Montreal music scene

Montreal's English-speaking music scene also succeeds in getting attention from popular media around the world. The growing success of the current variety of artists and bands, with Arcade Fire arguably leading the way, owes much to the city's culture of melting together different genres of music present from many different cultures. A variety of music festivals and independent local record labels also helps sustain this success. Other Montreal bands include Wolf Parade, Mobile, the Unicorns, and Simple Plan.

Jazz

The Montreal International Jazz Festival illustrates well this melting of genres. Far from limiting itself classical jazz (a style that Montreal always represented with jazzmen such as Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones), it features a great variety of artists who have espoused rhythms and styles from around the world. Smaller musical festivals include Montreal Nuits d'Afrique ("African Nights"), Montreal Reggae Festival, Pop Montreal, FestiBlues international de Montréal, Mutek electronic music, and Osheaga rock festival.

Constellation records

Constellation Records is an influential independent record label mostly known for releasing the albums of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.. for its contributions to post rock.

The label was founded in 1997, operating out of a loft in Montreal's inner city. Its founders had intended to begin by providing a live performance space for the musicians of Montreal's thriving underground music world, with the label to follow, but bureaucratic difficulties put an end to this plan, and the stage was skipped. Instead, the label and the live performance series—entitled Musique fragile—began concurrently. The label later moved to larger quarters in Montreal's Mile End. Constellation is fiercely anti-capitalist, and anti-globalist; its mission, according to its founders, was to "enact a mode of cultural production that critiques the worst tendencies of the music industry, artistic commodification, and perhaps in some tiny way, the world at large." It also hoped to recover and rebuild an independent music ethic that it saw as commodified and corporatized. To this end, Constellation tried to avoid selling its music through large corporate chains such as HMV and Virgin Records, preferring instead to deal directly with small and local businesses. Constellation releases are now available, however, from major media retailers such as Amazon.com.

French-speaking production

Theatre in Montreal is dominated by French-language productions, in part because Montreal has traditionally been a center for most successful Quebec plays. As a result, the most celebrated and internationally recognized Quebec playwrights have all worked in Montreal at some point, including Montreal's son Michel Tremblay, Montreal's adoptee Wajdi Mouawad. Most established French-language theatres are found in the Quartier Latin or near Place des Arts.

English-speaking production

In contrast, English theatre struggled but survived with the Centaur Theatre. Ethnic theatre, by the 70s, began to be a force, notably with the Black Theatre Workshop under the leadership of artistic director Tyrone Benskin, the Yiddish Theatre established at the Saidye Bronfman Centre and later with the Teesri Duniya Theatre. In the late 1990s, Montreal started to become a hotspot for low-budget independent English theatre with companies such as Optative Theatrical Laboratories, MainLine Theatre, Gravy Bath Theatre, Sa Booge, Persephone, Pumpkin Productions, and Tableau D'Hôte Theatre adding to the scene. More recently theatre has been taking a more activist turn with emerging organizations such as ATSA and the Optative Theatrical Laboratories, and festivals such as the Anarchist Theatre Festival, MAYWORKS, and the Infringement Festival.