Pop friction: performing Canada at the Festival Internacional da Canção Popular

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Canada-Brazil relations through the prism of a music festival, the Festival Internacional da Canção Popular, held in the wake of the 1964 military coup. Using sources (in French, English, and Portuguese) collected through multi-site research (Montreal, Ottawa, and Rio de Janeiro), it demonstrates that Canadians’ half-hearted, uninspired performance between 1966 and 1969 resulted from their perception of the South American giant as largely irrelevant – and too foreign – with regard to domestic and external priorities. Their elitist and tepid approach to music diplomacy was also a function of their failure of imagination in the making of international cultural relations. Not only did the Department of External Affairs and cultural officials in Canada fail to comprehend how popular music could be rendered valuable in the centennial decade and amid an upsurge of nationalism in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec, but they also found themselves complicit with the Brazilian dictatorship’s efforts to embellish its image through a spectacle of sound and light.