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This joint presentation originated in a Round Table Discussion which was held at the Joint Annual Meeting of AMS, CMS. SEM, and SMT in November 1985 at Vancouver. In a larger sense, it arises from one ethnomusicologist's concern with the nature and role of contemporary music making and thus forms part of the expanding dialogue between ethnomusicologists and Western music specialists. Western art music is normally analysed in terms of its sound structure and its meaning identified in terms of its own stylistic and aesthetic parameters. This has led to the general assumption that art music is free from contextual constraints and that the concert is an enduring catalyst for this most abstract of arts, not subject to social constraints or social change. This, in turn, has resulted in a neglect of the social contextual dimension as a significant factor in the analysis of Western art music which, I believe, leaves a gap in our understanding of the role this music plays in contemporary Canadian society and of the kinds of social change it may be subject to. Such an understanding is particularly needed today, when established orchestras threaten to collapse and contemporary composers struggle for a hearing of their music. As an ethnomusicologist whose focus has been on the process of music production elsewhere (1987), I am assuming that contemporary Canadian art music - and "serious" music generally - shares fundamental characteristics with other kinds of music, allowing one to approach it in the same way as Sufi songs or Indian ragas, that is, as any music created for performance today. Such an approach would extend two basic premises to the music under consideration. First, if music is a sound message created by a music maker for a listerner, then its communication becomes actual in performance, that is, when the composer's score is made audible to an authence - not when an adjudicator reads that score.1 For "serious" music today this has become complex to the point of removing the originator of the communication - the composer - from the receiver - the listener in time and space. From this emanate charges that composers do not compose for listeners and that composers are alienated from listeners, or, conversely, that listeners are not concerned with what composers might be saying today. Central to the nature of the contemporary music making process is the objectification of the composer's utterance, usually in the form of a score, an artifact that can be commissioned, bought, deposited and treated as a document of Canadian creativity, not to mention its study and analysis. Recordings are a further extension of this objectification of music. All this, I believe, contributes to a certain mystification (to borrow a Marxian term), of the basic reality about music making as a process that extends from a composer to an authence. It is to this process we wish to address ourselves here. Second, an essential source for understanding the music making process are the participants, prime among them the music maker himself. This holds true, I believe, even where an investigator of his own music can rely on his expertise, for it is the dynamic between protagonist and observer that generates the potential for insightful analysis. In Western art music practice only contemporary music allows access to living composers and therefore access to the music making process in its entirety. In order to initiate the scrutiny of this process, our present focus is directed to the first link in the chain, the composer. To begin with, musicologist Alan Lessem sets the stage with a cultural-historical perspective on the place of the composer and the forces that govern musical production in contemporary Canadian society. Then Alfred Fisher, John Beckwith, and Barry Truax each present positions that represent their particular outlook and commitment as composers, making it possible to identify issues of common conern as well as to gather together individual insights into a composite profile. …

From Composer to Audience: the Production of ''Serious'' Music in Canada