Juliette Bourassa-Trépanier

Bourassa-Trépanier, Juliette
Juliette Bourassa-Trépanier (b Bourassa). Musicologist, teacher, b Saint-Raymond de Portneuf, near Quebec City, 22 Feb 1918. B.A. (Laval) 1938, B MUS (Laval) 1965, D MUS (Laval) 1972. Having suspended her activities as a pianist in order to raise her family after her marriage, she resumed her involvement with music in 1961 with studies at Laval University under Jacques Hétu. She wrote (1960-5) scripts for radio programmes of the CBC in Montreal, and she has written, beginning in 1970, most of the comments pertaining to concerts and music programs recorded by the CBC in Quebec City.

Beginning in 1971, she has lectured on the history of Canadian music at Laval University, a course she herself introduced. In this capacity, she has sensitized Quebec City's musical milieu to Canadian repertoire by organizing concerts of music by Antoine Dessane, Rodolphe Mathieu, Émiliano Renaud, and Harry Somers. She took part (1977-1980) in the inventory of the Séminaire de Québec archives under the leadership of Claude Beaudry. In 1980, she was one of the founding members of ARMuQ, of which she was vice-president until 1983.

Since 1982, she has co-directed, with Lucien Poirier, a research team from Laval University who are cataloguing and studying the musical data of the Quebec press. The results of this study have been published in Répertoire des données musicales de la presse québécoise; the first of the six-volume series was released in Quebec City in 1990. She has contributed many articles to Canadian periodicals and to music dictionaries, among them EMC, Compositeurs canadiens contemporains and Dictionnaire de la musique by Marc Honegger (Paris). She wrote her doctoral thesis on Rodolphe Mathieu. She is the sister of pianist Guy Bourassa.

Author Irène Brisson