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Introduction
For at least the past ten years there has been a climate of insecurity and identity crisis surrounding college and university undergraduate music programs in North America and the United Kingdom. The reasons and motivations behind such concerns are tangled and multifarious, with energies focused on more inclusionary structures that allow room for training, performance, composition, and theoretical worldviews beyond the traditional Western European conservatory model (Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major 2016; Moore 2017; Robin 2017; City of Vancouver 2019). In Canada, such imperatives are compounded by the increased desire to decolonize the performance arts, repertoire, and curriculum (Hess 2015; Bartleet et al. 2016; Pearse et al. 2019; Beverley Diamond's contribution to this volume). Particularly precarious has been the place or role of commercial music making within campus walls, with forays into the worlds of jazz and popular music being adopted at times with fervour (see the accompanying articles on Carleton University and The Universitě du Québec a Montreal), at others with trepidation or scorn.
In 2018, I embarked on a project that focused on entrainment and the technological mediation of time keeping as found in the objects of the click track and electronic drum machine. Aiming more specifically at rock music of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, I began by contacting local Vancouver engineers, producers, and session musicians who were active during that period. What I began to notice was that as soon as I introduced myself as a music professor from the University of British Columbia (hereafter UBC), it was almost universally followed by some close variation on "Interesting, [I, or such and such a person] attended or worked at UBC." This statement initially took me by surprise, as even after having worked at UBC in the School of Music for 14 years, I hadn't heard anything about these connections or intersections between UBC Music and the Vancouver commercial music scene. (UBC has no major or full-time faculty member in commercial music making or production, nor any required courses in popular music.)
Subsequent research led to the conception of this article, which is about a largely unacknowledged and unrecorded history between UBC's Department/ School of Music (located on Point Grey, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the...