Alternative Music Culture in Toronto: Challenging Conventional Music Appreciation and Understanding

Since modern art tends to be enigmatic and elusive at best, the public feels discouraged to seek out new artistic paradigms. Many new and alternative music genres, therefore, have failed to challenge conventional music paradigms, ultimately failing to infiltrate public school music curricula. In Toronto’s music scene, however, there have been several musical genres which have advanced the limits of conventional musical boundaries, particularly New Music and Acoustic Ecology, respectively represented by compositions such as “Made in China,” by Toca Loca, and “Streetcar Harmonics,” by Andra McCarthy. New Music is concerned with providing new listening tools to appreciate altered musical boundaries, whereas Acoustic Ecology focuses upon appreciating sounds in relationship to life and society. Ultimately both genres separately advocate cultures which strive to present an alternative way of listening to sound (be it music or soundscape), as well as challenging conventional musical paradigms, reinventing the notion of contemporary music, and questioning the boundaries of what ‘music’ really is, which has huge implications for music education.