Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Allyson Rogers

The postwar era was a highly productive time for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), when the institution enjoyed a period of relative political and financial stability. By the 1950s, the NFB retained a large roster of filmmakers on permanent contracts, produced over one hundred films annually, and continued to build an international reputation for artistic innovation. The NFB’s production staff also included three full-time composers — Maurice Blackburn, Robert Fleming, and Eldon Rathburn — who were all classically trained and who joined the Board in the mid-1940s. With few exceptions, the NFB’s postwar documentaries are underscored by music written by these three composers. Scoring government films poses specific compositional challenges, and by the late 1940s, the staff composers had developed similar ways of navigating the constraints, aesthetic boundaries, and ideological strictures imposed by the institution. This gave rise to an idiosyncratic “NFB sound” that characterizes the standard documentaries from this period. In this paper, I define the postwar NFB sound, examine the political dimensions inherent in the aesthetics of this music, and the role it plays in constructing the ideological messages embodied in these films.

Biography: