National Post (National Edition)
Fiddling with the past
The secrets of Scottish music are revealed
IONA, N.S. • Squatting on a rutted dirt road on the slope of Creignish Mountain, Ashley MacIsaac unpacked a tawny fiddle dusted white across the top with piney rosin. His bow was shredded at the ends, a stray horsehair looping in the breeze like a fly fisherman’s line.
“Many Irish and Scottish melodies are the same, but the ornamentation is different,” MacIsaac said, unleashing a seemingly effortless stream of notes, a vivid example of a culture transported here from across the ocean. He is a virtuoso of traditional Cape Breton fiddling, which has thrived on this isolated island since it arrived with Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders two centuries ago.
The music is on full display in the fall during the Celtic Colours International Festival, when sleepy Cape Breton Island comes alive with fiddle music and step dancing, community suppers and singing — about 350 energetic events crowded into a little more than a week in October across a few thousand square miles of spectacular, autumn-tinted countryside. The festival is in its 20th year.
Impoverished Highlanders, Gaelic-speaking descendants of the Celtic tribes who once roamed northwestern Scotland, flooded into Cape Breton in the early 19th century. Starting as a trickle, the migration rose to a torrent amid the Highland Clearances, in which tenant farmers in Scotland were evicted from their lands by property owners. A collapse in the price of kelp, burned to produce potash, forced others to leave.
The immigrants took with them the rich culture that had embroidered their stark lives: bagpipe and fiddle, step dance and song. As occasionally happens with a concentrated diaspora, Scottish Cape Bretoners kept those traditions alive, passing them from generation to generation through ceilidhs (pronounced kay-lees) or “kitchen parties,” social gatherings large and small.
The music in Scotland, meanwhile, evolved, blending with classical styles. Irish music eventually dominated Celtic music, thanks to the larger and later Irish diaspora and to the popularity of bands like the Chieftains and, more recently, productions like Riverdance.
Not until the 1980s, when less expensive travel and technology allowed Cape Breton musicians to tour Scotland, did the exceptionality of Cape Breton music become palpable there. Many people in Scotland considered the Cape Breton style — fiddling and dancing, in particular — as frozen in time. The music helped spark a revival in the old country.
A week spent at the festival presented an opportunity to delve into the surprisingly subtle and complex nature of Scottish fiddling.
“While an Irish fiddler would play with something called ‘rolls,’ a Scottish person would play with something called ‘cuts,’” explained MacIsaac, perhaps Cape Breton’s most famous living fiddler. A “cut” is a rapid bow technique in which four notes are played consecutively to fill the space of one note.
“Rolls” do the same thing, MacIsaac said, but are produced with fingering that plays the main note, a grace note above and a grace note below, before returning to the main note in rapid succession. A casual listener might not notice the difference, but like any nuance, once understood, the technique becomes obvious.
Other uses of the bow distinguish Cape Breton fiddling from Irish and other styles. Natalie MacMaster, another famous fiddler from the island, explained that Irish fiddlers typically played several notes in one stroke of the bow, “slurring” the notes. Cape Breton fiddlers, meanwhile, move the bow faster, changing the direction of the bow for each note as much as possible. Cape Bretoners, MacMaster noted, also “crunch” the bow against the strings, creating a raw, scraping sound that would make a high school violin teacher shudder. “But when you get a little of that in the right spot, it’s awesome,” she said with a delighted smile.
The combination of “cuts,” shorter and faster bow strokes, and occasional crunching of the bow results in a choppier, coarser sound — what Cape Bretoners call the “dirt” in their fiddling. It also makes for wilder, more upbeat music that moves enthusiastic listeners to their feet. At the festival’s nightly after-hours gathering last month, a wild reel flew from Christine Melanson’s fiddle, her knee bouncing to keep time as her foot stomped the floor. Soon, the driving music had people up dancing in front of the crowded room, first one and then another, their arms hanging limply and their feet a busy blur.
“Because of limited communication with the rest of the world, and relative isolation from Scotland, things were held on to,” said Liz Doherty of Ulster University in Belfast, a frequent guest at Celtic Colours. “In Cape Breton, they use the word ‘correctness’ to refer to the strict adhesion to traditional forms.”