During the decade between 1940 and 1950, the composers in Canada began to express themselves through contemporary and avant-garde idioms. The concepts learned abroad and from composers who immigrated to Canada created a musical mosaic that reflected the cultural and historical influences in Canada. This prominent and influential post-war generation of composers, including Violet Archer, John Beckwith, Jean Coulthard, Sophie Eckhardt-Grammate, and Barbara Pentland, succeeded in establishing the foundation for contemporary music in Canada. Through their teaching, they encouraged the current generation of composers to write artistically valid pieces for young children that would stimulate interest in contemporary music.

This study demonstrates selected twentieth-century compositional techniques and nontraditional notation through musical examples and brief pedagogical annotations of over two hundred compositions for beginning, intermediate, and early-advanced level piano students written by composers in Canada between 1970 and 2004. The music is categorized with respect to rhythm and meter; harmony and tonality; melody and modality; and textures and extended techniques. Reproductions of demonstrative passages in the music highlight each compositional technique, including shifting accents and non-metrical notation; bitonality, parallelism, and clusters; pentatonic, whole-tone and chromatic scales; and polyphony, indeterminacy, minimalism, and percussive and vocal effects. Annotations provide information regarding stylistic and interpretive considerations, performance suggestions, an explanation of notational symbols and compositional devices, and any directions provided by the composer. The repertoire in the document is organized into two charts: the first by grade and level of difficulty, and the second by compositional technique. A list of the music publishers in Canada provides the sources from which annotated pieces may be acquired.

An overview of music composition in Canada provides information pertaining to publishing, music festivals, examination systems, and government-supported organizations which have shaped the musical scene in Canada. The repertoire in the study represents forty Canadian composers, including Stephen Chatman, David Dahlgren, David Duke, Mary Gardiner, Joan Hansen, Alexina Louie, Linda Niamath, Ann Southam, Roberta Stephen, and Gerhard Wuensch. Many of these composers and their music get little exposure outside of Canada. Brief biographical accounts for each composer serve as an introduction to their backgrounds and influences.