ABSTRACTS

Margarethe Adams

Kazakhstan’s shrine pilgrimages are widely varying in scope and kind, including sites dedicated to Sufi saints, military heroes, Soviet composers, and musicians. Possibly due to its shamanic past, the Kazakh qobyz, a two-stringed horsehair fiddle with a skin head, is the sacred focus of two such pilgrimage sites – one a nationally funded and widely-known site (which also functions as a museum); the other, once a barely marked gravesite of a qobyz player, is now a popular destination for busloads of pilgrims and sacred tourists seeking healing. This paper focuses on three aspects of these shrines to the Kazakh fiddle: the use of sound, vibration, and silence in the sacralisation of place; the musical aspects of the qobyz and their connections to concepts of the sacred; and the shamanic history that links qobyz playing to an animistic belief system. Finally, I consider whether, in this current period of precarity in Kazakhstan, the seeking for stabilising belief systems rooted in a pre-Soviet past may be leading Kazakhstanis in greater numbers to pilgrimage, to alternative healing (particularly faith healing), and to reverence for the Kazakh qobyz.

Roy Andrade and Jane MacMorran

Founded in 1982, Bluegrass, Old-Time, Celtic, and Country Music Studies at East Tennessee State University is the oldest established program of its kind at any four-year institution. Students from around the globe come to ETSU exclusively to study the music of the mountains in the rich cultural hearth of north-east Tennessee. Conceived as a bluegrass music program, old-time and Celtic music are thriving. The nature of old-time fiddling and Celtic styles as they exist in East Tennessee, and as they relate to a primarily bluegrass music curriculum has created a unique challenge pedagogically. While bluegrass, old-time, and Celtic fiddling are closely related historically, the styles have grown apart culturally and created opportunities for re-examining matters of regionality. Our paper will explore the strategies we have found to both connect the styles we teach, and to build autonomy in the service of the traditions themselves both within the institution and in the community.

Patricia Ballantyne

The period from the mid-nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in the population of Scotland’s towns and cities as people flocked to urban areas in search of work. In Aberdeen, in common with other urban areas in Scotland and further afield, this migration of the population was reflected by an increase in the number of dancing masters active in the city, all vying with each other for business. One result of such increased competition was the formation of the regulatory dance societies. This paper will address the impact this change had on dance teaching in Scotland and consider the significant effect it was to have on Scottish social dance and repertoire. The Aberdeen dance teacher, A. Cosmo Mitchell, kept a comprehensive archive of dance-related materials which covers the period from 1849 to 1924. This paper will draw on Mitchell’s archive to illustrate the development in dance teaching and repertoire that accompanied the significant social and economic changes of the period.

Alice Barron

Studies of musical collaborations with Indian musicians tend to focus on traditional working relationships between performers in the Hindustani (Northern) and Carnatic (Southern) classical traditions. Focusing on my experiences studying with seven Carnatic violinists in Chennai, Mysore, and London, this paper examines a collaboration between guru and shishya (broadly defined as master and disciple). The collaboration challenges the conventional roles of the shishya as subservient to the guru and of learning through direct imitation. I discuss how the roles of guru and shishya are deeply embedded within broader cultural and historical frameworks that drive traditional teaching practice in India, and demonstrate how South Indian gurukula teaching brings cultural insight to my working relationship with Carnatic violinist Jyotsna Srikanth in London. The paper discusses the dynamics between guru and shishya by examining how this relationship plays out in three collaborative sessions with Jyotsna Srikanth, and in a collaborative session with a different Carnatic violinist. I ask: (1) What can a collaboration between teacher and student reveal about the guru-shishya tradition and relationship? (2) How can a traditional guru-shishya format be a model for creative collaboration as a method for learning and interacting with Carnatic violinists? Similar questions have been addressed in practitioner-led accounts of the guru-shishya relationship by John Baily (2001), David Clarke (2013), Gerry Farrell (2001), David Henderson (2009), and Amanda Weidman (2006; 2008). In considering these and other perspectives, the paper addresses some of the ways in which my findings relate to broader shifts and challenges facing traditional teaching in India in the twenty-first century. To conclude, I will propose a model of creative collaboration as a method for working with Carnatic violinists. The paper will include an element of live solo violin performance to supplement the recordings.

Paul Burgess

When Cecil Sharp visited Gloucestershire hunting for survivals of Morris dancing in 1907, he visited two fiddle players, John Mason and William Hathaway, from whom he noted a good number of tunes. They knew each other, had lived close to each other and both men had played for Morris dancing in the area, but their repertoires were strikingly different. This paper examines their differing backgrounds and the way this influenced their performance history and functionality.

Conor Caldwell

This paper examines the development of style in Irish traditional fiddle playing, using one of its greatest exponents, John Doherty, as a case study. Doherty (1900–1980) is often held up as an exemplar of a ‘Donegal’ style, variously described as fast, staccato, and aggressive. This paper seeks to unpack the reasons behind these interpretations, based on a longitudinal study of his music which takes recordings from different eras of his life into account. The validity of stylistic assignations to an individual musician, and their wider regional context are contested. Using Niall Keegan’s ‘Parameters of Style in Irish Traditional Music’ as a basis, the paper seeks to raise questions about received knowledge of style in Irish traditional music more generally.

Matt Cranitch

The concept of dynamics is one that may not generally be thought of in the context of Irish traditional music, perhaps because of the perception that overall volume levels remain relatively constant. However, if the term ‘dynamics’ is taken as relating to the idea of variation in the volume of the music, then it is surely also applicable to traditional music, but in a particular way. While it may be largely the case that, in this music, volume per se does not change dramatically, as happens in other genres, nonetheless there is an ongoing variation in this parameter, but on a different time-scale, and reflecting particular aesthetic values. The issue relates not so much to the idea of volume as in ‘loud’ and ‘soft’, but rather to its ongoing time-related aspects, with the changes that are manifest in this variable quantity corresponding to the rate of rhythmic articulation being expressed. The temporal dimension plays an equally central role in other aspects of the music, such as the idiomatic expression in performance of the shorter notes in a tune, as well as in relation to the enunciation of ornamentation. Taken together, dynamics and timing are at the heart of creating the characteristic metrical identity of the various different tune-types encountered in Irish traditional music. This paper will consider these questions with particular reference to the fiddle tradition of the Sliabh Luachra area in the south-west of Ireland. Using both archive material and live demonstration, these features of performance will be considered in the case of a number of specific tune-types, as well as more generally with regard to a wider stylistic context. Also, the effects of accompaniment on the idiomatic enunciation of the music will be considered.

Jean Duval

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, several individuals put efforts and money into reviving traditional music and dances in the Western world. Some, like Cecil Sharp (Schofield 2016) and Henry Ford (Gifford 2010), the automobile magnate, are well known; others less so. One of the latter is the promoter John J. Sullivan of Lewiston, Maine. After putting on a successful state-wide fiddle contest in the autumn of 1925, he decided to organize one with an international scope in April 1926. The idea was, over a period of five days, to first select the best fiddler from each participating country and then to have the finalists compete for a title of world champion. Fiddle contests had existed for more than a century in both Europe and North America. Usually, however, their scope had been local, regional or, at most, national. The Lewiston contest stood out because it featured fiddle music and fiddlers from Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. All but one of the Canadian contestants were French-Canadians. Sullivan’s #World Wide Fiddlers Contest# also had the particularity that only musicians aged 60 years or older could compete, the hope being to present ‘real’ old-time music, devoid of jazz or novelty influence. In this paper, through newspapers articles of the period, I will present the contest day by day, some of the contestants, and how contestants were chosen. I will show how the contest evolved from Sullivan’s original idea to what it became, and the commercial context he had to deal with. I will also show how the ‘French’ fiddlers, both from Canada and the US, were an important part of the contest, and the marked effect this contest had in Quebec’s fiddling thereafter.

Stuart Eydmann

This presentation analyses David Wilkie’s seminal painting The Blind Fiddler to extract what it tells us about the history of the fiddle in Scotland, to challenge current interpretations of its content, and to position it within the context of other evidence. As a case study it is drawn from the current project ‘The Art of the Fiddle’, as featured in the short video being shown at the festival.

Carolyn Francis

This presentation outlines the growth of the ‘Lakeland Fiddlers’ as a model for building a grassroots community education project, non-institutionally based, and embedding it sustainably in the local culture. It will include recent developments of methods of and materials for teaching fiddle in whole class/small group situations at a grassroots level in primary schools. These two strands are now being combined to build vibrant inter-generational community projects. In 1998, having made the commitment to earn my living in Cumbria with the fiddle, I started teaching fiddle as an Adult Education Class at the local arts centre. Two years later the ‘Lakeland Fiddlers’ was formed and constituted as a voluntary organisation with aims which include: raising awareness of fiddle music in the county, particularly of tunes indigenous to the area, which has a proliferation of manuscripts left by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century players; running workshops for people of all ages, skill levels, and backgrounds; and forging links between fiddlers, step dancers, and other related arts. Since that time the growth in the project has been steady. Most of the original ‘Lakeland Fiddlers# are now of retirement age and find talking part in community events with the young players exciting and uplifting whereas the presence of the older players adds a stability and solidity for the young ones. This has been an unplanned ‘side-effect# of the work, but is among its most rewarding aspects.

Alfonso Franco

Galicia is a land of emigrants. The main destination for Galician people has been Latin America. Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba have preserved an important part of Galician traditional music in a purer state than in Galicia, where it was subject to the globalisation of tradition under the forty-year dictatorship. Despite not having created such important emigrant centres, Mexico is the country that has made the most significant impact on the current music of Galicia. I will explore, through the fiddle, the purest Mexican root music, in search of the connections between two peoples brought together by the Virgen de Guadalupe, the most venerated image in Mexico, and to whom the non-official hymn of Galicia is dedicated. Our Galician fiddle camps, Encordass and San Simón Fiddle Camp, were devoted to Mexico last year. After numerous workshops, concerts, conferences about popular beliefs, and even spirits tastings, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have got to know an exciting fiddle style, the violín huasteco, which has nothing to do with the mariachi, and which is not very well known by the international fiddle community. As a result of this intercultural activity, new generations of Galician and Huasteco fiddlers are incorporating into their repertoires very close music from very distant regions.

Iain Fraser

From eighteenth-century tune and variation sets, the romanticism of the MacCrimmons and the Gows, the rhythmic requirements needed to play for dance, the recognition and valuing of regional styles, the cataloguing of key recordings of the tradition, and the role of the informal session, we have well documented evidence as to what has gone before. Accessing it is also much easier than it has ever been. For many years, my teaching syllabus has been based on a relatively slow moving unbroken tradition but we need to recognise what is happening now; our current labels and definitions are being disrupted. New compositions are inspired by lifestyles, politics, and struggles which bear little resemblance to the past. Playing styles are inspired by emulating musicians and styles from across the world (YouTube does not recognise national music boundaries). How do we square ‘passing on the Tradition’ with equipping players with the skills to adapt, create, and entertain throughout their lives? When should we incorporate popular new compositions and styles into our teaching? What do we imagine our students will do with the knowledge, skills, and repertoire gained? This paper will outline ideas for creating a dynamic teaching syllabus which prepares students for life in a fast-changing world of traditional music, and which creates a stronger link between the age we live in and possible future definitions of our National Folk Music.

Ronnie Gibson

The Aberdeen Strathspey & Reel Society oral history project aimed to capture the experience and memories of members in the organisation’s ninetieth anniversary year. This presentation will discuss the themes highlighted by participants, and contextualise their contributions within the wider fiddle-orchestra movement in Scotland.

Chris Goertzen

It comes as no surprise when given time that traditional arts trade some measure of inherited function for increased complexity in performance. Hand-crafted rugs gain intricacy of pattern as they leave the floor for the wall; pots departing the kitchen acquire new shapes and colours. Fiddling in the southern United States, with its connection with dancing loosened, has seen musical content intensified in several layers. First, fiddlers in Texas drew on diverse south-eastern styles and local innovations to shape the contest-oriented complex of styles now preferred in much of the US. This ‘contest style’ features systematic variation techniques, thus transparently illustrating the simplest kind of intensification – through generous addition of content. Second, urban revival of old-time fiddling styles of the Upper South has focused on tune repertoires of unassailable authenticity; many tunes bear validating earmarks such as salty titles, irregular phrasing, and/or striking modes, these factors combining to illustrate intensification through selection. Third, the contemporary continued intensification of southern fiddling, steadily increasing virtuosity, regular addition of content, and the playing of especially distinctive items continue to work together. That’s easy to demonstrate for Texas-derived contest fiddling – tricky tunes are favoured, and comparing transcriptions of performances of the same tunes from successive decades reveals continuous elaboration of variation technique. Similar but harder to measure processes hold for revivalist old-time fiddling. In this paper, I’ll explore this through comparing performances both on and off of the stage at a major revivalist fiddle convention – Clifftop – from 2000 and 2014. This analysis is complicated by the fact that fiddlers play in different equally-legitimate dialects. Nevertheless, it is possible to demonstrate that playing continues to become more and more skilled, tune choices increasingly distinctive, and that both subtle and bold variation techniques continue to evolve.

Brittany Haas

A short exploration of the music of fiddler Ed Haley, accompanied by audio examples of his playing.

Gregory Hansen

The increased global interest in heritage over the past three decades has included a recent focus on intangible cultural heritage (ICH). To this end, the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has provided guidelines for safeguarding ICH in various conventions during the past fifteen years. Various opportunities for preserving cultural traditions arise when an artistic expression, such as fiddling, is cast as ICH. Nations that have signed onto UNESCO conventions have been engaged in various projects that may involve establishing a canon of ICH in the form of ‘listed designations’ as well as through programs for cultural conservation. Recent scholarship in Heritage Studies elucidates various challenges in safeguarding ICH that are especially relevant to contextualizing fiddling as intangible cultural heritage. Even though the United States has limited official endorsement of UNESCO’s heritage initiatives, state and federal agencies have contributed to UNESCO policy. This NAFCo presentation demonstrates how the State of Florida supports a three-decade old ‘Florida Folk Heritage Award’ programme, within which fiddling is implicitly cast as ICH. Modelled after the National Endowment for the Arts ‘National Heritage Fellowships’, the award programme honours living traditional artists for their contributions to the state’s folk heritage. In the award programme’s history, nine fiddlers and one fiddle maker have received these awards. Profiles of representative winners show how honouring these musicians also enshrines fiddle traditions into the wider idea of Florida heritage through a process sometimes termed ‘heritagisation’. An overview of this process within the wider rubric of public folklore can provide options for developing similar projects that support fiddling within other parts of the world. Although Florida’s programme may resolve problems with the ‘items and inventories’ approach to safeguarding ICH, it also is not without its own contingent challenges.

Daithí Kearney

The historical influences and interchange between Irish and Scottish fiddle traditions are often referenced in the narratives of each nation, often in an Irish context related to the introduction of reels and the Donegal-style and repertoire. In this paper I focus on the career of Josephine Keegan (b. 1935), probably best known as the piano accompanist on albums by seminal male artists in Irish traditional music from the 1960s to the 1980s, but also a notable fiddle player and composer. Although born in Dundee, Keegan did not return there after leaving it as a young child. However she regularly visited Scotland and, in particular, Shetland, drawing from the music she heard there and on the recordings of Scottish musicians who became part of her network. Through her collaborations with musicians such as Seán Maguire (1927–2005), she also included the music of James Scott Skinner in her repertoire. Many of Keegan’s own compositions make reference to and are dedicated to Scottish musicians. This paper re-evaluates the influence of Scottish musicians and experiences in Shetland on Keegan as a musician who contributed to shaping the soundscape of Irish traditional music in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Gaila Kirdienė

The aim of my paper is to highlight regional and local characteristics of Lithuanian countryside fiddle dance music expressed in orchestral dance music by first wave Lithuanian emigrants in the cities of the USA. It is one of the first attempts to investigate the interrelation between traditional instrumental and fiddle music making of Lithuanians in their homeland and those living in the USA, taking into account various contextual agencies. Relevant sources of my investigation were approximately two hundred published phonograph recordings and notations of this dance music made in the USA from 1912 to 1940. Before the first reestablishment of independent Lithuania in 1918, Lithuanians who came to the USA had very strong regional and local identities which were developed, and which played one of the major roles in creating and strengthening their national self-consciousness, fostering their traditions in the multi-cultural American space. At the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, American Lithuanian associations founded not only brass bands, but also mixed orchestras incorporating fiddles. The latter orchestral constitution was rare in Lithuania. These American Lithuanian orchestras formed distinctive repertoires of dances, mainly polkas and waltzes. According to the titles, they originated from all five historical regions of Lithuania (Aukštaitija, Dzūkija, Sudovia, Samogitia and Lithuania Minor). I discovered many tunes known in Lithuanian folk fiddle music. Among these were not only the dances spread throughout the whole of Lithuania – which had started to be stylized and unified in Lithuanian communities abroad at the end of the nineteenth century – but also of regional dances, even of multi-part quadrilles. However, musicians were usually of various ranges as well as native of various regions. The conductors of these orchestras have interpreted, arranged, and stylized Lithuanian folk music more or less following traditional ways of performance and styles.

Anne Lederman

In order to better understand the connections between north-west Canadian fiddle-dance traditions of Indigenous communities (Métis and First Nations) and those of Quebec, I recently undertook a one-month residency project in Montreal to learn as much as possible about Quebec dance traditions from Pierre Chartrand, director of Centre Mnémo. These traditions include both ‘la gigue’ (solo step-dancing) and group dances. Since the connections with Quebec in the instrumental repertoire of Indigenous communities are well established, both in my work and that of others, I hoped that further insights might be gained about the origin and diffusion of dance steps and figures, keeping in mind that dancing was the primary purpose of fiddling in both areas in the past. This presentation is a very preliminary look at some of the remarkable insights gained in that month and an indication of where we might go from here.

Sophie Lavoie

Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean is a region that has been relatively isolated from the rest of the Province of Quebec since the beginning of its colonisation in 1838, due to the topography of the region. People from this region are generally perceived, by themselves and by others, as a distinctive and homogenous cultural group, which can be easily observed today in their language (regional expressions and unique accent) and food habits. Combined genetics and migration studies confirm that these people came mainly from one region called Charlevoix, where they were previously established, and moved deeper into Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean through the generations, thus preserving a relatively homogenous group. With regard to fiddle playing in this region, many musicians of the Province of Quebec agree that there is a unique style of playing amongst the older fiddler players. Could there be a unique fiddle style in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean? A style that preserved an older tradition due to a family-oriented immigration, or a style that would have evolved its own way due to a prolonged isolation? This presentation does not have the answers for the above questions, but aims to observe and discuss the homogenous use of fiddle techniques and the common repertoire in the region of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean of an older generation with a view to defining a style.

Catriona Macdonald

Bjørndal (1882–1965) was one of the major collectors of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle music in the twentieth century, and one of the first ethnomusicologists to collect and transcribe fiddle melodies in Shetland. This paper aims to piece together fragmentary documentation held in Shetland Archives, Lerwick regarding this 1949 visit, and bring them together for the first time with Bjørndal’s melodic transcriptions, collecting notes, travel diary, and photos recently discovered at the Arne Bjørndal Samling (Archive), University of Bergen. I will also cross-reference Bjørndal’s documentation of this trip with that of his non-musical friend and travel companion Einar Seim. Norwegian scholar, and regular visitor to Shetland, Seim made the initial introductions to key personnel in Shetland and his unpublished diaries add an illuminating perspective to Bjørndal’s travels. Questions emerge regarding the impact of Bjørndal’s visit on Shetland’s post-WWII folk revival. The folk music revival and national romanticism prevalent in Norway at the turn of the twentieth century resonate with a similar rise of island interest in Shetland’s Nordic past, and its folkloric and musical traditions. I will explore Bjørndal’s influence on the newly formed Shetland Folk Society and discuss how far this trip bolstered the Society’s conviction to preserve and collect material within the islands, and lastly reflect on whether his visit may have encouraged some long-lasting romantic mythmaking.

Tim Macdonald

The strathspey has long enjoyed recognition as ‘the most essentially characteristic form’ of Scottish music, but its own essential character is much less clear, especially when considering the time before Romantic changes to Scottish dance music. The strathspey emerged in the mid-18th century, and at first glance early sources appear to disagree on whether it is a distinct form or merely a type of reel, its performance tempo, and how it should be accented (one writer even claiming that the 4/4 strathspey should be accented in the same manner as the 6/8 jig). The proposed paper examines the above disagreements and synthesizes them into a clearer picture of the early strathspey, focusing particularly on its performance practice, its use by dancers, and its relationship to the reel. It includes a mathematical analysis of time signatures and tempo markings in contemporaneous printed collections of strathspeys and reels, an examination of dance manuals and other treatises on dance music, and a discussion of period accounts of concerts and balls. Also considered is the influence of the leading tune composers and dance musicians, such as William Marshall (who Robert Burns called ‘the first composer of strathspeys of the age’), the Gow family, and Robert Mackintosh (the Prince of Wales’s favourite dance band leader). What emerges is a greater understanding of the strathspey’s evolution from its origins to its popularity during the Regency Era.

Mats Melin