Fiddlers take a bow as Aberdeen hosts international convention
Aberdeen and its surrounding shire will become a vibrant meeting place for those who play and study the “tremblin’ string” next month, when Aberdeen University and its Elphinstone institute host the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention.
A major event among traditional arts gatherings across Europe and North America, NAFCO, which runs from 11-15 July, is unusual in that it combines a folk festival with an international conference celebrating a wealth of fiddle styles and associated music and dance, from the Aberdeenshire heartland of the grand North East style to the broader fiddle scenes of Scotland and Ireland and well beyond to Scandinavia and North America. This year’s event – the first time Aberdeen has hosted NAFCO since 2010, with previous venues including Donegal and Nova Scotia – also features exponents of fiddle styles that transcend that North Atlantic designation, from Mexico and India.
“It’s pretty unique in its format,” says the event’s director, Carley Williams, a fiddler originally from Vancouver who came to Aberdeen in 2004, ostensibly for a one-year Mlitt in ethnology and folklore, got “sucked into NAFCO” and stayed, with this year being her debut as director. “It provides a unique opportunity for researchers and musicians to get together and explore their music and dance forms. Also, because a lot of researchers also play, it gives them a chance to get outside of the symposium and enjoy the festival in a way they couldn’t do if it was just a flat-out conference.”
The convention’s theme for 2018 – “Dialects and Dialogues: Fiddling and Dancing across Oceans and Continents” – will examine how, far from isolating communities, the northern seas have in fact been corridors for cultural exchange and the development of distinctive but related musical traditions. A lengthy and suitably cosmopolitan guest list of performers includes such familiar Scottish names as Adam Sutherland, Alasdair Fraser (with cellist Natalie Haas), Aonghas Grant and the festival’s “ambassador”, North-east stylist Paul Anderson. Guests from further afield include the Rheingans Sisters from England, Irishman Matt Cranitch, the Scots-scandinavian Nordic Fiddlers’ Bloc, Göran Premberg and Anna Lindblad from Sweden and Anne Lederman, Evelyn Osborne and Troy Macgillivray from Canada.
Extending the event’s musical horizons even further are the London-based Indian Carnatic virtuoso Jyotsna Srikanth and, from north-west Spain, 40 players from Association Galicia Fiddle, who will be joined by Mexican huasteco violin exponent Osiris Ramsés Caballero León.
New strands this year include a five-day youth fiddle camp, with youngsters between the ages of ten and 25 participating in the creation and performance of a newly commissioned work from Perthshire fiddler Patsy Reid. A further premiere will be that of Ian Fraser’s Koterana, inspired by the epic voyaging of the Reverend Norman Macleod and his followers, from Lochinver to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, then ultimately to Waipu, New Zealand.
Another innovation will see fiddler Laura Risk and dancer Nic Gareiss, both from the United States, curating a “performance as research” strand, aimed at bridging the gap between academia and music-making, with “performer respondents” playing in response to papers, while some researchers will turn performer, drawing on their research. “This is pushing the limits of both sides,” says Williams, “forcing academics and performers to rub up against each other a bit more than they normally would.”
The event has doubled its expansion into outlying Aberdeenshire venues, such as Haddo House, St Margaret’s in Braemar and The Barn in Banchory, while coach tours will introduce participants to the surrounding area. Among other things, these tours will pay tribute to past luminaries, visiting the grave of the redoubtable James Scott Skinner at Aberdeen’s Allenvale Cemetery and also the memorial to his mentor, Peter Milne, in the city’s Nellfield Cemetery.
It was Milne, the “Tarland Minstrel”, who once declared himself “that fond o’ my fiddle, I could sit inside it and look oot”. With its globe-spanning colloquy, NAFCO will be taking an informed look at the fiddle, from all sides.
It provides a unique opportunity for researchers and musicians to get together