From its humble beginnings at the University of Alberta to today's world-wide audience over the Internet, CKUA has been a leader in public radio. It has been a training ground for Albertan and Canadian talent, and a platform for important ideas. Throughout its seventy-five-year history, Canada's oldest public broadcaster has been one of Alberta's leading cultural institutions. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For presents much more than the story of the little radio station that could. Marylu Walters has captured the political and cultural context of the times: the pioneering spirit that brought the station to life, the creativity that emerged from benign neglect and the passionate battles that maintained the station in the face of adversity. Packed with human stories told by the people who lived them, CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For is an essential book for CKUA devotees across Alberta and around the world. If you haven't yet become a CKUA convert, this book is sure to hook you.
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Why is music so important to radio? This anthology explores the ways in which musical life and radio interact, overlap and have influenced each other for nearly a century. One of music radio's major functions is to help build smaller or larger communities by continuously offering broadcast music as a means to create identity and senses of belonging. Music radio also helps identify and develop musical genres in collaboration with listeners and the music industry by mediating and by gatekeeping. Focusing on music from around the world, Music Radio discusses what music radio is and why or for what purposes it is produced. Each essay illuminates the intricate cultural processes associated with music and radio and suggests ways of working with such complexities.
I Was There shares the insights and experiences of the generations of students, professors, and staff who lived and worked at the U of A for the past 100 years. First-person stories and period photographs present a unique insight into university lore from the vantage point of those who were most intimately involved in making the university what it is today: the students and alumni.
One little question propels both author and reader on a genre-bending quest to find the elusive essence of a Canadian province built on sturdy stereotypes of oil-spoiled, beef-eating, bible-thumping rednecks devoid of class or culture. Through essay, interview, colourful observation, and whatever other exposé it takes to amplify the hyperbolic absurdity of seeking a simple answer to an incendiary question, Geo Takach spotlights the cultural complexity of this perplexing province. Readers will be delightfully edified after a dizzying romp around Wild Rose Country with Geo and a cast of citizens and celebs (alive and dead).
This anthology emanated from a conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland, that brought together popular music scholars, folklorists and ethnomusicologists from Canada and Australia. Implicit in that conference and in this anthology is the comparability of the two countries. Their ‘post-colonial’ status (if that is indeed an appropriate modifier in either case) has some points of similarity. On the other hand, their ‘distance’ – from hegemonic centres, from colonial histories – is arguably more a matter of contrast than similarity. Canada and Australia are similar in various regards. Post-colonial in the sense that they are both former British colonies, they now each have more than a century of stature as nation states. By the beginning of the 21st century, they are each modest in size but rich in ethnocultural diversity. Nonetheless, each country has some skeletons in the closet where openness to difference, to indigenous and new immigrant groups are concerned. Both countries are similarly both experiencing rapid shifts in cultural makeup with the biggest population increases in Australia coming from China, India, and South Africa, and the biggest in Canada from Afro-Caribbean, South Asian countries, and China. The chapters in this anthology constitute an important comparative initiative. Perhaps the most obvious point of comparison is that both countries create commercial music in the shadow of the hegemonic US and British industries. As the authors demonstrate, both proximity (specifically Canada’s nearness to the US) and distance have advantages and disadvantages. As the third and fourth largest Anglophone music markets for popular music, they face similar issues relating to music management, performance markets, and production. A second relationship, as chapters in this anthology attest, is the significant movement between the two countries in a matrix of exchange and influence among musicians that has rarely been studied hitherto. Third, both countries invite comparison with regard to the popular music production of diverse social groups within their national populations. In particular, the tremendous growth of indigenous popular music has resulted in opportunities as well as challenges. Additionally, however, the strategies that different waves of immigrants have adopted to devise or localize popular music that was both competitive and meaningful to their own people as well as to a larger demographic bear comparison. The historical similarities and differences as well as the global positionality of each country in the early 21st century, then, invites comparison relating to musical practices, social organization, lyrics as they articulate social issues, career strategies, industry structures and listeners.
Alberta's contradictory landscape has fired the imaginative energies of writers for centuries. The sweep of the plains, the thrust of the Rockies, and the long roll of the woodlands have left vivid impressions on all of Alberta's writers--both those who passed through Alberta in search of other horizons and those who made it their home. The Literary History of Alberta surveys writing in and about Alberta from prehistory to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes profiles of dozens of writers (from the earnestly intended to the truly gifted) and their texts (from the commercial to the arcane). It reminds us of long-forgotten names and faces, figures who quietly--or not so quietly--wrote the books that underpin Alberta's thriving literary culture today. Melnyk also discusses the institutions that have shaped Alberta's literary culture. The Literary History of Alberta is an essential text for any reader interested in the cultural history of western Canada, and a landmark achievement in Alberta's continuing literary history.
Linda Goyette and Carolina Roemmich have tapped Edmonton's collective memoir, through the written record, the spoken stories and the vast silences. All of the people who ever lived at this bend in the North Saskatchewan took part in creating the city we know as Edmonton. Through traditional Indigenous stories about the earliest travellers along the bend in the river, diaries, archival records and letters of 19th century inhabitants and the recollections of living residents who talk about the emerging city, Edmonton's history is told using the words and stories of the people who have called this city home. Citizens with diverse viewpoints speak for themselves, describing important events in Edmonton's social, political and economic development. The official publication of the City of Edmonton's Centennial, Edmonton In Our Own Words includes many never seen before photographs from private collections, historic maps and a timeline of Edmonton's history. Imagine a conversation between Edmonton's past inhabitants and its living citizens. What would we tell the rest of the world about our place on the map? What stories would we tell with tears in our eyes, or laughter, or pride? In Edmonton In Our Own Words, experience the personal stories of eyewitnesses and descendants explaining, arguing, crying, scolding, laughing and interrupting one another in a city's evolving conversation with itself as Edmonton celebrates its past and future.
