentals of music at the University of British Columbia from 1940 to 1961 . She taught the first class for music understanding at the university and from 1964 to 1965 the first class in ethnomusicology. During her time in Vancouver, she became an active part of their music scene. In 1948 she was co-founder of the Chamber Music Friends ( English The Friends of Chamber Music ) and until 1952 their president, program director 1951 to 1958 and honorary president from 1952 until her death in 1987. Ida Halpern appeared in radio shows and TV discussions and was 1952 to 1961 music critic for The Province . In 1958 she became the director of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (singing competitions of the New York Metropolitan Opera ) in western Canada and promoted the careers of several talents, including Judith Forst ,  Ermanno Mauro and Perry Price . From 1960 to 1962 she was president of Vancouver Women 's Music Club ( English Vancouver Woman's Musical Club ).

Ida Halpern found great interest in the music of the First Nations of the Canadian east coast and said that folk music closed the gap between so-called “primitive” music and music as art. She died in Vancouver in 1987.

research

Ida Halpern is best known for her work with the First Nations peoples of British Columbia. She recorded their music, transcribed it and documented how it was used. At first, her interest was not particularly focused on First Nations music. Her immigration entry even states that she would research the music of Canadian farmers. After performing the first opera by the East Coast natives, Ida Halpern understood that Canadians mostly had no idea about Native music. She really wanted Canadian music to find its own voice on the world stage.

Nuu-chah-nulth-Children 1930 Friendly Cove, British Columbia

Ida Halpern initiated groundbreaking research for her time. She began and did most of her fieldwork at a time when it was actually illegal for the First Nations to practice their culture. Little has been handed down. It was not until 1947 that Ida Halpern could really begin to study ethnomusicology. When she started collecting, it was widely believed that "Indians" did not have music. "It took six years of intense contact before I was able to successfully make it clear to the Indians that they should sing me their old authentic songs," she wrote. In many cases, these folk songs were very personal and in some cases so sacred that they from the non initiates could not be heard. Because of this, the First Nations were not ready to give their songs to anyone. Ida Halpern had to work closely with them and over time gain their trust. During this period of collaboration with indigenous groups - most notably the Kwakwaka'wakw , Nuuchahnulth , Haida , Nuxalk, and Coastal Salish - she collected more than 500 folk songs, many of which were made available on records by the Folkways Ethnic Library . Eight records were released in total, each as a double long-playing record in 1967, 1974, 1981 and most recently 1986. She had her first success in 1947 with Chief Billy Assu of the Kwakwaka'wakw. The younger generations, who would normally inherit this culture, increasingly turned to the western lifestyle. Because of this, they didn't take the time to learn the cultural songs. It is said that as soon as Assu understood that his music would die with him, he offered Ida Halpern "a hundred songs". After Ida Halpern recorded over 80 folk songs from Chief Billy Assus, she was helped by the artist and composer Mungo Martin , who was also a Kwakwaka'wakw. With him she recorded another 124 songs. Other artists Ida Halpern worked with were George Clutesi , Dan Cranmer and Stanley Hunt. As her collection grew, she examined it and did her best to share what she had learned, although that affected the work she was still doing at the university.

Her work has occasionally been criticized for its "cultural material". In particular, some of their cover texts contain typing errors, incomplete information, or incorrect information about the owner of the song. However, it is widely recognized that their musical descriptions were largely error-free. She began to investigate the fact that Aboriginal music was significantly different from European music, and that listening with "western" ears did not allow full understanding. In order to understand the music she had recorded, “Halpern had to break free from the standard concepts and structures of Western music and notation. To analyze the beat, Halpern used medieval modal notation , which uses stressed and unstressed beats. This showed that the beat occurs in predetermined patterns, similar to the iambus , dactylus , trochaeus and anapaest . ”Because of all this, Ida Halpern felt great respect for the music of the indigenous people and saw it as very important. Later, in her work, she was able to use sonography to measure the nuances of the sounds used in the folk songs. Ida Halpern believed that music was a marker of the complexity of the society it created and that sonographic data showed how complex these songs were.

While Halpern was first and foremost a musicologist, she depended on First Nations informants for cultural explanations and translations of what she had recorded. She is known for refuting the belief that many of the sounds in aboriginal folk songs were meaningless " filler " sounds . Some were special words, while others were more onomatopoeic . These stood for pain or animal sounds, for example. Others were choreographic cues. In the early 1980s, Ida Halpern identified 29 styles of folk song among the pieces she examined.

Despite the contributions that Ida Halpern had made throughout her career, "the honors Halpern has received sound hollow because of the somber observation that her research on First Nations music has in fact been largely overlooked by ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and folklorists." Lack could be attributed to her research style, which was "derived only from the comparison of fragments, an Austro-German school of comparative musicology that was incompatible with popular North American ethnomusicology, anthropology and folklore," as Kenneth Chen writes, because of a clash of four paradigms different theoretical backgrounds which led to an “inappropriate exclusion” of Ida Halpern. Additionally, Halpern's name is strangely missing from Chief Martin's biography and the writings of George Clutesi, an artist with whom she had worked. Despite this disregard, there is physical evidence of their work. In 1984 Ida Halpern donated a large part of her collection of over 30 file boxes with written records, publications, moving images, sound recordings and interviews and 342 songs to the British Columbia Archives . The rest went to the archives of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Few works are available online as many of the songs have strong references to First Nations ceremonies or families. They can only be heard by prior appointment in the British Columbia Archives and may not be reproduced.

Honors

She was honored with the Ida Halpern Fellowship and Award to aid research into the music of the Native American people of the United States and Canada.

Halpern was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Elizabeth II in 1957 and the Order of Canada in 1978 .

She received an honorary degree from Simon Fraser University in 1978 and an honorary degree in music from the University of Victoria in 1986 .

Works

  • Franz Schubert in contemporary criticism . PhD thesis. Ed .: University of Vienna. Vienna 1938.
  • What is modern music? In: Pacific Northwest Library Association Quarterly . tape 2 , 1947 (English).
  • Kwa-Kiutl Indian music . In: Journal of the International Folk Music Council . tape 14 , 1962 (English).
  • Music of the BC Northwest Coast Indians . In: Peter Crossley-Holland (Ed.): Proceedings of the Centennial Workshop on Ethnomusicology . Victoria, British Columbia 1968 (English).
  • On the interpretation of "meaningless-nonsensical syllables" in the music of the Pacific Northwest Indians . In: Ethnomusicology . tape May 20 , 1976 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Douglas Cole, Christine Mullins: “Haida Ida”: The Musical World of Ida Halpern . In: BC Studies . No. 97 , 1993, ISSN  0005-2949 , pp. 3–37 (English, ojs.library.ubc.ca [PDF; 8.3 MB ]).
  2. ^ Raymond Frogner: The Ida Halpern Records and the Archival Depiction of Indigenous Culture and Identity. Royal British Columbia Museum , November 7, 2013, accessed February 27, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e Charles E. Borden: Ida Halpern. In: The Canadian Encyclopedia . June 28, 2007, accessed February 27, 2017 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Kenneth Chen: Ida Halpern: A Post-Colonial Portrait of a Canadian Pioneer Ethnomusicologist . In: Canadian University Music Review . tape 16 , no. 1 , 1995, p. 41-59 , doi : 10.7202 / 1014415ar (English).
  5. ^ A b Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Rosemary J. Coombe, Fiona MacArailt: A Broken Record: Subjecting 'Music' to Cultural Rights . In: James O. Young, Conrad G. Brunk (Eds.): The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation . Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. UK 2009, doi : 10.1002 / 9781444311099.ch8 (English).
  6. ^ Richard Watts: How an escape from Nazis led to new world of First Nations songs . In: Times-Colonist . August 6, 2015 (English, timescolonist.com [accessed February 28, 2017]).
  7. ^ Ida Halpern Fellowship and Award. Society for Ethnomusicology, accessed February 27, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Halpern, Ida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ruhdörfer, Ida (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Canadian ethnomusicologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 1987
Place of death Vancouver , Canada