Ida Halpern facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ida Halpern
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Halpern in 1943
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| Born |
Ida Ruhdörfer
July 17, 1910 |
| Died | February 7, 1987 (aged 76) |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Alma mater | Ph.D., musicology, University of Vienna, 1938 |
| Known for | Collecting, recording, and transcribing music of Native Americans of coastal British Columbia (particularly the Kwakiutl) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Ethnomusicologist |
| Institutions | University of Shanghai, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University |
| Academic advisors | Robert Lach, Egon Wellesz, Robert Haas |
Ida Halpern OC (born Ida Ruhdörfer; July 17, 1910 – February 7, 1987) was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. An ethnomusicologist is someone who studies the music of different cultures.
Ida Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She came to Canada to escape a dangerous political movement called Nazism. She became a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked with Native Americans along the British Columbia Coast in the mid-1900s. She collected, recorded, and wrote down their music. She also documented how they used music in their cultures. Many of her recordings were released as special records called LPs. Later, her collection was also made available digitally.
Contents
Her Early Life and Journey
Ida Ruhdörfer, later known as Ida Halpern, was mostly raised by her mother, Sabine. Her parents had separated when she was very young. She started learning piano at age six and loved it right away. She went to public school and then a private high school. There, she studied old languages and German literature. She also enjoyed gymnastics and continued her interest in music.
When she was 19, she became very ill with a serious heart condition. She was in the hospital for a year. Her heart never fully recovered, so playing the piano a lot was too hard for her. Because of this, she decided to study musicology instead. In 1929, she joined the Musicological Institute at the University of Vienna. She studied with important teachers like Robert Lach, Egon Wellesz, and Robert Haas.
In 1936, she married Georg Halpern, a chemist from the same university. They moved to Italy, where she finished her important paper for her degree. The couple returned to Vienna within a year. They were thinking about where to live permanently, possibly South America. But then, the Nazis entered Vienna. As soon as Ida defended her paper and received her Ph.D. in musicology, they escaped. They went to Shanghai because it was one of the few places that didn't require a visa. Also, Georg's sister taught at a college there.
Shanghai was also having problems because of the Second Sino-Japanese War. After a short time working at the university, the Halperns left for Canada. Getting into Canada was difficult for them. The government usually wanted immigrants to be farmers, which they were not. Also, the immigration board was suspicious about money they had borrowed for their move. Germany was at war with Canada, and Ida couldn't talk to her family back home. Luckily, the friend who lent them the money explained things to the immigration officials. The Halperns were then allowed to stay. They settled in British Columbia and made Vancouver their permanent home.
Building a Music Career in Canada
When Ida Halpern arrived in Canada, she became the first woman in the country with a doctoral degree in musicology. She slowly started to rebuild her career in music. In 1940, she opened her own music studio and gave piano lessons. She took every chance she could to teach. Eventually, she created a special course for the UBC. It was called "Fundamentals of Music." She also taught the university's first class in music appreciation. Later, she taught its first class in ethnomusicology.
Throughout her time in Vancouver, she became a very active part of the city's music scene. She helped start "Friends of Chamber Music" in 1948. She was its president for four years and its program chair for seven more. She was also involved with important music auditions for Western Canada and the Vancouver Women's Musical Club. Ida Halpern was very interested in the folk music of the First Nations people on Canada's west coast. She felt that folk music connected older, traditional music with modern art music. She passed away in Vancouver in 1987.
Discovering First Nations Music
Ida Halpern is most famous for her work with the First Nations people of British Columbia. She recorded their music, wrote it down, and explained how it was used. At first, she didn't focus on Native folk songs. Her immigration papers even suggested she would study the music of Canadian farmers. But after seeing the first Native opera from Canada's east coast, Halpern realized that most Canadians didn't know much about Aboriginal Canadian songs. She really wanted Canadian music to be recognized around the world.
Halpern started important research for her time. She began her fieldwork when it was actually against the law for First Nations cultures to be celebrated or even preserved. It wasn't until 1947 that Halpern truly began her work in ethnomusicology. When she started collecting, many people wrongly believed that "Indians" had no music. She wrote, "It took six years of intense contact making before I was successful in convincing the Indians that they should sing for me their old authentic songs."
Earning Trust and Recording Songs
In many cases, these folk songs were very personal. Some were so sacred that they were not meant to be heard by just anyone. Because of this, the First Nations people were not willing to "give" their songs to strangers. Ida had to work closely with them and earn their trust over time.
During her years working with different Native groups, she collected over 300 folk songs. Most of these were from the Kwakwaka'wakw (sometimes called Kwakiutl) and Nuuchahnulth (previously called Nootka) peoples. Many of these songs were released on LPs by Folkways Records. She released eight records in total.
Her first big success was with Chief Billy Assu, a Kwakwaka'wakw leader. Younger generations often wanted to adopt Western ways. As a result, they weren't learning these important cultural songs. It is said that when Chief Assu realized his music might be lost forever, he offered her "one hundred songs." After Halpern recorded over 80 of his folk songs, she got help from Mungo Martin. He was also a Kwakwaka'wakw man, and a talented artist and songwriter. With him, she recorded another 124 songs.
Understanding Unique Musical Styles
As her collection grew, she studied the songs and tried to share what she learned. While her work has sometimes been criticized for small mistakes, her musical descriptions were mostly perfect. She began to understand that Native music was very different from European music. She realized that listening with "Western" ears wouldn't give a full understanding.
To truly understand the music she recorded, Halpern had to let go of typical Western music ideas. To analyze the beat, she used an old way of writing music that showed stressed and unstressed beats. This showed that the beats followed specific patterns, similar to patterns in poetry. She had great respect for Native music and believed it was extremely important. Later, she used special technology called sonography. This helped her measure the small details of the sounds in the folk songs. She believed that music showed how complex a society was. The sonograph data proved how complex these songs truly were.
Ida Halpern was mainly a musicologist. But she also relied on her First Nations helpers for cultural explanations and translations of what she recorded. She also helped prove that many sounds in Native folk songs were not meaningless "filler." Some were specific words, while others were like onomatopoeia. This means they imitated sounds, like sounds of pain or animal sounds. Others were cues for dances. By the early 1980s, Halpern had found 29 different style characteristics in the folk songs she studied.
Her Lasting Contributions
Even with all her important work, Ida Halpern's studies on First Nations music have sometimes been overlooked by other experts. This might be because her research style was different from what was popular in North America at the time. Despite this, there is clear proof of her contributions. In 1984, Halpern gave most of her collection to the Provincial Archives of British Columbia. This included many records, photos, and sound recordings. The rest of her collection went to the archives of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Honors and Recognition
The Ida Halpern Fellowship and Award was created in her honor. It helps support research on Native American Music in the United States and Canada.
Halpern received a special award called a CBE from Queen Elizabeth II in 1957. She also received the Order of Canada in 1978.
She was given honorary degrees from Simon Fraser University in 1978 and the University of Victoria in 1986.
In September 2017, the Royal BC Museum and Archives suggested that the Ida Halpern collection be added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World register. This is a list of important documents and collections from around the world. A new exhibit about Halpern's recordings is now on display at the Royal BC Museum.
