Duncan McCallum

Duncan McCallum

Challenging Canada’s Musical Mosaic

Often described as a cultural mosaic, Canada is imagined as a nation of diverse yet coexisting identities. However, this mosaic metaphor often creates tensions and hierarchies within, while excluding some identities entirely. The 1990s saw a wave of Canadian popular music—known as the CanRock revival—gain national prominence and highlight the diversity of regional musical identities across the country. Still, this revival often reflected the same biases as the mosaic metaphor, favouring some regions and styles while ignoring others. This project examines how the CanRock revival constructed a musical mosaic of regional identities and interrogates how these representations and exclusions alike contributed to, complicated, or resisted dominant narratives of Canadian nationalism.

Duncan McCallum
PhD candidate, Musicology
Don Wright Faculty of Music - Western University

Supervisor
Dr. Norma Coates

Duncan McCallum is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology within the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University. He holds an M.A. in musicology from Western, and a B.Mus. (Hons) from McMaster University. His research interests lie in popular music and sound studies, especially as they relate to Canadian music. Duncan’s dissertation focuses on Canadian identity and nationalism in the music of the 1990s CanRock revival.

You can connect with Duncan on LinkedIn.

View Duncan's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection.