Bakhtin and Genre: Musical-Social Interaction at the Cape Breton Milling Frolic Bret D

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2011 Bakhtin and Genre: Musical-Social Interaction at the Cape Breton Milling Frolic Bret D. Woods

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC

BAKHTIN AND GENRE: MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION AT THE CAPE BRETON MILLING FROLIC

By BRET D. WOODS

A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011

______Frank Gunderson Professor Directing Dissertation

______Juan Carlos Galeano University Representative

______Michael B. Bakan Committee Member

______Charles E. Brewer Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to all those who made me feel welcome in Cape Breton, including Amber, Lennie, Todd, Shay, Glenn, Anita, James, Rod, Lorrie, Allan, Mary, Beth, John, Jane, Barry, James, Jamie, and everyone at the Christmas Island Fire Hall. Thanks to all the couch surfers, family, and friends who accommodated me along the way; I hope to visit you again. I have an immense amount of appreciation for my dissertation advisor, Frank Gunderson, whose faith in this project and willingness to press me to see things from new angles have helped me become a better scholar. And, for my committee members, Michael Bakan, Charles Brewer, and Juan Carlos Galeano, I am equally grateful for their insight and brilliant input into this work. The collaborative efforts of a document such as this are no small task, and I am honored to have such a well-rounded and rigorous group of thinkers. I would also thank my colleagues and friends who have worked with me in many dialogs, especially Damascus Kafumbe, Janine Tiffe, Matt Morin, Peter Hoesing, Kari Kistler, and Paul Vermeren. Conversing about my topic has always jogged a memory or created an inspiration in me that allows me to pursue a particular avenue of thought that I would not have considered on my own. Thanks also to my wonderful family, for their furtherance of me in my dedication to my work. Often my research keeps me from spending all my time with them, and I am grateful for their continued steadfast commitment to supporting me in my life’s goals.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………. vi List of Audio Examples……………………………………………………………………….. viii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………... ix PROLOGUE…………………………………………………………………………………… x 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………... 1 1.1. Background and Significance……………………………………………………... 4 1.2. Literature Review………………………………………………………………….. 9 1.2.1. Specific Sources…………………………………………………………. 9 1.2.2. General Sources…………………………………………………………. 12 1.2.3. Theoretical Sources……………………………………………………… 15 1.2.4. Media Sources…………………………………………………………… 21 1.7. Theoretical Approach……………………………………………………………… 21 1.8. Methodology………………………………………………………………………. 26 1.9. A Roadmap of Sorts……………………………………………………………….. 28

2. THE LAND OF TREES AND HIGH MOUNTAINS………………………………………. 31 2.1. Highland Settlers in the New World: Historical Perspectives…………………….. 33 2.2. A Wealth of Gaelic: Language and the Diaspora…………………………………. 37 2.3. Gaelicness and Scottishness: The Gaelic College at St. Ann’s…………………… 40 2.4. Traveling in Cape Breton………………………………………………………….. 45 2.5. Gaelic Song and the Fèis Movement……………………………………………… 48 2.6. Féis an Eilein……………………………………………………………………… 50 2.7. Portrait of the Milling Frolic………………………………………………………. 55 2.8. Milling Frolic at the Christmas Island Fire Hall…………………………………... 57 2.9. Milling Frolic in Johnstown, Cape Breton………………………………………… 62

3. GAELIC COMMUNITY, LANGUAGE, AND IDENTITY……………………………….. 65 3.1. The Current State of the Gaelic Language in Cape Breton……………………….. 70 3.2. Gaelic Identity and Social Life in Cape Breton…………………………………… 76 3.3. The Milling Frolic as Cultural Revitalization…………………………………….. 82

4. CHRONOTOPES: GENRE AND MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION…………………. 84 4.1. Bakhtin, the Novel, and Being-As-Event…………………………………………. 87 4.2. Forms of Style and the Chronotope………………………………………………. 90 4.3. Accessing Genre…………………………………………………………………... 93 4.4. An Ethnographic Narrative on the Chronotope and Genre……………………….. 98 4.5. The Construction and Consumption of Meaning: Self-other Actualization…………………………………………………………… 101

5. DIALOGISMS: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND SPACE-TIME………………………. 103 5.1. Preserving the Old or Inventing the New: Identity and Tradition ………………... 105 5.2. Commodification of Song: A Type of Preservation? …………………………….. 111 5.3. “Our Traditions Will be Lost if We Don’t Sing Them.”………………………….. 119 5.4. Forced to Preserve as Opposed to Disseminate…………………………………… 121 5.5. In the Community during the Week of the Féis…………………………………. 123

6. TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION…………………. 127 6.1. Narrative, Symbol, and Music…………………………………………………….. 129 6.2. Chronotope, Genre, Heteroglossia………………………………………………… 132 6.3. Dialogisms in Space and Place……………………………………………………. 138 6.4. A Narrative of Ethnographic Identity…………………………………………….. 139

7. POLYPHONY AND AUTHORSHIP IN A COLONIAL/POST- COLONIAL DIASPORA…………………………………………………………………… 143 7.1. The Politics of Representation…………………………………………………….. 145 7.2. Tradition and Transformation: Continuity and Change in the Milling Frolic……………………………………………………………………… 149 7.3. Identity as the Focal Point in Social Interaction at the Milling Frolic…………….. 151 7.4. On the Growing Notion of Celticity………………………………………………. 155 7.5. Celticity: Transcending Nationality for a Broadly-Encompassing Notion of Tradition………………………………………………………………... 157

8. MOVING BEYOND METHODOLOGY: INTERDISCIPLINARY THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY……… 159 8.1. Interdisciplinary Imaginings of a Discipline………………………………………. 161 8.2. Dialogic Interaction……………………………………………………………….. 162

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………… 178 APPENDICES…………………………………………………………………………………. 180 A. VISUAL NARRATIVE……………………………………………………………. 180 B. HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL……………………………….. 193 C. FÈIS SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND: A MOVEMENT……………………………... 194 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 199 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………... 211

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Map of Northern Nova Scotia from Antigonish to Cape Breton (Google 2011)……. 3 Figure 2: The park at Commercial Street, Glace Bay, Cape Breton, N.S……………………… 47 Figure 3: Around the Milling Table (Comunn Féis An Eilein)………………………………… 56 Figure 4: Milling frolic table at Christmas Island……………………………………………… 59 Figure 5: Glenora Distillery in Glenville, Cape Breton………………………………………... 66 Figure 6: Published in The Halifax Herald Limited…………………………………………… 68 Figure 7: The commemorative trademarked bottle, booklet, and packaging of the “Battle of the Glen Special Edition Canadian Malt Whisky” (Glenora Distillery)….. 69

Figure 8: MacIsaac performing “Sleepy Maggie” on the Conan O’Brien Show (1997) moments before flashing the cameras…………………………………….…. 108

Figure 9: CD Jacket of Còmhla Cruinn………………………………………………….…….. 118 Figure 10: Meandering the Backroads of Central Cape Breton……………………….……..… 180 Figure 11: Little Narrows Ferry………………………………………………………………... 180 Figure 12: Finding Fuel………………………………………………………………………... 181 Figure 13: MacKenzie’s Little Narrows Country Store……………………………………….. 181 Figure 14: Entering Christmas Island from Grand Narrows…………………………………… 182 Figure 15: Cross Lines on the Corner of Dorchester and Esplanade, Downtown Sydney…….. 182 Figure 16: A Street Sign in Sydney……………………………………………………………. 183 Figure 17: Dimensions of Identity: The Nova Scotian, Canadian, and Gaelic Flags………….. 183 Figure 18: St. Columba Catholic Church, Iona, Cape Breton, N.S……………………………. 184 Figure 19: Sydney Waterfront, Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia…………………………… 184 Figure 20: Hillside view of the Waterfront and the Giant Fiddle……………………………… 185 Figure 21: Sydney’s Giant Fiddle……………………………………………………………… 185 Figure 22: Coastline at Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia………………………………... 186 Figure 23: Glace Bay Coastline………………………………………………………………... 186 Figure 24: Local Birdlife in Glace Bay………………………………………………………… 187 Figure 25: Central Cape Breton………………………………………………………………... 187 Figure 26: Malagawatch Church on the Bras d’Or Lakes on the way to Highland Village Museum (The Griffin 2004)…………………………………….. 188

Figure 27: Malagawatch Church en route to its new location (The Griffin 2004)……………... 188 Figure 28: The Barra Strait Train Bridge………………………………………………………. 189 Figure 29: Coal train, having just crossed the Barra Strait from Grand Narrows to Iona……... 189 Figure 30: Road to the Black House, Highland Village Museum…………………………….. 190 Figure 31: A view from the Black House overlooking Bras d’Or Lakes……………………… 190 Figure 32: The Finished Malagawatch Church at Highland Village Museum………………… 191 Figure 33: View of the Malagawatch Church from Grand Narrows…………………………... 191 Figure 34: Looking out from a house over a lake……………………………………………… 192 Figure 35: A glimpse of Piper’s Cove in the distance…………………………………………. 192

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LIST OF AUDIO EXAMPLES

This PDF contains several audio excerpts that pertain to the overall experiential ethnography. These are brief clips that fall under fair use copyright law. They are not intended to catalog or collect songs in the way that other studies have done, but rather to provide context to the narrative itself. Throughout the dissertation you can hear the audio by clicking on the designated text. Listening to the audio examples requires Adobe Reader 9 or greater. Please download the most recent version of Adobe Reader. It is available for free from http://get.adobe.com/reader/.

“Ailean Duinn a Ni ‘s a Nàire” (“Brown haired Allan, His Riches and Shame”)…………….. 53

“Òran Do Cheap Breatainn” (“Song of Cape Breton”)……………………………………….. 59

“Ì horo” (Berry George Song)………...….…..…...... ……..………….….…..…….. 99

“Sleepy Maggie” (A&M Records)……………………………………………………………...110

“An Gaidheal am measg nan Gaidheal” (“A Gael among the Lowlanders”)…………………. 116

“Ged a Sheòl Mi Air M'Aineol” (“Although I Sailed to Foreign Countries”)…………………. 133

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ABSTRACT What follows is a story-driven expression of dialog and music. My research explores a Bakhtinian approach to genre and musical-social interaction, and the ways in which they serve the invention of various categories of identity, as evident in the milling frolic. The milling frolic is a social musical gathering where people celebrate their cultural heritage through the singing of a body of Scottish Gaelic songs, while reenacting a labor tradition. The genres consist of an ever- growing and ever-changing repertoire of songs that ebb and flow in a continuum of music that perpetually reinvents and rediscovers concepts of tradition. In music, genres provide a tangible connection among people and place through communication and interpretation. The cultural traditions, real and invented, emerge and are made evident through dialogic performance. Bakhtin observed that people communicate through genres—contextually defined and articulated expressions that negotiate perception and interaction. I further this notion in that, beyond a simple taxonomic classification of varying styles of music, genres constitute the communicative framework through which all musical-social distinction is made relevant. If language is one type of communicative social interaction, then Bakhtin’s literary genre model can be applied to other social interactions in the same theoretical sense; specifically with music and other performative social situations, genre is a pragmatic link that brings together text and context, form and function, performer and audience—genre networks—in varying hierarchical dimensions of both communication through music and speech utterances about musical experience and reception. Essentially, genre makes all communication possible in the social dimension. In understanding the various ways in which Gaelic song genres are important for Cape Bretoners, a more fundamental understanding of Cape Breton Gaelic identity can be achieved. I use genre theory to articulate the social distinctions regarding the traditional music of Cape Breton as performed at the milling frolic, and within these hierarchies articulate the way in which genres allow people to identify with themselves, their environment, and each other. Such a framework will provide a fitting metaphor for the negotiation of Gaelic and Celtic identity in Cape Breton, through varying dimensions. Indeed, genre theory and social anthropology can be applied to many popular interdisciplinary concepts in the field of ethnomusicology, such as invented tradition, imagined communities, and the link between changing contexts and changing ideas about textual meaning.

PROLOGUE

Dis•ser•ta•tion [dis-er-tey-shuhn] Noun— 1. A written essay, treatise, or thesis, especially one written by a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 2. Any formal discourse in speech or writing. (Random House, Inc. 2011)

This is the story of the time I rode my motorcycle from Tallahassee to Cape Breton. It began one morning when I triple-checked the rigging of my Adirondack hiking pack to the back seat of the bike. There was a system to the placement of the luggage that had a certain interdependency. The black, padded shoulder and hip straps of the pack faced backward, extending past the backrest. A rope—nylon/cotton blend—was woven through loops at the top of the pack. It stabilized the pack from side-to-side movement with its vertical length and three well-placed anchor hitches. A long, yellow bungee cord wrapped around the front of the pack and pulled it taut against the backrest by hooking onto the luggage rack that extends about sixteen inches over the tail light. A black backpack, loaned to me by my good friend Damascus, was then placed atop the luggage rack, and a half-sized, red bungee cord hugged it in place. The interlocking was completed when I clipped the cross lines on the shoulder and hip straps around the pack situated on the luggage rack, as if the bag on the back of my motorcycle were wearing hiking gear. A final, smaller bungee cord kept the hip-level and shoulder-level straps together at the center of the loaner. Shaking the gear back and forth was an essential final step, to see if the many cords and straps were working well together. What resulted reminded me of something out of The Road Warrior. I saddled up and hit the road around 8:30 AM. Long motorcycle trips really provide ample time for deep thought. Some sixty minutes or so after I began my journey, I was on a state route in southern Georgia on the way toward Savannah, engaged in just such thought. There were very few cars on the road; it was not too warm in the breeze. I was thinking about embarking on this trip. I decided rather rashly that I would ride to Canada. Initially, I intended to fly to Nova Scotia for fieldwork, and pursuant to that goal I applied for three different grants, none of which I receieved. By the time I needed to

go into the field, I had no funding and no help. When the third grant was declined, I simply said, “If no one wants to grant me funding for this research, I’ll just drive up there and do it myself.” Well, here I was. First hour of a long trip. I smiled because my hiking pack was like the back of a chair, allowing me to lean back and take some of the pressure off. Leaning back, I noticed in the distance a large, empty cattle rig rolling down the highway. The long, blue trailer, pulled by its massive Peterbilt truck, rattled in the wind that pushed over the slight hill. The truck was headed toward me, but on the opposite side of the divided four lane, and it was several hundred yards off. I looked at my speedometer and slowed down a bit from seventy-five to an even seventy when the wind hit me too. That’s when I noticed a large buzzard. It had black wings and a strikingly red scalp, and as the truck approached its position it leapt up and spread its wings, engaging itself in a little game. The buzzard ascended in the face of the wind, gathering considerable altitude as the truck and I continued to approach each other’s mile-marker position. As it rose higher, it began to slow and hover for a moment. I began to wax poetic as I thought about dimensions. “Dimensions of perspective.” “Us looking up, the buzzard looking down.” The scavenger banked right suddenly and then began to dive down toward the south-bound side of the road where the truck was about to reach, halfway from our projected meeting point. The dive became almost a free fall, and it began to appear as if the bird was planning to crash directly into the grill of the rig. It sped up its descent, but the truck did not relent, perhaps oblivious to the buzzard just a stone’s throw above his cabin ceiling. Then, in a feat of strength, the bird spread out its wings, catching the updraft of pressure from the truck’s forward progression. The burst of air thrust the buzzard back into the sky, soaring above the grassy median. I slowed down a bit just to marvel at the daring creature. It was an interesting exercise, just the three of us alone on the highway engaging the surroundings in our own way. I could only wonder at what was happening inside the cabin of that truck. Perhaps the driver was listening to music, or a radio talk show, or maybe he was talking on the Citizens Band Radio. Perhaps, like myself, he was listening to the sound of his own engine and the hum of the tires on the highway. We finally met the point at which we began traveling away from each other, and the rattling of the cattle trailer became submerged under the wash of sound from the motorcycle’s engine and exhaust. It reached quite a high amplitude above fifty-five miles per hour, mainly because it only has five gears.

In a sudden rush of excitement, I noticed the buzzard once again; it was floating above my north-bound portion of the state route, still riding the wave of air pressure that had catapulted it into the sky. The buzzard began to bank again, this time left, and as his altitude was not as pronounced as when it first climbed above the truck, I began to think that it was going to fly right at me. It was. The buzzard was headed straight for me. It happened so quickly this time—when I was watching this game above the truck I had a great deal of distance and relative time to contemplate what was happening. Now, the buzzard was only several nanoseconds from my direct trajectory. I had nowhere to turn—the road curved right, so I needed to keep the handlebars pressed right to comply with the angle and centripetal force. I let loose the throttle, and instinctively I ducked my head behind the windshield of the motorcycle. I did this right at the moment when the bird was about to hit me. I could not, however, resist the urge see what was about to happen, so when I ducked down I actually just dipped my chest nearly touching the gas tank while leaning my head backward to keep my helmet from obscuring my view. I looked up and saw the talons of the creature through the glass of my motorcycle’s windshield; they were oddly brown. One of the digits was misshapen and worn, which struck me odd within the moment. The image of the underside of this creature burned into my head so energetically that for a brief moment that was all I could think about. In my mind, it was a certainty that the bird in its current path of flight, would strike either my windshield or my helmet. But, as I waited for impact in my awkward position, it never came. The buzzard simply flew overhead somehow inches from the edge of my windshield, missing me entirely. I continued to decelerate with my chest pressed downward and my eyes angled up through the looking glass for a few seconds, and then I pulled over, heart pounding, to see where the buzzard went. I looked up and saw nothing. The bird was nowhere around me now. I could not find it in the sky; I was alone. I stood there briefly before I started off again, amazed. Over the next several days, I made my way up the east coast and into Cape Breton, staying with friends and strangers along the way, but that initial experience with the buzzard stuck with me. I revisited the memory at the start of each day, and looked up each morning, wondering if I would spot another bird playing another game. A few times, I even leaned my chest down toward the gas tank in mid-ride, looking up through the

xii windshield, if only for a moment, recalling the talons that narrowly missed me before disappearing into thin air. As I made my way back home from Cape Breton, my experience began to take on new shape, new dimension in my mind; I began to relive the memories in a new way each time I shared with others the story of the buzzard game. I realized that my fieldwork began before I crossed the border. It began when I cinched up my luggage with bungee cords. Perhaps it began even before that. *** It began innocently, with the turn of a valve. The metal, noticeably cold even through the leather of my glove, is now positioned upright toward the word “Reserve.” I am seated in the saddle of my 2005 V-Star Classic, a reliable, black 650cc motorcycle with my day pack strapped to the back rest. I am squeezing the throttle a quarter-twist, my insides equal parts excitement and uneasiness. I am riding south down something called Little Narrows Road, with breathtaking views of wooded hills, though I have no idea exactly how I got here or where I am going. It started like this: I was traversing the 223, also south, toward Grand Narrows when I realized I should probably get gas; the gas tank only holds a few gallons, and that gets me roughly 135-150 miles per tank. My tripometer read 142; I made the tragic mistake of assuming I could get gas near the Highland Village Museum. The problem was that the further I rode past Iona on the 223, the more I decided that I was going to run out of fuel, but I was stuck in the existential moments of hope and confusion where I knew I did not have enough gas to turn back but did not know where to stop, so I just kept going. I stayed my course for a while after the road snakes back north, hoping that somewhere there would be gas. Relying wholly on my friend’s loaned global positioning satellite to guide the way was my next mistake. It had worked out well for directions thus far, but was for the first time failing me on the back roads of Cape Breton. I queried the global positioning satellite as to the closest gas station, which to my surprise was apparently four-point-seven miles in the direction I was already headed. Satisfied, I continued along the suggested trajectory of the friendly electronic arrow. Suddenly, the global positioning satellite commanded me, “in one mile, turn right,” and I obliged, nervously aware that the tripometer now read 146.

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The road quickly abandoned its pavement for a hard-packed dirt/gravel mix full of potholes that required my constant course adjustment. I kept saying “global positioning satellite” with a smile on my face, perhaps because part of me hoped that the erudite syllables would make the time pass more quickly. Really I was just being confrontational with the robot. That was another mistake. The uncomfortable road seemed endless and my mind flooded with scenarios of being stranded next to some place called Nineveh. I began to wonder just how deep my reserve tank could go. I had never field-tested it. No time like the present. “In six miles, turn left.” “Oh, boy.” I pulled over to inspect the maps in the device for myself. Clearly I was being misinformed. I thought the electronic voice needed a second opinion. Why had I not seen something called Peter MacLean Road on any map? I could see my analogous position on the LCD, zoomed in, but found no words on the map. I needed to keep riding or I would soon be walking. This road continues and hits another road that sends me toward another road that looks like the 105. Got it. There has to be gas there. Fair enough. First gear. “I’m giving you one more chance,” I said to the global positioning satellite. Numerous telephone conversations have honed my considerable skills at talking to robots; it takes a direct tone. Emotion is acceptable but not required. I just missed that pothole. Then I turned left, from one dirt road onto another one—anonymous. Committed to my course I could only laugh when the electronic voice informed me, “In seven-point-six miles, turn left, then turn right.” My mind’s image of the electronic map did not concur. “You’ve got it wrong, robot.” Tripometer read 151. There is pavement ahead, this is good, because the vibrations were beginning to fatigue my gluteus and the global positioning satellite was difficult to read, let alone listen to. The road came to a “T” and I decided to turn left; according to my memory of the label-less map, this was back toward Iona. I figured it was best to be stranded among people I know. This was Little Narrows Road. “Recalculating.” That is what the global positioning satellite says when it is lost. “That’s all you’ve got, then?” “In two miles, turn right.” I am arriving at the right turn, a noticeable layer of perspiration on my brow as I pull off to the right, only to come to a stop at the edge of a road dock—the Little Narrows Ferry.

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“In seven miles, turn right.” Now the robot wants me to drive my motorcycle across the waterway. I guess that means to take the ferry? Tripometer reads 154. This was when the engine began to hesitate. There was no way I was going to make it anywhere. This was it. I was lost. I killed the engine. The soundscape calmed to a light breeze, the sound of the water lapping against the ferry dock as the relatively large white vessel barely noticeably bobbed before me. Then I turned around to gather my surroundings, and much to my surprise, there was a gas pump right behind me. It was right across the road. The place was called MacKenzie’s Country Store, a small white building with a clever sign and a single gasoline pump that could not have been more than thirty feet from the edge of the highway. Somehow, on my last fumes, quibbling with my global positioning satellite, I had stumbled on a gas station. At some point, if you ride a motorcycle, you may have to come to terms with one question in particular: how long will my reserve tank last? The answer is twelve miles, and then after several arguments with a robot your motorcycle will find you a fuel source. I pushed my bike across the highway and positioned it to fill the tank. Inside is where I met Louise; she’s worked at the store for quite a long time. I was smiling when I asked her. “There is gasoline in there, right?” “Last time I checked.” I chuckled. “So, let me ask you, as an expert on the area here.” “Oh, I’m no expert.” “You’re being modest. Where are all the gas stations?” She laughed. I filled the tank, and then went inside to pay. Louise and I had a nice chat about her store, what I was doing in Cape Breton, traffic, the weather, and local history. She was being modest too; she was most certainly an expert eyewitness of local events. She was even there the time when the ferry cable broke and the ferry nearly floated into the center of the lakes. I saw pictures of that day hanging on the wall near the cash register. Another store customer arrived and was staring at my license plate as she entered the store. “Where are you from?” “I came from Florida.” “You rode here?” “Yeah.”

“On your motorcycle?” “Yeah.” She paused. “Are you serious?” “Yeah.” “Why on earth would you do that?” I laughed and thought about it a moment. She did not realize it, of course, but she was on the cusp of quite a long, convoluted story involving a number of faceless characters each contributing to my preparations for fieldwork, unwittingly leading me here to this moment, this question. This was an important question. I felt the weight of it. Was there a simple answer? Had I managed to land a grant, I would not be standing here right now, still perspiring from my near stranding. The moment passed. “Well, I got lost.” She laughed. “He’s here for the Féis1,” Louise added, remembering from our earlier conversation. “That's right, I’m actually here as part of my dissertation research. I’m a student at Florida State University.” “You came all the way up here to do research?” “Yeah.” This time the moment was hers. She smiled and shook her head as she hesitated. Then she said, “I would have to do a lot of soul searching before I took that far of a trip,” she replied. Louise smiled. I chuckled and added, “Well, like I said, I got lost....” ***

1 As a note on consistency throughout the document, you will see “fèis” and “féis.” In most spellings the grave accent is preferred, but the Cape Breton society Comunn Féis An Eilein utilizes an acute accent in their spelling. When the word “féis” is found on its own, but with an acute accent, it means to refer to the Féis an Eilein. When found with a grave accent, it is to refer to fèisan in general.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

“If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.” –David Foster Wallace (1993)

This dissertation explores genre and musical-social interaction and the ways they inform cultural identity, through the lens of the milling frolic, which is performed primarily in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Genre is a French word of Latin origin (genus) that simply means “type,” “class,” or “kind.” The term is used quite often, in the classificatory sense, especially in discourse about music. However, this dissertation utilizes the terms “genre,” “generic,” and their affiliates not simply as taxonomic tools, but also in their applications in literary genre theory. As such, I define genre as the socially active link between text and context, a link that is made relevant through dialog (see pp. 21-25 for my full definition and discussion of genre as it pertains to the theoretical approach of this dissertation).The milling frolic is a regional gathering at which people celebrate their heritage and cultural traditions through the singing of Gaelic songs, and is often performed as a central feature of larger Gaelic/community functions, such as the Féis an Eilein (“Festival of the Island”) in Christmas Island, Cape Breton, where it is accompanied by other Gaelic activities, music, and dance in a group environment. Presently, there are a handful of communities in Cape Breton that perform this tradition, the Gaelic communities of Christmas Island and Johnstown being among the most prominent. Scottish Gaelic is the dominant language of the songs, which largely consist of a genre known as òrain luaidh, or waulking songs. Music in all its forms is an integral aspect of community in Cape Breton, but the milling frolic in particular stands at the forefront of this community’s sociocultural Gaelic identity. Gaelic song endured a tumultuous history of political and religious oppression prior to the revival of interest in the early twentieth century. In investigating the history of the milling frolic as a case study, one must be aware of the history of Scotland itself—chiefly in approaching notions of a Gaelic ethnic identity. Despite Scotland’s long past as a nation, ethnicity does not

1 necessarily equal nationality in the case of genre. Indeed, when entertaining notions of genre in the Gaelic diaspora, “Scottish” folk song and “Gaelic” folk song represent different markers altogether. The song tradition from the Gaelic population in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland is an integral component of everyday life, as it has been throughout the recorded history of the region. Singing has long accompanied most social functions in Scottish Gaelic communities. Gaelic song genres consist of an ever-growing and ever-changing repertoire of songs that ebb and flow in a continuum of music that perpetually reinvents and rediscovers concepts of tradition. Tradition is conceived of here as distinct from custom: (…) which dominates so-called “traditional” societies. The object and characteristic of “traditions,” including invented ones, is [perceived] invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes fixed (normally formalized) practices such as repetition…. Inventing traditions… is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition. (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983:2, 4)

In music, genres provide an intricate connectivity of people and place through communication and interpretation—traditions real and invented—evident not only in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland today, but also in the Gaelic diaspora within Cape Breton. This musical-social connection and interaction is acutely evident in the milling frolic. At the meta-level, the milling frolic itself represents a Cape Breton tradition that links past to present within the diaspora. Such a continuity of identity inspires a broad ethnic awareness that transcends specific communities and serves to represent what it means to be a Gael in Cape Breton. At the community level, the festival acts as an important social institution, especially for resident Gaelic speakers and non-Gaelic speakers to connect both to their traditions and to each other. At the individual level, the milling frolic becomes a familial and personal tradition from which one derives their cultural identity. As a cultural force, Gaelic song contributes to the idea of Celtic ethnicity, or “Celticity,” as well. The recognition of this power can be heard in the lyrics of “Celtic” folk songs (those written in English as well as in Gaelic) that use Celtic imagery to deconstruct boundaries of nation-state, as well as broad ethnic boundaries. The music has reciprocal impact on non-Gaelic and non-Celtic peoples as well.

Throughout this dissertation, I will address issues of ethnicity, nationality, community, and individuality—each an important dimension of cultural identity—and their interrelationships found evident in the milling frolic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Specifically for Cape Bretoners who participate in the milling frolic, I will show how musical-social interaction is situated at the core of other performative aspects of culture, such as community and tradition, and subsequently how these are related to meaning and identity. Ultimately, I will elucidate the many ways in which music interconnects us and defines our social reality, as well as demonstrate the genre dimensions that we create, perpetuate, and utilize through musical-social interaction.

Figure 1: Map of Northern Nova Scotia from Antigonish to Cape Breton (Google 2011)

Background and Significance At the beginning of the nineteenth century, nearly one million people emigrated from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland to British North America. The predominant area of settlement for this large Scottish population in exodus was Cape Breton, a 3,981 square mile island situated just under one mile from the northeast coast of the rest of the province of Nova Scotia. “Cape Breton, the mainland of Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the nearest part to Scotland of the American continent, formed the most convenient dumping ground for the unwanted inhabitants of the Highlands” (Campbell 1999:20). The emigration had a dramatic impact on the Island and its culture. The population increased from fewer than 3,000 in 1801 to almost 55,000 in 1851, and the ethnic composition changed greatly. By the early 1820s, Scots made up a majority of the population; by 1871, 50,000 of the 75,000 Islanders were of Scottish origin, outnumbering by two to one the descendants of Acadian, Irish, and Loyalist families who had settled in Cape Breton before 1800. In large part, “Cape Breton had become a Scottish island” (Hornsby 1992:31). Emigration continued into the twentieth century, but the rural solace sought by these settlers disappeared in the economic and material resource needs brought on by the Industrial Revolution. By 1913, “coal production in Cape Breton peaked at six million tons” annually, and over the next few decades, the internal economy revolved around coal and steel mining rather than agriculture (Thornhill 1986:11). Gaelic songs and stories are the oldest musical-oral practice within the culture. Historically, Gaelic song has accompanied all manner of laboring, such as milling, reaping, rowing, grinding, spinning, milking, churning, and cutting, as well as other aspects of daily life, such as entertainment (including lullabies and festivals). The texts are an important part of all of these song genres, as these ever-changing lyrics are socially representative oral history juxtaposed with deep sociocultural metaphor and meaning. The milling frolic in some parts of Cape Breton has been practiced annually as an important cultural reenactment for close to a century. At present, people practice the milling frolic only as a cultural activity, as new technologies have displaced the need for manual milling. The milling frolic is essentially a social institution dedicated to the practice of Gaelic songs. Its main function as a song tradition remains the exchange of stories and witticisms in Gaelic while passing the time around the milling table. There are written sources from which to learn Gaelic

4 songs performed at these functions, but the performance itself is an oral transmission. Moreover, it is common for any particular milling song to have many verses—in some cases over twenty— and there are often verses performed that are not written down. Cape Bretoners “preserved” their old traditions by modifying centuries-old Scottish Gaelic practices. For example, the Hebridean repertoire and practice of waulking songs, which accompany the waulking1 of wool, was, before the migration, solely the practice of women. One notices evidence of this in the lyrical content of the Hebridean repertoire, which entertains topics that often have to do with a woman’s outlook on men. Heather Sparling explains, “According to one of my consultants, Rosemary McCormack, a number of waulking songs were about women’s subjects and women did not feel comfortable singing them in front of men. Apparently, waulking song repertoire covered such subjects as sex, matchmaking, and other ribald topics from a woman’s perspective” (Sparling 2000:61). This was an important reason why Cape Breton milling song repertoire changed so much in lyrical content during the growth of the milling frolic, as it became more of a cultural reenactment that included men and the genre’s lyrical and musical content broadened. Òrain luaidh (waulking songs) are an old Scottish tradition of musical labor2 and consist of a repetitive rhythmic structure, choruses that act as refrains, and vocables as well as sociocultural commentary in the verses, which can be quite numerous. To refer to Gaelic labor songs as “musical labor” is to communicate the depth and importance of the role music exhibits in Gaelic daily life, both past and present. Analagous to Gunderson’s findings regarding conceptions of labor among Sukuma farmers in Tanzania, East Africa, Cape Bretoners may be said to espouse a “philosophy that sees musical labor as a human experience both related to and different from labor, a performative behavior neither strict music performance nor strict labor, neither work nor play, but somehow retaining aspects of both” (Gunderson 2001:4). The performance of music becomes more than just a “musical activity” to pass the time while

1 Waulking is the second step in a two-part process of preparing woolen cloth. Also called “fulling” and in Cape Breton referred to as “milling,” it is the beating of lengths of wool to thicken and strengthen the fabric before it can be used to make clothing or blankets. At present there are various machines that prepare woolen cloth, eliminating the need for manual milling, but Scottish Gaels have a centuries-old tradition of labor songs that accompany the milling of wool. This social activity is primarily reenacted in a milling frolic. 2 “Musical labor” is a phrase coined by Frank Gunderson, first used in “‘Dancing with Porcupines’ to ‘Twirling a Hoe’: Musical Labor Transformed in Sukumaland, Tanzania.” Africa Today 48:4-25 (2001). And in, Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania: “We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming” (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2010).

5 laboring; “(…) it plays a crucial role in establishing closeness, mutual support, and community solidarity” (Gunderson 2001:4). Genres of Gaelic song fit this functional definition quite well, and as I will show in this dissertation there is a rich body of oral history and sociocultural commentary that can be seen with the ethnographic analysis of song texts, as well as performance of milling frolic repertoire. Through the case study of the Cape Breton milling frolic, I will explore the ways in which Gaelic song becomes the vehicle that transports Cape Bretoners to past heritage and socially articulates present identity. The purpose of this study of Gaelic song in Cape Breton is multifaceted. In a community that was predominantly Gaelic-speaking not more than a century ago, now with a dwindling population of Gaelic speakers, festivals such as the milling frolic are perceived as important social institutions that help to preserve the oral history of the region. But more than just a social gathering or a medium of cultural continuity and preservation, the milling frolic represents an invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) of continuity and transformation of far older Gaelic song practices in Cape Breton. As such, the performance itself represents an important example of Gaelic traditions in the diaspora, and its study reveals insights regarding the discovery and transformation of those traditions, the sociocultural connections that the festival fosters, and the embodiment of cultural identity. Another significant aspect of this dissertation is to elucidate the many varying conceptions that Cape Bretoners have about their own traditions—the origins, differences, importance, and function of their music. Many Cape Breton musicians have developed interesting and widely discrepant hierarchical conceptions of different Gaelic song traditions, that is, of different song genres. The milling frolic is a productive setting to collect ethnographic data concerning these various views on genre and their cultural importance. In social settings, the distinction of song genres is seldom discussed explicitly, but distinctions and hierarchy of genre are nevertheless widely utilized and canonized in practice. Building Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as well as on relevant ethnomusicological, anthropological, and sociological literature, I will show how social distinction—that is the placing of value and the development of hierarchies—in the case of genre and communication about music, informs and is informed by the various dimensions of cultural identity. In his book, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu defines habitus as:

Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.” (Bourdieu 1977:72)

In other words, one’s habitus is his or her individual sociocultural identity that defines interaction within a social environment. This identity both informs and is informed by the social environment and is in a constant state of cumulative development. Developing and performed senses of identity emerge from the cultural interaction of habitus and social distinction, through which communities garner a sense of ethos: …Through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. (Bourdieu 1979:7)

Taste is Bourdieu’s social spectrum that separates the perceived “good” from the “bad,” which subsequently guides the trajectory of traditional practice throughout history. In considering Bourdieu’s above-mentioned concepts of distinction and habitus, I will show how shifting modes of dominant sociocultural ethos contribute to an overall change in musical “taste” with regard to the musics considered traditional. Additionally, the fascinating access music has to identity in a particular cultural tradition, including its ability to affect social stimulus and change, suggests that far from being a simple structural element of society, music is an agent of discovery and invention of cultural identity. It is this emergence that will inform how accessing dialog is key to understanding and negotiating the complex interrelationships inherent within it. More than just a question of social distinction, which I define as a constantly developing series of conscious and unconscious decisions and determinations that comprise one’s individual

7 sense of value,3 hierarchical treatment of different musical practices among Cape Bretoners is a question of genre. The popularity of certain genres relative to others, as well as diverse performance practices within and between genres, problematize the authority of tradition, revealing that tradition itself is a constant process of discovery, interpretation, and invention. In many ways, these generic hierarchies also mirror the flow of music as a commodity, making the genre question in these cases a marker of supply and demand—not just for Gaelic-speaking peoples, but also for any group who decides to participate in the music at some level. This conglomeration of traditions affects the continuum of music, thus reinventing the concept of traditional Gaelic song. The milling frolic, an important musical gathering, provides revealing examples of all of these cultural issues. The study of the music of Cape Breton has been done in the past with special attention given to collecting songs, stories and tunes. This type of collecting is a holdover from the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century practice of cataloging and documenting music. Well into the twentieth century, musicians interested in Cape Breton “Celtic” sounds also focused on the elaborate fiddle traditions that had developed on the island. Some scholars insisted the practices were similar to older, now “lost,” Scottish traditions, while still others claimed to codify a specific Cape Breton style. The main body of musical study for Nova Scotia still consists of this genre. However, currently in Cape Breton musicology, scholars are paying more attention to the dwindling practices of Gaelic folk song, which was once an integral part of everyday life for Cape Bretoners, now at risk of becoming little more than memories and in some cases forgotten altogether. Despite a recent ethnography written about puirt-a-beul, 4 or “mouth music,” as well as a current documentary film in production about practiced song and storytelling in Cape Breton, little ethnomusicological research exists concerning the Cape Breton Gaelic milling frolic, with the exception of various published song collections dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, and a number of archived recordings (many of which are the work of John Shaw). Thus, my study of the milling frolic is important in its culturally sensitive representation of the sociocultural aspects of the genre itself, as well as in its ethnomusicological treatment of the songs sung during the frolic. Analysis and interpretation of this traditional process will

3 This concept of distinction is based on that of Bourdieu, as outlined in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), quoted previously. 4 Puirt-a-beul literally translates as “Mouth songs,” and is a dance genre of music that consists of sung vocables and various simple lyrics and is traditionally performed a capella. The origin of this genre is often attributed to a way to remember piping tunes during the period in Scotland when the bagpipes and other instruments were outlawed.

8 demonstrate how Gaelic songs performed at the milling frolic operate as tools of discovery and invention of cultural identity. My work will focus less on the musical analysis of specific items in the repertory and stylistics, and focus instead on genre and its role of social action for participants. The core of this study has to do with my theoretical approach to investigating the social position of the milling frolic at various dimensions of engagement, which is centered in a type of dimensional analysis. Dimensional analysis, the purview of genre studies, involves defining features and qualities of a particular practice or concept from varying points of view. Each dimensional treatment of a topic is tiered from most general, or broadly encompassing (the meta- level), to most specific. Sociologists often employ dimensional analysis as a way of investigating a particular topic from various viewpoints. Such analysis, approached ethnographically, holds potential for articulating the ways in which sociocultural dimensions such as ethnicity, nationality, community, and individuality, are accessed—in this case through the music and other various social interaction featured at a milling frolic. These, too, will be implicit in my narrative.

Literature Review The literature that informs this dissertation comprises a diverse, interdisciplinary array of anthropological, ethnomusicological, genre studies, historical, and sociological sources, as well as a number of song collections compiled by amateurs and scholars alike. Each source contributes to the dissertation as a whole in specific ways. However, the sources may be divided into and discussed in terms of four main categories: (1) specific sources, which include song and song text collections, public records, interviews and similar items; (2) general sources, consisting of any historical documents and general background information; (3) theoretical sources, which provide the foundations of scholarly discourse from which I launch my theoretical framework; and (4) media sources, comprised of audio and video sources of Gaelic songs and other milling frolic musics.

Specific Sources Song collections are an important part of this dissertation. I have reviewed several of the most comprehensive Gaelic song collections as well as a collection of repertoire from the milling

9 frolics I have attended. A most influential work in Gaelic song investigation in Nova Scotia is John Lorne Campbell’s Songs Remembered in Exile (1999). The author and his wife, both of whom lived on the Island of Barra in the Hebrides in the early twentieth century, traveled to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island numerous times between 1932 and 1989. Their fieldwork, based on several expeditions to Cape Breton, yielded an astounding collection of Gaelic poetry and songs that were thriving in the New World nearly 150 years after their emigration from Scotland. The book is, essentially, raw data by contemporary ethnomusicological standards. There are unanalyzed field notes, expedition stories, public accounts, photographs, maps, and most importantly a number of transcribed songs—texts with translations and musical notation. Séamus Ennis transcribed the majority of the songs and Gaelic texts from the wax cylinder recordings made by Campbell and his wife, while Campbell organized the book after the model of Margaret Fay Shaw’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955) and Campbell and Francis Collinson’s Scottish collection Hebridean Folksongs (1981) (Both are Gaelic song collections from the Hebrides). The book is quite relevant to the dissertation, though it contains few actual waulking songs, in that it is a definitive collection of Gaelic songs and texts. Many milling frolic groups perform songs found in this collection as well. As a critical source, some of the Gaelic transcription should be scrutinized, perhaps in a future edition, and it would benefit from an accompanying CD containing the recordings. Familiarity with this collection is a must when entering the field and attending milling frolics, and any songs collected in personal fieldwork will be compared to those collected by Campbell. This source will be further applied in that the popularity of the songs over fifty years ago can be compared to the popularity of songs today in order to get a sense of the continuity of tradition. Campbell published a number of other sources that laid the groundwork for my field study in Cape Breton. His report for the journal The Scotsman, titled “Scottish Gaelic in Canada: an Unofficial Census” (1933) details the number of Gaelic speakers in various communities based on several institutions throughout Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. In the report, Campbell documents Scottish Gaelic culture throughout these regions, on which he expanded in his subsequent articles “Scottish Gaelic in Canada” (1936), and “Highland Links with Nova Scotia” (1953). Still, Campbell’s most groundbreaking work on Scottish diasporic music study, Songs Remembered in Exile (1999), is a recurring reference throughout this work, as it has been in

10 conversations and interviews in Cape Breton as the precursory study of Gaelic song in Nova Scotia. John Shaw’s work is of vital pertinence to Cape Breton Gaelic studies. His Sgeul gu Latha (Tales Until Dawn) (1987) is a large volume of various stories and missives (as told to him over several years of fieldwork with Joe Neil MacNeil) that stand as a window into the life of a Scottish Gael in Cape Breton. Particularly in the volume, MacNeil discusses stories as they relate to specific regions and family groups on the Island. Shaw also collected numerous Gaelic songs as sung throughout Cape Breton in the recently published Brìgh an Òrain: A Story in Every Song The Songs and Tales of Lauchie MacLellan (2000). The songs are organized by genre into an impressive collection. In 2007, Shaw published The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton, where he likewise organizes a group of stories into genres. Shaw’s dedication to the collection and translation of Gaelic stories and songs in Cape Breton has been locally recognized as an important work toward the preservation of traditions among this Gaelic- speaking population, where the loss of language is a severe reality. Another more dated collection worth mention is Helen Creighton’s and Calum MacLeod’s Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia (1964). It contains a number of song texts collected with a particular emphasis on texts composed in Cape Breton. Published in the anthropological series of the National Museum of Canada Bulletin, this collection contains songs with text, translation, and musical notation. There are occasional notes accompanying the songs that detail when, where, or with whom the song was originally recorded, the composer’s story, or the history behind the song text. Beyond these footnotes to the songs, the collection itself reads like a simple songbook. The collection’s relevance, as in the last collection reviewed, is in its texts; part of the scope of this dissertation is the social relevance of song texts and stories popular at milling frolics. This social importance will be discovered through expressive meaning and ethnopoetic interpretation of the song texts. The collection of Hebridean Folksongs by Donald MacCormick (1969) is more than a simple tome of data. The book comprises a history of the waulking tradition in the Hebrides. Specifically, MacCormick’s work, along with the work of Francis Collinson and Margaret Fay Shaw, helped to shape the contemporary notion of the variety among Gaelic song genres— specifically among the labor songs of the Highlands and Western Hebrides. This collection consists of some of the most popular waulking songs sung in the Hebrides since the late

11 nineteenth century, all but forgotten in the past few decades. The specific connection that a work such as this has to the milling frolic is in its rich description of the origin of the waulking song genre, and in the melodies and motifs that were so popular that they were set to multiple texts. The study of Scottish music in the diaspora is in part a study of Scottish music in general. As such, the specific works of scholars such as John Lorne Campbell (as previously introduced), Francis Collinson, and Margaret Fay Shaw have been important for this dissertation. Collinson published two important books: The Traditional and National Music of Scotland (1966) and The Bagpipe: The History of a Musical Instrument (1975), as well as the book co-authored with Campbell (previously mentioned), each of which will be important to the analysis of Scottish traditional music as performed in the Cape Breton milling frolic. Collinson was also one of the first scholars to delineate between Hebridean folksong genres, building on Kennedy-Fraser’s Songs of the Hebrides (1909). Each of these sources is specifically related to this dissertation in terms of genre as reference for songs that have been performed, recorded, and analyzed. Collinson and Campbell have laboriously studied collections of Scottish songs dating back to the nineteenth century; thus, my study of Scottish music in the diaspora must consider these sources as specifically relevant. Another source for Gaelic song scholarship is Margaret Fay Shaw’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955; second edition 1999). Shaw has compiled numerous photographs, song texts with music notation, and specific history of the practice of folk song performance in South Uist. Shaw conducted many interviews that provide a dense description of life and music in the Hebrides. This source is quite relevant to this dissertation on three levels: its detail in recording song texts and histories, its approach to the analysis of Gaelic folksong, which situates the music firmly in its cultural context, and in the interview process, with which Shaw was methodically attentive to her informants. Gaelic song studies in Nova Scotia have been gaining scholarly interest since the publication of Songs of the Hebrides by Marjory Kennedy Fraser (1909). Currently, anthropological and ethnomusicological studies have inspired new ethnographic investigations of the musical culture of the area (Sparling 1996, 2000; Feintuch 2004, 2010). Each of the sources listed above contribute in their own way to the collection and codification of Gaelic song in the diaspora, and as such these studies serve as specific references for my particular experiences with the musical-social interaction of the region.

General Sources Kenneth Donovan’s book, The Island: New Perspectives on Cape Breton’s History, 1713-1990 (1990), is a compendium of general information regarding many aspects of Cape Breton history, from settlement to early history, effects of the Industrial Revolution on the economy of the Island, the various national expressions of culture, and even the political climate of the region. As a general reference, the book informs this dissertation by providing a solid source of background information, as well as a bibliography of references about Cape Breton history. This source is applied in various forms to the dissertation as pertinent background material and historical data. Another topical historical source for this study is Charles Dunn’s Highland settler: A Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Nova Scotia (1953). This book is a series of accounts of early settlement in Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. It tells of the profound impact that the mass immigration of Scottish Gales had on the Island itself, drastically changing the major demographic of the area in a few short decades. This is relevant to the dissertation for two reasons: first, the number of immigrants into the region essentially resulted in a transposed society of Gaelic peoples. The numerous settling families created and recreated their social networks within their newly found land. Second, the communities throughout Nova Scotia depended on their native language, Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), in order to construct their society. This bolstered the sociocultural connection of all Gaelic peoples, which at present day remains an important link. While the book does delve into more philosophical and social aspects of Gaelic life in Nova Scotia, it applies to the dissertation more generally as a reference to settler life on Cape Breton Island. Dunn is an important scholar of the Gaelic diaspora in Nova Scotia, with works in folklore, such as “Gaelic Proverbs in Nova Scotia” (1959). His insights in folklore and history contribute to this dissertation as a general source concerning the continuity of tradition. More than through historical documentation, the general picture of Cape Breton society comes into focus when understanding the powerful link that language provides for Gaelic society. In Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect (1981), Nancy C. Dorian provides a comprehensive description of the use of Gàidhlig throughout Scotland, Sutherland, and the diaspora. Considering the rapid decline of the language on Cape Breton

Island since the Industrial Revolution, this book is germane in that it discusses the practicality of Scottish Gaelic in an often English-dominated and assimilating culture. When dealing with development and importance of Gàidhlig throughout the dissertation, this book served as a useful source. In Warren Gordon’s Cape Breton, Island of Islands (1985), the reader will find a commemoration of the Island in word and picture. This book stands as an art piece of some intrigue, containing numerous photographs and descriptions from the point of view of a native who is undoubtedly infatuated with the region. Gordon’s work provides something of a practical relevance to this dissertation—familiarity and inspiration. Its application is apparent in the artistic recreation of Island scenes, coupled with stories and trivial facts. It is not a scholarly source per se, though its application cannot be underestimated. Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance, by Sharon MacDonald (1997), is an important general source of information. Fluency in the Gaelic language has become drastically scarce throughout the Island since the decades of the initial immigration. Even though Cape Breton still boasts the largest Gaelic speaking population outside of Scotland, the number of actual fluent speakers is extremely low. MacDonald discusses the ramifications of the assimilation of Gaelic as well as how the “Gaelic renaissance” has rekindled a growing importance for the use of Gaelic in schools and at home among native Gaelic populations in the United Kingdom and in the diaspora. Her discussion of cultural identity and the relevance of language provides important insight for the construction of interview questions in particular, as it gives specific information regarding Gaelic awareness that MacDonald gathered through interviews and census studies. Myth, Migration, and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia, c.1700-1990 (Harper, Vance 2000) is another important general historical narrative concerning the background information of this dissertation. The book itself departs from Donovan’s interdisciplinary historical portrait in that its collection of essays revolves around a specific theme relevant to Cape Breton history. This collection of essays discusses the relationships between Scotland and Nova Scotia and Canada. Each chapter discusses the “Scottishness” of Nova Scotia as a unique feature in provincial Canada. According to the collection, the unity among Gaels is brought out by a unity in history—the Highland clearances, oppression—and it is strengthened by Gaelic cultural traditions—through language and cultural awareness. Despite

14 being a general source, it is very relevant to this dissertation, given that nearly each essay provides an important gem of knowledge that speaks to the overall theme of my study. Still, as it does not specifically elucidate any points concerning Gaelic song or the milling frolic, its application to this dissertation remains rather general.

Theoretical Sources I situate my ethnographic study between the generalized perceptions of cultural identity and the specific individual social distinctions that I have observed both inside and outside the milling frolic. The theoretical trajectory for such a study is guided by contemporary social theory and literary genre studies in addition to current ethnomusicological studies of Gaelic and Celtic musics, as well as other ethnomusicological studies. As such, the sources mentioned here describe the background of my theoretical approach from the most generally relevant social theory to the more topically applicable concepts introduced by current scholars in the field. The core of my theoretical approach is inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, specifically his two seminal works: The Dialogic Imagination (a collection of four essays by Bakhtin as compiled and translated by Michael Holquist in 1981) and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (translated by Vern W. McGee and edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist in 1986). In these works, language—communication—is realized not as de Saussure envisioned it (langue et parole), but rather as a group of dialogic utterances (oral, written, or otherwise). These utterances are qualified based on their use and context, and as such, certain stable structures are formed that Bakhtin called “speech genres.” The application of Bakhtin’s theories are widespread, in that he viewed genres not simply as sets of rules and conventions (in their generative structure), but as ways of conceptualizing one’s reality. Genres are forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of one’s social environment. Ultimately, genres are the fundamental molds in which we cast all elements of social communication and interaction. These texts demonstrate the multifaceted nature of communication, and ultimately will prove to be highly applicable to any ethnomusicological genre study. It should be noted here that there are several works authored by members of The Bakhtin Circle5 that have been attributed to Bakhtin himself. Specifically, certain works by Valentin

5 A group of like-minded Russian philosophers who, in the early twentieth century, positioned their ideas around the works of Bakhtin.

Nikolaevich Vološinov and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev, it has been debated, were written by Bakhtin and published under an alternate different name. This is not to suggest that works by these authors are not original or that they did not publish thoughts of their own, but in appreciating this ongoing debate there are references in this dissertation from Vološinov’s Freudianism: A Marxist Critique that I and others (Todorov 1984) attribute to Bakhtin. As such, when a quote from Vološinov is noted as Bakhtin’s idea, it is with this in mind. Also applicable to the dialogic approach is Michael Holquist’s book, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. This is a concise but dense book outlining the dialogic concepts represented in numerous Bakhtin works. In an almost artistic way, Holquist pieces together thought-provoking passages from the course of Bakhtin’s writings, from early works to ones published just before his death, all of which create a logic-chain continuum of dialogic thought. The general premise in dialogism is that in the social realm, the self cannot exist without the other; all that is socialized is performed. Dialogism, let it be clear from the outset, is itself not a systematic philosophy. But the specific way in which it refuses to be systematic can only be gauged against the failure of all nineteenth-century metaphysical systems to cope with the new challenges raised by the natural and mathematical sciences. (Holquist 1990:16)

The existence of the dialogic self is a simultaneous one, actualized and experienced in emergent ways. Holquist’s explorations of Bakhtin’s work fit nicely within an emerging ethnomusicology of genre and dialogism, particularly with regard to this dissertation. The concepts of doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy, as discussed in “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power” (Bourdieu 1994), are Pierre Bourdieu’s main notions in his theory of capital and symbolic power. Doxa represents that which is undisputed in the social realm; that is, it represents elements in society upon which each individual can agree. Social distinction complicates doxa as it exists in the discourse between orthodoxy (those social choices that emphasize conformity with doxa) and heterodoxy (dissenting or unconventional social practices). Bourdieu posits these concepts in order to theorize about the nature of class domination. He suggests that value judgments, which exist in the realm of discourse between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, are inspired by a power struggle between the classes. It is important to realize that there are many contributing factors involving nationality, social status, family history, and fluency of language that apply as the foundation of the development of these

16 imaginations. Coupled with these notions is the participation in the cultural traditions that are vitally important to the perpetuation of this identity. Along with all participatory elements of this connection between past heritage and present identity exists a “misrecognition of arbitrariness” (Bourdieu 1977:165-70), or what could be seen as an “invented legitimacy” (Bourdieu 1977:165- 70), concerning the tradition of the milling frolic, creating a separation of Cape Breton communities and those of the western isles of Scotland. These concepts of symbolic power can be applied specifically to social distinctions evident in the milling frolic repertoire and traditions, but this dissertation departs from Bourdieu’s theory in its more intricate conclusions about power and symbolic capital, specifically in terms of the perpetuation of tradition in this community having little to do with a struggle between the people and the state. Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu 1979) is an in-depth look at the theoretical treatment of elements of social distinction. I will employ the author’s outlook on culture and aesthetics in order to address discovery and invention of tradition through participation. The book builds upon the author’s own concept of habitus as well as on the dialectic relationship between cultural influence on taste and vice versa. Bourdieu envisions structuralist notions governing the development of genre and aesthetic. In some ways, his study departs from the analysis of genre that is most relevant to this dissertation in its exhaustive statistical study of aesthetics, but it is still informative to the study of Gaelic song in Cape Breton in its implications for aesthetics and cultural tradition. The essays included in The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change (Coe 2002), edited by Richard Coe, focus on a Foucauldian approach to analyzing and understanding literary genre as it relates to the nature of dominative ideological discourse. In understanding genre as it applies to music and music discourse, it is important to think about how power systems influence the relative nature of acceptance and identity in music and music classification and how these classifications influence and are influenced by the status quo. This work is influenced by social theory and philosophy, such as Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) and Foucault’s “Lectures” (1994). It builds upon the literature of literary theory and genre studies and stands as a relevant source for genre studies of song text and music, informed by the ideology of how culture influences the uses and applications of genre for classification and identity. While its focus on literary genre as it applies to functional pedagogy for writing

17 instruction for students and teachers of ESL is not directly related to ethnomusicology, the basic theoretical premises are generalizeable to the present study in key respects. David Duff’s Modern Genre Theory (2000) is a collection that focuses on how one conceives genre and how to interpret genre theory in today’s discourse. Duff has assembled fifteen essays and excerpts to represent theoretical work on genre in the twentieth century. In addition to providing a generally useful head note to each item, he has included an annotated bibliography and a glossary that serve as excellent scholarly tools. This work is influenced by the philosophical and theoretical work of such authors as Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida. It builds upon the literature of literary theory and genre studies and stands as an important source for understanding and applying genre theory to music studies. The book serves as a text for the understanding of the subaltern framework behind genre, the result being a greater understanding of how this informs cultural identity. The book departs from specific applications of genre theory in a way, by its thick descriptions of structuralism and its somewhat inaccessible nature as a direct result of its literary angle. However, it remains a good source for this dissertation in that it represents the basis for explanation of and modern application of genre theory. Timothy Rice’s “Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and Ethnography” (2003) has influenced the approach of ethnography in this dissertation. Rice asks pertinent questions that I also asked many people in relation to Gaelic song, for example, “Why do two people living in the same time and place experience the same music so differently” (Rice 2003:152)? Understanding location or space as a social construction is the first step in connecting the Hebrides and Cape Breton through the continuity of their tradition. The concept of “being Scottish” is not limited to existing within the boundaries imposed by England at the end of the Jacobite Wars, it is the abstract, imagined identity that links many individuals on multiple levels, not dependent on geography. Understanding time as chronological and historical is to understand only where traditions of a Scottish and Gaelic nature have originated. To conceive of time as experiential and phenomenological is to note that the present perception is important to the application of any cultural element. To hear a Cape Breton milling song now as opposed to before the Industrial Revolution is to have two completely different experiences. Understanding metaphor is understanding the important epistemological and ontological implications of Gaelic song. The meaningful metaphoric utterances in Gaelic song are examples

18 of old traditions having new relevance in participatory engagement in cultural identity and inclusion in broader concepts of perceptually real groups. Invention of tradition is a concept that is very germane to the topic of diasporic studies, and Eric Hobsbawm is one of the leading scholars in this field. The book The Invention of Tradition (1983), which he co-edited with Terence Ranger, represents the definitive work in this area. It is a collection of essays that discuss how notions of continuity are forged in order to bolster a sense of identity and foster legitimacy for traditional practices within a society. The interaction of past and present is the major theme of this group of essays from numerous contributors. This book is immensely applicable to the theoretical framework of this dissertation, in that the milling frolic itself is an invented tradition based on notions of Scottish identity and continuity of ancient Gaelic traditions, which in and of themselves are also invented, as the book points out in the essay, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland” (Hobsbawm 1983:15). Music, in particular, seems to have the ability to create a sense of continuity and identity through which any number of traditions can be created, and in the particular case of the milling frolic, the festival repertoire may be vastly different from year to year, while still maintaining a link of continuity from the event’s origins to the present day. Hobsbawm’s essay discusses similar instances in Scottish history which make this reference an important theoretical source. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s book is both generally and specifically relevant to the theoretical framework of this dissertation, as there are broad concepts and specific historical ideas that I will apply to the Scottish diaspora. Sean Williams, co-editor of Southeast Asia: Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 4 (1998) and a leading scholar of Sundanese music, has also written on the Irish Gaelic tradition of sean-nós singing. Her article, “Melodic Ornamentation in the Connemara Sean-nós Singing of Joe Heaney” (2004), discusses the nature of ornamentation in the music of Heaney (1919-1984), a sean-nós singer from Connemara who moved to the United States in the mid- 1900s. In the article, Williams describes the important meaning that ornamentation can convey in a song. The ornamentation was difficult for Heaney to teach, and he often needed to describe it in metaphorical terms in order to make his point. This article represents current study of folk song in the Irish Gaelic diaspora, and for the purposes of this dissertation serves as a theoretical source. Williams’s analysis of folk song text is an important example of form for my own

19 analysis of songs performed at the milling frolic. This article is not a specific source, however, as it is not related specifically to the topic of Scottish Gaelic folksong. James Porter’s works could be considered specific sources for this study, considering his main area of expertise is Celtic music. However, for the purposes of this literature review, I categorize him as a theoretical source (though some of his work will specifically inform this dissertation), due to his analysis of tradition. Porter’s article, “Locating Celtic Music (and Song)” (1998), is quite relevant to my theoretical approach. “The modern concept of Celticity,” Porter writes, “is indeed bound up with both discovery and invention, and invention especially has played a powerful role in developing current notions of who the Celts were and are, and what Celtic culture involves” (Porter 1998:207). I plan to write extensively on this concept, as it relates to the repertoire of the milling frolic—both from an emic and etic perspective—with Porter’s work as my direct inspiration. His article, “‘Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson’: The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse” (2001), discusses the importance of James Macpherson’s work to the development of “Celticity,” and is framed in the rhetoric of invention tradition. Another important article by Porter that is pertinent to the theoretical analysis of Gaelic folksongs in Cape Breton is “Convergence, Divergence, and Dialectic in Folksong Paradigms: Critical Directions for Transatlantic Scholarship” (1993). He writes: The future of North Atlantic song scholarship depends, it seems, on the ability of scholars to assess one another's work in the context of disciplinary convergence and divergence, to revise their critical conception of both subject matter and social usage, and to develop from this dialectic persuasive paradigms for the study of singing in multiple and diverse contexts. (Porter 1993:88)

This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to access the context of which Porter speaks. Porter’s works are important to the theoretical approach of this dissertation, and stand as paramount examples of contemporary Celtic music scholarship. Likewise, the scholarship of Peter Crossley-Holland set a precedent for Celtic music studies. Crossley-Holland published on a variety of topics, but his most pertinent contributions to Celtic studies were on the subject of the music traditions of Wales. His work will also inform the theoretical analysis of this dissertation in reference and approach. The recent work of Karin Barber in The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics is a poignant addition to my research, not only with its direct relationship to Bakhtin’s work, but in

20 the way that Barber articulates the social position of personhood. The concept of the individual, a paramount assumption for modern Western capitalist society, is itself a new model and by no means one that holds credence in less alienated social economies. In her assertion, based on Bakhtin’s generative approach model—the ground up aggregate—Barber notes how the relationship between person and other is how many other indigenous societies structure their sense of identity. Such identity is emergent and processual, and also more closely resembles the processes of social interactions through which texts—in their infinite generic and generative incarnations—communicate with one another. Finally, I mention Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, edited by Martin Stokes and Philip V. Bohlman (2003). This book is very topically relevant, though does not qualify as a specific source for this dissertation as it focuses on Irish music and not specifically on Gaelic folk songs in the diaspora. A collection of essays all dealing with the concepts of “Celtic” in music, what I deem “Celticity,” this book is an important ethnographic and theoretical look at identity in music. It departs from this dissertation study in its generalization about Celtic music, since it gives more weight about ideas concerning Celticity to Irish musicians while paying little attention to other genres that, in the book, have unwittingly become part of a contrived periphery.

Media Sources I list here four of a number of important audio collections of Gaelic songs that have been considered references for this dissertation. Particularly applicable is the music of Mary Jane Lamond, as she has been a strong voice in milling frolic performances for many years. Her artful transformations of traditional songs resonate throughout Cape Breton Gaelic communities as a pillar of Gaelic preservation and communal identity. Each collection contains important examples whose relevance to milling frolic repertoire will be analyzed within this work. These sources include the following: Còmhla Cruínn—Gathered Together (CBC Radio 2002); Stòras (Turtlemusik 2005); Òrain Ghàidhlig—Gaelic Songs of Cape Breton (Turtlemusik 2001); Làn Dùil (Turtlemusik 1999).

Theoretical Approach It was Bakhtin’s contention that people communicate through genres—contextually defined and articulated utterances that mediate the social dimensions of perception and

21 interaction. With the core of my theoretical approaches for this dissertation, I further this notion in that, beyond a simple taxonomic classification of varying styles of music, genres constitute the communicative framework through which all social distinction is made relevant. Critical studies in literary genre theory and rhetorical criticism (Bakhtin, Holquist [1981, 1982], [1986]; Miller [1984]; Swales [1990]) have articulated how genres can elucidate a host of connotative and multi-faceted hierarchies of meaning in language. If language is one type of communicative social interaction, then the literary genre model can be applied to other social interactions in the same theoretical sense; specifically with music and other performative social situations, genre is a pragmatic link that brings together text and context, form and function, performer and audience, in varying hierarchical dimensions of both communication through music and speech utterances about musical experience and reception. John Swales states, “A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre” (Swales 1990:58). As I wrote in my master’s thesis, “Genre is an integrated framework of links between modes of transmission of a number of varying textual and contextual elements that exists in the social realm of use and communication” (Woods 2007:106). Essentially, genre makes all sociocultural communication possible; genre is social action. To understand the various ways in which Gaelic song genres are important for Cape Bretoners is to understand a deeper level of Cape Breton Gaelic identity. Rather than using genre analysis in an exhaustive definitional study of Gaelic song classification (which has been already been championed by scholars such as Campbell & Collinson [1981] and Shaw [1955]), I use genre theory as a specific approach to defining the social distinctions regarding the traditional music of Cape Breton as performed at the milling frolic, and with these hierarchies articulate the way in which genres allow people to identify with themselves, their environment, and each other (in all their infinite permutations). One aspect of genre that is often misunderstood is the notion that it is classificatory and inhibiting; this is a misperception due to the inherent stability of genre as a communicative link. But quite to the contrary, the concept of genre never relies purely on textual elements—it is never static or wedded to one space-time. Each social event and situation is unique, and though one can make note of the genre of a given event, this still means that doing so is a unique

22 performative experience (indeed, Bakhtin referred to his as “being-as-event”). Genre’s utility is in its fluidity from one social event to the next. Genre theory also shines as a methodological framework in articulating identity—what Barber calls “personhood”—as genre itself is a communicative ideology. Such a framework provides a fitting metaphor for the negotiation of Gaelic and Celtic identity in Cape Breton, through varying dimensions. Indeed, genre theory and social anthropology can be applied to many popular concepts in the field of ethnomusicology and specifically this research, such as invented tradition, imagined communities, and the link between changing contexts and changing ideas about textual meaning. Other theoretical aspects of this dissertation, while leaning on this foundation of genre theory, involve ethnographic dimensional analysis (which provides the necessary tools for interpretation of social distinction), the discovery, transformation, and invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and the importance of that tradition (and its transformations) for engaging cultural identity. These stem from genre hierarchies negotiating group and individual nostalgia and transformative tradition. Each of these elements is evident in the milling frolic. Beyond the general techniques of participation, observation and documentation, the ethnographic method of this study (discussed in the next section) is theoretically driven on two levels: On the macro level, learning about community members’ social distinctions—specifically their perceptions of the abstract notions of meaning, of being Celtic, Gaelic, Scottish, Canadian, and Cape Breton, provide me with the tools to theorize about the nature of cultural identity on multiple levels. After describing the milling frolic, beginning with its origins and practices in the history of the island, I will note the ways in which the Gaelic song repertoire has changed in the diaspora, noting renegotiations of specific styles of genres due to chronology, technology, economy, and specific tastes in Cape Breton. Through interviews I have collected song performances and song commentaries, texts (with translations from Gaelic to English), histories, and ideas about Gaelic song. Thus, the investigation of genres of music and their position in society relative to individual conceptions of genre will reveal the ways in which people disseminate, perform, perceive, and preserve these individual and group perceptions of music. Through these macro-level explorations into the culture of the milling frolic the strength of dialogues will be made evident. On the micro level, working with individuals and groups to uncover the contemporary scope of Gaelic song tradition relevant to the festival allow me to focus on how varying song

23 genres, as performed in the milling frolic, are used and interpreted in relation to important social distinctions. These choices are governed by social relevance of and dialogues about music. Themes emerge when people discuss what they think about these song genres, how they relate and do not relate, and what inspires them to sing these songs, such as perceived preservation of traditions, family and community interaction, and cultural awareness and appreciation. Many people in the Scottish Gaelic community of Cape Breton have familiarized themselves with the history of their song traditions. Utilizing dialog to note social distinctions and genre hierarchies at work in milling frolics serve as markers to understanding dimensions of cultural identity. Moreover, this dialogic, ethnographic approach allows me to access fluid elements of identity and genre that have been overlooked in much previous scholarship—specifically, understanding the perceived importance of preserving traditions that are doomed to be lost. Indeed, why is it important that certain traditions are “lost?” What does this mean, and how does a group define value in and of traditional practice, and how is value different from meaningfulness? What does affiliation with a culture provide for identity, and how does ownership of affiliation create interesting political paradoxes within the “insider-outsider” dichotomies? How are these questions further problematized by the recognition of invented traditions and negotiation of self and space? All of these questions and more have been addressed and will be elucidated through the lens of dialogic genre. Another aspect of my theoretical approach involves what could be seen as a type of dimensional analysis6, incorporating interdisciplinary scholarship in ethnomusicology, sociology, genre studies, and cultural studies from scholars including Bakan (2007), Bauman (2004), Bourdieu (1977, 1979), Duff (2000), Foucault (1994), Keil (1994), MacDonald (1997), Ong (1982), Rice (2003), Stam (2000), and Turino (2004). In employing this approach, I will describe varying conceptions of emic song genre realized through ethnographic analysis. For example, I asked informants specific questions geared toward their perceptions of a single Gaelic song they may have performed at a milling frolic, as well as their experiences learning the song and preparing for the performance. I also asked their perceptions of the overall Gaelic music festival

6 A qualitative approach in sociology based on the systematic methodology of grounded theory with its own epistemological development in the discipline over the past few decades. At its core, it involves understanding definitional and structural boundaries and how they are incorporated in a qualitative study. (See Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Kools, et al 1996)

24 itself, and how their performance is situated as traditional7 for the activity as a whole. These were juxtaposed with questions about how the Gaelic song genres performed at the milling frolic are perceived as a whole, as far as who is choosing repertoire, why, and to what ends? I would then follow up with a question about Gaelic song in Cape Breton that is performed inside and outside of the milling frolic. This type of dimensional questionnaire is designed to gather information about the various perceptions Cape Bretoners have about their Gaelic song traditions. Analyzing the social position of the milling frolic at various dimensions of engagement has yielded accessible and germane results for ethnomusicological discourse. Hierarchies such as those discussed above often lead to specific genres, sub-genres, or other categories that create boundaries about what music belongs in which specific contexts. Indeed, the blurring of boundaries happens in music and society, which challenges the efficacy and structure of genres, encouraging hierarchical concepts of “should,” “should not,” “better,” “worse,” and of course, “bad” and “good.” Such distinctions have been known to change a group’s social structure altogether, which in some cases leads to the phasing out of various genres that are no longer viable, utilized, or otherwise socially relevant. Such social motion has a profound impact on cultural identity. Yet, while people fundamentally challenge hierarchies and categories (while reinforcing others), and genre blurring always occurs (since no social category can be mutually exclusive due to the fluid nature of human interaction and the changeable state of cultural traditions), genre categorization and hierarchies must exist in order for other aspects of culture to be legitimated and in order for communication to occur. A problem lies within the moral ascription of a social hierarchy. When this domain of identity leaks into that of aesthetic judgment, the notion of “bad” music, for example, belongs to an entirely different sub-set of genre categories which have to do with other social awareness. In this all things are connected in the social realm, and genres are doubly necessary for communication to occur. Thus, we need to have a notion of hierarchies within social interaction, or it would seem that we have no notion of communication about music at all. Music functions in social life, in the social self, to effect a connective communication between people. This is not simply an abstract expression that one might refer to as an “imitation

7 I will gauge emic concepts of tradition according to the theoretical models introduced by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and by Bakan (2007), which concern invented tradition and the continuity inspired by neo-traditional and post-traditional categories (respectively).

25 of life” (Turino 2008), but is rather a process that crystallizes the social reality in which we live and interact and emphasizes that interplay, the “space between,” in a way that performs that which is directly possible and that which is remembered and reinvented from the past within a present space of social continuity. The milling frolic will serve as an active example of this process of musical-social interaction.

Methodology Ethnographic methods have allowed me to compile a genre description of Cape Breton culture and soundscape through observation of and participation in various regional milling frolics. I attended festival events, musical events, and language workshops, all the while conducting interviews and participating in performances (through both observation and performing myself). The time spent was with other performers and in discussions contributed to my overall sense of musical-social interaction and my view of the milling frolic through stories and missives and other interactions during my time there. I also spent a great deal of time traveling around the island meeting as many people as possible. When not at the festival itself, I visited other musical venues and social gathering places, engaging many different people in conversation in order to better understand the importance of Cape Breton identity, the Gaelic language, and Gaelic song in everyday life. I encouraged most people with whom I spoke and interacted to keep in contact with me through facebook and other electronic means. My goal was to gather group and individual perceptions of the entire process of this annual celebration, establishing a rapport with community groups in order to appreciate the full spectrum of cultural engagement with traditions from my own point of view. The primary source of this information was interviews, but only some of them were formalized interviews in the usual sense of the word. In large part, I simply discussed, in dynamic dialogs, performers’ ideas and perceptions of the festival and observed the repertory performed. My own participation in the preparation and performance of the milling frolic was vital in providing me with the tools necessary to understand the traditional process of the milling frolic. Prior to actively engaging in fieldwork, the first phase of this dissertation research involved thoroughly studying and describing the history of Gaelic song genres. To that end, I reviewed several seminal ethnographic and musical collections of Gaelic song (Shaw, 1956, 1987, 2001, 2007; Campbell, 1999; Collinson, 1981; Creighton, 1964; Dunn, 1953; MacDonald,

1895; Porter, 1998; Reiss, 2003; Shaw, 1955; Sparling, 2000). Historical documents detailing the settlement of Cape Breton and describing the Scottish Highland Clearances8 are the primary source of information concerning early establishment of Scottish Gaelic community on the Island. These sources are housed in various locations including the Florida State University Library’s Scottish Studies Collection, Cape Breton University Library (The Beaton Institute), various cooperative lending institutions, and in public records from South Uist, Barra, and those reviewed in Sydney and North Sydney, Cape Breton. Records of song genres and song texts popular in Cape Breton over the past century, especially those performed at milling frolics, are available through dedicated collectors, tradition-bearers on Christmas Island and in Johnstown, as well as in a number of other publications relative to Gaelic song in Cape Breton. I consulted several community members about their own experiences participating in the milling frolic, that is, when and why they learn and perform the music, and inquired about their knowledge of the history of the cultural practice. Outside the festival, the main place of importance for Gaelic song is in the home. Particularly, in the Scottish tradition known as the “house ceilidh,” which was the primary source of entertainment for several generations of Gaelic life in the New World. This includes the informal transmission of traditional songs from older generations to younger generations, as well as formal music education, which has (thanks to the efforts of many local Gaelic scholars, tradition-bearers, and casual learners) taken a more prominent role in the lives of Cape Bretoners today. In some instances, I questioned informants regarding Gaelic song genres: how they relate and do not relate, and what inspires people to sing these songs, such as perceived preservation of traditions, family and community interaction, and cultural awareness and appreciation. The recurrent theme to which most conversations seemed to return was that of identity—specifically in the narratives of heritage and tradition that rests primarily in seeing the continued use of the Gaelic language. At the festivals themselves, gathering ethnographic data relied more on my ability to observe social interactions and document the events in and of themselves, than on focusing on stylistics. Juxtaposing these general musical observances with individual interviews and experiences provided a different sort of “thick description” (Geertz 1973) that contributed to the

8 The Highland Clearances (Fuadaich nan Gàidheal) were the campaigns in the United Kingdom throughout the eighteenth century aimed at the forceful eviction of clan tenants throughout the Highlands. England propagandized this displacement as a change in agricultural policy, but the change did not benefit the Highlanders, many of whose clans had lived on the land for centuries. The result was a rather violent clearing of Scots from the Highlands, during which time many families emigrated across the Atlantic.

27 musical-social interactivity evident for my overall analysis of Gaelic song and the milling frolic tradition on the Island. During the week of the twentieth annual Fèis especially, I asked numerous informants about their language and customs, as well as inquired about their thoughts upon hearing words (which I later refer to as “identity markers”) such as: Gaelic, Celtic, Scottish, et al. This level of inquiry most specifically engages my concepts of social genre and contributes to the interactive dialogism that rests at the core of the ethnographic analysis. For example, a Cape Bretoner may be less likely to identify himself or herself as a “Celtic” singer than a “Gaelic” singer, given their own perceptions of how society at large views those classifications. Each individual participant demonstrates the complex interrelationships evident in a dynamic and dialogic existence. Additionally, each person I have spoken with has their own conceptions and hierarchical distinctions concerning Gaelic song genres, which is another important aspect of my overall study. The use of Gaelic song, through the lens of the milling frolic informs critical thought concerning ideas about cultural vitality, identity, and acceptance of change. My own participation in the exchange of song through performance is an additional narrative lending itself to notions of identity and validity of tradition in the social realm of the milling frolic.

A Roadmap of Sorts Throughout this work, it has been my strategy to intersperse historical and ethnographic narratives with theoretical explorations as my own artistic expression to approach more dynamically the complex dialogic interrelationships of contextualized experiences, blurring the boundaries of generic forms. Chapter two provides historical and ethnographic perspectives of my travels in Cape Breton, with specific relevance to issues of Gaelic music, language, identity, and song performance practices. The historical narratives address Cape Breton’s long-standing struggle to maintain a connection to the Gaelic language, a legacy that is directly linked to identity and subsequently to the value awarded to musical traditions. This can be noted also in the frequency with which musical traditions are performed and the value of meanings performed through them. From this narrative, themes emerge that challenge generic notions of community and identity, which are further explored in Chapter three. I discuss the current state of Scottish Gaelic in Cape Breton, after which I return to the notion of the milling frolic and suggest its active role in the preservation of texts and performance of identity. It is in Chapter four where I

28 begin to advance a Bakhtinian theoretical model based on the narratives prevalent in Cape Breton, both specifically for the milling frolic and in a broader sense for what the milling frolic represents with regard to human dialogic musical activity. This “musical-social interation” serves to address the dialogism inherent in performative expression. In Chapter five, building on the context of the first four chapters, I begin to form together perceived boundaries of genre—grammar, narratives, chronotopes—that comprise musical-social interaction and identity in the milling frolic and in the Celtic musics performed on the Island. The interactivity of all these generic forms has a direct relevance with regard to personhood, memory, remembrance, and the performance of the self. Pursuant to this, I note how the psychology of the self as dialogic offers a critique of Freudian thought with regard to the subjective use of language. Additionally, I approach economic issues of identity, commodification, and the social economy of music both in Gaelic Cape Breton and the global market. After exploring more dynamic interrelationships of local practices with global perpectives, I propose a philosophical trajectory for my theoretical model, through which I take a deeper look at chronotopes and genre, as well as issues of geography experienced and imagined. I close the chapter with a critical look at the geography of the field, of where, in fact, “the field” actually exists. My conclusion leads me to look at geographical boundaries in a different conceptual light, contributing to the overall philosophical discussion of dialogism in musical- social interaction. In Chapter seven, I explore Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony and subjectivity in the agency of performative expressions. Such a discussion inevitably lends itself to the broader (and increasingly popular) notions of ethnicity as group identity, both in a performative and interactive sense. I follow this in Chapter eight with a final allegorical narrative before launching into a discussion of “imaginary” proportions, one that addresses ethnomusicology as a discipline and reiterates the relevance of genre theory and Bakhtinian philosophy in music studies. The final word is offered in a modest conclusion based on what the milling frolic has taught me about musical-social interaction and identity. In my roadmap I must post a cautionary sign or two regarding the areas of the road where I might deviate outside the established boundaries. Entering into this dissertation with the assumption that it means to describe in detail the stylistics of a single traditional event will leave the reader wondering where the additional ethnographic fieldwork is, outside the insular events of a music festival. I am aware of potential criticism in this regard, but as much as the stylistics

29 of the event are important to me (and indeed I plan to continue to involve myself and my future research with the welcoming communities in Cape Breton), this dissertation stems from work in multiple “fields” of research over the course of the past two years. The theoretical musings pursued within address not only the milling frolic and performative social interaction, but the nature of the ethnomusicological approach itself with regard to interdisciplinarity and Bakhtinian philosophy. In Chapters six and eight, I discuss this at length pertaining to the boundaries of this study and beyond. Throughout I also toy with the notion of fiction and with the use of fictional devices. In this instance fiction is not to be understood as a binary opposite to non-fiction, in the 1:1 logic sense of truth and falsehood. Rather, this is a narrative representation of experience, and like any narrative representation it is an artistic expression. Its dialogic existence necessitates that just as much as I might structure my sentences as best I can into bits of information as contributive to a body of knowledge (generically), you must also engage the sentences in your own way. Fiction is like the glue that connects the sentences together, into ways that one might begin to shape meaning of the narrative in an emergent sense.

CHAPTER 2 THE LAND OF TREES AND HIGH MOUNTAINS

“All the languages of heteroglossia ... are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific worldviews, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values.” –Mikhail Bakhtin (1934)

In his 1937 trip to Nova Scotia, John Lorne Campbell visited Cape Breton, Antigonish, and Prince Edward Island, gathering data on the state of Gaelic language and culture and collecting songs, all of which were later organized into a book9. Campbell’s story relies on eyewitness accounts from a number of informants. Aside from the documented songs, he emphasized both the hardships Cape Bretoners faced during their settlement and the preservation of traditional Gaelic songs, particularly the wealth of waulking songs that were, by the time of his visit, becoming something of a rarity in Scotland. The first Highlanders to settle in Cape Breton worked with few tools in the dense forests surrounding Bras d’Or lake, a large, sea-fed lake at the center of the Island. This must have been an especially daunting challenge, considering the barren and rocky landscape from where they came in the western Highlands and Isles. Campbell also writes about the warm Highland hospitality he saw, despite the suspicion he initially encountered bringing his English car across the “Gut of Canso” on the ferry. Overall, he marveled at Gaelic life in Cape Breton: Today, Cape Breton appears to a Highland visitor as a land of strange incongruities; a country where one can hear the Gaelic of Lewis, Skye, or Barra against a seemingly most inappropriate background of dense spruce forest; a Highland community where there are no lairds; where the descendants of settlers from Skye live beside Micmac Indians… where the people still refer to themselves as “Lewismen,” “Skyemen,” “Uistmen,” “Barramen,” and so on, although none of them have ever seen these places; where many can describe perfectly, from their grandparents’ reminiscing, places in the “Old Country”

9 John Lorne Campbell, Songs Remembered in Exile: Traditional Gaelic songs from Nova Scotia recorded in Cape Breton and Antigonish County in 1937 with an account of the causes of the Highland emigration, 1790-1835, Aberdeen University Press, 1990. The surveys and songs collected were organized in the same format as Margaret Fay Shaw’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1977), likely to maintain consistency in codifying a canon of traditional songs from the Highlands and Hebrides that were carried to the New World. John Lorne Campbell did note new song compositions in his expeditions to Nova Scotia, but his focus was on traditional songs from Scotland.

which they have never seen. Where, in fact, an inherited nostalgia and old habits and customs have survived in a most astonishing way. (Campbell 1999:19-20)

Traveling by motorcycle to Nova Scotia seventy-three years, two months later, I took a route similar to Campbell’s as I made my way to Cape Breton, riding east through New Brunswick and into the province. I think the wide, accessible highways are probably a step up from the roads he experienced. In some places on controlled access roads I saw no one for miles upon miles of stretched concrete. Familiar as I was with Campbell’s account of his visits to Nova Scotia, I was constantly aware of the fact that his emphasis was seeking out Scottish Gaelic traditions in the diaspora and noting the way in which they were preserved as time pieces, examples of texts extant but less relevant in their “original homeland.” I was aware of this and of the fact that such conclusions were not my focus. As soon as I made it to Nova Scotia’s border, I pulled off the highway into the “Welcome Centre,” a very large plot of land with an extensive parking lot, a faux cobblestone walkway, an outdoor park overlooking a vast field, and a huge visitor center with all kinds of tourist information and clever provincial mugs, magnets, sweat shirts, and snow globes. From the highway just before the exit for the welcome centre, there is a large, elaborate white sign with blue lettering, the top of which that displays the current provincial flag—a figure-ground reversal of the St. Andrew’s cross (Scotland’s flag) with the Scottish rampant lion displayed on a center shield. A welcome sign greeted me in Gaelic with Ciad Mile Failte (A Hundred Thousand Welcomes). A young piper clad in the Nova Scotia tartan played a couple of pipe tunes as I wandered around the area. Clearly the link to Scotland through the use of specifically targeted symbols of Scottish representation—what Ian McKay calls “Tartanisms”—is the primary, marketed theme of tourism here. It was not until I reached Antigonish10 that I started to see evidence of Gaelic apart from its token Scottish pageantry, apparent in a few bi-lingual road signs and certain place names. A causeway was completed across the Canso Strait, or “Gut of Canso,” as Campbell called it, on April 13, 1955, so there was no need for me to take a ferry to Cape Breton. I almost wish I needed to, though, so I could have had more time to admire the spectacular view of the Island

10 Antigonish is actually a local Mi’kmaq word that is reported (at least as I read in one Trans-Canada bicycle tour guide) to mean, “The place where branches are torn off trees by bears gathering beech nuts,” or, “river of fish.” St. Francis-Xavier University is located in Antigonish, having a Celtic Studies department and boasting the only university program outside Scotland with four full years of Gaelic education.

32 from the opposite side of the strait nearly a mile across. The rocky hillside of the Island is lined with spruce trees that climb out of the Canso waterway. Once on the Island, I pulled over to snap a picture of the welcome sign that read, “Welcome to Cape Breton: Explore our Scenic Travelways.” What followed was a collection of roadways through breathtaking, dense forests that occasionally clear long enough to peek out at the vast waterways that comprise the Bras d’Or lakes region and the Maritime Atlantic. North of Port Hastings, bilingual signs can be see along the roadways of the Island. On the Eskasoni Reserve, some signs are in Mi’kmaq and English, but in most other places they are in Gaelic and English, a testament to Cape Breton’s dedication to interest in preservation and dissemination of the language so rapidly in decline. For many Cape Bretoners, the link to Gaelic identity seems deeply bound to language, which is most accessible through the extant song traditions as opposed to colloquial conversation. Each of the locals with whom I interacted provided a context of contemporary Gaelic identity and social life—social interactions that continue to be specific identifiers for the preservation and dissemination of Gaelic on the Island. In this chapter, as a preamble to addressing these and issues of language and identity, we take a historical and ethnographic journey around Cape Breton and the realms in and around Gaelic song and the milling frolic for a glimpse into life in the modern diaspora.

Highland Settlers in the New World: Historical Perspectives Immigrants from Scotland settled in great numbers in Cape Breton and the surrounding regions in Nova Scotia throughout the nineteenth century during the Fuadach nan Gàidheal (the Highland Clearances, literally, the “eviction of the Gaels”). Many of the evictions during the Clearances were violent and traumatic, uprooting entire clans and rural communities and radically disintegrating a way of life. Some of the communities established in Cape Breton were direct transplantations of tiny rural villages—others were small family groups—but all of the early settlers left their homeland to find a strikingly different landscape. Many of the first Highlanders in Cape Breton experienced extreme hardships due to the harsh winters, dense forests, rocky hills, and relative isolation from the mainland. Moreover, all Gaelic settlers in the New World carried with them the “centuries of neglect and persecution” that had been established in the Old Country. “Years of living as a linguistic minority in their own country

33 were not erased upon their arrival in a new country that, after all, was dominated by the same culture that had been hovering over them all along” (Dembling 1999:12). Early settler life in Cape Breton was bleak and lonely, and its negative impact was expressed in the oral traditions of the early Gaelic settlers—primarily song. “The human experiences of the Gaels can be traced in the instinctive, inveterate and spontaneous compositions of the bards… they react to every major event affecting the lives of their community, and their songs mirror their folk history” (Bloomfield and Dunn 1989:67). The bard John MacLean, who was born in Caolas, Tiree, Inner Hebrides, Scotland in 1787 and emigrated to Pictou County in Nova Scotia in 1819, wrote “A’ Choille Ghruamach” (“The Gloomy Forest”), a well-known song describing his feelings of losing his homeland: Gu bheil mi ‘m ònrachd ‘s a’ choille ghruamaich, Mo smaointin luaineach, cha tog me fonn: Fhuair mi’n t-àite so’n aghaidh nàduir, Gun thréig gach tàlanta bha ‘n a m’cheann: Cha dean mi òran a chur air dòigh ann, ‘N uair ni mi tòiseachadh bidh mi trom: Chaill mi Ghaidhlig seach mar a b’àbhaist dhomh, ‘N uair a bha mi ‘s an dùthaich thall.

Lone, brooding mid the gloom of the forest verdure, My moods are fitful and my soul is wan: This place I’ve got so stands in strife with nature, That all my early powers of mind are gone: I cannot now construct a song in order, And if I should begin my heart grows sore: The Gaelic, too, I’ve lost as used o’er yonder In that far world of mountains ‘mine no more.’ (Creighton 1964:296-97)

In the song, MacLean seems to suggest that living in the “gloomy forests” of the New World is the cause of his depression and his inability to compose a song “in order.” MacLean’s isolation in this new place also inspired fear of losing his Gaelic, a result of the lack of Gaelic-speaking neighbors in Nova Scotia, which was of deep concern to settlers in the early nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1840, the population in Cape Breton and the mainland changed drastically. The earliest settlers had begun establishing communities and townships throughout the Island, and the population of Scottish immigrants had quadrupled since the beginning of the century. MacLean relocated to Antigonish County where he found other Gaelic speakers. Songs

34 composed by MacLean and other bards after this time fostered a different view of the Island, praising it as the loved and beautiful homeland of the Gaels. Toward the 1850s and into the latter half of the nineteenth century, Gaelic became a firmly-established language of communication throughout rural Cape Breton. The population had grown to such a level that the New World was a welcome respite from the political and social turmoil that plagued Scotland in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This was reflected in the songs composed in Nova Scotia around this time, such as Malcolm Gillis’s Am Bràighe (The Braes of Margaree), and it was then that the Gaelic bards in Cape Breton were most numerous. The brief renaissance of Gaelic culture from 1840-1880 quickly waned in the decreasing economic conditions in Cape Breton. As industrialization increased throughout the world toward the turn of the twentieth century, the Maritimes, especially Cape Breton, were forced into the periphery as railways and transnational trade dominated what was only decades before maintained through farming and shipping trades. Grain trade forced farms in the East out of business, and many people migrated westward in search of work in coal mines and large grain farms that were in closer proximity to central provinces (Mertz 1982:80). The outmigration between 1880 and 1900 decreased the population of Gaelic speakers on the Island by an estimated 10,000 people; by 1921 the number decreased by another 15,000 people (MacNeil 2002:3). The generations settled and established in Cape Breton by the end of the nineteenth century were firmly rooted in Gaelic traditions, but the dominant social institutions that mediated daily life emphasized English as the primary form of lingual interaction. Families were able to use Gaelic in the home, where they also were able to exchange stories, songs, and games dependent on the language; but interaction outside close-knit family groups depended on English. The rapid growth of this social schism further pressed the Gaelic language into the minority. Into the twentieth century, this legacy has inspired a number of different strategies geared toward preserving the language that most recognized was at risk of becoming assimilated into the larger socio-economic influence of English. The oral and aural transmission of local culture and history was a way of life for Highland Gaels both in the old country and in the diaspora, and so too was the propensity to compose new songs and stories that addressed popular life. As such, we can look to these texts to gather a sense of the social history as the region transformed into the twentieth century. Charles Dunn, in his book Highland Settler, discusses a number of influential, turn-of-the-century Gaelic

35 bards such as John MacLean, Malcolm Gillis, John MacRae of Kintail, and James MacGregor, all of whom set the precedent of folk traditions among the Gaels of Nova Scotia and captured in their poetry and song the character of the way of life in the New World. Very few of the Gaels who settled the rural communities of Nova Scotia were literate in English or Gaelic as “they were accustomed and even contented to rely on oral transmission for their literary recreation.” But in this new environment where news and announcements were relegated to a printed medium, “some of the more enterprising of [Highland] descendants ventured to publish Gaelic writings; and even those Gaels who had up to this time been illiterate received these publications with enthusiasm,” even though they had to teach themselves to pronounce the written words (Dunn 1953:74). In 1852 John Boyd, a school teacher of Pictou County, established a periodical—The Casket—a weekly newspaper, half of which was “devoted to songs, stories, and editorials written in Gaelic.” The other half of the paper was local news, written in English. “The name of the paper was suggested by a local doctor, William Currie. The word, casket, at that time meant a treasure box, a container of precious things” (Casket 2011). So profound was the impact of English in the literal sense that in the seventh issue of the paper Boyd wrote: Tha sinn duilich gu’m feum sinn aideach gu’m bheil a’ Gahidhlig a’ tarruing air ais a h-uile latha agus a’ Bheurla a’ deanamh a bonnaibh na’s treasa us na’s treasa a h-uile car; air chor ’s gu’m bheil a h-uile coltas air gu’n cuir I’Ghaelig bhochd an cuil chumhann mur faigh i’chobhair ach mar tha i faotainn.

We’re sorry that we must admit that Gaelic is drawing back every day and English strengthening her foundations more and more at every turn; so that there is every appearance that she will put the poor Gaelic into a tight corner unless it gets more support than it is getting. (1852:28)

Eventually, The Casket phased out publishing any article in Gaelic until quite recently. At present there are occasional bilingual publications in the Editorial section. Not surprisingly, though, the issue of loss and preservation of language is still the predominant theme of these local bilingual articles. An example of this can be read in a recent The Casket article by Michael Newton, who teaches in the Celtic Studies department at St. Francis-Xavier University. Newton rearticulates the recognizable duality of Gaelic identity in the New World—a flourishing musical culture juxtaposing a waning connection to the Gaelic language.

Dh’fhàs ceòl “Ceilteach” (ge brith a th’ann) gu math fasanta feadh an fhicheadamh ceud, agus tha móran daoine ag ionnsachadh agus a’ seinn ceòl Gàidhealach ann an iomadh dùthaich chéin – ach chan e Gàidheil a th’ annta air sgàth a’ chiùil a sheinneas iad a-mhàin. Am bheil comas seinn Bach ’gad dhèanamh Gearmailteach? Chanainn nach ionnan sin agus brìgh nan òran: ma tha stòras mór òran (agus an cuid seanchais) aig neach agus e ’gan tuigsinn gu domhainn, bidh fiosrachadh nas fhàrsainge aige mu dhùthchas nan Gàidheal. Tha cànan mar bhun-stèidh an eòlais sin. ’Se iomarbhaidh achrannach ioma-fhillte a th’ann as fhiach tuilleadh cnuasachd a dhèanamh air. Thàinig is dh’fhalbh nòsan ciùil is dannsa anns gach coimhearsnachd. Ach chumainn fhéin a-mach le cinnt mur bi ann ach luchd na Beurla a sheinneas ceòl “Gàidhealach” ’se ceòl na Beurla a bhios ann agus is beag an duais dha’n Ghàidhlig sin.

“Celtic” music (whatever that is) became quite fashionable in the twentieth century and there are many people learning and playing Highland music in many foreign countries – but they are not Gaels only on account of the music they play. Does the ability to play Bach make you German? I would say that the situation is different for song: if someone knows a large canon of songs and the stories behind them, and understands them in depth, s/he will have a broader knowledge of Gaelic culture. Language is the foundation of that knowledge. It is a complex and multifaceted debate worthy of more serious deliberation. Music and dance styles have come and gone in every community. But I would assert unequivocally that if only anglophones play “Highland” music, then it is simply anglophone music, and that’s cold comfort for Gaelic. (Newton 2010)

While Newton’s more dramatic assertions regarding culture may be seen as controversial or perhaps as slight overstatements, the subtext of the article is apparent. Identity—in the sense of personhood and community—can only be firmly established through dialog. Utterances are grounded in a specific grammar, a collective of expressions dependent on the forms of the Gaelic language in order to achieve a space of shared understanding and expression. In a nutshell, some things simply cannot be translated from the language in which they were conceived.

A Wealth of Gaelic: Language and the Diaspora John Lorne Campbell’s legacy of discovering and collecting Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia is truly championed by one scholar in particular—John Shaw. Shaw studied with Campbell in Scotland in 1961 and was first encouraged by Campbell to pursue Gaelic in Nova

Scotia. Shaw studied Gaelic language, literature, and linguistics at Harvard University (with Charles Dunn), after which he worked on several Gaelic-related projects in Ireland, Scotland, and Nova Scotia, the most comprehensive of which was a five year folklore project funded by St. Francis-Xavier University in Antigonish. For this project, Shaw interviewed 168 individuals throughout Nova Scotia and collected an immense amount of audio recordings of primarily stories and songs in Gaelic. The success of Shaw’s folklore studies in Cape Breton are not only a testament to his rigorous work, but to the immense wealth of Gaelic culture still on the Island in the mid-twentieth century despite massive outmigration. Among the most powerful works published by Shaw is his collection of stories as told by the late Joe Neil MacNeil of Middle Cape, titled, Tales Until Dawn: The World of a Cape Breton Gaelic Story-Teller. The book is an unrivaled tome of Gaelic stories and missives that gives special attention (that is, Joe Neil MacNeil himself always paid certain regard) to the origins of the stories that are recorded—specifically in the family names from whom and place names where the tales were first learned. Part of the magic of this text is in the unassuming way it engages the reader into the Gaelic culture of Cape Breton—far more analogous to the way in which someone might engage with this cultural space were she to travel to the Island and speak directly to the teller of the tales. Quite simply, the character of what it is to be a Cape Breton Gael in MacNeil’s time, translates to the reader through memory and narrative, through the tales themselves: Air réir na h-eachdraidh a fhuair mi bhuapa fhéin ‘s ann à Barraidh a thànaig Cloinn ‘Illeain. Ach bha iad fhéin a’ cantail gura h-ann do Chloinn ‘Illeain Dhubhairt a bha iad bho thùs. Agus tha e coltach ma dh’fhaoidte gun deachaidh iad an toirt a null a Bharraidh. Ma dh’fhaoidte gu robh iad ann an Uibhist-a-Tuath. Cha n-eil fhios a’m air a’ sin idir, ach ma dh’fhaoidte gu robh iad ann an Uibhist-a-Tuath agus gun deach iad as a’ sin a Bharraidh. Tha e coltach thall ‘san Albainn gura h-e Lachlainn Gobha agus Iain mac Lachlainn Ghobha; agus thànaig Calum Òg maci Iain ‘ac Lachlainn Ghomha, thànaig e a nall gu Cheap Breatunn. A nist, cha n-eil fhios a’m gu dé an t-am a thànaig esan a nall; an ann an deaghaidh dha ‘n chloinn a dhol a null na ‘n deach e a null comhla riu. Ach co-dhiubh cha dean sin deifir. Bha Calum Òg a bhos ann a Ceap Breatunn. Agus bho ‘n a ‘s e Calum Òg an t-ainm a bh’ air shaoilinn-sa ma dh’fhaoidte gum biodh e air fear dhe na b’òige a bh’ as an teaghlach: ‘s cinnteach gu robh dà Chalum as an teaghlach air a rèir sin. Ach ‘s ann thall a’ sin a chaochail e. Chaidh e thìodhlaigeadh shios aig a’ chladh shios aig a’ Phon Mhór na aig a Phòn Mheadhonach mar a bheir iad.

According to the history that I got from them, these MacLeans came from Barra. But they maintain that originally they belonged to the MacLeans of Duart. It seems that they may have been brought over to Barra. Perhaps they were in North Uist. I don’t know anything about that, but perhaps they were in North Uist and went from there to Barra. It seems that over in Scotland there was Lachlann Ghobha (Lachlann the Blacksmith) and Ian mac Lachlainn Ghobha (John son of Lachlann the Blacksmith); and Calum Òg, son of Ian mac Lachlainn Ghobha came over to Cape Breton. Now I don’t know when he came over, whether it was after his children emigrated or whether he came over with them. But that is of no great importance. Calum Òg was over here in Cape Breton. And since he was styled Calum Òg (Young Malcolm) I would guess that he would probably be one of the youngest in the family; certainly the name indicates there were two Calums in the family. But it was over here that he died. He was buried down in the graveyard in Big Pond or in Middle Pond, as they say. (MacNeil, Shaw 1987:119)

MacNeil’s invocation of memory and emigration (in this example and many others in the text), with regard to the origin of families he knew and with whom he shared stories in Cape Breton, situates himself and his tales in what Katharyne Mitchell calls a “third space of hybridity,” that occupies “a position beyond space and time, and beyond the situated practices of place and the lived experience of history” (Mitchell 1997: 533-34). Particularly with respect to diaspora studies, this hybridized space serves as a narrative link between a real and/or perceived homeland and a realized territory or new “place” wherein mobility and periphery become actualized aspects of identity. It is in this “space between” where an ambiguity of identity leads to societal shifts such as the loss of language and outmigration, such as has been the case in Cape Breton. Shaw writes in his introduction to Tales Until Dawn: It is not our task here to attempt a comprehensive account of the culture of this Gaelic-speaking community as it existed in Joe Neil’s youth. Instead, we have endeavored to portray in part the intellectual life of a once vigorous Gaelic area as seen through the eyes and heart of a traditional story-teller living in our own time. (MacNeil, Shaw 1987:xvii)

Implicit is Shaw’s apparent recognition that Gaelic Cape Breton has changed dramatically in its relatively short history of settlement and development—that over the generation of one man’s life we can note the devastation that such a rapid transformation has had on the community. He points to the geographic isolation of Cape Breton as the primary reason why folklore studies

39 came to the region relatively late as compared to collections being completed in Scotland in previous years. Beyond the Island’s geographical isolation from the provincial mainland as Shaw suggests, however, Gaelic Cape Breton has a longstanding dysfunctional history with regard to Gaelic “place,” an irony brought out diachronically toward the end of the nineteenth century with regard to colonialism, forced migration, and industrialization, that resulted in a social disassociation with the very language that was communally established by the first Gaels to settle in the region. Undoubtedly, this phenomenon resulted from issues common to many modern diasporic cultures, in that their “isolation” is a struggle not only of geography but one of identity and political liminality between imagined past and realized present, the “historically contingent and socially constructed” notion of a homeland that serves as a generic setting for emergent existence (Cohen 2008:123). I use the term “diaspora” in this instance with regard to recent cultural and social studies undertaken regarding diaspora, modernization, and globalization (Appadurai 1996, 2001; Evans Braziel 2008; Feld 1988; Monson 2000) that emphasize not only the debate between homogeneity and heterogeneity, but also the many narratives of place that become intrinsic markers for hybridity and identity. Specifically with Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, Scottish relocation to the New World is inextricably linked to the Gaelic language in terms of identity, given the political underpinnings of Scotland as a nation-state under British law. Tensions between England and Scotland and issues of homogeneity that had been established as a way of life even before the Highland Clearances had their impact on the demographic both in Scotland and in the settlements of the new world. The Gaelic language continued to remain at the center of this debate, the “social battleground” where Gaels recreated the present sense of community both integrated with and set apart from their new locale. The fluidity of this hybridized and increasingly globalized space contributed to the rapid change in communal identity, giving rise to multiple attempts to renegotiate the overall sense of “who” or “what” it meant to be a Gael in the New World.

Gaelicness and Scottishness: The Gaelic College at St. Ann’s In 1938, a Presbyterian minister by the name of Reverend Angus William Rugg MacKenzie—a relatively new arrival in Baddeck, Cape Breton—purchased a plot of land in St. Ann’s Bay from Norman MacDonald using funds donated from many locals of Scottish descent.

It was there that he founded the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts, an institution geared toward the preservation of Gaelic culture by fostering “Highland traditions in Cape Breton.” Though many of the locals in Baddeck at the time still spoke Gaelic on a daily basis, MacKenzie spoke no Gaelic of his own, but rather his connection to a Gaelic identity stemmed from a then popular ideal of noble Celticness, a “totality of Gaelic culture that was quite divergent from reality” (Dembling 1999:19). MacKenzie was not only interested in promoting the language, but in fulfilling his own romanticized notions of Gaelic traditions, many of which were recent inventions or had fallen out of use or interest among Cape Bretoners in the homogenous wake of the modern era. Though one could certainly criticize MacKenzie’s tartanization as another kind of assimilation, his goals were also his greatest contemporary marketing strategies for procuring interest and ultimately funding for the college, given the relative popularity of rugged, savage nobility both in the literature and sciences of the early twentieth century. It is true that the rather populous cloisters of Gaelic speakers in the New World were less than two generations removed from their Highland roots, but the vast majority of these people lived socially in an Anglicized modern world where the Gaelic language had little utility. Thus, the Gaelic College’s early mission represented a tartanist caricature of Scottish ethnic identity for those Gaels in the diaspora at risk of losing their language and culture, one with which they could seldom connect. At the same time tartanism encouraged the commodification and dissemination of Celticity for English speakers content to consume the romanticized aspects of that which was perceived to be Gaelic. Dembling notes, “Just as Creighton misrepresented ‘the Folk’ in her own upright, conservative image and marketed them for personal profit, so did MacKenzie, whose institution continues to ensure that government funds and tourist dollars are diverted away from the very people who are meant to be honored. At the same time, the Gaels… are denied what McKay calls their ‘specificity of history,’ rendering them as caricatures of themselves” (1999:22-23). “The Folk,” as Dembling refers to it, was an often misrepresented category in the early twentieth century as it could not escape its stigma of backward simplicity—a stigma indicative of the general positivistic perceptions that developed in many places during the first few decades of “modern society.” Many Gaels of this time became caricatures, indeed, forced into a liminality of figure- ground reversals of stigmatizing proportions. Industrialization stood in stark contrast to rural life, where the former represented progressive achievements and the latter represented backwards,

“country” ways. Society pressed forward into this modern age beyond a sense of the simple, folk life. As a result of these dualities, Gaelic became part of that peripheral “Other,” and the younger generation of Gaels who sought to improve their station in life left the confines of their rural home and language, leaving the older generations with few neighbors, if any, with whom to speak their language. For younger generations, “Gaelic came to be considered the language of poverty and ignorance… while English was regarded as the language of refinement and culture” (Dunn 1953:134). The Bard MacDermott of North Shore, Cape Breton, illustrates this stigma with his song, “An Tè a Chaill a Gàidhlig” (The Woman Who Lost Her Gaelic), from which the following two verses are most revealing: Chiur mi fàilte orr’gu cairdeil “De mar a tha tha sheann leannan? Gun do shìn mi mo làmh dhith ’s thug mi dha dhe na crathadh Bheil thu gu math na do shlàinte, bheil iad slàn aig a’bhaile De mar a tha d’athair ’s do mhàthair ’s a bheil mo chàirdean-sa fallain ’S a h-uile neach?”

Fhreagar ise gu naimhdeil “You're a Scotchman I reckon I don't know your Gaelic. Perhaps you are from Cape Breton And I guess you're a farmer, you’re too saucy for better. So I will not shake hands and I would rather at present Be going off.”

I greeted her with affection “How are you old sweetheart?” I held out my hand but she ignored it “Are you well in health, are they well in your village? How are your father and mother and are my friends in good health And everyone?”

She answered haughtily, “You’re a Scotchman I reckon. I don’t speak your Gaelic. Perhaps you’re from Cape Breton And I guess you’re a farmer, you’re too saucy for better. So I will not shake hands and I would rather at present Be going off.” (MacEdward 2004)

The narrator addresses a common occurrence in rural communities of Gaels in the New World, when his lover understands his words yet refuses to speak any Gaelic of her own. The implication is all too clear; Gaels are to be considered backward, simple, farming folk. The rural communities of Cape Breton met this rift between Gaelic and English with frustration and sadness. For example, the Bard Angus Ban MacFarlane of Margaree lamented the outmigration of Gaels, as many of his contemporaries did, through telling lyrics:

Nuair a rainig mi an clireadh Anns an robh thu, Neill, a’ tamhachd, Fhuair mi ’n fhardach air a dunadh; Shil mo shuilean, ’s cha bu nar dhomh.

Nuair a chruinnicheadh na h-eaolaich Staigh ’nad sheomar, mar bu ghnath leo, Gu’m biodh cridhealas gu leor ann, ’S gheibhte ceol us orain Ghaidhlig.

Dh’ fhalbh thu bhuainn a Gleann a’ Phiobair’; Chuir sin mighean air mo nadur. ’S ann ort fhein ’s air do chuid cloinne ’Chaidh a shloinneadh, tha iad ag raitinn.

Séist: Ho gur misde, he gur misde, ho gur misde leam mar tha ’chuis; ’S misde leam gu’n d’ rinn thu gluasad null gu tir a’ ghuail a thamachd.

When I reached the clearing where you were living, Neil, I found the house locked up; the tears came to my eyes, as well they might.

When friends would gather in your room as they used to like to, There would be merriment a-plenty and music and Gaelic songs.

You have gone away from us from Piper’s Glen, and that sheds gloom on my spirits; it was after you and your children that the glen was named, they say.

Chorus: Oh, I’m the worse; oh, I’m the worse; oh, I’m the worse as things have turned; I’m the worse since you have moved away to stay in the country of coal. (Dunn 1953:130-31)

While these lyrics capture the sentiment of many Gaels in Cape Breton at the turn of the century, the population decrease between 1900 and 1940 also inspired locals to draw closer together and better appreciate their common heritage. Gaelic was often a topic of discussion in many church fellowships and community gatherings throughout Cape Breton, which was the main impetus in funding institutions such as the Gaelic College that promised to help preserve and promote Gaelic culture that was “at risk of being lost.” Thus, there is an ironic sort of reciprocity in the Gaelic college itself, which was founded in large part—inspired by the difficult stigma of Gaelic in the modern English world—to address the loss of language and culture among the Nova Scotia Gaels, but for any measure of success it needed to be directed toward English assumptions and stereotypes that were, due to mass appeal, most readily marketable in the early twentieth

43 century. After A. W. R. MacKenzie died in 1967, his successors Leonard Jones and Evan Lloyd abandoned many of the romanticized endeavors, running the college as a practical business. “A common feature of activity on behalf of Gaelic during this time was the codification and regimentation of the language and culture” (Dembling 1999:24). The college poured money into creating and obtaining materials geared toward Gaelic literacy and began to surface from its tartanist mold into a destination for Gaelic language study and community participation. Since that time, the College at St. Ann’s has grown to several buildings in this picturesque region of Cape Breton Island, attracting students from all over the world who study Gaelic and a variety of subjects in the field of Celtic studies. In the past two decades, the dedication to the preservation and dissemination of Gaelic has been one of the college’s primary goals; to that end there are many conferences throughout the year, in addition to the standard summer curriculum, that features Gaelic TIP (total immersion plus) seminars—one completely oral, and an advanced level that incorporates reading and writing with speaking. The college’s current mission statement is as follows: “To promote, preserve and perpetuate through studies in all related areas: the culture, music, language, arts, crafts, customs and traditions of immigrants from the Highlands of Scotland.”11 Activities scheduled throughout the year work toward these goals, but competency in the Gaelic language—while not a stated demand or a requisite—is quite important in achieving this mission statement. As such, programs geared toward teaching and promoting the use of colloquial Gaelic are among the most numerous within the college. The college continues to develop and draw more students to its programs, offering numerous tutorials and educational materials in their curriculum and on their website for prospective students as well as casual learners. Several community activities are held at the college per month as well. These are just a few examples of the various intersections of Gaelic heritage on the Island. While awareness increases within the community in and around the Gaelic college, regarding issues of language, literacy, and musical traditions, ultimately the locale still depends on attracting paying students from all over the world who attend first and foremost to perform their sense identity through specific forms of Gaelic culture. With locations such as the “Great Hall of Clans,” a Pioneer museum, and an art gallery dedicated to the Rev. Norman MacLeod,

11 http://www.gaeliccollege.edu/about.html.

44 the question of where Gaelic traditions are situated remains nebulous, and the invocation of the “Folk” sensibility continues to drive most economic considerations.

Traveling in Cape Breton In terms of its scenic travelways, Cape Breton is remarkably equipped with some of the most picturesque scenery I have seen in any similar biotic sphere. Route 4 from Port Hawkesbury to Sydney provides spectacular views along coast of the largest portion of the Bras d’Or lake region. I found myself stopping at the side of the road many times to gaze out over the massive body of water. On my initial trip across the Island toward Glace Bay, I took Route 4. There is a noticeable climb over a hill as you leave the settlements near the Canso Strait. The road heads directly over the hill into a dense group of spruce trees, and continues east-northeast toward MacIntyre Lake. As soon as I rounded the hill, the sounds of busied vehicles and waterfront machinery were gone, and I was left alone with my motorcycle in a thick forest, several miles yet ahead of me before the road reached the coast of the gigantic sea-lake. There were times in New Brunswick when I became deeply aware of how alone I was on the back of my motorcycle in the middle of a wilderness of vast open spaces and large hills overlooking countless miles to the horizon with no human settlements in sight. But on Cape Breton Island it was a different feeling of isolation. While in the forest-road there was not much to see around me besides dense treelines on ether side of the pavement, and the occasional road sign reminding me how many kilometers were left until Sydney. That first day I had, maybe, an hour of sunlight left as I approached the MacIntyre Lake area, which inspired in me a sense of immediacy to make it to Glace Bay before dark. There were no lights around the area except my own. Before long, I was well past Cleveland, which consists of roughly six houses in relatively close proximity to one another, as well as a few junctions of roadways, and on through more dense forest until the road came to a “T.” After turning right, the landscape transformed into numerous beautiful coves and waterways jutting into the landscape, differing drastically from the confinement of the forest-winding road. The wind was cold coming from the water, which in this area could be seen on either side of the road. Only miles later, the landscape was again dominated by forest, until I reached the edge of Soldier’s Cove, after which the forest on the left side of the road gave way to water, this time a massive flat of blue-gray that seemed as clear and abstract as the sky. I began to shiver from the cold. It was August, but the sun was dipping

45 further into the horizon and the wind from over the water was unforgiving. I had just ridden days before from weather over one hundred degrees farenheit, and was naïve enough to think that it would not be too cold for me. It must have been fifty, or maybe fifty-five. I was shivering. Still, the views over the water were like nothing I had ever seen. I rode through places called “Irish Cove,” and “Middle Cape,” and “Big Pond,” and “St. Andrew’s Channel” on my way to Glace Bay that day, all situated along the shore of one of the largest saltwater lakes in the world. When I finally approached Sydney Forks outside of the city of Sydney, it was dusk, and I had to pull over to switch to clear goggles so I could see better. I got a glimpse of Sydney, to which I would later return for several days of music performances, as I rode through to Glace Bay. When I arrived in Glace Bay, I needed to wait a while until my host arrived, so, still shivering, I entered the local A&W and had a burger and a root beer. It was kind of exciting for me because I hadn’t had an A&W dinner in a long time. There was a Michael Jackson song playing lightly over the intercom and the cashier smiled when I sang along quietly as I received my change, and then sat at the window and looked out across the street as I ate. Glace Bay also has Tim Horton’s, an all-American (in the continental, international sense of the phrase) restaurant with the best coffee in the universe (as I was told by my host later in the evening on my first night there). There was even a rumor circulating around the Savoy Theater crew I met that Tim Horton’s puts nicotine and chickory in their coffee to make it more addictive. I have yet to corroborate this. I couldn’t taste the nicotine. Glace Bay is an odd conglomerate of what was once a promising, booming city, now little more than a small town. The Marconi Museum is also in Glace Bay, which houses remnants of Guglielmo Marconi’s first radio towers and happens to be the site of one of his first transatlantic radio transmissions. So, too, is the Miner’s Museum; it opened in Glace Bay in 1967. Located on a fifteen-acre site only one mile from downtown, the museum catalogs Cape Breton’s geological development of the Sydney Coal Fields. Specifically, displays describe what it is that makes Cape Breton a ripe area for coal extraction. Part of the museum is an underground mine tour that is set in 1932. From there, the tourist takes a journey back into the present day, catching a glimpse of how mining technologies have continued to develop. Back in town, there a number of other sites of interest. There is a shopping strip along Commercial Street, which is where the Tim Horton’s is located, and an indoor access shopping mall with a Celtic gift shop. The Savoy Theater is in Glace Bay as well, a historic performance hall built in

46 the 1920s that catered to local and traveling performers. The locale stuck with me more than most because it was one of the first places I stayed, but also because it reminded me so much of the locale where I grew up in Upstate New York.

Figure 2: The park at Commercial Street, Glace Bay, Cape Breton, N.S.

Sydney is more populous than Glace Bay, and serves as the major urban center of Cape Breton. It has its own airport (though flying into the Sydney airport from a considerable distance is almost never an option). So it is said, Sydney was first settled by loyalists who defected from New York State. Not long afterward, the Highland Clearances sent numerous Scottish into Cape Breton, and not long after that, those Gaels headed toward Sydney in search of work. The Sydney I visited was well-groomed and its tourist centers capitalized on the connection to historic events. Similarly, the Cape Breton fiddle tradition is quite strong in and around the city; the city hosts the Fiddler’s Run and sits as a major center of the Ceilidh Trail. I enjoyed Sydney, except when I needed to have my back tire replaced due to an untimely flat. Ramsay’s Harley Davidson charged me $319.13 CAD for the work.

Inverness County in the west of the Island is touted as the major center for Cape Breton’s music culture. Riding out to Cheticamp it becomes evident exactly how travel and tourism are angled on the Island—toward music. The various music cultures represented in the west are predominately Gaelic, though there is also a vibrant French enclave in the west, as well as a number of first nations groups who have revivals of their own oral traditions. But the cultural “riches” that most tourists to Cape Breton seek are largely the small Gaelic communities here and in the Narrows region at the center of the Island. Judique, almost due west from the center of the Island, has something called the “Celtic Music Interpretive Centre,” whose mission statement is “to collect, preserve and promote the traditional Celtic music of Cape Breton Island through Education, Research and Performance.” I was fascinated that in these smaller locales, rural community centers, town halls, and locally-created performance spaces, there was a strong sense of cultural authenticity and authority. Music, not spoken language, was the generic form at the center of this authenticity, serving also as the source of a revival and resurgence in awareness about issues of Gaelic identity.

Gaelic Song and the Fèis Movement Where Gaelic music saw the most drastic shifts in traditional practices since the Highland Clearances was in the social dynamic of labor and technology, multicultural influences within the diaspora, oppression through religious fervor, and the loss of language. Each of these transformations has had a noticeable effect on the emic and etic perceptions of Gaelic music, but none as profound as the noticeable decline in language and communal transmission. Like language, the state of Gaelic musical expression in the diaspora is contained within a larger hegemony of commodified music in the industrialized world. In response to these issues that swept most industrialized nations throughout the globe following WWII, folk revivals within communities in Scotland and its diaspora looked toward the Highlands and Hebrides to reclaim aspects of Gaelic language and culture that had fallen out of colloquial use. In Scotland, the main repository of Gaelic language and culture since the nineteenth century has been in the Western Isles. Residents of these regions retained daily use of the language, and “shared a common background, culture, and history of neglect” (Prattis 1987:102). Since the 1960s, folk revivalists interested in reclaiming Gaelic sought out members of various communities throughout the Hebrides as denizens of cultural identity. Spoken language, music,

48 and the structure of daily life became the generic snapshot of Gaelic identity, an identity being lost and assimilated into a popular culture and a modernity where Gaelic was in the minority. Community members were elevated to the status of “culture bearers,” or “tradition bearers,” and revivalists spawned numerous grassroots movements geared toward preserving Gaelic. Thus far the most successful folk revival setting a precedent both in Scotland and in Cape Breton has been the Fèis movement. A Fèis (pronounced “faysh,” literally means “festival”) is a community-based festival designed to promote Gaelic language and culture. Established on the Island of Barra in 1980, the first Gaelic Fèis was the brainchild of the parish priest of Northbay, Father Colin McInnes. The goal of the Fèis was to provide a vehicle for Gaelic music, art, and language to become an everyday part of life. To this end, Father McInnes organized a two-week long summer festival to work in tandem with a year-round curriculum providing instruction and supervision in the Gaelic language and in the performing Gaelic Arts. Prattis notes: The formal structure of the Fèis evolved from a small, ad hoc group of helpers to a formally constituted Festival Association—Comann Fèis Bharraigh—which acts as the parent body for a number of local cultural groups under its umbrella. These different groups—dancing, clarsach, heritage, Island Games, and so on— are encouraged to organize their own activities and fundraising, and conduct their own elections as well. They are co-ordinated by the Festival Association in terms of general policy and practice. (1987: 105)

Those who identified with the loss of language and cultural heritage immediately latched onto the ideas exemplified by the Fèis. There were two primary themes underlying the Barra Fèis immortalized as the vision of Father McInnes’s program. First, a commitment to Gaelic language is emphasized above all else. Gaelic is the official language of the Fèis and all activities and institutions having to do with the Fèis stem from preserving and disseminating the language. The second theme is, beyond just a colloquial use of the language, a commitment to the “generational transfer of cultural activities.” In fact, the slogan for the Comann Fèis Bharraigh’s 1982-83 annual report was “Gaelic in our Homes.” For the organizers of the Barra Fèis, in order to preserve Gaelic culture, people needed to share it both in a communal place and within their own families. Today in Scotland the Fèis Movement has grown to number approximately forty-two different community groups. The organization, Fèisan nan Gàidheal12, is a compendium that

12 http://www.feisean.org/feisean/feisean.html.

49 details most of these societies and provides information regarding the yearly festivals and performances as well as resources and information about Gaelic language and culture (See Appendix C for an annotated list of these organizations).

Féis an Eilein Christmas Island (Eilean Na Nollaig), Cape Breton, is home to the first Fèis held outside of Scotland. Initially conceived in 1991, Féis An Eilein endeavored to formalize gatherings geared toward Gaelic interaction. In 1993, several local residents formed a volunteer committee to “allow for increased community participation in the preservation and promotion of... indigenous Gaelic Culture” (FE 2010). Since that time, the Féis Movement in Cape Breton has grown to number four others, and Féis An Eilein holds a seminal position representing the resurgence of Gaelic culture in the New World. When I visited in August 2010, the Comunn Féis An Eilein was celebrating An Ficheadamh Bliadhna (the twentieth year) of consecutive meetings at the Christmas Island fire hall. Comunn Féis An Eilein has gained a prominent position within the Gaelic cultural community. Dedication to our underlying principals has engendered respect amongst our peers. Indeed when Salter Street Films wished to film a traditional milling frolic for their Celtic Electric Special, resource people in the Gaelic Cultural community directed the producer to Féis An Eilein. Subsequently, a segment was filmed in Christmas Island for the show. (FE 2010)13

There was a lot of excitement in the community of Christmas Island and the Grand Narrows region in general when I arrived for the festival week. The first night there predominantly involved me acquainting myself with some people with whom I had previously corresponded via email or phone conversations. Beth MacNeil, who works in the Highland Village Museum, greeted me at the Barra Strait Waterfront in Grand Narrows that Monday evening. This was the setting of the local children’s concert, a community event involving many participants from the summer music program, each of whom took a turn on the small stage which stood about twenty feet from the dock ramp. The students performed a collection of fiddle, piano, and step dance tunes before Anita MacDonald and Evan Bonaparte took the stage, playing numerous Scottish medleys on the fiddle and guitar.

13 See http://feisaneilein.ca/history.html for more information.

Beth MacNeil is originally from Sydney, but now resides in Beaver Cove, Cape Breton. She is a charming and kind woman, and works as an Animator at the Nova Scotia Highland Village Museum’s living history display. I first met her inside the historical general store, behind a glass counter full of historical memorabilia. Beth began learning Gaelic years ago at the museum as part of the on-site animation. Since that time she has gone on to become very involved in the community in Iona, Grand Narrows, and Christmas Island. She is a recognized and noted solo Gaelic singer, and has been noted by Seamus Watson (also at the Highland Village Museum) as being “a valuable addition to any milling frolic.” Beth is a longtime member of Féis an Eilein in Christmas Island, and I have witnessed her teaching various Gaelic language and Gaelic song classes in addition to all her efforts in coordinating events. Evan is a student at Sgoil Mhic Fhraing a’ Chaolais (Rankin School of the Narrows) in Iona, Nova Scotia, situated across the street from the Highland Village Museum. Anita, a recent graduate of the same school, has aspirations to continue onto post secondary school to become a Gaelic teacher. “One of my goals is to become a fluent Gaelic speaker,” noted Anita. “Through our school Jody [another Sgoil Mhic Fhraing a’ Chaolais student], Evan and I started to learn and use our talent to sing Gaelic songs. We have sought the help of some of our local Gaelic tradition bearers .We have performed at ceilidhs and gatherings together” (CG 2010). I sat quitely and attentively on the benches while the concert took place, introducing myself occasionally to people walking by or sitting near me. It was an informal audience— mostly parents—who could come and go as their children were finished performing. Beth MacNeil was coordinating the hot dog cooking near the waterfront—a small campfire-sized pile of wood was smoking while she readied a nearby table with napkins and condiments. Several people gathered long sticks and whittled the ends into points. The hot dogs were impaled by these branches and positioned precariously over the small bonfire. I helped a few people cook their dogs, and then grabbed one of my own. The evening ended while listening to the musicians continue to play; the sun dipped into the distant water while a small house boat pulled into the docks for the night. Tuesday’s highlight was Céilidh nam Piobbairean (The Piper’s Ceilidh), which seemed more like a lecture recital to me. Inside the Christmas Island Fire Hall, a cafeteria-like space attached to the Volunteer Fire Department station, a stage was positioned in the far left corner, with a raised section on the front left designed for step dancing. Chairs were arranged in a typical

51 concert audience fashion. The renowned piper Barry Shears sat and played a collection of several tunes, describing the intricate history and performance practice tradition of each between each song. Graham Mulholland of Scotland followed Shears with a few performances on the Scottish small pipes, his debut in the Christmas Island community. Shears also joined Mulholland playing a couple of tunes on his own set of small pipes. Particularly fascinating was the way in which Mulholland responded when Anita MacDonald went onto the step dance stage. Moments after beginning his second tune, MacDonald walked up onto the stage and began dancing along with Mulholland’s piping music. The crowd roared and many people began to clap. At the end of the tune, the piper said, “Thank you,” and then proceeded to note that it was a wonderful experience being able to play with a dancer, as it was something that is not seen anymore in Scotland. Wednesday’s festival events centered around language, and there were many workshops scheduled for children, beginners, and intermediate speakers. Effie Rankin from Mabou held a workshop on local idioms. The evening, however, was the larger undertaking for the community. It was the twentieth annual symposium for the Comunn Féis An Eilein, and Lorrie MacKinnon hosted the night’s events, where they looked back at the activities they had undertaken since their first festival in the early 1990s. Many locals spoke out about language and community, telling stories and reminiscing about what the Comunn Féis An Eilein had contributed to the area. The evening was also the highlight of the documentary filming that was taking place during the week, a project funded in part by the BBC. Ultimately, it was a night full of nostalgia and promise for what the future might hold for Gaelic in Cape Breton. On Thursday, most of the activities were geared toward Gaelic song. There was a Gaelic song workshop during the day, with a specific focus on learning milling songs. I decided to attend the workshop that day instead of conduct interviews at the Highland Village Museum. Jamie MacNeil and Rod C. MacNeil directed the event, teaching me and six other people a few milling songs before the milling frolic that was to be held there later that evening. Rod C. MacNeil is a kind man who possesses a wealth of knowledge of Gaelic song, having been a strong promoter of the Gaelic language and culture of his home in Cape Breton for close to fifty years. He was raised in Barra Glen before serving in the War, after which he worked in Ontario for many years. MacNeil later returned to Cape Breton where he took over his family’s farm. I also had the pleasure to meet his wife Helen, who was incredibly charming and told me I have a nice singing voice. Roddie’s (people in the area call him Roddie) dedication to promoting Gaelic

52 in Cape Breton has benefited the community greatly. He is actively involved in local milling frolics and the Féis an Eilein, the Nova Scotia Highland Village Museum, local society preservation projects, and is often consulted by activists, scholars, and journalists concerning local Gaelic history and songs. He was incredibly generous when I met him during the week of the Féis, inviting me to sing with him and after workshops lending me friendly advice. One of the songs we sang was the well-known ballad “Ailean Duinn a Ni ‘s a Nàire” (“Brown haired Allan, His Riches and Shame”), performed more quickly than I was used to, at a walking pace typical of the milling table. The refrain is sung between each line (Play example). Séist: Ì ‘s na hug oirnn o ho Ì ‘s na hì ri ri ù

1. Ailean duinn a ni ‘s a nàire 2. ‘S goirt ‘s daor gum phàigh me màl dhut 3. Cha chrodh-laoigh, na chaoraich bhàna 4. Cha bhola, cha pheic, ‘s cha mhàm e 5. Cha nì, chan innsridh, ‘s chan àirneis 6. Ach an luchd a thaom am bàta 7. Bha m’athair oirre ‘s mo thriùir bhràithrean 8. ‘S laogh mo chuim a rinn mi àrach 9. Chan e sin a léir ‘s a chràidh mi 10. Ach am fear a ghlac air làimh mi 11. Leathanach a’ bhroillich bhàn-ghil 12. ‘Se a thug on Chlachan Di màirt mi 13. Ailean donn, b’e beul a’ mhànrain 14. A Righ nam Fear, bu mhór do gràdh dhomh

Chorus: Ì ‘s na hug oirnn o ho Ì ‘s na hì ri ri ù (vocables)

1. Brown haired Allan, his riches and shame 2. My rent to you was sore and dear. 3. It isn’t calves or white sheep. 4. It isn’t the bole, peck, or handful of grain. 5. It isn’t wealth, possessions, or plenishings. 6. But folk who bailed the boat. 7. My father and three brothers were on board. 8. And the calf of my womb who I nurtured. 9. That’s not what vexed and wounded me. 10. But the one who took me by the hand. 11. The fair chested MacLean

12. He took me from the Clachan on Tuesday. 13. Brown Allan, his speech was sporting. 14. God, your love for me was great.

The song is one of many similar traditional Gaelic songs of various genres from Scotland that are regularly performed within the milling frolic. One of my consultants, Colin Watson, was raised with Gaelic as his native language in the home with his father, Seamus Watson. Seamus, or James, who is originally from the United States and moved to Cape Breton to pursue Gaelic as a living culture, has worked in numerous community projects throughout Cape Breton, and serves the Highland Village Museum as the Manager of Gaelic Interpretation and Education. I was told that his favorite saying is, “Cha n-eil sìon coltach ris a’ Ghàidhlig mhóir” (“Nothing compares to the big Gaelic.”) Colin, his son, is also actively involved with many Gaelic events around the community, from Cape Breton County to Inverness County, and is quickly becoming a respected tradition-bearer. He has also been a member of the group Triskele, founded by Melody and Derrick Cameron two locally praised musicians. I first met Colin at the Highland Village Museum grounds and had several conversations with him over the course of the week during Féis an Eilein. When we first met we had a brief conversation, during which time he stressed the importance of Gaelic song and the milling frolic: BW: So tell me a bit about Gaelic song in the community here.

CW: Well, do you mean during the Féis an Eilein week, or in general...?

BW: During Féis week.

CW: We have a lot of visitors, and a lot of people from around here get together and sing songs, and share Gaelic. There aren’t too many people around here who speak Gaelic anymore, so this is a good time for people to get experience, and we try to get people to younger people to realize the importance of speaking the language.

BW: How long have you been involved in the Féis an Eilein?

CW: Since as long as I remember.

BW: Actually, I should ask specifically about the milling frolic. It seems like everyone is pretty excited for the milling frolic this week, like there is a lot of anticipation in the air. What is so special about the milling frolic?

CW: Well, it’s fun. Yeah, there’s a lot of songs and it’s fun to just sit around the table and sing the songs.... You get a lot of people singing the choruses at the same time, and everyone’s having a good time. Yeah, and it gives people a chance to practice their Gaelic.

BW: It seems like a lot of the activities are geared toward language…

CW: Yeah, it’s important to keep the language going. That’s what this is all about. Besides all the language classes that give people a chance to learn Gaelic, there are a lot of music activities for people to use Gaelic…

BW: Like the milling frolic?

CW: Right, yeah, like the milling frolic. (CW 2010)

Certainly the prominent feature of the Féis An Eilein, besides the numerous language workshops, is the milling frolic. Christmas Island’s milling frolic, and the week of the Fèis in general, inspires people from Ontario to Halifax with ties to Cape Breton to return to Christmas Island and add a few songs to the table. Of course, the Féis An Eilein involves many Gaelic sessions and opportunities for Gaelic communication, song, and story, but the milling frolic serves as Cape Breton’s concise icon of Gaelic culture, a tradition that is Gaelic in origin (and hence, from Scotland) yet uniquely Cape Breton in the form of its practice.

Portrait of the Milling Frolic The milling frolic is a contemporary Gaelic musical performance practice that involves singing a largely traditional repertoire of Òrain Gàidhlig (Gaelic folk songs)—primarily a genre known as Òrain luaidh (waulking songs)—in a communal setting while rhythmically thumping a bolt of dampened cloth in unison on a broad surface, usually a long table, to mark out the beat. Men and women, young and old, are generally encouraged to sit at the table to share the wool and sing along in Gaelic. Usually, each person sitting at the table takes a turn to lead a song (i.e., sing the verses, start, and end the song), after which the neighboring participant takes the lead, and so on around the table. The songs are drawn from various genres, but generally tend to be traditional waulking songs, homeland songs, great songs, as well as any new songs composed in those styles. A typical waulking song has a standard form and practice, where the refrain is sung at the beginning and again after every verse, and then sung twice to mark the end of the

55 performance. Using the cloth to demarcate the pulse of the song is a direct cultural reenactment of the process of waulking tweed cloth, which was a labor practice common for centuries in the Highlands and Hebrides of Scotland before it was rendered obsolete with advancements in textiles technologies during the Industrial Revolution. Newly woven tweed, when pulled from the loom, is coarse and loose making it nearly impossible for broadly-applicable textile use. The raw wool fibers must be waulked in order to be thickened and worked into a soft and useable fabric. Waulking is a labor-intensive process when done by hand, requiring the efforts of dozens of workers who can work the cloth for hours. “The cloth was soaked in what we call ‘household ammonia’ (stale urine!). This useful chemical, known in Gaelic as maistir, helped make the dyes fast, and to soften the cloth” (SLI 2010). Traditionally, as a means of seasonal labor in the Highlands and Hebrides, waulking was a job done only by women. But in the new world, this practice is engaged by men and women, as a way to interact through traditional Gaelic song.

Figure 3: Around the Milling Table (Comunn Féis An Eilein)

Beth MacNeil had this to say about Gaelic song traditions and the efficacy of the milling frolic in Cape Breton: One of the things that is typical for Gaelic songs is that there is a chorus, which is what I perceive to be the fun part in a lot of ways—especially for learners— because even if you don’t have the time, or can’t put the extra effort into learning the verses of the song, you have the chorus. And that’s why the milling frolic, sitting at the table in the milling frolic is such a good time, because you participate. And usually, even if you’re new to it, by the time the song is done, and if you’re kind of sitting close to somebody who is singing in your ear, or something, or if you can read lips across the table, you’ll have the chorus by the time the song is done. So, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s very inclusive. You know, no one’s excluded from Gaelic song. Most of the time it’s not really performance- based; it’s not about standing on a stage, and, you know, one person singing— although that certainly does happen—but, with the kind of milling and the way the songs are set up. And even that, when we do our concert series here during the summer, every week the M.C., and usually we try to make it a bilingual concert, there’s always a Gaelic song incorporated somehow into the concert, and the audience is always encouraged to sing along. If there’s a chorus, yeah, sing along. (BMN 2010)

During the Highland Clearances, settlers from Scotland brought this labor tradition with them to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where it is referred to as milling. Advancements in textiles were slow to reach the more remote areas of the Hebrides in Scotland, as well as Cape Breton and Newfoundland, and in these areas the traditional practice remained functional into the twentieth century. As such, milling frolics do have history as labor gatherings in Nova Scotia as well. At present, however, the milling frolic serves primarily as a multi-faceted celebration of Gaelic language and culture in the Maritimes. It provides a “fun” and interactive way to participate in Gaelic community, facilitates preservation and dissemination of the songs and language that for generations have been in rapid decline, and operates as a core element of Gaelic identity, particularly in Cape Breton (i.e., the people who live in Cape Breton or are otherwise connected to that place).

Milling Frolic at the Christmas Island Fire Hall On Thursday, August 19, 2010, I participated in my first traditional Gaelic milling frolic. It was after dark but not too cold out. The Hideaway B&B where I had checked in earlier in the day is situated just off the Barra Straight near Piper’s Cove, only a few miles from the Christmas Island fire hall where many of the other Féis events are held, so travel to and from was easy.

When I arrived that evening, I pressed the red kill switch, stopping the engine, and extended the kick stand of my motorcycle, parking in what had become over the past week my favored spot on the far right end of the fire hall. I waved hello to a few people who were entering the hall and noticed that cars were already beginning to crowd the makeshift parking area across the street, promising a good turnout for the night’s event. I hung my helmet on the handlebars and gathered my recording equipment, happy that yesterday’s flat tire was fixed in time to make it to the night’s event. I entered the glass doors and decided not to hang up my jacket in the entryway this time walked right by the merchandise table situated just to the left of the entryway inside the hall itself, waved hello, and made my way to a seat on the far side of the floor where I could set up my recording equipment. The long milling table was situated in the center of the hall, with a long cord of wool resting there, surrounded by sixteen chairs. Above it were several hanging microphones, which were routed by way of the ceiling to the corner opposite the merchandise table where the sound man and his son tested levels and prepared to record the evening’s songs. Surrounding the central setup of the milling table were many additional chairs for those spectating the event. I spoke with a few people in the common area while we all waited for the milling songs to begin. Beth MacNeil announced the commencement of the evening’s activities, and I watched as the community elders first took their seats, followed by community members close to them or otherwise directly involved in the Féis an Eilein. After that, visitors directly involved in other Fèis and Gaelic organizations (some visiting from Halifax and surrounding areas) took their place around the table. Among these were Gaelic musician and language activist Mary Jane Lamond, Joe Murphy, and Gaelic College/Cape Breton University professor Hector MacNeil. All these seats were filled before the general group inside the fire hall decided to approach the table, which consisted of a handful of interested people. Finally, the table was fully populated, and the milling frolic began signaled by the singing of a refrain and the pounding of the wool.

Figure 4: Milling frolic table at Christmas Island

Song after song rounded the table. Among them was the popular “Òran Do Cheap Breatainn” (“Song of Cape Breton”), by Dan Alex MacDonald of Framboise, Richmond County, Cape Breton. The melody was similar to how Helen Creighton recorded it back in 1964. The text is a telling narrative about Cape Breton culture (Play example): Séist: ‘S e Ceap Breatainn tìr mo ghràidh, Tìr nan craobh, ‘s nam beanntan àrd’; ‘S e Ceap Breatainn tìr mo gràidh, Tìr is àillidh leinn air thalamh.

‘S bho’n a tha mi anns an ám, Còmhnaidh ann an tìr nam beann; ‘S ged a tha mo Ghàidhlig gann, Ni mi rann do thìr nan gleannan.

Àit’ as maisich’ tha fo’n ghréin, Smeòraich seinn air bhàrr nan geug; Gobhlain-gaoithe cluich ri chéil’, ‘S an nead’ gléidhte fo na ceangail.

Feasgar foghair ám an fheòir, ‘N uair a dhùnadh oirnn na neòil; Ceò na mara tighinn ‘n a thòrr, ‘S e ‘n a sgleò air bhàrr nam beannan.

‘N uair théid a’ ghrian dhan àird an iar, ‘S a thig an dealt air an fhiar; ‘S binne leam guth nan ian, Seinn cho dian air bhàrr nam meangan.

Chluinnte "bellichean" le gliong, Air a’ chrodh ri taobh a’ ghlinn’; ‘S na aoigh òga stigh ‘s na tuim, ‘S iad fo chuing na cuileig seangaich.

Anns a’ gheamhradh, ám an fhuachd, Ám nam bainnsean, ám nan luadh; Chluinnte gillean air cléith-luaidh, ‘S gruagaich’ le guth’ cruaidh ‘g an leanaid.

‘N uair bhiodh am fùcadh ulamh réidh, Chuirt’ an fhidheall sin air ghleus; Dhannsamaid air ùrlar réidh, Gur e "Cabar Féidh" bu mhath leinn.

Chìte cailleach ghasda, chòir, Tighinn mu’n cuairt a thomhas a’ chlò; An cromadh aice air a dòrn, ‘S cha robh dòigh ac’ air a mealladh.

‘S e chuir mise nochd fo bhròn, Cuimhneachadh air làithean m’òig; Feadhainn a bhiodh leinn ri spòrs, Gu bheil cuid diubh nach’eil maireann.

‘S ged a dh’fhalbh a’ chuid sin bhuainn, Chaithis iad dhan dachaidh bhuan; Ann am pàileas Rìgh an t-sluaigh, Far’eil sòlas, buan bhios maireann.

Am Framboise fhuair mi m’àrachd òg, Ann an nàbachd Chloinn Mhic Leòid; ‘S tric bha sinn ri mir’ is spòrs, Làithean sòlasach nach maireann.

Chan urrainn dhomh-sa leth dhuibh ìnns’,

Na tha mhaisealachd ‘s an tìr; Stadaidh mi bho’n tha mi sgith, Beannachd leibh, is oidhche mhath leibh.

Chorus: Cape Breton is the Land of My Love, the land of trees and high mountains. Cape Breton is the land of my love; we deem it the most beautiful land on earth.

Since I am, at this time, living in the land of the mountains; and although my Gaelic is meager, I will compose a verse to the land of the glens.

The most beautiful place under the sun, thrushes sing on the tips of the branches. Swallows play with one another, with their nests secure underneath the rafters.

On an autumn evening, at hay-making time, when the clouds close upon us, as the sea mist unfurls in banks spreading a film over the peaks of the mountains.

When the sun sets in the West, and the dew covers the grass, melodious to me is the warbling of the birds singing eagerly on the tips of the branches.

The tinkling of cow-bells may be heard on the glen-slope, and the young calves may be seen clustering amongst the hillocks under the bondage of hungry flies.

In cold winter, the time for weddings and for milling frolics, young men may be heard at the fuller’s hurdle, whilst the maidens follow them, singing with clear voices.

When the fulling would be complete and in order, the fiddle would then be tuned; dancing would then take place on the smooth floor; “Cabar Feidh” would be our favourite tune.

An affable, kindly old lady would be seen making her visit to measure the cloth. She would measure with the full middle finger of her fist, and ther was no means by which they could deceive her.

To-night, I am sad thinking about the days of my youth, and those people who used to be with us making fun; some of them are no longer living.

Although these people have departed from us, they went to their eternal home; in the palace of the King of hosts, where there is everlasting happiness.

I was reared in my youth, in Framboise, in the neighbourhood of the Clan MacLeod. Many a time we were joyful and sportive in the happy days that are no more.

I cannot describe to you even the half-measure of beauty that exists in the land. I will conclude because I am tired; blessings be with you and good-night. (Creighton 1964:48-51)

The whole table joined in with the last line of the final verse, followed by a rousing, volume- raising repetition of the chorus. After a while a seat opened up and Joe Murphy waved me over to join the table, which I did, and started up singing some refrains with the rest of the group. Soon after I joined, the sound man recording the event noted that we had our work cut out for us if we were to break last year’s record of seventy-five songs sung during the milling frolic. It soon became a challenge, of course, and with periodic breaks for conversation, story, and laughter, the group continued singing until well into the night. By 3:00 AM we had completed a new record of eighty-six songs sung, according to the count made by the recording group. Most people had gone home by that time, including the local tradition-bearers, leaving a handful of us; some from out of town, some from just down the road. It became obvious to me after attending the event that the milling frolic is more than just an icon of Cape Breton musical-social interaction; it is Gaelic Cape Breton.

Milling Frolic in Johnstown, Cape Breton I was excited to attend the milling frolic in Johnstown, as it is often described as the oldest and longest-running one on the Island. It was quite a drive from Piper’s Cove; I rode in the car with Glenn Wrightson who was gracious enough to drive us both the distance. Along the way we stopped at a small fish and chips restaurant called “The Lord Fin and Feather,” just off the main road into Johnstown. I signed the guestbook inside, as did Glenn who hails from Colorado, and the cook/owner of the establishment was taken aback to see people come from so far away just to attend a milling frolic. As I discussed attending this milling frolic with a few locals in Christmas Island, they assured me that most of the regulars near the Barra Strait would not attend the one in Johnstown, claiming it was “too far away,” and more often than that, “too loud.” It is true that it was difficult to hear the singers. The event takes place in the same building where they also have bingo, an arts fair, and (in the room directly above where we sat for the milling frolic) a square dance, all at the same time. The square dance, particularly creates a surreal atmosphere of thumping from the ceiling above, a wash of muffled tones and difficult acoustic interference. The building itself

62 is a large, town hall-type building with several rooms that were likely added on over the course of time as the need for room grew. The milling table was in a cramped but quaint space, with wood paneled walls and an industrial loop blue carpet. There were many surrounding chairs and a place along the walls for spectators to watch the singers at the main table. Tables were also set up in the back part of the room with food and drink; someone (I thanked her several times but never got her name) served me beer and kept encouraging me to grab some food “while it lasted.” When we got there, there were several people folding out the cloth, creating a long circle on the formica table table with metal edges. One woman grabbed an empty pickle jar with holes poked in the lid and filled it halfway with water. She used this device to sprinkle water on the surface of the cloth, to simulate the way in which the cloth was wet during the time when milling was a functional activity. Once the cloth was wet, the veterans of the room—the ones who knew the most songs and had the most experience—took their seats. I joined them right away this time, sitting across from Rod MacNeil’s wife who kindly told me I have a nice voice. A number of people from around the nearby community attended, but relatively few people changed seats at the table. I ducked away several times to give more people an opportunity to join in the group, but for the most part, the songs were sung by a select few in attendance. There were children there as well, many of whom were encouraged to sing a song they had learned at the table, some of whom shyly obliged. Parents helped their children full the cloth and pronounce the lyrics as the songs continued to be exchanged around the table. I did my best to lead a song, but forgot a few verses in the center. I had heard the song for the first time the day before, so Rod MacNeil helped me through it with a smile. The singers around the table were equipped with a small wireless microphone and a speaker, but it was still too difficult to hear most of the songs due to the acoustic interference from the surrounding audience and the square dance through the ceiling above. Just as Lorrie MacKinnon and Joe MacNeil each predicted, several of the older community members from around Christmas Island attended, but ended up complaining about the noise level. Truthfully, it was a frustrating space for exchanging song. It was so difficult to hear that even the refrains were bombarded by cacophonous interference from the surrounding areas. Several times the woman who wet the cloth at the beginning of the event took the microphone between songs and asked that people keep their voices down in order to hear the songs. There was a great deal of respect

63 here for the singers, so usually her pleas for silence would last several minutes before people began to talk amongst themselves once again. It was the talking that also struck me here. People were gathered together surrounding the table of singers surrounding the bolt of cloth. Each was engaged on some level with a connection to someone else, and all of it had to do with the milling frolic. While I was on break from the table numerous times, I found myself in interesting conversations with local singers, as well as a few visitors to the region who attend each year during the time of the Féis. Ultimately, most of the same songs were sung in Johnstown that were sung in Christmas Island, and despite the loud environment the connection to Gaelic culture was clear. Here were numerous Cape Bretoners who were performing their local and ethnic identity through this momentous genre. Of all things Gaelic still holding a sense of tangible and living reality on the Island, the milling frolic, in general, stood out to me. It seemed to be an activity that sort of developed organically during Gaelic settlement into a secure setting through which men and women, young and old continued to share songs. Especially with dwindling numbers of Gaelic speakers, language became an increasingly important concern among the community, and the milling frolic shined as a particularly dynamic way to interact in Gaelic. In and around the milling frolic were countless narratives regarding the nature of Gaelic life in Cape Breton—the loss of language, efforts of preservation, and the makings of tradition and what it means to be a Gael in the New World.

CHAPTER 3 GAELIC COMMUNITY, LANGUAGE, AND IDENTITY

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” –Philip K. Dick (1985)

In the small town of Glenville, Cape Breton, there is a distillery by the name of Glenora Distillers International LTD, which started production of its various beverages and merchandise in June 1990. The distillery has an annual production of 250,000 liters of whisky, notably their reserve blend called “Glen Breton,” made in the traditional copper pot stills method blending only barley, yeast, and water. They are now well known (particularly among connoisseurs) as the only single malt distillery in North America. But due to a civil suit enacted by the world’s authority over single malt scotch, the Scotch Whisky Association (with offices in Edinburgh and London), they almost lost the legal ability to sell their product as such, in a seven year-long court struggle that has since been immortalized as the “Battle of the Glen.” Docket T-402-07 between applicant Scotch Whisky Association and respondent Glenora Distillers International LTD opens with a fascinating delineation of nationality: “When is scotch whisky not scotch whisky? When it is not distilled and matured in Scotland.”14 The contention centered primarily on the usage of the word “Glen,” a word of Gaelic origin which means “mountain valley.” The notion that Ian Glen Barclay put forth was that “glen,” despite its origins in the Gaelic tongue, has long been understood in its English sense and when used for the purposes of a product such as a single malt whisky, carries the connotation of being inextricably linked to Scotland and the British Isles. Lauchie MacLean, the president of Glenora, stipulated that the whisky distilled in Glenville, Cape Breton, fits well within the bounds of a logical usage of the term—the whisky is distilled in the traditional Scottish way, contains 100% malt whisky (hence its claim to being a single malt), and as a rare, aged whisky comes from a place called “Glenville.” Harrington claims that there “is considerable evidence of actual confusion between

14 Scotch Whisky Association v. Glenora Distillers International, Ltd. T-402-07 (2008).

Glen Breton and the Scottish glens documented in price lists and articles under the auspices of the Liquor Control Boards of Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia” (Harrington 2008:9). From a list of restaurant menus and drink lists, the civil suit initially swayed toward the exclusion of “Glen” from the Canadian whisky distiller on the grounds that many venders place Glen Breton “in with the single malt scotches” (9). The argument was made that the “consumer who thought he or she was ordering a new Scottish single malt would never know that something else was served” (9). This imposed boundary is violently awe-inspiring. The distillery grounds are kept, in a traditional sense, as many single malt distilleries in Scotland. The 300-acre property is home to seven buildings which house malt, kiln, milling production, warehouses, bottling, and hospitality facilities. The tour house itself boasts a “traditional post and beam style, similar in nature to distilleries found in Scotland,” and the font identifying the building has a pleasant “Celtic” flare (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Glenora Distillery in Glenville, Cape Breton

Certainly, the locale, the architecture, the distillery practices, the ingredients, the product, and the clientele, are catered to a specific aesthetic generally shared among consumers of the traditional

Scottish drink. Yet, due to the location within the diaspora, such practices proved to be a national (in the sense of Scotland’s nationalized borders) impediment to perceived capital. So, the initial court case was grounded in eliminating the confusion for the “ultimate consumer” who, in his or her passive confusion, would undoubtedly contribute to an unbalanced market by purchasing a single malt that in their mind’s eye was imported from Scotland, but in the reality of the market hailed from the neighboring province. Harrington explicitly notes that the issue is a consumer one, yet seems to contradict himself in this ultimate decision to side with the association based on consumer issues alone, considering that the “ultimate consumer’s” confusion would in any case result from an ignorance of the national origin of things. Perhaps this is why the case itself was argued strongly over issues of ethnicity regarding the origin, use, and implications of “glen” and its traditional links with regard to whisky. In the 2008 docket, Harrington notes: Both parties went much too far in asserting ethnicity. The Association is of the view that Glenora cannot use any word which might evoke Scotland. Glenora counters that the heritage of Nova Scotia, particularly Cape Breton cannot be escaped. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century the mother tongue of over 40% of the residents of Cape Breton was Gaelic, and it is still spoken there today. In this connection, both parties were anxious to pierce the corporate veil, ignoring that corporations are rather sterile creatures of statute. I have found in favour of the Association not because of the argument that “glen” is Scottish in origin, but because it has long been in actual use in Canada by distillers of Scotch whisky to the exclusion of all others. Had the Irish, who can also lay claim to the word, marketed “glens” in Canada the situation may well have been different…. To put matters into perspective, Scotland’s greatest export to this country was its people, not its whisky. Cape Bretoners… are rightly proud of their heritage and are entitled to evoke it. However, it is too late to use the word “glen.”15

The staggering way in which the Association and the court overruled Glenora, under the legalistic, “sterile creatures of statute,” amid a battle for language and connotation, is a testament to the way in which our social relationships continue to be commodified in the modern age. Yet, the Battle of the Glen also gives us a view into the dynamic dialogs of our social existence (See Figure 6). Of course, the locals of Cape Breton and throughout the province were in no way silent to the proceedings of the court regarding the Battle, which in its entirety saw over seven years of litigation in various provincial and national courts before being settled by the Supreme Court on June 11, 2009.

15 Scotch Whisky Association v. Glenora Distillers International, Ltd. T-402-07 (2008).

Figure 6: Published in The Halifax Herald Limited

The distillery’s victory came from a decision that concluded “the word ‘glen’ has not been shown to constitute a mark within the meaning of section 10 of the Trade-marks Act, and therefore cannot be prohibited.”16 Glenora earned the right to bear the mark of “Glen” on their select single malt after four levels of appeal. The final decision was celebrated locally, even prompting the development of a select bottle of whisky to bear a significant label commemorating the “Battle of the Glen,” which they also promptly trademarked as a special edition of the Glen Breton rare single malt (See Figure 7). Lauchie MacLean noted: As far as we are aware, BATTLE OF THE GLEN is the first and only product created as a result of intellectual property litigation. The packaging and special booklet enclosure chronicle our fight for the inspiration of lovers of fine single malt whisky, and records our struggle for posterity. I am tremendously proud of the work of our people here at Glenora in producing this Special Edition. Glenora also wishes to acknowledge the creative talent of Cape Bretoners, of Famous Folks/Creative Communications, based in Halifax and Toronto, for concept and development of the presentation box and labeling of the BATTLE OF THE GLEN Special Edition.

16 Glenora Distillers International, Ltd. v. Scotch Whisky Association A-194-08 (2009).

With release of this Special Edition Glen Breton, as Cape Bretoners, as Nova Scotians and as Canadians, we also honour all of our families who have gone before us, in courage and with sacrifice, to defend their rights in all just causes. (MacLean 2010)

Figure 7: The commemorative trademarked bottle, booklet, and packaging of the “Battle of the Glen Special Edition Canadian Malt Whisky” (Glenora Distillery)

The right to use and identify in language is an important one for all of us, as was evident when I first heard this story regarding Gaelic identity in the New World. In the “Battle of the Glen” story, we also see a poignant example of the way language’s subjectivity serves as an inadequate basis for objective, enforceable boundaries and definitions regarding meaning and identity. Robert Stam notes, “For Bakhtin, language is a social battleground, the place where political struggles are engaged both comprehensively and intimately. Human beings do not simply enter into language as a master code; they participate in it as socially constituted subjects” (Stam 1989:79). Perhaps this is where the corporate veil provides little utility beyond alienating people from the complex social interrelationships that characterize exchange and consumption. Indeed, the complexity creates social “feedback” when language is appropriated on

69 that battleground to serve both the concrete letter of objective law and the discursive explorations of subjective debates. It is with this struggle in mind that I engage this chapter, where historical issues of text and language contribute to a sense of community, and ultimately a Gaelic identity in Cape Breton. Complex, entropic interrelationships emerge from Cape Breton’s language struggles, particularly the loss of Gaelic and the recent developments of localized community- supported organizations determined to provide future generations the opportunity to speak Gaelic as a first language. I will explore these issues before returning to examples of the milling frolic, where community and identity are interwoven with language and song.

The Current State of the Gaelic Language in Cape Breton Linden MacIntyre is a distinguished broadcast journalist in Canada. He has been honored with multiple Gemini awards, an International Emmy, and has reported from many different locations throughout the world. He was raised in Cape Breton, with Gaelic spoken in his home, and in an interview with Celtic Heritage Magazine, he recalled the revival of Gaelic in Nova Scotia in the 1970s, and the creation of the Gaelic Society of Nova Scotia: I heard a number recently, that there’s 500 Gaelic speakers left in Cape Breton. We used to hear the number 1,500. When we got the Gaelic Society going, we discovered it was a whole lot more than that. There were a whole lot of people who wouldn’t even write down on the census they were Gaelic speakers because they thought it wasn’t worth writing down, or they didn’t think they were Gaelic speakers. My father would (say), ‘I can’t speak Gaelic.’ And yet I would sit in the kitchen of his parents place and listen to them speak for a day without hearing a single word of English. But they couldn’t speak Gaelic, oh no. ‘We’re not like the people in the Old Country, they know how to speak Gaelic.’ Then when the people from the Old Country came over here, they said, ‘This Gaelic is more pure than what we’ve got over there’. (CG 2010)

The Gaelic language is nearly not represented in nation-wide Canadian media; nor is it considered by Nova Scotia at large as a provincial bilingualism, yet it still seems to me to be important to many people on Cape Breton Island. Most everyone I met around the Island, even some of whom lived in more urbanized areas such as Glace Bay and Sydney, had a clear connection to Gaelic culture through language, music, or both, and were quite knowledgeable about the various institutions on the Island dedicated to preserving the language and culture. What I noticed as quite apparent in most of my Island interactions was an acknowledgement of strong ties among the people on the Island to elements of a perceived Gaelic culture and heritage.

I say “perceived” in this case not to suggest that Gaelic culture and heritage is simply an abstract concept, but rather to point out that many people with whom I had conversations regarding the Gaelic language spoke no Gaelic of their own, but were quick to point out to me all the institutions that made Cape Breton a hotbed of Gaelic festivals and cultural preservation, while at the same time warning that Gaelic was at risk of being lost and overshadowed by a modern, English-speaking media. While Gaelic music is treasured throughout the Island as being the standard of the modern revival, many people with whom I spoke believed that, as Silver Donald Cameron noted in a 1996 article in Canadian Geographic, “music is thriving, yes, but at its moment of triumph—Juno awards, TV specials, international tours, profiles in national magazines—the language and the culture are fading” (Cameron 1996:70). An Island publication titled Scenic Cape Breton that I picked up in the Barra Strait dock house laundry room has as its first article, “Cape Breton Island Preserved Gaelic Culture— Language & Music.” I read the newspaper as I waited for my laundry to dry one afternoon. “Natalie MacMaster, The Barra MacNeils, Mary Jane Lamond, Ashley MacIsaac, it reads like a ‘who’s who’ of the current wave of Celtic music that is sweeping the world. Everyone headlined on this list has one thing in common…. Cape Breton Island” (SCB 2010:2). The laundry did not dry all the way, so I read it again. “The relative isolation of the Scottish Gaels in Cape Breton kept the ancient Celtic traditions alive…. Cape Breton Island developed a unique and interesting pattern of Celtic musical styles…. In Iona, ‘the Highland village’, a recreation of an early typical Scottish settlement in Cape Breton has also kept the language and culture of the Gaels alive” (SCB 2010:2). I started thinking about a book I had read a few months prior called Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages (Fishman 1991), where the author laid the groundwork (at least in my mind) for a dialectic between macro-level language institutions and micro-level language institutions in regard to threatened or minority languages. Of course I had to look it up again, but I remembered the sum of what he wrote here: Much language policy is discussed in terms of the nationwide level only; however, that is not the only or even necessarily the optimal level for [Reversing Language Shift (RLS)] and for language status planning more generally. Indeed, the more disadvantaged a particular language is the less productive (and the less feasible) macro-level (nationwide, regionwide) policies may actually be. Under such circumstances, more pinpointed goals must be focused upon first, goals that are oriented toward much smaller societal units such as families, clubs or

neighborhoods, or to speaking (rather than writing), or to schools (rather than businesses), or to kindergartens (rather than high schools), etc. (Fishman 1991:12)

The general nature of Fishman’s statements seemed to be visible in the free newspaper Scenic Cape Breton. Here was a local publication that focused its reporting on the rich collection of Gaelic cultural institutions around the Island. Cape Breton as a community supported such a vast network of “pinpointed goals,” through the promotion of Gaelic arts, history, music, and language. Yet, the simple fact that the paper is written in English and is structured by the standard of most other Canadian newspapers was also evident. The newspaper itself was a tangible example of the level with which Gaelic in the diaspora is subsumed by a larger English hegemony and a host of issues surrounding national policies, modernity, “Folk” culture and tradition, and the construction of identity. Despite all the community-wide efforts to bring Gaelic to the daily life of Cape Breton’s Gaels, including the programs hosted by the Gaelic college, there still exists this rift between the optimism to see the language grow from these institutions, and the actual application for Cape Breton on a broader scale. At present, however, there seems to be little standardization to contribute to that end. Gaelic was not permissible in the region’s schools until after World War I, and even after that point there was no pragmatic way to introduce it into the curriculum in a standardized way, since English resources were the mainstay of the province. Education is standardized at the federal and provincial levels of government, much like in the U.S., and is compulsory to age sixteen in most provinces. Some provinces place more emphasis on bilingualism than others, particularly Quebec and New Brunswick in the east. Overall, however, English is the standardized language for all federally and provincially funded institutions, including standardized testing. Jeff MacDonald is a gifted singer and a dedicated activist for Gaelic in Cape Breton. I met Jeff briefly at the Christmas Island Fire Hall, but he was not at many of the events I attended during the week of the Féis. I hope to continue our correspondence in the future. In an interview for the Féis symposium, in preparation for the twentieth annual festival, Jeff noted: “I began learning Gaelic eighteen years ago, and during that time I tried to be optimistic, but in fact I held out little hope for Gaelic. It was a sad loss for me every time that an old friend died. I felt it especially at funerals. You can’t deny that everything’s going” (CCIF 2010). Jeff is very involved in the Celtic Colours International Festival, which for more than a decade has

72 encouraged Gaels young and old to be more involved in their culture through musical events across the Island. With regard to the atmosphere of the Gaelic language, Jeff wrote a song, with Irish singer-songwriter Brian Ó hEadhra. At the Celtic Colours festival, Jeff described what the song represents: If you take a drive up the TransCanada for fifteen minutes, you’ll pass by Beinn Guirme, (MacIntyre’s Mountain), and this is a song we [Brian Ó hEadhra and I] made together, called “The Blue Mountains Lullaby,” MacIntyre’s Mountain Lullaby. And just in the song it’s a story about the mountains, and it was there since the beginning of creation by itself, and then it saw our people come in and it kind of adopted our people. And over the last couple generations it’s seen us getting scarce, and the language, the beautiful language that we spoke was being replaced by a hard, foreign language. And the last bit of the song is that the mountain will still remain there, guarding its foster children (CCIF 2005).

This assimilation of the Gaelic population into an English-speaking world through standardized education is profound, especially considering that only a few generations prior, the Gaels rallied around making the language a provincial standard. In his book The Last of the Celts, Marcus Tanner reminds us: John Morrison, of Victoria County, recommended the Nova Scotia assembly in 1879 to divert funding from what he called ‘contemptible worthless French’ and spend it on ‘the honourable Gaelic tongue.’ The demand elicited no response but the fact that it was made at all, and at a time when the language was widely despised in Scotland, indicated the higher status that it had won in Nova Scotia. (Tanner 2004:300)

Perhaps the dismissal of such a request also points to the views of Gaelic overall with regard to the population of the assembly in that time. There was little to no support for, and often much prejudice directed toward Gaels and their language around the turn of the twentieth century in the modern world. In any case, as I noted earlier in the chapter, the language reached its peak around this time before it began to decline rapidly. Tanner notes, in many of his ethnographic details, the way in which Gaelic seemed to “dissolve” into modern Nova Scotia, even in Cape Breton, a struggle between generations borne of pronunciation, metaphors, idioms, and the occasional scattered quote, fragments of phrases and pieces of words that are indicative of an ambiguous past but, but also of a broken language. “Older people [have] retained a distinct Scottish pronunciation,” he writes, but “the younger generation of Nova Scotia has adopted the American intonation of English. Like young Americans, they interpolate their sentences with the

73 repeated use of the word ‘like’ and emphasise the ultimate or penultimate syllable, so that many of their sentences finish with a ‘like awesome!’ or with a ‘like wow’ or with a ‘like, you know, incredible!’” (Tanner 2004:300) I, like Tanner, was surprised when I visited Cape Breton University, primarily that there was not more in the way of a dedication to Gaelic. My excuse was that my previous affiliation with the institution was mainly through my own distant scholarship, with links to the Beaton collection and to Gaelic studies linked to the University, which skewed my perception of the place. Essentially, before visiting the university, everything I had come to know of the history of the region and the current demographic gave me a sense that it was one of the few areas left in Nova Scotia with a predominately Gaelic culture. Of course, directionality always skews our expectations of things. The day I parked my motorcycle outside the Campus Centre, across from the Boardmore Playhouse, there were very few cars outside. On my way inside I noticed the security guard was asleep, so I helped myself to the orientation map and found my way around. I walked all over campus, found the library, made my way to the Beaton Institute, walked through the Student, Culture, and Heritage Centre, and eventually ended up in the Cafeteria near the Bookstore. Besides novelties, some artwork, and some of the items in the Beaton Institute, the area reminded me of any other typical English-speaking college campus, in the generic sense. Like Tanner, it seemed to me that all vestiges of Gaelic culture that were advertized as dominant aspects of the college’s draw were little more than remnants. Still, Gaelic is now offered as a minor at the University, which is a promising result of the community-wide revival of the past few decades. An integral element of the minor in Gaelic is an exchange with the Gaelic College on the Isle of Skye. Many of the students who participate in this exchange return to Cape Breton with some of the enrichments that are taking place in Scotland as a result of their own language revivals over the past forty years. The hope is that such enrichment will contribute to the overall success of retaining Gaelic in Cape Breton, eventually increasing the number of speakers. “Hope” and “optimism” are two words I think aptly describe the state of Gaelic I encountered many times during my travels in Cape Breton. The unfortunate truth, as Tanner puts it, is that the language “(…) will not be recaptured by students studying Gaelic culture on university courses” (Tanner 2004:301). Little is being done at the institutional level to make Gaelic more accessible to the wider public. For people on the Island who hope to rekindle the

74 colloquial use of Gaelic, the best “hope” remains in the stories and songs of tradition-bearers that are honored enough to be disseminated to younger generations. There are so few native speakers of Gaelic left in Cape Breton that most people who approach the language today do so completely by choice. Communities such as the Grand Narrows/Iona area are championing Gaelic revival in their area with institutions such as the Rankin School of the Narrows, a combined primary and secondary school that recently established a core language program in Gaelic. The school has represented the language for years now, but only recently have they had the resources to provide multiple Gaelic immersion programs both as curricular and extracurricular activities. The community in the Narrows region especially (with a few exceptions) seemed dedicated to and optimistic of the revival of the language in Cape Breton. The Highland Village Museum serves the community as an epicenter for Gaelic activities as well, promoting the positive aspects of Gaelic in daily life. For some people in the Narrows, I seemed to notice during my visit a narrative of shared Gaelic identity that was fostered by the Highland Village Museum’s physical link to an older, more romantic sense of Gaelic life. The Gaelic we speak, handed down by generations of our ancestors, is Scottish Gaelic. Like modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic derives from Old Gaelic of the Goidelic Celts who settled Ireland in the fifth century A.D. For tens of thousands of Scottish Highlanders emigrating to Nova Scotia during the early to mid- nineteenth century, Gaelic was their only language. By the early 20th century, an estimated 100,000 Nova Scotians spoke Gaelic. Today, Gaelic is evident in our communities and a defining component of our cultural identity. As you tour our site, please try one or more of the following Gaelic phrases. Gum meal sibh ur turas ‘nar measg. (Enjoy your visit with us.) (HVM 2010)

I spoke with a number of people around the Highland Village Museum, some patrons and a few employees. One woman said she grew up in a house hearing Gaelic every day, but that the language wasn’t emphasized, nor was it spoken directly to her as a primary mode of communication. “Anytime my mother spoke with my grandmother I could hear [Gaelic], but I don’t recall her ever speaking it to me much. Now… I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard an entire conversation [in the language]!” A recent college graduate told me, “It’s just a forgotten language, really. I mean, English has really taken over. It just happens, some languages just get lost and there’s nothing you can do about it.” When I asked her about the festival, the fact that there were so many people gathered in the Narrows who were dedicated to Gaelic revival, she

75 replied, “I think for some people they are going to be interested in speaking the language, and in that sense it won’t die off. But it’s just not used in a regular way today. Those people will be able to teach the people they know, maybe get some more people interested, but it will be a small element.” Someone else I met, a tourist from Connecticut told me at one point in our conversation, “In Gaelic, my name is ‘Shay-muss.’ What’s yours?” I told him I didn’t know, to which he replied “That’s okay.” In the general store I spoke with Beth MacNeil and a few other people about the importance of language revival. “It’s our heritage,” someone said. “It’s part of who we are, and if we don’t learn it then it’s like we’re not really living a full life.” Underneath the surface elements that the museum offers, there are an amazing number of dedicated scholars of language who are crafting projects geared toward bringing back the Gaelic. One such project, Cainnt Mo Mhàthar (“My Mother’s Language”), consists of a video and audio collection of local tradition-bearers, telling stories, singing songs, and participating in interviews. The collections are presented as a website archive, organized to provide “the chance to hear the everyday, idiomatic Gaelic spoken here whenever you want.” The site’s welcome message continues that, “you’ll be learning about Gaelic culture in Nova Scotia from those who know it best—men and women immersed in the language and traditions of their communities” (CMM 2010). Supported by the Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia and the Highland Village Museum, as well as contributions from locals, the project documents nearly thirty different men and women from Cape Breton, as native Gaelic speakers, coordinated by local Gaelic scholars like Seamus Watson and Hector MacNeil. It is in projects such as this that narratives of identity take on their most kinetic forms. While the state of the language throughout Nova Scotia continues to struggle, local communities such as in the region of the Narrows utilize modern resources to address the declining language by engaging in dynamic dialogs with local tradition-bearers, much like Shaw did with Joe Neil MacNeil. Ultimately, these dialogs will keep Gaelic relevant for future generations. And, where the language is most prominent in these localized enclaves of cultural retention, it is predominantly through song and story that the Gaelic is kept.

Gaelic Identity and Social Life in Cape Breton In a documentary short interview recorded for the Cape Breton cooperative, The Celtic Heart of North America, Joanne MacIntyre of An Clachan Gàidhealach (the Highland Village Museum) stated, “It is a part of my day-to-day life. The music, it touches me; the songs move

76 me. The language itself—it just feels right; it feels like it’s part of who I am” (CHNA 2010). This sentiment was reiterated by most other people who I met in my travels around Cape Breton—a shared sense of place, a deep belonging to a Gaelic heritage through language, culture, community, and locale. The “it” to which MacIntyre refers in the interview, overall, is her Gaelic identity; she possesses this connection because of her heritage but also because it is something she feels and shares with others. A recent book, In the Blood: Cape Breton Conversations on Culture, likewise discusses with a wide range of interviewees the state of Cape Breton, its culture and its people. Originally drawn to Cape Breton due to the fiddle music for which the Island is famous, the author Burt Feintuch’s dialogs with local residents weave a complex narrative, particularly with reference to the presence of Gaelic culture on the Island. Feintuch writes: Cape Breton today is itself a paradox. It is in real trouble economically, thanks to the decline of industries based on natural resources as well as its distance from markets. It is depopulating, as work is invariably located elsewhere. It has some of the worst health statistics in Canada; a recent Cape Breton Post article speaks of the 'wretched health status of Cape Bretoners as a population' (February 10, 2008). But Cape Bretoners report unusually high rates of satisfaction with life. Cultural production—especially music and writing—are flourishing extraordinarily. Despite the vicissitudes of North American economies, tourists continue to come, attracted by scenic beauty, cultural vitality, and the gentle ambiance of local life. (2010:14)

These invocations are a fitting introduction to Cape Breton identity, noting Feintuch’s “paradox,” in that Gaelic musical interaction and language are very much “alive” and “day-to-day” elements of social life that I also witnessed during my time there, expressed through traditional music and dialog. In music studies, as in related “folklore” studies, the notion of “The Folk,” as Ian McKay calls it (1994), often essentializes and objectifies a community and their “folklore” as a categorized other, both isolated and “primitive” (at least, separate from the general assumptions of most readers). Moreover, the Folk become elements of another naturalized world and their songs, stories, and crafts become materials of study, from which scholars somehow draw conclusions about the very essence of society. Fortunately, the days are past that situate such “findings” in the evolutionary paradigm of primitive to civilized, but the pejorative connotations exemplified from such a methodology are equally misleading when considering the Folk as fetishized play-things or even as grandmasters of authentic and traditional truth. No, the Folk are

77 complex people like you and me, and in the case of Cape Breton, “they” are people who call on their own traditions of music to invent new and effective ways of addressing the very real loss of language and economic depression that is the backdrop of each day on the Island. Helen Creighton solidified the notion of the Folk in Nova Scotia through her song collecting and colorful depictions of the quaint and “simple life” of the folks from whom she recorded ballads and songs texts. Her contributions to Gaelic song are numerous; she collected thousands of texts and stories, as well as audio recordings from Cape Breton and surrounding Nova Scotia over the length of her career. A bright journalist and a gifted writer, Creighton fell in love with song collecting and her journey into the world of the Folk, mysterious and magical in its enigma. “[Her] most salient structuring assumption was that there was within the population a subset of persons set apart, the Folk, characterized by their own distinctive culture and isolated from the modern society around them” (McKay 1994:9). From this notion—a philosophy reminiscent of Herder’s Volksgeist—and using the model of folklore collection from sources such as the Francis James Child Ballads17, Creighton set the precedent for the commodification of a “Folk culture” aesthetic, a process that was integral in the dissemination of Gaelic song to a wider audience. The same romantic ideals to which Creighton subscribed concerning Nova Scotian folk music became incorporated in sweeping social symbols of Scottishness shared throughout the entire province shortly after Creighton published her first collection, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia.18 Angus L. Macdonald, premier of Nova Scotia from 1933-40 and 1945-54 pressed the image of an “unquestionable essense” of Scottishness as the character of “New Scotland,” in all its token stereotypes, in order to draw a larger tourist base to the province. This broad sense of provincial identity glossed over the rather diverse population within Nova Scotia’s borders, and for the Gael became a glaring misrepresentation that only served to parody social identity.19 In large part, Macdonald’s campaign of Scottishness was driven by the characteristic “economic liberation” of the times, a political paradigm that favored euphemistic assimilation in the name of “progress,” but despite its success in garnering tourists it

17 Published from 1852 and completed in 1898, the Child ballads became a canon of song texts for folklorists into the twentieth century, many of whom shared Child's penchant for finding “genuine and traditional” songs among “non-literate” peoples. “Even after the ‘Child canon’ had started to erode as a universally accepted yardstick of authenticity, belief in the need for canon, authenticated by those with expert credentials, persisted” (See McKay 1994:18-30). 18 Helen Creighton, 1966, Dover, NY. 19 See McKay, 1992: 11-47.

78 did little but bolster the economic prosperity of the province, funds which no doubt never found their way into the communities of the Gaels who were being marginalized. In present-day Cape Breton, tourism continues to be an important aspect of social life and economic gain. Not surprisingly, music is one of the most accessible means of attracting tourists; each calendar year is full of events promoting Cape Breton music and dance. Gaelic communities throughout the Island are able to use the globalizing interest in Celtic music to increase awareness of Gaelic language and culture. In Iona just off the Barra Strait, An Clachan Gàidhealach (The Highland Village Museum) and Comhairle na Gàidhlig (The Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia) work in tandem, committed to “growing Gaelic in Nova Scotia,” and “to lead in creating an environment that makes Nova Scotia a place where Gaelic language, culture, and communities thrive” (CG 2010). As Seamus Watson, of the Council, notes: Nova Scotia’s Gaelic speaking regions no longer exist in isolation. Every year sees an increase in the number of tourists seeking Gaelic cultural experiences in Nova Scotia. In years gone by, Gaelic’s champions bore a vision of fidelity to their forebearers’ traditions. Their contribution has been immeasurable. It is now widely understood that Gaelic culture must also include an economy to continue its progress in modern terms. Gaelic Month proclaims the efforts of the old and new. Lets praise them all and keep up the Gaelic. (CG 2010)

An Clachan Gàidhealach attracts tourists, especially during the summer months, most of whom are on their way to the Cabot Trail and the Cape Breton Highlands to the northwest. The community is incredibly active in promoting Gaelic language, with activities nearly every day. Of course, it would be misguided to assume that all Cape Bretoners are “active” in the local Island efforts to preserve and disseminate the Gaelic language. For example, the demographic, economic status, architecture, and layout of Glace Bay and Sydney very much reminded me of where I grew up in Upstate New York (no glaring “Scottishness” in its atmosphere). Many houses in the center of the Island surrounding the Bras d’Or lakes region are summer homes owned by families from Toronto or the United States. I met a man in North Sydney who owns an insurance company and when I invited him out to a piper’s cèilidh he replied, “Thanks, but that’s not my thing.” Despite the homogenizing influence of modern society on the Island, however, there are remnants of Gaelic culture in the mainstream. Quite simply, I would hazard a guess that no one I speak to in my hometown would have the first idea what a milling frolic is, but every person I spoke with from Cape Breton—even those from Glace

Bay and Port Hastings—knew exactly what I was talking about, and many even had a few suggestions about where I might see one myself. And especially in Iona and the Grand Narrows area, institutions like the Rankin School of the Narrows have clearly created programs that are changing the agency of Gaelic in everyday life. One young musician I met, Evan Bonaparte, noted: The Gaelic Language is a very important part of our heritage. I have been fascinated with the Gaelic Language and some day hope to be a Gaelic speaker. Our community and school community has done an excellent job of exposing us to the language. Since my early days in school with exposure to Gaelic music and milling frolics I have grown to love the Gaelic Language. Our community has been blessed with a few Gaelic speakers who are very willing to pass their knowledge on to us and help keep this language alive. We are able to enjoy céilidhs, milling frolics, Gaelic classes, etc., in our school and community. I started taking guitar lessons when I was very young and from the start I would say I liked to use my talent to apply it to the Gaelic songs. Through our school Jody, Anita and I started to learn and use our talent to sing Gaelic songs. We have played at céilidhs and gatherings together and have been fortunate to have lessons available to us in our community. Hopefully we will continue our study in this language and keep playing at various céilidhs therefore promoting this fascinating language. Maybe someday the Gaelic language will once again be spoken by numerous people in our community. (CG 2010)

In addition to these regional connections to Gaelic culture that I encountered, I noticed a great deal of Island-wide dedication to musicianship. When I first arrived in Sydney, I grabbed some lunch at the Governor’s Pub on Esplanade, overlooking the waterfront that is home to the giant fiddle. I discovered that the pub was hosting a concert that evening, so I decided to return to hear the performance. Several talented young local musicians, Colette Deveaux, Breagh MacKinnon, and a few others, singing and playing acoustic guitar, performed original music, most of which seemed to be local favorites. After the concert I asked Deveaux if she had a CD, to which she replied, “No, I’m not the best at promoting myself.” I also had the pleasure of spending time with a dinner theater group in Glace Bay, who put on a musical locally written by Colin Appleton, “Life’s a Dominion Beach!” which is a rousing satirical comedy about the nearby location of the same name. One cast member explained, “The premise of the show is a toxic chemical spill has closed Dominion Beach and we’re having a telethon to raise money to clean up the spill and re-open the beach.” In real life, Dominion beach was closed due to pollution, though the cause was not a toxic chemical spill, but rather lax policies on dumped pollutants and waterway craft emissions. Some of the proceeds of the show actually help fund

80 cleaning up the area. After the show I spent time with the cast at the local bar called, “The Main Event,” where we heard even more local musicians playing, and discussed, among other things, Cape Breton Identity and the state of music education in North America. The theme in each of these instances to which I was continually returned is that it is the combination of language and musical interaction that constructs that identity in a dynamic way. In his recent book, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, Thomas Turino draws a line between the conceptual “self” and “identity,” stating it is “important to differentiate between the two,” due to the “ways individual and collective identities function in the social world” (Turino 2008:101). Turino’s psychosocial model is one of representation, that is it views the self as internal feelings, reflections, and internally motivated actions (our habits) while identity is how we select habits to “represent ourselves to ourselves and to others” (102). The author goes on to point out external awareness of identity, as well as generalizing categories and polarities of existence that are common aspects of modern (Western) social life. Noting Foucault’s (often varied) thoughts on discourse, Turino identifies social essentializations and exposes how generic categories can become “habits of thought,” indoctrinations that are “taken for granted” and not considered “as to their origin, nature, or accuracy” (103). In this acknowledgement, Turino’s own mutual exclusivity between the independent self and the representational identity breaks down. This is because of the inherent ambiguity in considering social discourse to be grounded in a monolithic “subject” and his or her agency to represent the varied perceptions of an entextualized environment. Bakhtin himself was suspicious of claiming the self’s self-sufficiency. For him, the “self” is a simultaneous relation that cannot exist without interaction with an “other.” The relationship is dialogic, and as such the relations that Turino himself recognizes in social life—created categories and dualisms such as good/bad, white/black, in/out, etc.—must be understood “not as binary oppositions but as asymmetric dualisms” (Holquist 1990:19). The self cannot exist socially without the other, and vice-versa. The subject indeed has agency and is an “active participant” in categorizations and representations, but that active participation depends on the dialogic simultaneity of the self/other relationship. This is because reality—even internal or fictional reality—is always experienced and not just perceived. When considering this possibility, Turino’s statement, “discursively produced categories of social identity must be understood in relation to the discourses that produce the terms and the

81 social and political functions of those discourses” (2008:103-104) takes on a different connotation altogether. So, I invoke “identity” with its dialogic simultaneity in mind, as it is this relational reality in which all of our social categories are given meaning. Criticizing categories for their merit or accuracy may have a methodological use in some imagined discourse, but for the purposes of social life such conclusions are beside the point, as the narrative of any subject’s self/other relation provides a more telling and less compartmentalized view of identity as a whole aspect of being.

The Milling Frolic as Cultural Revitalization It is with all the previous in mind that I return to the milling frolic, because it seems to me that the milling frolic is an activity that is almost perfectly suited for simultaneous local language preservation and Gaelic identity performance in Cape Breton. People are gathered around the table in a circle, holding a bolt of cloth and singing traditional Gaelic songs; it seems almost as if their words and songs spill into the circle at the center where they are pressed into the fabric and kept outside of the usual conception of time. The milling frolic as a traditional practice holds a certain importance for Gaelic communities around the Island. As Tanner suggests, “listening to their voices, we were tapping into more than a language; into a sound, a way of thinking, a way of viewing the world” (Tanner 2004:301). The milling frolics I have attended thus far in my time in Cape Breton were more than a genre or genres of song performance, in that while gathered around the table we were able to meld into an alternate universe, a narrative reality wherein exchanged songs served interactively as metaphors of all social exchange and ultimately of identity. In many ways, the milling frolic is the seminal “traditional ceremony” in Cape Breton that links participants to a concrete sense of Gaelic identity. At least, that’s what I think Geertz would have called it. I call it an analog for dialog. It serves to provide an interactive space wherein Gaelic dialog can occur in a timeless, generic form. In terms of language and identity, the milling frolic is an infinitely complex event that “manifests itself in the form of a constant, ceaseless creation and exchange of meaning” (Holquist 1990:41). It is dialogic, in that it is a human phenomenon, and it is related to language, to “speaking” and “exchange,” a type of “conversation” wherein the “speakers are different from each other and the utterance each makes

82 is always different from the other’s (even when one appears to repeat the ‘same’ word as the other)” (Holquist 1990:40). The narratives of milling frolic songs are traditions recontextualized in their present performance as generic links between subjects in the dynamic interplay of dialogic simultaneity. So, what am I talking about, exactly? At the present intersection of tourism and globalization, language and dialogism, the milling frolic stands as a monument to the Nova Scotia Gael of what Bakhtin called a “chronotope” (explored more in the next chapter), an omnipresent representative setting for generic but dynamic (dialogic) exchange. The milling frolic bends the traditional boundaries of genre into more pliable forms for social relationships, directing the performers (and the audience) both implicitly and explicitly toward issues of language and ethnic identity. For native speakers of Gaelic, who are relatively few and far between in today’s Cape Breton, the songs continue to play a vital role in memory, nostalgia, and consciousness (much as the bardic tradition of the Gaels has always done), articulating through metaphor and fiction the complexity of life’s experiences and events, each seen from a unique and relational point of view. For learners and appreciators of Gaelic alike, milling frolics allow subjects to “tap into more than just language” as they flux within the cosmic space, connected to the cloth and to the physical vibrations that forge awareness about who and where they are in an ever-developing, emergent sense. And from my particular perspective, it is in this dialogic existence that the milling frolic bolsters music studies, providing us with an active example of a more inclusive way to understand musical (inter)activity in social life.

CHAPTER 4 CHRONOTOPES: GENRE AND MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” –David Foster Wallace 1993

In his essay, “Communication, Music, and Speech About Music” (the title, of course, being a nod to Charles Seeger and his similarly titled work in systematic musicology), Steven Feld begins by stating: “Music has a fundamentally social life” (1994:77). Though by now in musicology this may be an overwhelmingly obvious statement, and perhaps even an obvious choice in this document given the nature of my dissertation, I think it both provides a fitting introduction to the discussion of Bakhtinian philosophy in music studies and serves as an apt and inspirational springboard for diving into the issues of musical-social interaction. By musical- social interaction, I initially mean to describe the dialogic process of engagement with a stimulus that is defined stylistically as “musical” in a culturally-accepted understanding of the word. This also includes speech acts—what the Bakhtinian circle refers to as “utterances”—and communication, defined by Feld as “a socially interactive and subjective process of reality construction through message making and interpretation” (1994:94), about music. The reason I choose not to delineate, as Seeger and ultimately Feld have done, between music and “speech about music,” is that in a generic sense the features that separate (a) that which a music performance can effectively communicate from (b) discussing the meanings derived from a music performance, are implicit in the dialog. The form and content, essentially, are one and the same. Furthermore, answering the question, “What is music?” is of no concern in such a narrative, since the varied ideas that address the concept of music itself are implicit in any dialogic moment, and it is assumed that just as language is the learned prerequisite of dialog, a learned musical vocabulary gives one precondition for a musical exchange. Similarly, Seeger’s question, “What does music communicate?” falls short of accessing the multifaceted modes of social engagement through which people create, experience, and share musical meaning, since the simultaneity in dialogic interaction favors neither form nor content one over the other. Put another way, then, musical-social interaction is at once communication, music, and speech about

84 music; it is the social performance of musical texts and the dialogs through which those texts are imbued with meaning. Feld, in addressing Seeger’s verbose explorations of “communication about music,” introduces the notion of “interpretive moves,” which “emerge dialectically from the human social encounter with a sound object or event” (1994:86). Feld is careful to use the word “emerge” here, to note that such interpretive moves may be conscious or unconscious affects of social stimulus. Likewise, “interpretive” suggests that meaning must be actively sorted out both internally and externally through dialogic reflection. It is important to remember that these interpretive moves are not necessarily decisive tools we “activate” in musical moments we experience, but that they are a fluid extension of our social selves and in a sense, always active and experienced kinetically as events of being. Interpretation happens at once and at all times, a dialogic process that cannot be turned off or ever replicated in precisely the same manner as it has just been expressed. In contrast to Feld’s definitive categories of interpretive moves, musical-social interaction is ever-diverse and completely interdependent upon the generic structure in which it is discovered and invented. Regardless of shared understandings and definitions in the social realm, musical-social interaction, like any other dialogic process is constantly negotiated, problematized, renegotiated, and actualized; like social energy it cannot be created or destroyed; it simply is as a result of our dialogic existence. The generic structure of music, as it is largely understood in Western culture, is performative. Performance in this instance refers to the presentation of a specific text (whether it be newly created or re-performed) that demonstrates a “responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence, subject to evaluation for the skill and efficacy with which the act of expression is accomplished” (Bauman 2004:110). All socially performed texts in the generic sense are performative since they are at their core dialogic—a relation of simultaneity. “No matter how conceived, simultaneity deals with ratios of same and different in space and time, which is why Bakhtin was always so concerned with space/time”20 (Holquist 1990:19). Dialogism suggests that separateness and simultaneity are fundamental conditions of existence, arguing that “all meaning is relative” since meaning is derived from two bodies occupying

20 Holquist also points out that Bakhtin’s philosophy is heavily influenced by post-Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. He grew up in a time when great debates segmented the scientific community concerning concepts of space-time. In many of his writings and lectures, Einstein created situational narratives to describe motion as perceived at relative positions to an observer. Many of those scenarios are similar in structure to Bakhtin’s thought experiments.

85 different space simultaneously. “Motion, we have come to accept, has only a relative meaning. Stated differently, one body’s motion has meaning only in relation to another body; or—since it is a relation that is mutual—has meaning only in dialog with another body” (Holquist 1990:19). Our sense of dialogical being is structured from a reality that is constantly experienced through self-other actualization and organized in space and time. This process is how we interact at all times, and it is keenly performed in all complex permutations of being (for our purposes, this process is likewise performed in music, thus, addressed by the notion of musical-social interaction). With this in mind, we arrive at the concept of the chronotope, literally “time-space,” which was borrowed from mathematics by Bakhtin “for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)” (Bakhtin 1981:84). It refers to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981:84). In literature, chronotope’s utility first lies in that it signifies and defines genre and specific narrative distinctions by establishing a timeline as its primary source of expression. In this conceptualization, the chronotope operates as a strong tool for narrative analysis, as a “kind of recurring formal feature that distinguishes a particular text type in such a way that—no matter when it is heard or read—it will always be recognizable as being that kind of text” (Holquist 1990:110). As a philosophical method, and not merely a device for literary analysis, the chronotope can be more broadly conceived as “indispensable forms of any cognition,” in the Kantian sense, as Bakhtin notes in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” “beginning with elementary perceptions and representations” (1981:85). Thus, as a concept in and of itself, our sense of experiential being and of the self is chronotopic, since the chronotope lies at the core of our developed cognitive process. Kant considered such forms of developed cognition as “transcendental,” while Bakhtin conceived chronotopes as “forms of the most immediate reality” (Bakhtin 1981:85). In this is Bakhtin’s assertion that the chronotopes of our own lived experiences are reflected in the chronotopes of our artistic expression. He makes a clear delineation between art and life, but it must not be understood as a binary mutual exclusivity. “When conceived as more than a narrowly technical narrative device, then, the chronotope provides a means to explore the complex, indirect, and always mediated relation between art and life” (Holquist 1990:111). It is in this sense that chronotope will serve

86 genre and this dissertation. Thus, exploring chronotopes is invaluable for evaluating the dialogic relationship between text and audience, or said another way, the dialogism of performance. This chapter explores the intrinsic spatiotemporal links among subjects through genres. Informed by the model of Bakhtinian literary studies, I will begin to demonstrate how dialogic interaction challenges individualized notions of identity. Specifically at the milling frolic, chronotopes define how the audience understands and performs a traditional text in the present moment, and how the text dialogically negotiates and reinforces the world of the audience. The cultural reenactment of the waulking process, for example, is a central chronotopic element that both situates the musical activity in the ambiguous authenticity of traditional origins and defines it as a codified genre. Singers may get together and exchange Gaelic songs with all the same stylistic features as those sung in a milling frolic, but it is not signified as a milling frolic without the chronotope of waulking the wool. Hence what follows is a delineation of the concepts surrounding the narratives of musical-social interaction.

Bakhtin, the Novel, and Being-As-Event For Bakhtin the power of the novel as an expressive form lies in its ability to foster ambiguous interpretation and entextualization, both in the moment of experience and through remembrance and discussion, essentially granting the author and the audience access to the contextual world in which the story unfolds. Essentially, what makes the novel such a representative genre is its heterogeneity in both form and content and the interaction of each. Bakhtin posited his notions regarding the novel to challenge the barrier that literary studies had long placed between form and content, arguing that in any discourse form and content “(…) are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (Bakhtin 1981:260). Establishing a dialectic between the novel and the epic was integral in Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination in literary studies. This is not to suggest a positivistic dichotomy between two extremes of literary utterances, but rather to turn the hierarchy of the established canon on its head. Where the novel represented dialog in social life, the epic represented a decontextualized monologue. In other words, the poetics of the epic represent a long-dead and otherwise completely foreign genre to the audience, and the novel—or “novelness”—exemplifies the

87 complex interrelationships of the present and familiar, the chronotope of simultaneity. “Studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages; studying the novel, on the other hand, is like studying languages that are not only alive, but still young” (Bakhtin 1981:3). A formalist view of the structure of his argument places a legalistic divide between “discourse in art” and “discourse in life,” where the former emphasizes style and the abstract monologue, and the latter emphasizes language and in-the-moment dialog. This strict dichotomy should be understood in the historical light in which Bakhtin conceived it—to challenge a long-standing hierarchy that disregarded the novel as a popular form, inferior to a canon of classics which were responsible for standardizing and enforcing the conventions of literature. It is here where I see a strong correlation to music scholarship. Indeed, in Western scholarship there is a legacy of an established, fetishized, hierarchical canon of classics, texts that outline the forms and genres of historical “stylistics.” Musicological discourse has made many contributions to understanding the abstract contextualization of such art and its reception, but in many ways historical interpretation of stylistics is a localized artistic abstraction, divorced from the immediacy and simultaneity of social existence. Bakhtin wrote: The separation of style and language from the question of genre has been largely responsible for a situation in which only individual and period-bound overtones of a style are the privileged subjects of study, while its basic social tone is ignored. The great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are linked with individual artists and artistic movements. For this reason, stylistics has been deprived of an authentic philosophical and sociological approach to its problems; it has become bogged down in stylistic trivia; it is not able to sense behind the individual and period- bound shifts the great and anonymous destinies of artistic discourse itself. More often than not, stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities, and villages, of social groups, generations, and epochs. Stylistics is concerned not with living discourse but with a histological specimen made from it, with abstract linguistic discourse in the service of an artist’s individual creative powers. But these individual and tendentious overtones of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in which discourse lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract in such a formulation and cannot therefore be studied in organic unity with a work’s semantic components. (1981:259)

The specialized properties of the novel as one (albeit highly important) genre in a larger category of what Bakhtin referred to as “verbal art” studies (language studies, linguistics)—like the

88 discourse of life to which it is analogous—emphasize this genre’s dependency on and perpetuation of intertextuality. “Novels are overwhelmingly intertextual, constantly referring, within themselves, to other works outside them” (Holquist 1990:88). In much the same way, other communicative genres in other fields of human interaction have demonstrated similar persistence of intertextuality. Bakhtin’s overarching philosophy suggests that such “novel” forms exist elsewhere in the social realm (i.e., beyond what is localized in the conceptualized realm of the “verbal arts”). Robert Stam and (more recently) Martin Flanagan speak directly to this in film studies, noting that film texts, too, “are part of human culture and communication and take their place, and should be located within, the back and forth of anticipation, interpretation, reception and, inevitably, argument that makes up that sphere in all its complexity and vitality” (Flanagan 2009:20). In other words—while it certainly must be qualified in its own forms of textual discourse—film, like the novel, is a genre through which people can access the dialogic interplay of our social existence. This same dialogic process—and this is my main argument in this chapter and in this dissertation—is evident in musics that are likewise dependent on intertextuality. Musical expression is an integral aspect of our social dialog. Ethnomusicology as a field has already championed this notion, though not explicitly as such. Implicit in multicultural narratives about musical interaction is the recognition of the interrelatedness of form and content in both individual and communal musical activities. In the broad sense, certainly all texts are in some ways interrelated, since they are all created and performed in the social realm. But in considering Bakhtin’s dialectic, there is a recognizable line being drawn between texts that are canonized by their conventions and thus trapped by the stylistic features that are enforced as a point of definition, and those texts that are interrelated analogues of life’s discourse, left simply in their fluid and connotative state of being. Bakhtin viewed the world as a dialogic activity, and thus, life itself was seen as “the unique and unified event of being” (Holquist 1990:24).21 Moreover, life is not simply an event in and of itself, but an event that is and must be shared, an event of simultaneity, of multiplicity. Put simply, any text must be performed in some way, in order to be considered a living, active part of the event of being. Bakhtin “never ceased pursuing differing answers to the same set of questions,” which through that pursuit exposed his life as “quest or project” as opposed to a

21 This notion of being as at once “unique” and “unified” is best unpacked in Holquist’s Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, pp. 24-39.

89 theoretical conclusion (Clark, Holquist 1984). If positivistic conclusions are not the goal of critical analysis, the characters and subjects of any narrative represent a more dynamic import— not in the sense of creating a new hierarchical set of “authorities” or enforceable authenticities, but rather in the way of posing a collective myriad of meanings through dialogs, relations between the self and other that characterize being.

Forms of Style and the Chronotope To give some context for the development of chronotope beyond Bakhtin’s specificity that it remain a “formally constitutive category of literature” and his wish not to “deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture” (Bakhtin 1981:84), I turn to three recent usages that ignore such localized warnings just as I have. Of course such a formative philosophical analysis of the novel inevitably would find its application outside the confines of the genre, given that the concept so readily articulates the shapes of how we think about events and our own being (and that Bakhtin, himself, appropriated the concept from yet another source). Keith Basso, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, applied the idea of the chronotope in his work with the historical narratives of the Western Apache. First in the collection, Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society (Bruner 1984:44-45), and later in his book, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996), Basso invokes (in oddly atemporal verbatim passages) Bakhtin’s sense of dynamic time and space, in that for the Western Apache “geographical features have served the people for centuries as indispensable mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of their history. Accordingly, such locations present themselves as instances of… chronotopes” (Basso 1996:62). He later adds, “The Apache landscape is full of named locations where time and space have fused and where, through the agency of historical tales, their intersection is ‘made visible for human contemplation’” (Ibid). Basso directly ties this application to Bakhtin’s notions of this dynamic simultaneity at work within the novel, where “[chronotope] expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)” (Bakhtin 1981:84). Bakhtin’s analysis of the Greek Romance noted that generically the characters’ actions “are reduced to enforced movement through space,” and despite their passive interaction with the Fates, a character is a “living human being” who regardless of passivity must “endure” the games fate plays (105). The core of Basso’s appropriation of the chronotope thus has to do with how humans shape the places

90 they exist into “spaces” of interaction more imbued with meaning throughout the enduring passage of time. In what has become a well-cited passage, Basso attributes the following to Bakhtin, as stating that “chronotopes are”: (…) points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people…. Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves. (Basso 1984:44-45; 1996:62)22

This is perhaps extrapolated from what Bakhtin wrote of the “literary artistic chronotope” that the defined “special and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981:84). Basso’s usage of chronotope localizes the concept at the center of a realized place within a community, landscapes and landmarks upon which meaning is ascribed through dynamic interaction and communicated through generic utterances, which ultimately influences cultural identity. In a 2006 pedagogical education study, Raymond Brown and Peter Renshaw utilized chronotopical analysis to direct “attention to the grounding of interaction in dynamic and shifting time-space contexts of the classroom, considering how particular groundings for interaction are created as they draw on past, present, and future temporal relations to explain and justify their ideas to one another” (Brown and Renshaw 2006:247). The core of their study demonstrates that the classroom is not simply a static place where learning occurs, but rather it is experiential, simultaneously containing the breadth of social existence, interaction, and understanding, guided by memories, performed through present experience, and shaped through future anticipations. Chronotopes “give voice to place” in the sense that Belden Lane wrote (2001), but more than simply “finding the sacred” around us, we interact with and leave our particular impression on

22 Basso’s words as quoted here appear verbatim in at least two of his separate publications. In the first citation (1984) Basso attributes this quote to Bakhtin 1981, p. 7, but in the actual cited publication (translated and edited by Holquist and Emerson) no such quote can be found as such on the noted pages. In his later publication (1996) Basso again cites this passage of Bakhtin, again as appearing on p. 7 (although in a later footnote it is attributed to pp. 84- 85 of the book), where, again, the quote is not present. Several other sources (including Pryce 1999:93; Jordan 2006:182, who, quoting Basso’s surrounding text and Bakhtin’s supposed block quote simultaneously as one citation seems to suggest that Apache “mnemonic pegs” are also Bakhtin's ideas; and Thornton 2008:17) attribute this quote to Bakhtin as did Basso, via the 1981 Holquist/Emerson publication, but I cannot to date find evidence to support Basso’s citation.

91 our surroundings at all times. Two ways that Brown and Renshaw note this happens are that chronotope “highlights the importance of considering the intertextuality of… utterances,” and that “chronotope alerts us to the struggle for influence within the dialogic act… where learning to speak within a particular community means exhibiting mastery in constructing utterances privileged within the history of that community” (Brown and Renshaw 2006:258). Understanding the chronotopes that abound and direct generic utterances is key to studying subjects as opposed to objects, social interaction as opposed to textual interpretation. Objects are monologic, voiceless “things,” whereas “a subject… cannot be perceived and studied as a thing, for as a subject it cannog, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic” (Bakhtin 1986:161). In 2009, Michiel van Eijck and Wolff-Michael Roth published “Towards a Chronotopic Theory of ‘Place’ in Place-Based Education,” in which they explore various notions of place specific to scientific/scholarly discourse and the classroom. With a less pedagogical approach and a more theoretical methodology, the authors describe various scenarios for recasting thought of place in terms of its dynamic intertextuality. Primarily, place is not simply a fixed and static point in space-time represented by one voice, nor can it be considered as such “because people inhabit, visit, rebuild, make, enjoy, sorrow, describe, and recount, hence live it, by which it is articulated by a multitude of voices” (Eijck and Roth 2009:882). Ultimately, their “chronotope of place” (…) deﬁnes the relation of the unit of the narrative and the world we inhabit. Place as chronotope is not some position, not an empty space, but an area, an arena, that becomes a place because of its meaning as a “public square” inhabited by human beings. The chronotope of place thus refers to locations where people meet, which become places because of uniting people and hence being a lived entity. As such, place, as chronotope, shapes and is shaped by the identity of the people who inhabit it—take it as a dwelling. (Eijck and Roth 2009:885-86)

As chronotope, place articulates our dialogic existence, the dynamic intertextuality of the self and the other. Inevitably, chronotopes give way to identity as it represents the construction of personhood and community by way of linking past, present, and future. Chronotopes are useful tools for ethnopoetic analysis, considering that all discourse in and about music and poetics (all discourse in general, for that matter) utilizes genre as a means of communication. At its most general level, genre is a plethora of connotations and expectations

92 engaged on specific texts and expressed through dialog. Since chronotopes help to define the intrinsic links within genres, their import lies at the core of all speech and narrative structure. Additionally, chronotopes are distinct in that neither time nor space is privileged; each is completely dependent upon the other. But the key to understanding chronotopes beyond their utility as artistic and analytical devices is in recognizing their dialogic interconnectedness. Our chronotopes define the development of personhood and the stratification of our existence. Bakhtin’s distinction between art and life exists within the social realm, where all thoughts and utterances are formed. Though many cultures have tangible realities constructed around the whole of what is considered “art” and what is considered “life,” both are generalized paradigms that fit within the same social phenomenon. Holquist writes that “the chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring” (1981:452-26). If we recognize that all realities are social realities developed through dialog then chronotopes demonstrate that there is no universal mystery behind these cultural “forces,” since all utterances can be woven together in genres and usually wind up being reflected/performed in narratives. Such a notion fosters “a conception of social life as discursively constituted, produced and reproduced in situated acts of speaking and other signifying practices that are simultaneously anchored in their situational contexts of use and transcendent of them, linked by interdiscursive ties to other situations, other acts, or other utterances” (Bauman 2004:2).

Accessing Genre Varying disciplinary methodologies, concepts, and usages of genre often lend their utility to the definitional approach. “Definitional” is the notion—based on the broadly-sweeping Western penchant for taxonomy in which genre extends etymologically from the French meaning of the word: “type,” “kind,” or “class”—that genres are codified and maintained by their formal features. In other words, a genre’s classificatory nature stems from its descriptive function, which is to serve the definitions that identify contextual boundaries around texts. When perceived within these disciplinary boundaries, genre is a definable taxonomic tool, a “rules set,” a positivistic method of classification. A pleasing ternary irony, this historical legacy of scholarship utilizes these subjective taxonomies as naturalizations, purifying, minimizing, and objectifying features of knowledge and information in order to invent/discover their basic elements, which then must be disseminated (and enforced) as core natural truths that, within the

93 social realm, are rife with complex interrelationships and conflicts. Thus, despite the concrete stability of classification, the definition of what constitutes any genre is problematized due to the social life of a genre’s diachronic discovery, invention, and recontextualization. The rules and formal features of genre operate in different ways in differing contexts, and as socialized elements cannot be objective regardless of naivety or temporal distance. That genre is a social function, then, would seem to be self-evident. The codification of formal features cannot exist outside of discourse about those features within any given lexical- logical chronotope (moveable space-time context). Moreover, if definition is the only goal of classification of and communication about texts, then genre would have little utility indeed, save the totalitarian enforcement of a group of stale, lifeless Cartesian dualities. Definitions are implicit within the dialog and shared within the social realm. Narratives, utterances, are linked from one subject to another through genre. This process is evident in the colloquial use of the term “genre” itself, as with any descriptors meant to serve connotatively as such. In 1980, Franco Fabbri, a musicologist who researches popular musics, first codified what he described as a “theory of musical genres” outlining the textual aspects of what constitutes a genre corpus. Fabbri began studying musical genres because of variations of one question in particular—“What kind of music is that?” He adopted a semiotic model to approach Aristotelian questions regarding how our discourse generates definitions that ebb and flow with time. Specifically with regard to his codification of genres in the early 1980s, Fabbri noted that new definitions needed to be approached in music studies, given that older models of genre were generally inconsistent with the actual, living music exchanged in the real world. This work was an important step forward in music studies, addressing the model of progressive aesthetics and classics canonized by writers in the nineteenth century, especially for popular musics that under the old model were under scrutiny as to their ability to be considered art and worthy of study as opposed to the consideration that they were ephemeral, or worse—a lower stratum of culture which threatened the sanctity of the high arts. Fabbri aptly pointed out that genres are codified through their use and effectiveness, and that they are not created apart from their cultural context (i.e., no genre of music could emerge that is completely irrelevant in the social dimension, or what Bakhtin would call an “isolated utterance”), yet his method for organizing these genres seems to contradict the recognition of this dialogism in that it builds (albeit in a more expansive sense) on concepts championed through the hierarchies present in modern aesthetics.

Fabbri’s theory is ultimately one that emphasizes the preservation of codified texts. He stated that genres are variegated categories that can change as their relevance changes and as their rules are no longer properly governed and enforced. One might also utilize genre rules to outline the definitive forms and styles of particular music practices in and of themselves (i.e. apart from their contexts, either through temporal distance or other means), and typical to one group or epoch. In the tradition of Saussure, Fabbri describes rules and ritual traditions found in different genres, and seems focused on coming to specific conclusions about genres after constructing an objective distance through a defined stylistics. Such a directed and insular notion of genre—one that seems to exclude the social function of dialogism—while able to address the collection and codification of texts with an authoritative vocabulary, has little capital for adequately studying the complex intertextuality (and intercontextuality) of musical-social interactivity. Focusing on stylistics or historical trends of reception and aesthetics is primarily a monologic activity. This is not to suggest that such studies in stylistics are unnecessary, just that they focus on part of the social equation, isolated in their scope of understanding. A genre can be defined and described as “a class, type or category, sanctioned by convention” (Samson 2011), but ultimately such a definition is realized and perpetuated through dialogic interaction, not through divine right or authoritative expertise. This is precisely why genres change diachronically, why they cannot be “isolated utterances,” why they blend into one another and interact, how they link subjects in real-time experiences, and how they become markers of identity. Genres are about communication insomuch as much as they are about learned definitions and shared descriptions during communicative events, but it is important to keep in mind that in any narrative, the definitions are implicit in the dialog. Any narrative would be a boring story indeed if it were to focus wholly on legalistic descriptions of a genre’s formal features as opposed to exploring the dialogic interactions through which specific genres are utilized. Thus, the breadth and complexity of social interaction is more successfully accessed through the exploration of genre as a dialogic medium, instead of simply a hierarchical taxonomy. Certainly Fabbri’s initial inspiration—the question of “What kind is it?”—continues to remain an intriguing one. Whether you are studying sixteenth century Italian madrigals or the electronic body music (EBM) of the 1980s, knowing what to call something is a fundamental framework for any dialog. Moreover, regardless of codified conventions, experts and novices

95 alike continually argue and debate the virtues of stylistics regarding these issues. And, even if the locus of contention in these dialogs revolves around the efficacy or authenticity of a genre’s formal features, even if a group that considers itself the authority on the subject enforces certain formal features over others, the point is that genre’s usage in these instances is completely dialogic. We want to know what “kind” of music it is, what “kind” of movie, what “kind” of story, what “kind” of song, because we want to talk about it with others (or file it away dynamically in our own memory, another dialogic process of self-other actualization). Conceived in this theoretical sense, genre defines not only our observational understanding, but our ability to synthesize that social interaction within our environment into a number of complex features and combinations that can be recontextualized and reflected upon and/or communicated to someone else. At their essence, genres are texts constructed with words, but their utility is not a purely textual, definitional one. They do not operate as a virtual tool chest of textual definitions in the representational sense of language. Genre is a mode of communication of language, of formalizing, synthesizing, and presenting utterances. Genres are learned types of utterances that link subjects within specific contexts. As a linguistic theory, Bakhtin’s revolutionary notions of genre stand apart from Saussure’s concepts of language and semiotics. Both scholars recognized that language is couched in contextual signs and conventions that are learned, utilized, and reified during communicative events. Saussure theorized that language (langue) and its conversational application (parole) collectively represent the mode of communication used by individuals who are more or less free to choose what they need to communicate in a given social context. From this, he imagined—with the number of chosen possibilities in conversation equal to the number of ideas formulated by one person, multiplied by the number of people in the world—the study of such a complex and random network of definitions would be impossible. Coupled with these individual choices, concluded Saussure, were systems of signs that ritualistically guided the flow of parole. Bakhtin’s theories concede to this notion, in that there are forms of language—genres, learned group combinations and hierarchies. But he noted that what Saussure failed to realize is that beyond the relative forms of language utilized in conversation, there are also “forms of combinations of forms of language” (Bakhtin 1986:xvi). Bakhtin’s point of reference in conceptualizing “communication” was not that it extended from the chosen use of words, as Saussure envisioned it (i.e. parole) in everyday conversation, but rather it cast communication as

96 the interaction inherent in the utterance of words through genres. Bakhtin observed, “Even in the most free, the most unconstrained conversation, we cast our speech in definite generic forms, sometimes rigid and trite ones, sometimes more flexible, plastic, and creative ones (everyday communication also has creative genres at its disposal).” He goes on to note, “…speech genres enter our experience and our consciousness together, and in close connection with one another” (Bakhtin 1986:78). Genres organize the forms of speech utterances through which we communicate. “Speech genres,” as Bakhtin referred to them, are social language activities in the interactive realm of dialogism. Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of the lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional structure. All three of these aspects—thematic content, style, and compositional structure—are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. (Bakhtin 1986:60)

The notion of the utterance is key for this methodology, in that we think, speak, and act in utterances that are given their “aspects” through genres, which essentially provide the substance of a shared space of understanding in the social dimension. An utterance exists in a reciprocity of dialog that assumes some type of activity or utterance has preceded it and that it will in turn inspire another reaction or utterance. This dialogic process ultimately represents “the link between language and life,” emphasizing the comprehensive use of dynamic concrete utterances in various diverse styles to characterize experience, to characterize being (Bakhtin 1986:63). Applying the speech genres model to the meta-narrative of social genre, one might also cast social interaction as a matrix of random, chaotic events stemming from a plethora of choices and organized only by a ritualized sense of the traditions, cultural symbols, and conventions that tend to be discovered and invented in society—our social norms. Many scholars have utilized semiotics as a methodology for accessing and describing culture in this way. Semiotics considers the recognition of signs and conventions to be the sole driving factor in social subjectivity. The subject has agency insomuch as their awareness allows engaging in their social environment

97 according to their free will, even though their environment is still subject to the ritualized indoctrination of their symbolic worldview. Given this reciprocity, it likewise seems reasonable that scholars endeavor to study semiotics itself, or risk being bogged down by the multiplicity of variables encountered by infinite heterogeneity. But genre theory can account for this diversity, in that it accounts for the way we as social creatures interact, understand, and compartmentalize our social environment in order to pay attention to these definitive tropes that comprise social interactivity within a given context—our “forms of combinations of forms.” Utilizing genres, the immediate reality of social interactivity can be studied, despite its recognizable diversity, because even though social interaction can seem to stem from within one person, the sphere in which a social institution is articulated is dependent on its own perceived set of stable, working criteria (genres) that have been dialogically developed, tested, and modified in practical performative usage. To keep these ideas in mind when we access the notion of genre in music studies, we must concede that music, similarly, is a dynamic, systematic human activity. Music is communicative—in that it is an expressive interaction, like an utterance, that is organized by generic features and exchanged through dialogic experience. And, music is an activity that involves the use of specified language—in stylistics, lyrics, and in meta-dialog—speech genres through which shared spaces of understanding are created. Music “genres” as codified texts represent one small aspect of musical-social interaction. Experiencing how genres are performed in a traditional sense, how they are discussed, taught, learned, how they develop, change, challenge their own sense of authority, become more or less inclusive—these are aspects of the whole of musical-social interaction.

An Ethnographic Narrative on the Chronotope and Genre Sitting at the table during a milling frolic, I witnessed Berry George lead a song as I had many times before. But this time was quite a bit different. In many instances, there is a bit of discussion at the table, usually in Gaelic, coupled with some questioning glances back and forth as to whether or not the people at the table are familiar with a particular song text. Generally speaking, this is to gather a consensus before beginning the song, but the process also has the pragmatic function of providing a break in the motion to rest the voice, rest the hands, exchange a missive, comment on the song just sung, and so on. Other times, the next in line around the

98 circle to sing the song simply breaks into the refrain, the rest of the table joining after a moment’s recognition, and the song commences. Often when this happens it is because the song is well known by the group. This time, however, the leader of the song began quietly, and as he continued to sing the hush around the table spread from our circle into much of the audience behind us. When Berry finished singing the refrain, he sang a verse, and then returned to the refrain with a few people who began to pick out the tune and a few words to join in. This process continued for a few verses; each time the refrain was revisited, more people would join, until finally after several verses everyone at the table was singing along. Each time the leader sang a new verse, everyone at the table would listen intently, singing more confidently during the chorus. In terms of genre, the song was similar in structure to a lilt, a four line refrain interspersed between four line verses. The tempo was slower than most song styles sung at a milling frolic, but not too slow for the wool to accompany it. Overall, the process of learning the refrain and listening to the verses is typical of a song that is unfamiliar to the group. When the leader finished singing the song, and the applause had subsided, a couple of people asked where the song came from. It was then that Berry admitted that he had composed the song himself. The rest of the table applauded and rang out praises, recognition of the quality and enjoyable nature of the tune (Play example). There is a great deal to note in the experience of this exchange. The milling frolic as a place to create and exchange songs is a dynamically interactive chronotope wherein each participant is immersed within the song space through the process of keeping time with the wool. It is a structured event that guides the perf ormance of various texts in their traditional conventions. Singers have learned and recognize genres that are viable for the performance as a whole, pursuant to that structure, while they also simultaneously exist in an open and unfinished (i.e., ever-developing) realm of perception. For participants in the leader’s song debut, there was a genuine reception of a song that they experienced for the first time, which in its composition was so grounded in the spatiotemporal matrix of the songs that came before it and the songs that went after it that to an outside observer would not have stood out as something “new.” Moreover, the perception of the song’s traditional authenticity shifted when the recognition of authorship changed in its directionality. Thus in a chronotopic study of such a song text, we encounter that the song exists as more than just a new composition; it requires active participation within the confines of its performance as a text of gradually increasing familiarity as it relies on genre-

specific knowledge of performance practice, relationships between people, and dialogic interactivity through which people collectively seek to bolster the activity as a whole. As a Gaelic learner and a musician, perceived as simultaneously participating with the reception of the song as part of the group and unique in my perception, the experiencing of the song for the first time made this dialogic process apparent for me. Additionally, each subsequent performance of the song among different people, with different organizations around the table, and varied settings will solidify the generic assimilation of the text into the community. The singing of a newly composed song around the circle of the milling frolic is a microcosmic analog for dialogic interaction and authorship within a community. The song itself is not simply composed “solely from the standpoint of the semantic and thematic content” of the music and the composer’s “expressive attitude toward this content” (Bakhtin 1986:97). Rather, the exchange also relies on the “dependence of style on a certain sense of understanding of the addressee on the part of the speaker and on the addressee’s actively responsive understanding that is anticipated by the speaker” (Ibid). In a broader sense, who we are as people—our identity—is constructed in an “emergent and processual” sense. “Persons are not given but made, often by a process of strategic and situational improvisation” (Barber 2007:104). Meaning and the self emerge through dialogic exchanges of genres. Frank MacDonald of the Inverness Oran, a weekly publication out of Inverness County, had this to say in an interview with the Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia: A social event like a milling frolic plays a role in conveying to a mostly uncomprehending audience a sense of what has been lost over the centuries since clearances and famine drove thousands from the Highlands of Scotland to a sister- like island across the Atlantic. More important than its “performance” appeal, however, is the practical function the milling frolic continues to play in communities like Christmas Island. The milling frolic brings together several of the island’s Gaelic speakers for a social event, a gathering where something more than songs are sung. The small community strengthens itself, native speakers giving time, instruction and encouragement to the Gaelic learners. (CG 2010)

That “something more than songs” refers to the performance of identity in the context of the milling frolic itself, a wealth of meaning and relationship to the loss and acquisition of language and what language and music represent for what it is to be a Gael in Cape Breton. This meaning is concrete and actualized, yet ever emergent and processual.

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The Construction and Consumption of Meaning: Self-other Actualization The notion of the self as an atomized, unique individual has come under scrutiny in anthropology and related fields, due to its disregard of relational elements of existence. Many other cultures have a different sense of being, built on relationships, on an indivisible sense of connectedness (See Barber 2007; Uzendoski 2005; Trosset 1993). “Text and intertextuality from this perspective are seen as a form of production, not a mode of representing a reality that is already constituted” (Barber 2007:106). Texts have no life or utility out of their context; much in the same way, the process of realizing meaning is lifeless without the dialogic interaction in which that meaning is performed. Freud’s notion of the self as the individual agent of meaning provides us with a powerful example of the inadequacy of a monologic consciousness. His error in creating an objective methodology for the evaluation of the self was that his basis for that method was language—a socialized medium present in “all human activity,” making it inherently subjective and emergent from within the dialogs of a community, not an individual or an authoritative text. Standardization of language has such an effect on language in that it changes the directionality of how utterances are perceived. Similarly: Freud sought to monologize the nature of language which was a necessary step if language was to be internalized in the consciousness as Freud described it. He saw the language of the unconscious as being at war with the language of consciousness, but the battle was fought out within the individual psyche. (Clark, Holquist 1984:179)

From Bakhtin’s perspective, the struggle of language is more accurately articulated through an analogy of dialog, the “extremely complex social interrelationship between doctor and patient”: In what does this interrelationship consist? A patient wishes to hide from the doctor certain of his experiences and certain events in his life. He wants to foist on the doctor his own point of view on the reasons for his illness and the nature of his experiences. The doctor, for his part, aims at enforcing his authority as a doctor, endeavors to wrest confessions from the patient and to compel him to take the “correct” point of view on his illness and its symptoms. Intertwined with all this are other factors: between doctor and patient there may be differences in sex, in age, in social standing, and moreover, there is the difference in their professions. All these factors complicate the struggles between them. And it is in the midst of this complex and very special social atmosphere that the verbal utterances are made—the patient’s narratives

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and his statements in conversation with the doctor—utterances that Freud placed squarely at the basis of his theory. Can we acknowledge these utterances as the expression of the patient’s individual psyche? Not a single instance of verbal utterance can be reckoned exclusively to its uterrer’s account. Every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges. (Vološinov 1976:78-79)

The conflicting exchange is not indicative of the “expressions of the patient’s individual psyche, but the social dynamics of the interrelations between doctor and patient” (79). Essentially, Freud’s entire model thus “projects the entire dynamics of the interrelationship between two people into the individual psyche” (80). Bakhtin posited in his Architectonics that this interrelationship is actualized in the contest “between the I-for-myself and the other” (Clark, Holquist 1984:180). When we deconstruct the notion of the individual psyche, we are left with a dynamic and interactive sense of meaning and of the self-other; life likewise becomes a process of constant transformation and redefinition. Identity is, thus, a similar emergence, discovered and invented through complex social interrelationships.

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CHAPTER 5 DIALOGISMS: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND SPACE-TIME

“We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life ‘outside’ the story changes the story.” -David Foster Wallace (1993)

The milling frolic fosters an emergent Gaelic identity deeply connected to language and traditions, but as a generic form it certainly is not the only marker of identity in the diaspora. Moreover, its practice rests in a host of other performative musical interactions that take place throughout the Island in various spatial and temporal dimensions. Accessing this dynamic, emergent sense requires an acknowledgment of its semantic elements that are not subject to deterministic views of fundamental existence. Bakhtin was fascinated with this semantic realm and the way in which humans seem to ascribe meaning on all the generic forms around them. He noted that, “(…) whatever these meanings turn out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us” (Bakhtin 1981:258). The construction of meaning is thus dialogic, with regard to our own sense of identity, in that actualization within the self—such as identifying with a musical interaction— is still based on the semantic forms that were in the first place shared in our social experience. Freud’s psychoanalysis is indicative of a longstanding notion in Western philosophy— social atomism. From the Aristotelian notion of primary substances, to Descartes’ thoughts about individual existence, to Hume’s reductionism of social relationships into representations of cause and effect, the idea of the individual psyche is fundamental to Western thought. Any positivistic hierarchical analysis depends on the premise that all things can be broken down into the components that comprise the whole, each constituent examined as self-sufficient in its own behavior, that only the combinations of these distinguishable elements and their subsequent patterns comprise the definition of varied realities of existence. These pieces formulate a notion and definition of society that taken as a definition in and of itself completely disregards dialogism and its role in actualization. Atomism may have many political benefits for a capital- market society, but individuality in its essentialism is an “incomplete” picture of the simultaneity

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of social existence. “[Social atomism] implies that human agents are distinguishable and separable, hence really or ideally self-sufficient, and that human organizations—businesses, for example—are described enough when we specify their defining tasks, without regard for their reciprocal relations (and responsibilities) to other social formation” (Weissman 2000:2). Likewise, conceptions of genre as monologized categorical atoms or definitions are “incomplete,” in that they also operate as essentialized systems of communication. Even though a genre is comprised of formalized definitional features that form useful rules and boundaries around any given social interaction, it is the interaction itself that completes the cycle. Generated hierarchies of formal features are not self-sufficient; they require, both for their creation and for effective communication, a relational set of momentous contextualizations. Genre is the link between text and context, between the self and other. The key to reciprocal communication— dialog—is the in-the-moment creation of a space of shared understanding based on generic utterances. For Bakhtin, human existence is “the event of co-being; it is a vast web of interconnections each and all of which are linked as participants in an event whose totality is so immense that no single one of us can ever know it. That event manifests itself in the form of a constant, ceaseless creation and exchange of meaning. The mutuality of differences makes dialog Bakhtin’s master concept, for it is present in exchanges at all levels—between words in language, people in society, organisms in ecosystems, and even between processes in the natural world” (Holquist 1990:41). With such infinite and overwhelmingly complex heterogeneity accessible through relational differences, it makes sense that scholars turn to paradigmatic notions of the forms and symbols that are identifiable and repeatable to create cultural patterns of study. But Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism are able to encompass heterogeneity by focusing on the syntagmatic features of the dialog itself, allowing patterns and stylistic elements that formulate traditions to function implicitly. “Although the distinction is not absolute between [the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic] levels, dialogism is a philosophy more of the sentence than the sign” (Holquist 1990:42). In this chapter, I will begin to piece together the dimensions of genre—grammar, narrative, and the chronotope—that characterize the musical-social interaction of Cape Breton and of the milling frolic. In this it will become clear that while stylistics and formal features may be used to disseminate, understand, and invent traditions (even to the point of enforcing traditions so strictly that they become dogmatic), these features alone cannot encompass the

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dialogic interactivity through which these genres are fluidly exchanged. Additionally I will address memory, remembrance, and the self, which also includes Western issues of orality versus literacy. In a sense, this chapter will seem to turn Freud’s shortsighted “unconscious” mind concept on its head. While I do not wish to claim that the unconscious self as Freud envisioned it does not “exist” (indeed, I see no benefit in attempting to prove or disprove such a useful chronotope), I do submit that such an inner self would be incomplete without its relational outer experience, a sort of “bodily unconscious” (Taussig 2009:14) that encompasses awareness, thoughts, emotions, sensations, metaphor, and aesthetics through performance, through social interaction. In this sense, “identity” as a concept should always refer to its dialogic existence. By “grammar,” I mean, in the sense of Derrida’s Grammatology, the collection of written and composed song genres set apart from utterances in their structure and adherence to a specific set of formalized poetic rhythms. Milling frolic song genres (“true” milling songs and all other songs sung at milling frolics) have a certain grammar and are a composed medium, adhering to the tradition of their poetry and the repeatable nature of their performance practice. Grammar also involves how song verses must be composed to invoke a specific sense of narrative. The performance structure and rhythm of a song extend from this grammar. Grammar represents a systemic difference between a song and a story of similar narrative; a story in its collection of words can vary from telling to telling, whereas the grammar of a song has limited to no variance in each of its subsequent performances, being designed to be repeatable.

Preserving the Old or Inventing the New: Identity and Tradition In the milling frolic, the songs are important in the way in which they are remembered and disseminated within the community, and as such become socially representational of the language and the event. The milling frolic as a local activity is certainly not the only place where Gaelic songs are exchanged, by far, but it remains a dynamic chronotope of that exchange, and has its impact on other aspects of social life. On a larger scale in terms of “Cape Breton identity,” and now that we can appreciate the place that the milling frolic holds for Cape Breton Gaels, we return to the dichotomy of a diminishing language culture juxtaposing a flourishing musical culture and in this intersection are faced with a confrontation of sorts, in that it is easy to essentialize aspects of identity regarding “folk” culture, especially when there is a specific agenda for preservation. But this is not the way in which that identity is experienced and

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performed. One of my consultants, Anita MacDonald, noted in a Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia interview, regarding her experience in the Rankin School: Gaelic culture is a very important aspect of my life. I grew up immersed in the culture through music, song, dance, and language. At an early age I began taking fiddle, piano, step-dancing, and Gaelic language lessons. Throughout the years I have taken part in Gaelic language, song workshops and TIP classes from well knowns such as Hector MacNeil, Angus MacLeod, Beth MacNeil, Cathy Ann MacPhee and Mary Jane Lamond. I have participated in Eilean nan Òg, at the Nova Scotia Highland Village Museum and completed the Beul an Tobair Online Gaelic Course through The Gaelic College. I have also been inspired by local tradition bearers such as The Iona Gaelic Singers, Peter Jack MacLean, and recordings of my great-grandfather John W. Ellis. I have performed all over Cape Breton as well as many other parts of Nova Scotia. My love of music and Gaelic culture has also given me the opportunity to perform in Prince Edward Island, and for people such as the Lieutenant Governor. I took an interest in learning the Gaelic language because I was very interested in learning about my past and culture. As it is part of my community, family, and school, I have grown up with the Gaelic culture all around me. (CG 2010)

As Anita’s example demonstrates, salient features of Cape Breton identity involve far more complex interrelationships than the disassociated monologue of an idealized Gaelic tradition. An important quality of Bakhtinian dialogism is presence of multiple voices—a “polyphony” of sorts—multiple discourses that foster fluidity and simultaneity. We have in mind first of all those instances of powerful influence exercised by another’s discourse on a given author. When such influences are laid bare, the half-concealed life lived by another’s discourse is revealed within the new context of the given author. When such an influence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act of reproduction, but rather a further creative development of another’s (more precisely, half-other) discourse in a new context and under new conditions. In all these instances the important thing is not only forms for transmitting another’s discourse, but the fact that in such forms there can always be found the embryonic beginnings of what is required for an artistic representation of another’s discourse. (Bakhtin 1981:347)

Discourses beyond the novelistic, into the realm of poetic and lyrical, take dialogic shape in the social realm in a way that surpasses Bakhtin’s specific assertions of monologic poetics as challenge to the contemporary hierarchical canon. Perhaps the best way to address the multiplicity of voices in terms of salient aspects of identity is through the multiple discourses of musical popularity between the “traditional” and “modern” guises of genre.

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A fiddler by the name of Ashley MacIsaac was “discovered by Philip Glass and his former wife, JoAnne Akalaitis, who have summer houses in Inverness County” (Feintuch 2004:90). The couple brought young MacIsaac to New York, where he began his career playing at various venues in the city as well as back home on Cape Breton Island. In 1992, at age 16, the musician recorded one of his first albums, titled Close to the Floor, which contains mostly acoustic traditional tunes, and in 1993 he recorded a local favorite, A Cape Breton Christmas. It was in 1995 that Ashley23 joined the Canadian top 40 hits with the hit song “Sleepy Maggie,” featured on the acclaimed album, Hi: How Are You Today? which is a syncretism of traditional tunes merged with mid-90s pop style. The album went platinum in Canada, and put Cape Breton fiddle music “on the map,” so to speak. By this time, Natalie MacMaster had really already done that with her album 1993 gold album Fit as a Fiddle. And Cape Breton fiddlers have been, since as far back as the 1960s, the topic of some intrigue in global music/fiddle-playing circles and traditional music aficionados, primarily for the unique style of playing traditional Scottish tunes, the regional “flavors” of various techniques from around the island, and the famous tropes gathered “all along the Ceilidh Trail.” But while MacIsaac’s commercial success is due to the captivating presence with which he plays, a traditional technique that is shared by others back on the Island (much like that of his cousin, MacMaster), his career as a musician gives us a more dynamic and complex window into notions of identity and genre. “As many people in Cape Breton will tell you, Natalie and Ashley have inspired a generation of young musicians to take up the fiddle” (Feintuch 2004:90). At least, youth gravitating toward the fiddle was evident in the local children’s concert I attended at the Barra Strait docks one Monday evening during the Féis an Eilein. There were more fiddle players than there were pianists or guitarists. The generic features generally associated with fiddle playing are far removed from the “rock star” phenomenon that in the late 1970s and 1980s had thousands of young people rushing out to learn the guitar. But MacIsaac’s persona did just that for many Cape Breton youths: MacIsaac signed with A&M records, and went on the road, touring with such mainstream artists as the Chieftains and Sarah McLachlan and Melissa Etheridge. He got excellent reviews for his quicksilver fiddling, and soon forged an outrageous public persona: step-dancing on Conan O’Brien’s show wearing nothing under his kilt; loudly telling interviewers that he was a “fiddle slut” who

23 According to Feintuch (2004:90), “everyone refers to fiddlers by their first names in Cape Breton,” a sentiment that in my experience seemed to extend to pipers, dancers, singers, and most other folks.

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liked hearing Courtney Love sing about heroin. During breaks from touring, MacIsaac was also recording, and in 1995 he released “Hi How Are You Today?” with its bizarre mixing of traditional and modern sounds. (Mead 1999:52)

As a young man, MacIsaac was thrust into a world of popularity in New York City, where his music thrived as did his persona; his fame came with the benefits of loads of money and the privilege of living openly gay, whereas in Cape Breton relatively few people knew about his lifestyle and sexual appetites, which according to Mead made MacIsaac “infamous”: In 1996, McClean’s selected him to be on its annual honor roll of worthy Canadians, and he managed to get himself struck from the list by telling one of the magazine’s writers about his underage boyfriend and his fondness for a particular sexual practice involving micturation. (The magazine ended up running a disapproving article that reprimanded MacIsaac for his “stunning recklessness about his image.”) (Mead 1999:53)

Figure 8: MacIsaac performing “Sleepy Maggie” on the Conan O’Brien Show (1997) moments before flashing the cameras

Mead also noted: Cape Breton purists criticized MacIsaac for messing with the music, and he defended himself aggressively. “Celts were the original punks,” he told one interviewer. Unlike, say, the recordings made in the early nineties by American hip-hop producers who sampled jazz riffs, MacIsaac’s music was a true fusion of new and old, and he knew the old as well as anyone. (Mead 1999:52)

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There is a dialogic power struggle in this example that is an important consideration for the efficacy of preservation of tradition. Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia become more than just social fact, as expressions of tradition are at odds with a central monologizing force that seeks to eliminate specific aspects deemed undesirable or unworthy of preservation. Thus over time, the dividing line between what is “traditional” and what is “not traditional” is continually drawn and re-drawn around parts of MacIsaac’s persona, the creation of specific, memory-altering fictions surrounding his life and his music. Likewise, MacIsaac himself will continue to recontextualize experience and memory dialogically in a continually developing sense of being. This is social interaction, and constantly takes place in each of us as we come face-to-face with our surroundings. MacIsaac’s international success also helped launch the career of Mary Jane Lamond, as much as Lamond’s recording of her first album introduced the young fiddler to a wider audience. Bho Thir Nan Craobh, “From the Land of Trees,” was her first album, featuring Ashley MacIsaac on fiddle and piano. It was recorded in 1995 while Lamond was still in the Celtic Studies program at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In her promotional biography she noted fond memories of visiting her grandparents in Nova Scotia during her youth, where it is said she fell in love with Scottish Gaelic song traditions. Certainly, Lamond has made a remarkable career out of Gaelic song, and her voice is iconic of the genre. Shortly after recording with MacIsaac on Hi How Are You Today? she released Suas e!, a brilliant album of traditional songs arranged with a modern edge. The album received a few Juno Award nominations and saw a great deal of radio play after its release in 1997. Since that time she has made numerous other recordings and continues to be active in the Gaelic community in Cape Breton. Her typical technique has always been, as she says, “to pick a variety of songs in the tradition and work on different ways to arrange them” (Lamond 2005). Indeed, she is a musician at heart: On [the album] Làn Dùil Lamond’s spell-binding renditions of treasured Gaelic songs are fused with original arrangements using a variety of instruments, from the familiar fiddle and bagpipes to Indian tabla. Ultimately, it’s a new style of world music that is unique to Mary Jane Lamond. Yet as the singer herself will tell you, it’s the stories that matter. While Làn Dùil soothes and stirs, it also chronicles Cape Breton’s living Scottish Gaelic culture. The sounds of friends, family and local legends are heard throughout the album. Despite the important

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role her music plays in preserving Scottish Gaelic songs that would otherwise rarely be heard outside Cape Breton, Mary Jane Lamond says Làn Dùil’s primary purpose is to entertain. “This is a huge oral literary tradition that is being lost at an alarming rate,” she says, “and I am involved with community things that help conserve it for younger people. But I’m also an interpreter, a singer and musician and in my music the challenge is to create something new and exciting that doesn’t destroy the heart of it.” (Jones & Co. 2005)

Some of the songs on her albums sound as if they are direct recordings of milling frolics, complete with the soundscape of the pounding and dragging of wool. Her efforts to preserve the traditions of Cape Breton’s Gaelic song involve numerous community functions around the Narrows, as well as participation with events through the Highland Village Museum and with the Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia. I was happy to meet Lamond during the Féis, and have the opportunity to sit at the milling table with her, where I admired her voice and wealth of knowledge of Gaelic songs. For me, Lamond is another example of the dynamic engagement of tradition, where traditional purists might chastise her hybridized sound from the monologic sense of preservation, but ultimately she transformed a broader song genre into something new, expressively, more relevant, more easily disseminated, and widely appreciated. Her music, like MacIsaac’s is inspired by a sense of tradition; her efforts in that regard have had the reciprocal effect of increasing the popularity of songs, even some that have become local favorites. Lamond’s featured vocals on the “Sleepy Maggie” single bend the puirt-a-beul genre around a hybridization of traditional fiddling and electronica beats (Play example). Dannsa, ruidhle, ruidhle bhoidheach, Ruidhle bhoidheach, dannsa direach. Dannsa, ruidhle, ruidhle bhoidheach, Ruidhle bhoidheach, dannsa direach.

Ciamar a ni mi dannsa direach, Ciamar a ni mi ruidhle bhoidheach? Ciamar a ni mi dannsa direach, Dh'fhalbh am prionn as bonn mo chota?

Dance, reel, a bonny reel, A bonny reel, a tidy dance. Dance, reel, a bonny reel, A bonny reel, a tidy dance.

How can I make a tidy dance, How can I dance a bonny reel?

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How can I make a tidy dance, The pin went from the hem of my coat? (MacIsaac 1995)

Standing stage right of MacIsaac on the Conan O’Brien show, she leaned into the microphone and sang these lyrics as the fiddler leapt into the air and revealed what was under his kilt. These musicians represent two dynamic examples of dialogic entextualization. The very process that creates traditions in the first place is what Bakhtin calls our “specific human nature,” that is that a subject “always expresses” himself or herself, that is, always creates a text (or the potential of a text) (Bakhtin 1986:107). Herein lies the problem with scholarly notions of preservation in particular to “ethnic” and “traditional” aspects of culture, is that in any human activity, the variegated, complex interrelationships of dynamic identity must all be considered, and not stylistically compartmentalized and ignored. Ethnicity and tradition become exposed as human activities or constructs, genres of identity. When we consider the example of these two artists, we see all of this dynamic complexity at once, and are brought face-to-face with their narratives. So what do we preserve in this example? Do we use stylistics as a system of weights and measures? In ignoring aspects of the musician’s life that garnered the most mass appeal in favor of a traditional style of fiddle playing that sees very little global representation, we embody the socially acceptable and invent that which we wish to remain as tradition, creating a monolithic vision of identity. Perhaps the hypertextual access to such texts in the information age contribute to our sense of what is ephemeral and what is enduring, but in any event, tradition in the social mind of Cape Breton is a negotiation, a direct reaction to the loss of language and culture as a result of forced migration, colonialism and industrialization that serves as a generic setting for emergent self-other actualization.

Commodification of Song: A Type of Preservation? I am extraordinarily fascinated by this question of preservation because of the many ways it is conceived in dialogic performance. And by extension, notions of what is enduring versus what is ephemeral seem inextricably linked to our interactivity and our present social economy. In scholarship, preservation finds its greatest early applications in historical and archeological studies, specifically with regard to “material culture,” those extant remains of texts far removed from the present chronotopes of contextualization and understanding. Studies which began to

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note the impact of social change on reciprocal moves toward preservation came as late as the 1970s and 80s (Shils 1975; Ong 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), but notions of “preserving” old traditions date as far back as the Victorian era, or perhaps the beginning of humanities and modern scholarship itself. So as far as I understand it, then, preservation of culture is a complex political hegemony that often finds more utility in not preserving than it ever could in preserving. Patrick Wright (1985) addresses this (though not explicitly), in dancing around the question, “Who is preserving what and for whom?” Who gets to make these decisions for a collective identity, and why? It is these questions and similar ones that inspire a critical analysis of concepts of “tradition” and “commodification” regarding Cape Breton culture. It is especially poignant to regard notions of preservation in the “information age,” where facebook, twitter, and blogs shift the definition of ephemeral utterances to a more enduring social interaction, mediated through machines. By “commodification of song,” I mean the transformation of a systematic human activity into an economic transaction, specifically, in two connotations. First, and with regard to song, I mean to invoke Marx’s notion of the “fetishism of commodities,” that is, of the social interrelationships that are generically exchanged as “things.” In Marx’s sense, too, a “thing” is never defined in and of itself; it is “Relational.” Certainly in a definitional sense, we can regard a song as a thing to be exchanged, but in such a transaction the relational component is suppressed (or disregarded), such as the song, in and of itself, is lifeless until it is being performed (or perhaps “recalled”). This is a necessary condition in order for any song-object to enter into market capital. Additionally, the character of how relations are conceived in the exchange of a song is considered to change considering whether a song is re-performed as opposed to “reproduced.” (Mechanical reproduction of a singular performance of a song is considered a different type of dissemination than many different recordings of many different performances of the same song.) In this connotation, then, the song becomes tangible—it takes up shelf space and/or file space, can be copied and deleted, and exchanged—wherein interaction becomes a meta-exchange to the commodity itself. This is a process that has been referred to as “reification” (Lukács 1967; Strathern 1988; Uzendoski 2004, 2005; Taylor 2007). Second, the nature of the commodified song-object itself, outside itself and in its relation to other subjects and other song-objects, is imbued with a sense of use-value that dynamically alters its power and expressive efficacy. That which is fetishized is always reciprocally

112 connected to the relational sense of other fetishized things. It is this phenomenon that allows for the alienable moral ambiguity of the market, while at the same time bolsters reification as a means for other genres of social interaction. In invoking this connotation I focus on the elements of the social interrelationships surrounding commodities insomuch as they are expressively consumed, alienated from how they are produced. Use-value places emphasis on use, while aspects of production remained assumed. Marx’s evaluation of commodities gives us a launching pad for a particular social philosophy regarding the exchange of those commodities, but by no means will this be an exhaustive exploration of Marxist Capital. For example, Marx insisted that “if then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor.” He continues by noting that “even the product of labor has been transformed in our hands. If we make abstractions from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value” (Marx 1976:126). It stands to reason, then, that celebrities of commodified Cape Breton music influence the flow of collective identity. In addition to Mary Jane Lamond and Ashley MacIsaac, Natalie MacMaster has been an incredible influence on the global representation of the Cape Breton music scene. Her biography boasts the incredible reception of her style over the breadth of her career as she “captured and interpreted the Cape Breton Sound”: It’s a signature sound that has resonated with world audiences through 10 albums, multiple gold sales figures and 27 years; numerous Juno and East Coast Music Awards; two honorary degrees (from Niagara University, NY, and Trent University) and an honorary doctorate (St. Thomas University); the Order Of Canada – and a reputation as one of Canada’s most captivating performers. (NMOS 2009)

Her immense social popularity, a commodity in and of itself, takes on aspects of stylistics and a generic form for substance: …her audiences… are left clapping, hollering and screaming for more as MacMaster and her band wow them with stylistic diversity as reflected in such top-selling CDs as the Grammy-nominated My Roots Are Showing, Blueprint and Yours Truly. The applause only increases in excitement when MacMaster incorporates step dancing into her performance. “I was 16 when I started focusing on the step dancing, and it was kind of a joke at the time,” she recalls. “I was with a bunch of other young musicians and we all played and we all danced. It was a joke at the beginning, but then I began pulling it out of the hat so to speak when I needed to perk up the crowd, and it always did the trick.” (NMOS 2009)

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In her reflection on the reception of her music, she ultimately seems to defer to its efficacy as a combination of three generic elements—tradition, expression, and time: But it’s her majesty with the bow and her intricate technique in making the fiddle sing and championing the Cape Breton tradition that floors her admirers for over 100 shows per year. “I guess culture and tradition never go out of style,” MacMaster explains. “For my crowds, they’ve been there for so many years—they just keep building and hanging on. I think they’ve seen me go from a very youthful new sound into a maturity and a confidence through the years. I also think they receive whatever it is that I give, not through me trying, but only through the nature of music itself. I always get the sense from them that they deeply understand the unspoken essence of what I do. That’s probably a combination of the Cape Breton tradition and a combination of personality and time.” (NMOS 2009)

And regarding her expression, there is a pragmatic recognition of her deviation from a concrete sense of tradition: “I am a very musical person,” MacMaster declares. “I love music, and I don’t just love Cape Breton fiddling, although it’s my favourite: I love jazz and pop rock and country. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Anne Murray—if I hear something really great, like Bonnie Raitt’s “Luck of the Draw” and “Good Man, Good Woman,” I want to be a part of it. That love spawned a few tunes like ‘Catharsis’ I recorded on No Boundaries— my first rock piece—and ‘Flamenco Fling’ on In My Hands. I heard flamenco guitar playing and I thought it was awesome, and thought I could put a fiddle tune over flamenco rhythms. I guess I’ve never felt that because I’m from Cape Breton, that’s all I can do. I’ve always felt like I can play music however I want to play it, although everything is rooted in the tradition of Cape Breton fiddling.” (NMOS 2009)

This social dialog lends credence to notions of tradition as a concrete marker, a form from which MacMaster herself deviates; though informed by it, she transforms its essence through the dialog of her own being. This transformation is viewed subjectively, since stylistic elements defined as “traditional” remain the impetus of her particular expressions, regardless of how specific genre boundaries are blurred or shattered. But this is because the elements of tradition that she performs are in no way static or natural to a sense of place; rather they are “ever-evolving ideas, constantly invented and reinvented by both dominant and minority cultural groups through changing historical contexts” (Schnell 2003:7). I heard numerous fiddle tunes played in my time in Cape Breton, and while I am no fiddler myself, I can say with certainty that I heard a

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remarkable amount of discussion about how Cape Breton fiddling style more accurately “preserves an older way of playing,” something that has long been lost in Scotland, Ireland, Wales… all the “Celtic” nations. To be clear, whether or not Cape Breton fiddle stylistics actually does this is not a point to prove, because for some people it does and for other it does not and still for others elements of both and neither are true statements of social fact. It is not my intention to perpetuate the monologic scholarly penchant for assuming the ultimate position of authority regarding naturalized studies of stylistics. What is at question is the level with which traditions are discovered/invented and imbued with meaning that contribute to a sense of identity and, as a result, which traditions must be preserved and passed down to future generations. In the narrative of commodification of stylistics we can see the impact that artists have had on a collective sense of identity in Cape Breton. As Feintuch notes: Ashley and Natalie’s successes also seem to have added additional value to the local musicians, who are increasingly invited to play off the island, featured in the media (Buddy MacMaster was awarded the Order of Canada recently), and becoming known abroad as exemplars of the old Scottish fiddle style. With the large transnational commerce in music described as Celtic, recordings of Cape Breton music are finding new markets. (Feintuch 2004:91)

The growth of the Celtic music market provides numerous narratives about “tradition” and “preservation” as people dialogically negotiate chronotopes and the generic forms of ethnicity and relational identity. The commodification of Gaelic song did not begin with the advent of recording technology, but rather was already well-established by that time. Still, the songs that immigrants brought to Nova Scotia, especially the musical labor genres that are largely remembered and exchanged in milling frolics, have remained largely untouched with regard to the tartanist imagery and piano arrangements attached to numerous ballads and other genres in the British Isles throughout the past few centuries. Indeed, the songs were utilized in a vibrant, fluid, and functional sense, and only recently (since the post WWII folk revivals) have issues of commodification and preservation become of more noticeable import with regard to their meaning and utility in identity. Mary Jane Lamond’s recordings give us an example of this type of preservation, in that her expression of Gaelic song emphasizes how important the stories, language, and aesthetic are to her own sense of meaning. Looking at one of the songs from her 2005 album Stòras, we can

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see an example of simultaneity in which commodification and technologizing can have aspects of preservation. She writes in the album’s notes of the song “An Gaidheal am measg nan Gaidheal” (“A Gael among the Lowlanders”): This is another song I got from Peter MacLean. It was composed by the Bard MacLean in Tiree before he immigrated to Nova Scotia. The story given by MacLean Sinclair in Clarsach na Coille is that a man named Angus MacNeil was working for the Bard’s father for a time as a hired hand. He left to go to look for work in the lowlands. When he returned he asked the Bard to compose a song for Catriona MacLeod, a sweetheart that he had in Canna. Although the Bard composed a sweet love song apparently Angus didn’t marry Catriona after all. Apparently he threw her over for an older woman with more money! In any case I still really like the song. (MJLOS 2005)

She provides the text of the song itself, linking the listener to her narrative and to the Bard MacLean, to a broader sense of Gaelic Bardic tradition (Play example): O a ruin, gur a tu th’ m’aire O a ruin, gur a tu th’ m’aire Tu-fhein a ruin, gura tu th’air m’aire Gur e do shugragh tha tighinn fainear dhomh.

Cha togar fonn leam ach trom th’air m’aineol Cha dean mi òran ‘s an doigh bu mhath leam, Gur mi bha gorach, nuair thug mi gealladh Dh’an nigheag oig a th’an comhnuidh ‘n Canna.

Gur mi bha stàiteal nuair dh’fhàg mi Ailean, A’togail gàradh, ‘sa càradh beulach, Gum b’fheàrr bhith ann airneo ‘s meallt mo bharail, Na bhith ‘san àm seo ‘san taing nan Gallaibh.

Nuair nì sinn gluasad Dìluain dh’an bhaile, Bha bodaich Gallt ann a gheall ar meallachd, Cha tuig mi nàduir le cànan Gallaich, Tha mise dall gun an càinnt am theangaidh.

Thoir soiridh bhuamsa thar cuan dh’a m’ leannan, Is innsaibh fhein dhi gu bheil mi fallain, Gu bheil mi’n drast ann an Cader Parish, ‘S gu deachaidh Gàidhlig an àite seallaidh.

‘S Tu Chatriona, tha tighinn air m’aire, Gur e do stòras a rinn mo mhealladh, ‘S tu bhith bòidheach, gun bhosd, gun bharrachd, Dh’en fhine mhòr ‘o MhacLeoid na Hearradh.

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O love you are on my mind, O love you are on my mind, It is you, o love, who is on my mind, It is your playfulness that I think of.

A song doesn’t lift me but I am heavy of heart, I will not make a song the way I used to, I was foolish when I made a promise To the young girl from Canna

I was stately before I left Allen, Building walls and fixing fences I would prefer to be there than Than to be here obliged to the Galls

When we left Monday to go to the town There were English old men there who made us promises I didn’t understand the English language I am blind without my language

Send my greetings over the sea to Catriona, And tell her that healthy And I am yet in Cader parish, And that Gaelic has gone from my view

And you Catriona, you are on my mind, It is your treasures which have enticed me. And you are beautiful, without boasting, without superiority From the great line of the MacLeods of Harris. (MJLOS 2005)

In her music, Lamond seems to embody the interactive nature that is a deeply-embedded practice common to Gaelic song genres. In particular, the songs—especially those musical labor genres exemplified in the milling frolic—have throughout history been exchanged and shared from person to person in small active groups, as opposed to performed as a means of entertainment for a larger, passive group. This shift of paradigm for musical activity echoes the changes in the post-Industrial modern era common to many modernized societies. Lamond’s recordings, then, can be seen as a mode of preservation in the sense that they are accessible commodities that can be passed onto younger generations, as traditions of their own with which to interact and imbue meaning.

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Increasingly, as well, local movements such as the Féis an Eilein in Christmas Island follow the same model, recording songs from their milling frolics not simply for posterity, but to bolster the fund of the festival society as well as preserve and disseminate their Gaelic songs. In 2002, produced in cooperation with CBC Radio and Comunn Féis an Eilein, a group of local tradition-bearers and singers recorded “Còmhla Cruinn Gathered Together,” a collection of milling frolic songs, along with a fiddle medley and a piping medley, serves as a snapshot of Gaelic culture in the Narrows in the twenty-first century.

Figure 9: CD Jacket of Còmhla Cruinn

In a review of the recording, Dembling noted: The songs themselves are also a varied bunch. They range from the popular to the seldom-heard, from the humourous to the serious, and are balanced between local compositions and older songs carried over from Scotland. The milling songs are the soul of the album…. Colin, the youngest native speaker at the table, shows his ease and confidence in the language with his rendition of Ged a Sheòl Mi air m’Aineol. And I could only marvel at the complex and subtle language rhythms in the songs by the older singers, such as Peter Jack’s wonderful version of Nigheanag a’ Chùil Duinn Nach Fhan Thu? In fact it is a treat to hear everyone bring their own swing to the songs. What makes this CD special is how seamless the entire range of performances comes together. Mary Jane’s beautiful voice doesn’t overshadow anyone else. The old timers’ authenticity does nothing to diminish the quality of the younger learners’ performances. The preconception of recorded music as either art or archive is turned on its head. Anyone who has observed or participated in Gaelic singing in Cape Breton, whether at a milling

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frolic, house ceilidh, or any other informal environment, will instantly recognize the aesthetic captured here. This is less a performance than a sharing of songs. Because we get to hear everyone’s voice, the entire tradition is enriched. (Dembling 2002)

I purchased a copy of the CD the night of the twentieth annual Féis milling frolic, though I had heard clips of it before. The booklet that accompanies the recording is a thick collection of lyrics and translations, as well as a concise history of some of the songs, biographies of the performers, and an account of the Gaelic emigration to the New World, by Hector MacNeil. In his early work, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Arjun Appadurai writes, “(…) commodities are things with a particular type of social potential, that they are distinguishable from ‘products,’ ‘objects,’ ‘goods,’ ‘artifacts,’ and other sorts of things—but only from a certain point of view.” By extension, he goes on to suggest, “It is definitionally useful to regard commodities as existing in a very wide variety of societies (though with a special intensity and salience in modern, capitalist societies)” (Appadurai 1986:6-7). Perhaps this definitional emphasis has utility for viewing commodified and marketed songs as “things with a particular type of social potential,” in that they provide a wider audience with a link to a localized tradition—one that is actively used to actualize meaning and ultimately a sense of identity within that tradition.

“Our Traditions Will be Lost if We Don’t Sing Them” Michael Taussig declared, “Song is the great medium. As breath and rhythm it collates and connects the vibratory quality of being. Emanating from the chest and throat, connected to dream and to body painting with red ochre, it connects a wide arc of possibilities and impossibilities” (2009:15). Here he refers to Australian songs of sorcery that were an aspect of Walter Cannon’s research in psycho-neural physiology from the 1920s (See Cannon 1932:19- 26). But the passage is equally poignant in the case of milling songs (or any shared song, for that matter), perhaps not in the sense of directly granting power to a “sorcerer” (the one who sings a song), but in that the performance practice transports the singer into a shared traditional space where historical narratives (and memory), identity, awareness, and expression become one. In Cape Breton, especially, song holds a vital position concerning Gaelic identity, both as it is lived by those who sing the songs and those who watch and listen from a distance.

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The physicality of a milling frolic is important. In an interview at the Highland Village Museum, I was told that while the songs are key, and crucial to the revival and remembrance of Gaelic, simply singing milling songs with a group does not constitute a milling frolic. In order to be considered a milling frolic, “you need your hands on the wool.” A circle of cloth, gripped by several singers seated in a circle around a table, where the cloth is worked into the surface of the table rhythmically as songs are sung. Hands move in unison as voices during the refrains; participants feel the hard surface of the table through the bundle of cloth in their hands. The percussive motion accompanies the entirety of the song, and between the refrains the singers listen to the narrative as the soloist sings the verses to the continuous thumping that drives each tune. “How long have you been singing these songs?” I asked one of the festival attendants originally from Cape Breton who now lives in Halifax. “Everyone here has a connection to Cape Breton and to Gaelic,” she said. “I grew up around Gaelic, but never really spoke it myself until I went to college. That’s when I got interested in getting back to my roots.” I asked, “But what about the songs themselves? Did you start learning those during your college years?” She smiled and replied, “Yes. Well, learning them yes. Of course we all knew what a milling frolic was and were familiar with the songs since we’d heard them, but I wanted to learn the language and the songs were the best way to do that.” She pointed toward a friend and noted, “He started learning the language because of the songs, because he wanted to learn more of them.” Later, as the discussion continued, it gravitated more toward language and ultimately tradition. I asked a purposefully loaded question, “Can Gaelic songs keep up the interest in language?” Someone noted, “It’s going to take more than that. You’ve got to be interested in singing because the language needs to be kept up.” Another person said, “Our language is why we do this. Our traditions will be lost if we don’t sing them.” The milling frolic is a Gaelic community function, but more than this it is a chronotope of what it means to be a Gael in Cape Breton, past, present, and future, an activity where such elements of meaning and identity can be dynamically performed. It is dynamic because the milling frolic is not simply a place where traditions and texts are preserved and exchanged, but rather a place where people (in all their complex ideas and expectations) express texts dialogically, constructing an emergent space of shared understanding where a host of complex interrelationships are experienced and where after

120 memory and narrative are combined to give such experiences meaning and a place within the overall generic notion of traditional understanding.

Forced to Preserve as Opposed to Disseminate In a book titled Heart of a Stranger, by Margaret Laurence (1976)—a book I read as a result of a reference by Ian McKay during my preliminary research for this dissertation—there is a moving passage that puts preservation and cultural power struggles into perspective. Laurence writes: History, as history, is moving when one catches a momentary sense of it, as I think I did in the Highlands, because the humans who lived before oneself are suddenly endowed with flesh and bones, and because man’s incredible ability to survive both the outer and the inner damage seems to me to be heartening wherever it occurs. But there is another kind of history, the kind that has the most power over us in unsuspected ways, the names o[f] tunes or trees that can recall a thousand images, and this almost-family history can be related only to one’s first home.

I am inclined to think one’s real roots do not extend very far back in time, nor very far forward. I can imagine and care about my possible grandchildren, and even (although in a weakened way) about my great-grandchildren. Going back, no one past my great-grandparents has any personal reality for me. I care about the ancestral past very much, but in a kind of mythical way. The ancestors, in the end, become everyone’s ancestors. But the history that one can feel personally encompasses only a very few generations. (Laurence 1976:122)

The way in which narrative memory is given a “mythical” meaning and linked to present-day interaction rests at the core of an actualized identity. Such a process cannot be experienced outside its dialogic existence, however, and it is crucial to remember that generic forms are essentializing forces that provide narrative utility for constructing shared spaces of understanding. When used monologically these narratives are composed as a body-text, a corporeal and familial relation to ancient reified traditions from a mythical past far removed yet ever present. They are favored formal features that marginalize a group of people (who dynamically endow their surroundings with a sense of daily experiential meaning through dialogic activity) as little more than a unitary body-commodity—a geographic locale where “the people” always do [insert thing here] just like “they always have and always will.” Such a tourist-attracting notion serves only to keep “the people” in the periphery.

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Under the premiership of Angus L. Macdonald during the 1930s, many narratives were written that shifted public ideas about Nova Scotia and Cape Breton toward what McKay calls “ethnic essentialism.” McKay wrote: An area once construed as a progressive and industrial hive of coal mines (not to mention Ford dealerships) was now described as a haven of simple folk. Neil MacNeil, a journalist with the New York Times who had been a college friend of Macdonald’s, achieved renown with The Highland Heart in Nova Scotia (1948), which painted a heart-warming portrait of the MacNeils of Barra, who exemplified Darwin’s “survival of the fittest, for only the strong, the brave and the intelligent could survive the rigors of their climate and the hardships of their life.” (McKay 1992:23)

To be sure, this peripheral notion of Cape Breton persists to the present day in various forms. The purpose that such narratives serve in today’s Cape Breton, removed from the daily life of its residents (yet a reality of which they are all, to varying respects, are aware), is all too apparent. Dean MacCannell discussed this phenomenon in a paper titled, “Reconstructed Ethnicity: Tourism and Cultural Identity in Third World Communities.” He writes, “Institutions of modern mass tourism are producing new and more highly deterministic ethnic forms than those produced during the colonial phase” (MacCannell 1984:377). In its quest to draw one group to view the Other, “tourism promotes the restoration, preservation, and fictional recreation of ethnic attributes” (Ibid). “Reconstructed ethnicity,” then, simply refers to the genres that have emerged from the dialogic impact of tourism on the region. But these genres as performed are out of necessity embodied and entextualized elements of identity, ways of ethno-being that characterize the reflexive reality of experiential interaction. John L. and Jean Comaroff write in the recent book, Ethnicity, Inc.: Ethnicity, Inc. has, without doubt, opened up new means of producing value, of claiming recognition, of asserting sovereignty, of giving affective voice to belonging; this, not infrequently, in the all-but-total absence of alternatives…. Ethno-commodities are queer things: their mass marketing is as likely to animate cultural identities as to devalue the difference on which they are founded— although, in the process, they may reformulate identity sui generis in important respects. (Comaroff 2009:142)

The narrative of an ethnicity in the public eye in Cape Breton now depends on these reciprocal marginalities brought about through tourism in order to negotiate the efficacy of an ethnic identity. Gaels who suffer the reality and struggle to maintain their language as spoken in daily

122 life utilize the generic public identity as a genre through which to articulate who they are and are not in relation to this essentialized description. Gaelic ethnicity is an increasingly important concept within Cape Breton, as its formal features are taking shape within the larger global notion of Celtic ethnicity and as public spheres become more aware of the dynamic ethnic narratives that surround them. Meaning and identity in the social realm has always depended on dialogic narratives, but particularly in the present reality of technology and information, social identity “is almost wholly mediated through processes of commodification” (Comaroff 2009:150), and, I would add, ethnic commodities as genres in and of themselves are almost wholly mediated through technologies that solidify their tangible shape as commodified objects, generic elements with which to construct the “profile” of a social “whole.” Musical exchange within this realm likewise relies on technologizing and commodifying song-objects as snapshots of preserved texts that function more as elements of an honored ethnic tradition in their meta-narrative substance than of the expressive event of the song itself. Still, such a categorical and commodified life manages to provide access, through the meta-narrative, to actualized expressive moments where those dialogically engaged in song and dance articulate meaning and identity of a deeper kind, splitting the atom of the self into an explosive phenomenon from which emerges a wealth of genres to perform.

In the Community during the Week of the Féis The driveway that leads to the Highland Village Museum forms a “Y.” Head to the right up the hill, and you find the two-tiered parking area that serves the museum proper; to the left up the opposite hill there is an inn, not surprisingly named the “Highland Heights Inn,” where one afternoon, stomach growling, I stopped for a bite to eat. The elaborate entryway has two ornately potted plants and white, metalized doors with gold-trim window centers that lead to a modest reception area. I sat in the dining room to the right of the entrance, along a row of windows that provide a spectacular view of the Barra Strait Bridge and the massive Bras d’Or lake that juxtaposes the heavily wooded landscape sloping steeply from the water’s edge. I ordered the “Turkey Club” sandwich—store-packaged, processed turkey slices with genetically-enhanced tomatoes and lettuce joined with imported bacon strips on mayonnaise-spread white bread— which tasted great, especially considering the interval of time that had lapsed since the last time I

123 had eaten. Thoughts about “Highland” imagery bounced around in my head as I masticated and peered out over the water. Seated two tables toward the center of the room were a group of people passing the day’s news and catching up in Gaelic. I had not yet met them, but would come to know them over the week of the Féis. Some of the group lived nearby, others were from the area but have since moved elsewhere—mainly to Halifax—and a few others were affiliated with the Gaelic College at St. Ann’s. I listened in on their conversation from time to time as I sat there, eating my generic sandwich. Keeping up the language was a key focus of their conversation, especially regarding one of the members of the table who was, like myself, just a learner of the language. But in addition to the value ascribed to the language and its upkeep, there was another running narrative regarding Cape Breton—that being born into this language was, regardless of one’s current fluency—was being born into an ethnicity of sorts. The language that was being learned was already a part of who this person was, his “birthright,” a tangible and inalienable element of his flesh and bone. It was an ethnic awareness that carried with it a requisite connection of Gaelic geography. This can also be seen in a Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia interview with Jody MacKenzie, a high school student at Sgoil Mhic Fhraing a’ Chaolais (Rankin School of the Narrows) in Iona, Nova Scotia. Jody notes: Gaelic is a significant part of my heritage. Almost all of my ancestors are of a Scottish background. My grandparents were native speakers and while growing up, I would often hear my grandmother and her siblings conversing in the language. I always thought this was amazing and Gaelic began to interest me at an early age. From grades primary through six, I received Gaelic language instruction through school. In the summer time, I always attended day camps put on by Féis an Eilein. Gaelic culture always seemed to be surrounding me. There is a strong desire in me to continue learning Gaelic because it connects me to my past. It is truly important to me. I am trying to learn as much as I can while I am still in school. I know that as I get older and become more focused on my career, Gaelic may take a backseat. But right now, I am trying to absorb as much as I can. Gaelic has also provided me with employment opportunities, such as entertaining at events and working for Féis an Eilein. Gaelic will always hold a special place in my heart, no matter where I go in life. It will always connect me to my home in Christmas Island and my past. (CG 2010)

In Jody’s statement, the interaction in “Gaelic culture” is the result of a collection of communal elements linking music, language, geography, and people. All of these elements exist

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dialogically within the community, dynamically defined and redefined with varying senses of meaning both in the way they are performed and the way they are perceived. During the week of the Féis, Gaels travel to the Narrows to get the opportunity to speak the language with each other, and to participate with the festival’s musical events. Tourists stop in as well, and of course the occasional interested party such as myself who wants to learn the language and the songs. It is this atmosphere of sharing that is most telling for me, regarding language and musical interaction. Hector MacNeil, in an interview for the video segement of the twentieth annual Féis an Eilein symposium, noted: We heard about Fèis Bharraigh. James Watson was working at the Iona Highland Village Museum. He spoke to others and to me at Fèis Bharraigh. We held a meeting to which James was invited to tell us about Fèis and fèisan in general. That prompted us to start the first feis…. We wanted youngsters to get involved, and we wanted to encourage the culture in the whole community. Although there were Gaelic classes, we didn’t hold classes in fiddling, piping, or dancing. That’s the origin of Féis an Eilein…. Some of the youngsters have made a good start at Gaelic and are approaching fluency. Perhaps we haven’t seen as much progress as we’d like, but young people are learning Gaelic and are working towards fluency. (FESV 2010)

Apart from the “reconstructed ethnicity” of Highland imagery that is a reified element of community around the Narrows—predominantly as an aspect of the Highland Village Museum—there is an interactivity that depends on a language, which in turn depends on its continued use, which depends on a constant renewal of legitimacy and meaning, which is constructed and fostered through interaction. Seamus Watson pointed out, “People on Christmas Island are very active. As well as the annual Féis, they work to introduce Gaelic to schoolchildren. They have small classes and events such as milling frolics in their hall. They have evening classes for adults. So, in addition to the Féis, they work at it all year” (FESV 2010). This cyclical interactivity borrows from the essentialized nature of the misrepresentation of itself in order to embody and/or challenge elements of meaning in any moment to arrive at a sense of identity. Is this social process in any way a new one? Thus, when considering issues of memory, remembrance, and the self with regard to interaction in and through music, the semantic forms that first allow meaning to emerge must not be overlooked when considering the efficacy of those forms within the self and the social group. In the case of Cape Breton, there are many examples of this process at play within the generic

125 sense of ethnicity among Gaels. The dialogisms of musical-social interaction fuel the constant treatment and re-treatment of community hierarchies and views on language, traditions, and the self in the modern diaspora.

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CHAPTER 6 TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION

“The musician, like music, is ambiguous. He plays a double game. He is simultaneously musicus and cantor, reproducer and prophet. If an outcast, he sees society in a political light. If accepted, he is its historian, the reflection of its deepest values. He speaks of society and he speaks against it. This duality was already present before capital arrived to impose its own rules and prohibitions.” –Jacques Attali (1985:12)

We must approach events and experiences from the premise that all reality is social reality. This is not a whimsical abstraction, but rather a theoretical position in the exploration of fundamental human social processes that are infinitely complex yet generically organized. Humans live socially, and construct their sense of personhood dialogically. Within this framework, social theory can be explored without biological reductionism, without taxonomic dogmatism, and one can approach the narratives of actually-experienced, socially-articulated nature of existence. “Being” is virtually dependent on its dialog with experience and contemplation, a perpetually developing life-event that is constantly objectified, defined, and redefined. The events of being gain meaning through communication, which is achieved through discovered and invented stratification of shared space, articulated through genres of texts performed and perceived. Music, beyond our theoretical constructions of its physical forms, is a social act. That is to say that music is a human activity that must be actively and simultaneously performed and experienced. To experience music is a uniquely dialogic phenomenon in what Bakhtin calls the “event-of-being,” that once entering the realm of descriptive and theoretical elements has already ceased to be. Yet in order to be actualized this experiential event-of-being must be articulated as such within a secondary narrative, a Janus-faced simultaneity that is aesthetically generic but ultimately an elaborate shared fiction of sorts. Because of this, when I discuss the admittedly verbose notion of “musical-social interaction,” I phrase it as such since I cannot separate the features of music a priori, from the generic forms that exist as ways in which to articulate

127 themselves, even though in the moment of the event-of-being I experience them as such. Or to put it another way: music is performed and experienced in the paradoxical forms of genre—its conditional and transcendental and narrative elements all combine to elicit its substance in momentous events, around which further narratives and meta-narratives are created to describe and contextualize those events. Bakhtin wrote: All attempts to surmount—from within theoretical cognition—the dualism of cognition and life, the dualism of thought and once-occurrent concrete actuality, are utterly hopeless. Having detached the content/sense aspect of cognition from the historical act of its actualization, we can get out from within it and enter the ought only by way of a leap. To look for the actual cognitional act as a performed deed in the content/sense is the same as trying to pull oneself up by one’s own hair. The detached cognitional act comes to be governed by its own immanent laws, according to which it then develops as if it had a will of its own. Inasmuch as we have entered that content, i.e., performed an act of abstraction, we are now controlled by its autonomous laws or, to be exact, we are simply no longer present in it as individually and answerably active human beings. (Bakhtin 1993:7)

Musical-social interaction as a human activity is, generally, a shared space of understanding and musical participation that simultaneously encompasses the awareness of musical expressivity in narratives, symbolism, and genre dialogically. As a human activity, it becomes part of the narratives of memory and meaning, as embodied symbols are learned, experienced, and expressed they take shape within the process of self-other actualization wherein certain moments become markers of identity, and awareness of the realities of others’ identities. In this chapter, I discuss ways we might begin to think about musical-social interaction with regard to this identity-link and as a meta-concern beyond (but not exclusive from) stylistics and form. Identity—cultural or otherwise—is comprised through dialogic inventiveness, imagination, and performance in the social realm. As a result, that which is conceived of as traditional, while it is an accepted stable pattern upon which other aspects of the self and community can be expanded, ultimately is a temporal and processual phenomenon. The effectiveness of tradition, in its perceived preservation/continuation extends from the constructed reality of self and remains effective only in its subjective performance and communication. The reciprocity of inventive performance reinforces the subject’s social agency, in that the traditions which are most significant are the ones with which the subject most wholly and generically identifies.

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Narrative, Symbol, and Music Communication of the experience of music is governed almost entirely by narrative metaphors. I note “almost” because music can be performed directly from one subject to another thus in a sense “communicating” the indescribable elements of experiential events. But even in those performative moments, or similar events where one subject plays a recording of music, narratives abound in relation to the experiences and the sounds. These narratives and the experiences they artistically articulate rest at the core of invention and reinvention of self and society. In the milling frolic, song and story intertwine in the interactive moment to the point of blurring genres. The participatory act embodies and entextualizes the text as story itself, as well as the meta-narrative of the chronotope of milling wool. In John Shaw’s Brìgh an Òrain: A Story in Every Song, Lauchie MacLellan gives us his narrative of a milling frolic as experienced in Broad Cove, Cape Breton: [Once the wool had been prepared], toward the end of autumn, word was sent out to the neighbours in the immediate area that a milling frolic would be held on a particular night. By then, of course, everyone in the neighbourhood knew that there was to be a milling and was waiting eagerly for it. The man of the house, usually with a friend’s help, would fetch two large planks, twelve feet long by ten inches wide and two inches thick. These were set side by side to make a flat surface on which the web [the unfulled cloth] could be milled. A fourteen-yard length of web was placed on the boards after it had been soaked in warm soapy water and fourteen people or so, both men and women, would sit at both sides and at the ends. Then the milling would begin…. After the milling had gone on for two songs the woman of the house would come up and measure the length of her middle finger (le cromadh a dòrn) to determine whether the web had been milled enough, or whether another song was required. Usually it would take three songs, and the folded-over web was passed [sunwise]24 around on the milling surface. (Shaw 2001:17)

Lauchie’s own experience with milling frolics naturally embodied this narrative as a dialogically realized experience. Mine can only embody his narrative as a relational element of itself. Each participant of a milling frolic, in their own way, engages in “narrative interpolations” of a kind as they perform the songs and reenact the physical process of milling the wool. This largely consists of the consideration of lyrics and their historical/metaphorical meanings as considered in the

24 In Scottish folklore, “sunwise” refers to setting sail on the proper course, east to west following the path of the sun. With regard to circular direction (as with a group of people sitting around a table), it is a term that in the northern hemisphere is interchangeable with “clockwise.”

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event of singing them. As is the point of stories, singers form relational bonds with subjects and characters in the narrative of the lyrics, as exemplified in their own significant narratives of identity in Cape Breton. Dialogically, performers express these bonds in the moment as they gauge others’ reactions and expectations during the shared peformative event. Moreover, the singer can assume the alternate identity of the subject in the alternate reality of the lyrical narrative, allowing those who sing with her admission into the shared space of the narrative. Of course, all of this happens instantaneously and not as a result of itself, which makes the process an embedded one. Singers perform songs because they enjoy them, or they wish to learn the language, or any number and combination of reasons (narratives) that they feel and decide to invoke. There is no primary substance of narrative that operates omnipresently throughout the social interaction (and subsequently, there is no authority of signs or symbols that hierarchically determines the authenticity of a narrative). Rather, narratives are constantly authored in performative moments of being in a relational sense, that is, dialogically (which, consequently, is why authenticity is an interpretive construct). Thus what makes narratives such a crucial component of musical-social interaction is that they comprise the foundation of ratios that allow communication to occur generically. “Relation, it will be helpful to remember, is also a telling, a narrative, an aspect of the word’s meaning” (Holquist 1990:29). It is a sharing in these “ratios of otherness,” a metaphor to emphasize that “we are—we cannot choose not to be—in dialogue, not only with other human beings, but also with the natural and cultural configurations we lump together as ‘the world’” (Holquist 1990:29- 30). In the moment-to-moment space in which we author our sense of self/personhood, we rely on narratives for generic structure, purpose, and meaning. As metaphors, narratives employ a loaded literary device: symbolism. As a point of utility, language is a collection of symbols, words that represent material objects or relational events within the environment. It has been well-documented that the “symbol” is notoriously difficult to define (Sperber 1975; Vološhinov 1976; Rieff 1979; Petocz 1999). Peirce saw symbols as sign-signifiers, that is, signs directly linked to concrete objects through linguistic definitions. In his convoluted representational theory, symbols have definable effects based on their sign-object relationships. Furthermore, symbols were seen to be subject to specific “semiotic chaining processes” that could be understood and repeated (Peirce 1955). Of course, the problem with constructing an objective, repeatable order on a symbolic and subjective system

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is apparent. Freud likewise espoused a conjectural notion of reductive symbolism, in its psychologically-embedded sense. As Freud stated it, condensation and displacement are the two means by which wishes otherwise unacceptable to a person can gain a degree of distortion and camouflage that allows them to be partially expressed. In condensation, one or more elements of the underlying wish (“latent dream thought”) are represented by one of their parts or properties, which serves as its “condensed substitute.” Thus in the dream itself (“manifest dream content”) a person might be condensed into one of his possessions or a phrase that he or she utters; two or more different persons might be represented by a single individual with a property common to them all, such as sex, age, or a feature of physiognomy. (Vološinov 1976:121)

Freud spent a good deal of time working in condensation and displacement, creating a complex (but nonetheless conjectural) taxonomy of signs and symbols of the inner self. Ultimately, his matrix of symbolic meaning depended on his own understanding of ideas in the realm of the mind and language as it existed in nineteenth-century Vienna, a subjective system that he utilized to an objective end. Perhaps the difficulty in creating a working model of formal features for the symbol (such as Turino’s recent usage, see Turino 2008:5-16) lies in its necessary subjectivity as a communication of the dialogic act. When we cease attempting to create a hierarchy of signs and symbols at work within the narrative, monologue becomes dialog and the attribution of meaning returns to the dialogic realm. Symbolic objectivity does not exist; likewise, symbols cannot exist outside the relational self. They are employed within the narrative with genres and as genres, connotations for the whole of experience. “The compellently and concretely real validity of the performed act in a given once-occurent context (of whatever kind), that is, the moment of actuality in it, is precisely its orientation within the whole of actual once-occurrent Being” (Bakhtin 1993:53). The complexity of the symbol is contextualized by the chronotope and communicated through genre. In musical-social interaction, generic symbols are readily employed as and with elements of narrative. In some instances, aural musical cues or motifs are symbolic of moods, settings, and events—themes of sound that communicate generically. Other interactivities favor lyrical and poetic narrative as a part of the musical act, where stylistic elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm directly link to the flow of poetics. In every instance, musical-social interaction employs narratives that at their most essential level are symbolic narratives—fictions of a formative kind,

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in which we find reflections of our sense of personhood and to which we ascribe relevant meaning. Notions of the self and its relational existence are often forced from this social interactivity into the realm of objective interpretation. When we ask “did that actually happen?” what we are attempting to access is “did you really experience that?” Monologic, representational objectivity skews the fundamental dialogism of narrative. Those who waste time attempting to discover the objective, “truth” of social facts and experiential events are missing the point. They are oblivious that they have already entered the subjective realm of narrative symbolism. This subjective realm bolsters the efficacy of ethnographic research regarding meaning and identity. The theoretical assertion that socio-historical understanding is a subjective process is not to be misconstrued as an overly ambiguous one. Subjectivity in no way precludes the establishment of hierarchies of knowledge that can be investigated in and of the confines of themselves. However, with regard to the social dimension, Bakhtin points out that monologic paradigms do not adequately treat subjectivity in its dialogic forms. “Relativism and dogmatism equally exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism)” (Bakhtin, Emerson 1984:69). Being, experience, and meaning are not static and determined, not fixed within one reality or one symbol, not monologically represented as a singular binary opposite. Rather, these elements of identity are constantly performed and re-performed in a unique and ever-changing fluidity. Of all human activities, music is uniquely suited to expose this performative existence, to remove the objective wall of alienation between narratives and their dialogic interpretation.

Chronotope, Genre, Heteroglossia In literature, the chronotope provides the foundation for generic signification. But this notion of the chronotope has a much broader utility, in that it can be applied to the “organization of the world (which can be legitimately named ‘chronotope’ insofar as time and space are fundamental categories in every imaginable universe” (Todorov 1984:83). Chronotopes very much govern the way we dialogically conceive of and apply knowledge of narrative devices. The words “nine eleven” have a specific chronotopical resonance for citizens of the United States. “Silent film” carries with it a specific era and set of generic signifiers. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….” “Folk music.” “Milling frolic.” These are social vehicles which situate

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and articulate intertextualities. That is to say that chronotopes are categories of dialogism as a part of interaction, in that they are inevitable reactions of the dialogic act. Bakhtin notes: Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in more complex interrelationships. The relationships themselves that exist among chronotopes cannot enter into any of the relationships contained within chronotopes. The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest use of the word). But this dialogue cannot enter into the world represented in the work, nor into any of the chronotopes represented in it; it is outside the world represented, although not outside the work as a whole. It (this dialogue) enters the world of the author, of the performer, and the world of the listeners and readers. And all these worlds are chronotopic as well. (Bakthin 1981:252)

Of course, this boundary line that Bakhtin envisioned between the world within the narrative and the world outside the narrative is not so impenetrable and mutually exclusive as this passage lets on. Chronotopic motion impresses itself in all directions insomuch as everything is affected to some degree by everything else within its proximity. Chronotopes are “part of the associational field implicated in relationships of generic intertextuality” (Bauman 2004:6). Songs sung during the milling frolic are representative of a chronotopical merging of time and space into a momentous, complex identity. An example of this concept can be seen at work within the popular song, “Ged a Sheòl Mi Air M'Aineol” (“Although I Sailed to Foreign Countries”). This song was a favorite in the Christmas Island area where I heard it numerous times (Play example). Séist: Ged a sheòl mi air m’aineol. Cha laigh smalan air m’inntinn, Ged a sheòl mi air m’aineol.

‘S ann à Boston a sheòl sinn ‘Dol air bhòidse chun na h-Innsean.

Rinn sinn còrdadh ri caiptean Air a’ bhàrc a bha rìomhach.

Trì latha roimh ‘n Nollaig Thàinig oirnn an droch shìde.

Shéid e cruaidh oirnn le frasan, ‘S clach-mheallain bha millteach.

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Cha robh ròpa ‘s robh òirleach, ‘N uair a reòth’ e nach robh trì ann.

Chaill sinn craiceann ar làmhan. ‘S bha ar gàirdeanan sgìth dheth.

Trì latha is trì oidhche, ‘S bha seachdnar ‘n sìneadh.

Ám na Nollaig, cha robh candaich Cha robh Sants anns an tìr seo.

Dh’fhalbh ‘n seòl-mullaich ‘n a shròicean, Chan e spòrs a bhi ‘g a ìnnse.

Chorus: Although I sailed to foreign countries, Sadness did not linger in my mind, Although I sailed to foreign countries.

We sailed from Boston On a voyage to the Indies

We came to an agreement with A skipper of a handsome ship.

Three days before Christmas Bad weather descended upon us.

The wind blew strongly with rain- Showers and stinging hail stones

When the inch-thick ropes froze They became three inches in girth.

We lost the skin of our hands, and Our arms were tired of the struggle.

I spent three days and three nights At the wheel during the storm.

It is Christmas, there isn’t candy, There is no Santa in this place.

The top-sail was torn to shreds;

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It is no fun to tell about it. (ACC 2010:17)

The story itself as composed, “conveys a direct geographical reality” in and of itself, in that it represents a singular narrative (Bakhtin 1986:47). The song was composed by Roderick G. Morrison, who was said to have left his home in Loch Lomond, Richmond County, Cape Breton to sail to California where he would stake his claim during the Gold Rush, only to return having no success, eventually entering the shipping trade between Cape Breton and Boston. The song chronicles one particularly dangerous journey that caused the ship to go off course seeking warmer climate in the Indies. When he finally returned to Cape Breton, he discovered that his wife had died and the rest of the community assumed he had died at sea. As it is sung, the song is assumed to be a historical narrative. The story is a first-person narrative, the experiences of a man who has actually lived. But in the performative event, there is no emphasis placed on the actual “precise geographical determination” or “non-fictitious place of action” (Bakhtin 1986:47), beyond the relational-identity (dialogic) aspect of the narrative that solidifies itself in a tangible sense for performance. The example links the performers to Cape Breton as the subject in the narrative is linked, as their own real and mythical ancestors are linked to seafaring. Additionally, the popularity of the song lends itself to multiple generic interpretations. While the melody varies in numerous transcriptions (MacEdward 2004; Creighton 1964: 24; ACC 2010), it has remained roughly unaltered, as performed, since it was first composed. There are banter-like verses that certain performers add to their singing of the songs. Essentially, the song in its wholly interactive existence is saturated with chronotopic essences. It is a Gaelic song, it has become a popular milling frolic song, and it is inextricably linked to Gaelic Cape Breton. Culturally-specific utterances are performed and mediated through genres. Genres are the active, tangible, and systematic (though not in any way static) way in which dialogic existence is performed. Utterance is a deed; it is active, productive; it resolves a situation, brings it to an evaluative conclusion (for the moment at least), or extends action into the future. In other words, consciousness is the medium and utterance the specific means by which two otherwise disparate elements—the quickness of experience and the materiality of language—are harnessed into volatile unity. Discourse does not reflect a situation, it is a situation. Each time we talk, we literally enact values in our speech through the culturally specific social scenario. Cultural specificity is

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able to penetrate the otherwise abstract system of language because utterances in dialogism are not unfettered speech” (Holquist 1990:63).

Historically (and particularly in cultural studies), genre has played a specific role in its function as a categorical hierarchy. Since the turn of the twentieth century especially, taxonomic definitions have been invented, utilized, and reinforced to distinguish the location of texts within culture. Folklore studies, for example, often depended on this type of critical analysis to define texts for preservation, performance, and study. “The centrality of texts in the Boasian tradition demanded discrimination among orders of texts, and generic categories inherited from the European (especially German) study of folkore served this classificatory purpose” (Bauman 2004:3). Early modern scholarship has regularly focused on the formal features of a text in order to identify the way in which that text is created, utilized, and transmitted; by critical extension, successive scholarship has placed more emphasis on how texts are discovered, perceived, exchanged, modified, and consumed. Often, a discipline specifically calls for any one of these fixated methods, such as with regard to an element’s physical properties and a principle’s operative characteristics. As the perceived collective importance of the acquisition of knowledge in Western sciences has developed, the temporal directionality of genre’s utility in modern scholarship has come to depend on formal features as guidelines to be enforced. Certainly much of the dominance of scientific definition in the modern world has been dependent on learning “how things work,” so to speak. Such a focused methodology severs text from context, object from subject. Philosophically speaking, genre’s purely definitional approach requires the death of the subject in order to codify enforceable features outside of their dialogic representation. The bottom line is that the definitional approach fails to address the diachronic and synchronic fluidity of genre—the way in which genre transcends the boundaries of its own formal features. Yet, the creation of a formalized text has no utility outside of a formalized context. Despite how genre operates in a conceptual space as a definitional tool, understanding its practical function is paradoxical. Genre features govern not only the formal features but also the realization, creation, recreation of and communication about texts. A text must first be realized and performed (typified in one pattern or another by the audience or receiver) before it can be interpreted and problematized. Despite its perceived stability (since understanding the formal features of a genre are only stable insomuch as they are constrained by accepted and enforced

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boundaries—regardless of the success one might have enforcing those boundaries), the definition of what constitutes a genre is impossibly complex due to the social nature of a genre’s diachronic discovery, invention, and recontextualization. In other words, the features that are often considered to be genre definitions are patterns dependent on contextual interpretation. Genre must exist in a dialogic dimension. Furthermore, standardizations of definitional forms are not where genres’ “coalescence into recognizable patterns can best be seen” (Holquist 1990:71), since such standardizations are simply one side of a dialogic pattern. Generic patterns are actualized in normal discourse, regardless of enforceable features that may or may not be present within that discourse. Various chronotopical treatments of genres find an example with the milling frolic. In essence, the milling frolic as an act constitutes a chronotope, a re-treatment of genres in function and reception. Songs such as those sung by Angus Ridge MacDonald (collected by John Lorne Cambpell in 1937) demonstrate the shift in genre evident in the performative aspects of the texts. “S Truagh Nach Robh Mi’n Riochd na h’Eala” (“It’s Sad That I Had Not the Shape of a Swan”) is a milling song that seemed to Campbell to be a version of “Coisich, a rùin” (collected in Collinson, Campbell Hebredian Folksongs II 144-50). The song is still sung in Cape Breton. As recorded by Campbell in 1937, the text was sung by Angus MacDonald but the narrative is clearly from a woman’s point of view (specifically in the verses, “Banais a-nochd ‘sa Chill Uachdraich, Nam bithinn an dheanainn fuadach, Nam biodh tè eil’ ann bhith ‘gah luadh riut, Sgathainn bun is bàrr a cuailein” [“There’s a wedding-feast tonight in the upper Cill, If I was there, I would clear it. If another girl there were with you connected, I would cut off her hair top and bottom”]). Similarly, songs that, due to their text and/or form, belong to other codified genres—milling songs, clapping songs, rowing songs, sailing songs, heavy songs, great songs— retain their stylistic form when sung at a milling frolic (though the tempo might be changed), but are treated differently in an interactive sense due to their chronotopic treatment. Even in what seems like well-established formal features of a genre, fluidity and chronotopic treatment blur the lines of entextualization and communication in performative dialogic moments. In the experienced events of musical-social interaction, there is a simultaneity in the dialog between performer and audience, author and performer, history, ethnicity—a host of identities—wherein the complex interrelationships of many meanings takes shape.

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“The simultaneity of these dialogues is merely a particular instance of the larger polyphony of social and discursive forces which Bakhtin calls ‘heteroglossia’” (Holquist 1990:69). This phenomenon, the “base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance,” ensures that all texts must be grounded wholly in a specific context (Bakhtin 1981:428). Moreover, heteroglossia represents a multiplicity, the “place where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress” (Ibid). Polyphony in this case does not so much symbolize a multitude of voices as it embodies a collective of voices within the subject and within the individual utterance. The nature of dialogism is what requires polyphony to occur. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heterglot conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. (Bakhtin 1981:293)

By extension, any expressive utterance must be linked to the generic forms through which it was experienced. Music is positioned to champion this notion in a performative sense.

Dialogisms in Space and Place As generically understood, the interpretation of our surroundings takes its various forms in a relational sense. In terms of memory and geography, dialogism suggests that the way we categorize elements of our surroundings is completely dependent on our continual self-other actualizations in the social dimension. But our geography—our sense of “place”—is more than its physical existence. We ascribe social meaning on our surroundings in what Belden Lane called a “curious transformation of consciousness” (Lane 2001:53). As dynamically as we experience our sense of place in a relational way, we rearticulate that place as a conceptual “space,” a symbolic arena in which our generic understanding can be shared. This is because we must express how we exist in the spaces we create in whatever place we happen to be. In this, our geography becomes more than a physical locale; just as we are emergent, it is emergent, active, and alive by virtue of its interaction with us. Generic spaces of shared understanding are a

138 core aspect of our consciousness—our psychology—since our relational personhood is formed through actual language expression (which must be socially acquired). Our dialogic existence is paradoxical. As soon as we achieve language, we are made aware through narrative that we were born. The very essence of who we are is expressed as a text; we embody that text and perform it, every breath we take a testament of its essential meaning and place within our sense of personhood. Every human being has, as a body, a very clearly marked beginning and end. But the human subject is not merely a body, of course—it is a conscious body. And here arises a paradox: others may see us born, and they may see us die; however, in my own consciousness “I” did not know the moment of my birth; and in my own consciousness “I” shall not know my death. (Holquist 1990:165)

Additionally, we are born in a place that we cannot experience until we remember how to articulate that experience (regardless of whether or not we reach an awareness in the same locale as our birth). The very first skills we learn are skills in narrative meaning. Musical-social interaction is connected to this process. Expressionist views hold that music and language are inevitably separate domains, in that music expresses emotions, inner- feelings that are ineffable, while language expresses the process of conceptualization. In the music-language divide (relationship?), these theoretical activities are cast as mutually exclusive in an expressive sense. Yet, expression cannot really exist outside of its conceptualized meaning. Understanding, expression, and meaning are all developed, cast molded in language’s generic forms. Music possesses an ineffable quality, perhaps, in the way it is experienced but the conceptualizations of where that nebulae of emotions rests within the self is dependent upon the interaction of feelings, expressions, and meanings in the musical moment (as well as narratives shared in the memory of that moment).

A Narrative of Ethnographic Identity In the “Roadmap” in Chapter one, I asked the reader to notice that this work travels through various “fields” of understanding, each of which is pertinent to the whole of the story. Let me elaborate on this. I will admit the whole concept of “fieldwork” as some separate activity defined by traveling to a specific location (“place”) and adopting a different definitional mindset (“space”) has never made much sense to me. The difference between “space” and “place” in this context is simply an ever-occurring social dialogism, the actualization of the conceptual self

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(“How does this environmental stimulus relate to me?”) and the other (“How does this environmental stimulus relate to everyone?” i.e., “Where am I on the map?”). Any confusion on my part regarding fieldwork is likely because of the way I dialog generally day-to-day. It is not that I have trouble with conceptual boundaries or definitional spaces (so far as I am aware). On the contrary, one of the concepts I outline in this document is an exploration of various dimensions of genre. My perplexity stems more from the fact that I am fairly certain that I never really leave the observational-interactive space of the “field.” I recognize that the “field,” such as it is, is a convenient invention much like the disciplinary boundaries that its exploration helps to define. It is a creative conceptual framework designed to foster critical thought and a specific kind of awareness in events, fueled mainly from its pragmatic function—the scientific methodology geared toward collecting, recording, and analyzing “data.” But as for me, I am guilty of always existing in this interactive realm of constant actualization and reflexivity. Just as “all the world’s a stage,” in the social sense, all the world’s a field for a critical thinker. I have asked myself many times, how can fieldwork exist as an independent tool of scholarship? Or more specifically, in what way is fieldwork a distinct activity in which someone can engage and then disengage? This question is far more dubious than it lets on, for reasons that I explored in this chapter. How also does the space-time event of being “in the field” help one to “draw conclusions and interpret data” in an isolated way? Indeed, if we are to be critical thinkers, we cannot dismiss the conditional convenience afforded through the creation of methodological boundaries surrounding a proposed hypothesis—much like the objectification of the “field” itself. Let me elaborate. It is true that as a music/socio-cultural studies scholar I have had plenty of experience navigating conceptual-methodological boundaries, since the practical nature of what I do is often expected to be quantified and legitimized. Tell anyone you are an “ethnomusicologist,” and you are likely to experience a wide array of micro-expressions ranging from curious to confused. Such an admission requires additional language and metaphor in order to describe what, specifically, it means. Even those etymologically capable will have little agency to decipher much beyond the many permutations of “world music,” thus, in situations such as these we are left exploring the realm of connotation to find, through dialog, the best-suited discernable form to create a space of shared understanding. Such an activity is like the creation of any narrative— to build an established and continually re-established concept with its own forms of

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combinations of forms. This is not specific to ethnomusicology; any discipline perceived as having a definable and relatively contained form in today’s increasingly hypertextual world struggles from the same healthy ambiguity. Where one scholar might make a stand about the enforceable forms and patterns of a genre, another might employ critical thought to promblematize those boundaries. The “field” is one such conceptual space. The crux of field’s ambiguity lies in its historical legacy of scientific exploration and collection of data, which is particularly of interest to late-modern ethnomusicologists concerned with legitimizing the discipline as actual science. As scientists, apparently, we are supposed to conflate real (actualized) discovery with real (objectified) field study, so as to ensure there is no confusion about where the discovery originated. Perhaps this has to do with the hierarchical emphasis placed on Field’s physical transference of place. Ethnomusicology has a long-standing and codependent history with the ethnographic place, as evidenced in many works (Merriam 1964; Nettl 1983) that describe the field as a place where ethnomusicological or ethnographic research begins (is actualized). The field was generalized as a stable point of locale, and the study of musical practices were organically linked and dependent on that cultural core. The major emphasis on “place” began as a paradigm shift in the mid-twentieth century inspired by growing anthropological interest in cultural immersion and fueled specifically by an insider-outsider hierarchy. Any relativist welcomes such a shift, allowing once “primitive” cultural practices to achieve their own voice in scholarship (even though they did not necessarily need such a voice ascribed to them). The result of the paradigm shift was a surge in cultural relativism and appreciation of the glorified “other” from scholars who struggled with reconciling the trope of the noble savage with their own identity crises (Blacking 1976; Hood 1982). At present in the discipline, many ethnomusicologists still correlate specific geographical locations with localized cultural practices. This can be seen in countless world music textbooks and classrooms. Others perpetuate the codependent need to legitimize the quality and import of their critical thought based on its geographical proximity to an assumed cultural epicenter. But we are also beginning to see another shift in sociological thought regarding the importance of place. When you peel away the expectation that the exploration of space and place must glean some archetypal truth about life or “culture,” you begin to notice that the importance of

141 fieldwork lies not in the “field” as a backdrop, but in the narratives that are constantly composed and re-composed that make “place” and “space” an important element of being. In any scientific process, the more boundaries are enforced the less they are relevant outside themselves, and they become severed from the larger meta-narrative of life events. In many scientific circles, such isolation has been and sometimes still is considered to be epistemological purity. Pure conclusions are drawn from experiments that are repeatable with little percent error—those processes that are contained within a specific form and criteria—and are necessary in order to create a stable definition about an observable element of the natural world. But in the meta-narrative sense, that stable definition must depend on other social dimensions in order to be understood and applied. In other words, what makes a natural law relevant exists in its social reapplication, where it achieves a reaffirmation of meaning. At their essence, all sciences are social processes. Throughout learning the many generic forms present in our social reality, we must see beyond the boundaries into the ways in which those forms combine, function, and transform, linking actual experience with shared understanding. For musical-social interaction, all that rests within the phenomenological moment is dialogical. Participation, re-imagined as musical-social interaction encompasses all interactive qualities of musical expression and the narratives that come from its shared existence. This is a philosophical view with which to approach ethnographic research, in that if one is “studying” music and “participating” in it, it already exists in a decontextualized realm that must be artificially accessed. Existence within that realm a priori is already an organic reality, and the attention to the flux of generic forms within a shared musical space gives voice to everyone who the scholar encounters—not in an abstract, relativistic sense, but in a dynamic discourse that is inclusive and emergent.

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CHAPTER 7 POLYPHONY AND AUTHORSHIP IN A COLONIAL/POST-COLONIAL DIASPORA

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.” (H.P. Lovecraft, 1920)

In a video excerpt of the Rick Mercer Report (RMR) that has become celebrated by several Gaelic groups and embedded on a few Gaelic websites in Cape Breton, the show’s host visits the Gaelic College at St. Ann’s for his “On Location” segment. Mercer is known throughout Canada as a television personality, and for his comedy, which characterizes the RMR as a satirical news broadcast. In each of the episodes, Mercer does an opening monologue, after which he showcases his travels to various sites to film “On Location,” usually showcasing a bit of Canada’s cultural resources, popular tourism sites, famous historical locations, museums, restaurants, and similar places of travel interest. The clip of point describes the Celtic Colours International Festival, and opens with a panned shot of typical Cape Breton waterfront scenery as an excerpt of “Sleepy Maggie” from Ashley MacIsaac’s 1995 album Hi How Are You Today? (Gaelic vocals by Mary Jane Lamond) quickly fades in and out of the non-diagetic space. An image of the provincial flag waving in the breeze is then followed by the welcome sign to the famous Cabot Trail—all important identity markers for Celtic Cape Breton—as a precursor to the “On Location segment.” Rick Mercer begins: “Welcome to the Gaelic College at St. Ann’s, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. This is the headquarters for the Celtic Colours International Festival. Every year around this time, hundreds of traditional musicians and their fans gather on this beautiful island for nine days of Celtic madness. Folks… start your bagpipes” (RMR 2010). The non-diegetic music fades back in, accompanied by several clips of music performers and audience members, dancing, and laughing before Mercer continues in the segment, interviewing a number of people who help make the festival what it is every year. The Celtic Colours International Festival began in 1997, a Cape Breton celebration of heritage, music, and culture with the specific mission to “promote, celebrate and develop Cape

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Breton’s living Celtic culture and hospitality by producing an international festival during the fall colours that builds relationships across Cape Breton Island and beyond” (CCIF 2009). The festival takes place annually in October, and besides attracting musicians from all over the Nova Scotia, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States, concerts and events are held all over Cape Breton Island, giving community participants an opportunity to host artists and musicians as well as travel to neighboring communities to participate. There are numerous performers and scheduled daily concerts; as such, one could not hope to attend every event during the annual festival. The organizers plan a variety of events with this in mind, “so that it is possible to get a taste of all that the Festival has to offer on any given day” (CCIF 2009). The core of the festival is celebrated at the Gaelic College at St. Ann’s, where they host the “Festival Club,” an area for artists to gather and perform in a more informal, session-style setting and where locals can interact with international artists on a more personal level. For Celtic musicians, the Festival Club is certainly a highlight of the annual concerts, where they can exchange ideas on performance practice and experiences with each other that a typical tour may not provide. Additionally, in a broader sense, Celtic Colours puts Cape Breton on the Celtic world map, so to speak. The popular notion of what constitutes being “Celtic” depends on a number of factors that exist as microcosmic elements of the festival. On one level, Celtic Colours despite being a locally-conceived festival has become a highly-marketed Celtic identity celebration with music and dance at its core. In today’s modern world, Celtic musics are a much stronger marker of identity than language, considering there are far fewer people who speak Celtic languages (Gaelic, in the case of Cape Breton) from a young age than there are who listen to and participate in Gaelic language-dominant musics from a young age. Understanding lingual idioms may be one marker of identity, but not by any means the most dominant one in the case of Celticness. It is with the representation of this festival in mind that I invoke in the title of this chapter a sense of polyphony, as Bakhtin conceived it (borrowed from music) as a metaphor or “graphic analogy” (Bakhtin, Emerson 1984:22). Polyphony, not unlike its use in music theory, stylistics, and form, represents a concurrent collection or multiplicity of voices or parts within one subject, each contributing to the whole in an individual but thematically relevant way. More to Bakhtin’s point, “if one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of several individual wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in

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principle exceeded” (1984:21). This is a philosophical distinction when concerning narrative identity, the identity of multiple subjects within a shared space, and is an inevitable result of dialogic interaction. “The artistic will of polyphony is the will to combine many wills, a will to the event” (1984:22). When considering agency and authorship in identity, dialogic polyphony must be acknowledged, primarily because despite any sense of unified purpose in a collective shared space, the “voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order that in homophony” (1984:21). Polyphony is the basis for how each narrative voice uniquely contributes to the dialog. In this chapter, polyphony will indeed inform the dynamic setting for Celtic identity among Gaels in Cape Breton and globally, and the dialog between those two subjects, considering diasporic issues of representation and personhood—stereotypes, marginalization, and subordination—in the composition of various “fictions” of social fact about “Celticness” and “Gaelicness.” As issues of identity are explored in the narrative sense, it is important to remember that such a discussion does not attempt to prove or disprove the validity of various realities (as is often the connotation with realizing “fictions”); rather, such explorations reveal a deeper understanding for the simultaneity of chronotopes that fuel the interactivity of relational points of view.

The Politics of Representation The phenomenon of a monolithic, “Celtic” culture has proliferated over the past few decades throughout the modern world, though it seems to be a common trope dating back to the origins of capitalism. The notion of “Celticness,” is set apart—Other—a product of the anti- establishment, “antibureaucratic and prone to acting on instinct,” mystical, pre-industrial, natural, pure (McCarthy, Hague 2004:391). It is a heavily-marketed and widely-consumed narrative that perhaps finds its origins in the epic standoff between Vercingetorix and Julius Cesar (before Vercingetorix’s ultimate surrender), or maybe more generically in the binary opposition between the “Celts” and the “Anglo-Saxons.” Celtic ethnicity seems similar to the binary opposition between the modern and the “Folk.” However they are invoked, these stereotypical views influence the market of “Celtic” goods and ultimately of Celtic identity. By “identity” in this case, I pay specific attention to representation, which can be defined in this context as the generic patterning of specific narratives of identity to construct a typified model for social performance. Marketed representations of Celtic identity create a polyphony of

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actualized traditions that contribute to an embodied sense of Celtic ethnicity. In the modern global social economy, the politics of representation leave a powerful mark on popular consumerism, and ultimately the dialog of the ethnic imagination. For Gaels in Cape Breton, “Gaelic” identity has as its primary marker language and the efforts to continue the use of that language in daily life (which is often through musical-social interaction). The polyphonic complexity of Gaelic Cape Breton in the ethnic imagination rests on the relationship of this lingual-musical identity the more broadly-subsuming category of Celtic in a global sense, and how that is represented, embodied, and performed. In some instances, it becomes beneficial to adopt some of the incorporated ethnic “traits” of being Celtic, given the assumed marginality, rural sensibility, and sympathetic “underdog pluck” that comes with the territory (Arndorfer 1999). Representation is part of the reality of how we think in the modern world. Visual media creates a passive and monologic view of dialogically dramatic topics, and as a result must utilize representative techniques to communicate a more complex narrative. Elements of identity are embedded in the narrative, but the markers of social meaning are dialogically expressed, based not only on how they are performed, but also on how they are actualized in the audience. The way this is employed and performed largely rests on creating specific markers of difference such as a lingual accent, fluency in one of the “Celtic” languages (or at least a link to that fluency), a fashion statement such as a kilt, delineation of ancestry, and connection to specific musical cues and/or instruments commonly identified as “Celtic” (Bagpipes, tin whistle, fiddle)—identity’s polyphonic multiculturalism. One cannot simply state, “I am Celtic,” or play the bagpipes, or speak Gaelic to lay claim to an ethnicity; rather there must be a polyphony and an embodiment in the performance of certain traits, and an interest in representing them as such. Since the 1970s, with public debates about multiculturalism, everyone has come to be regarded as needing ‘an ethnic identity.’ Compared with previous generations, consciousness of ancestry has become heightened and people have been goaded into taking an interest in their ethnic heritage: the cultural stuff of being Irish. (Byron 1999:292)

Typical notions of ties to being “Celtic” in the Americas generally links back to a familial connection, an “ethnic heartland in either Ireland or Scotland,” which is accompanied by the appropriation of numerous political ideals (Dietler 1994:585).

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In Nova Scotia, this odd representational identity finds its origins in the 1930s with the campaign of Angus Macdonald to create a more “Scottish” identity for the province, complete with its own “historical” Scottish tartan. Indeed, Nova Scotia—Cape Breton especially—has been since its Gaelic settlement uniquely positioned to confront notions of Gaelic identity with regard to language, music, and other human activities. “Groups and individuals are constantly reimagining their past, sometimes to lend legitimacy to the present, sometimes to criticize it” (Schnell 2003:8). But in Macdonald’s case, the marketability of tourism was his major impetus. McKay wrote: The tartan completed a complex network of words and things that summoned up Scottishness. What Margaret Laurence called the “Dance of the Ancestors” could now proceed with this most colourful and exquisite of props. It could be “slicked up, prettified, and performed forever in the same way. Nothing must ever make reference to reality, to real sores, to now. The tourists are paying to be provided with an embodiment of their own fantasies. (McKay 1992:45)

Celtic representations marketed by the tourist industry gloss over local Gaelic traditions— traditions that have been fostered, utilized, and transformed in dynamic ways—in favor of more static and tangible cultural ideals that can be consumed in a global market: After all, Ethnicity, Inc., to the extent that it founds claims to “inherent” rights and “natural” interests on the sovereignty of difference, does require both the incorporation of identity and a cultural substance of sorts to realize, recognize, and accomplish itself. In this respect, it is a living tautology: Without the first, it would have no sovereign materiality; without the second it would be indistinguishable from any other species of business enterprise. (Comaroff 2009:116)

But they also lend symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984) to localized traditions, giving more power for authorship to grassroots cultural movements. Ironically (and perhaps it is a typical irony of capitalism), the very tartanist elements of Nova Scotia that forced Gaelic into the periphery during the beginning half of the twentieth century, now serve—as markers of a more broadly appropriated “Celtic” ethnicity—to legitimize the authenticity of local traditions as “true” exemplars of the ethnic self. These grassroots foundations represent themselves accordingly, as authentic preservers of time-honored tradition. On the home page of the Celtic Colours International Festival we see this dialogic irony at work. Fiona Heywood of “The Living Tradition” website, a compendium of folk music on the

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web, is featured in her article “Celtic Colours: There is No Getting Away From It” at the top of the page. She writes of Celtic Colours, “It is a gem of a festival that proudly boasts its Celtic roots and showcases the music of the island which is very much alive and kicking” (Heywood 2010). Continuing with more markers of identity, she writes: Just off the North East coast of Canada, Cape Breton is a picturesque island, not unlike some parts of the Highlands of Scotland in many ways. It is vast, rural and encompasses many small communities with strong culture and traditions. The similarity to Scotland is obvious from the moment you cross the causeway – place names, people’s surnames, road signs in Gaelic, the landscape, the friendly welcoming nature of the people – and then you hear the music, that immediately recognisable Cape Breton sound that is at once incredibly Scottish, and yet totally unique with a life all of its own! (Heywood 2010)

The festival depends on these representations to draw crowds and ultimately impact the economy of Cape Breton. In 2010, the audience expenditure was $6.2 million CAD, which was a measured increase of over thirteen percent from the previous year (CCIF 2010). The internet fosters a greater agency with which smaller community groups can represent issues at the heart of Cape Breton Gaelic identity—primarily that of the loss of language and the negotiation of traditions in the modern world. The Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia, for example, attests to the level of hypertextuality possible regarding communicating relevant issues of language and compiling important resources. Still, with all the information represented within such a site, there is still necessarily a need for a specific representation of identity markers that legitimize elements of identity in the interactive realm. On the home page of the Gaelic Council, it is noted: Nova Scotia is the only region outside Scotland where Gaelic language and culture remain everyday aspects of community life.

Even though Gaels in Nova Scotia share many traditions with Scotland, our culture is unique and distinct because it is shaped by our experience of leaving our homeland and of creating a new and flourishing Gaelic community as Canadian pioneers. It is estimated that there were 100,000 people speaking Gaelic in Nova Scotia around the turn of the 20th century.

Thirty percent of Nova Scotians claim Scottish Gaelic heritage as their birthright, representing the largest ethnic group of the province, yet the language has been put in serious jeopardy over the years. Although strengthening this rich language and culture is serious business, when Gaels rally to this work, song and stories

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abound. Comhairle na Gàdhlig is part of a Nova Scotian community which celebrates and shares our living and ‘lively’ cultures. (CG 2010)

Representation ultimately becomes a genre process. “The sense of text being something recognisable, something whose elements can be identified and discussed as if they had an existence independent of the speaker and hearer,” is generically articulated “not only through making texts the objects of attention (in quotation, in the exegesis of obscurities), but through the distributive mode of the constitution of textual meaning” (Barber 2007:100).

Tradition and Transformation: Continuity and Change in the Milling Frolic Critical analysis of phenomena in ethnomusicology and related interdisciplinary studies too often essentializes the complex and dialogic social dynamics as simplistic atomist notions of ritual, tradition, and symbolism. It is too one-sided of a view to consider an interactive cultural performance as “authentic” traditional participation through which “Folks” engage with customs of their own heritage-past, since within such performances other issues are simultaneously at play. At the outset, traditions must be understood to be genre processes. “Inventing traditions… is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition” (Hobsbawm, Ranger 1983:4). When considered in this framework, the dynamic transformation of their formal features will take the same shape as that of genres, blurred boundaries in dialogic space. Likewise, positivistic enforcement of traditions will suffer the fate of strictly formalized genres. “In general any strict adherence to a genre begins to feel like a stylization, a stylization taken to the point of parody, despite the artistic intent of the author” (Bakhtin 1981:6). It is with this in mind that we explore the role of the tradition in identity. Marketed “traditions” as representations of ethnicity depend on formalized sameness, yet any tradition that is not continually reimagined as it is utilized in the dialogic realm becomes discarded (decontextualized), a relic of alienated interpretations. This is evident on multiple levels within the milling frolic—through the process of beating the cloth, through the narratives of the songs themselves, and through the exchange of the language in a constructed space of preservation. For all intents and purposes, the milling frolic is a Cape Breton tradition, invented to keep alive the musical-social interaction in Gaelic communities. As its invention is linked to time-honored customs, the tradition links its new entexutalizations with countless narratives of its perceived

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origins in such a way as to engender a sense of continuity. Especially in Cape Breton, regarding the rapid transition of economy, the mobility (and assimilation) of language, and other transitioning forces such as the standardization of education, daily life becomes devoid of a connection, a heritage or legacy, thus prompting a necessary narrative of continuity that situates a tangible identity in the modern world. Modern society is perceived as monotonous and devoid of “real” connections or “authentic” culture, and the ideas of symbol, tradition, and continuity are all invoked in order to regain this realness and authenticity, to gain a sense of connection to the past…. Ethnicity is simply a means to this end. (Schnell 2003:24)

Bakhtin notes that genres are “a particular way of looking at the world” (Holquist 1990:163). Specifically, genres are how we make sense of experience. We constantly make generic sense of it, because experience never ceases to be and never reaches a state in which it can be fully realized or understood. There is an infinite sense of it; I cannot stop being until I cease to be, at which point I will not be aware that my experience has stopped. This makes death the ultimate act of consummation, the finalization of the other. My awareness of experience constantly relies on memory of the experiences before and anticipation of the experiences to be. There is also a finite sense of experience, that which I attribute to the other as the could- be of the self. I can see another’s birth and witness another’s death; thus, the most direct, shared relationship I can create is through the finalization or the consummation of the other and the other’s experiences as they relate to myself. This can only be achieved through generic forms. For Bakhtin, genres are the substance of heritage and continuity, in that the dialogic relationships within expression, stylistics, and ultimately traditions must be generically realized. Individual creativity is only possible within a specific tradition, in the awareness and expression of its generic forms. What seems to be evident in the milling frolic is the embodiment of the Gaelic language as a tradition through a specific collection of recontextualized genres. Moreover, the environment of sharing songs in such a context makes apparent, in a performative sense, that musical-social interaction is not the product of the individual psyche and its consummated creativity; rather the song is shared with everyone, learned by everyone, experienced by everyone. Regardless of the composer of the song and the traditional aspect of the genre, the performance is an act of authorship—a dynamic contextualization that prioritizes aspects of the musical-social interaction in relevant forms. Traditional style is important for

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allowing the performative act to achieve expression, but only in mediating the participatory realm, since as the milling frolic takes place the combinations of forms achieve a sort of organic unity through which stylistics becomes secondary to the actual exchange. One way to view this atmosphere is as an environment of learning. Numerous times a singer would begin leading the group in a song, only to forget a verse. Sometimes when this happened, we would all keep the rhythm with the wool while the song leader sorted out what he or she was trying to sing next. Other times, another singer at the table would prompt the leader with the correct lyrics, singing along to help them recover their place in the song. In these moments, there was no underlying subtextual tension between the established traditional stylistics and performance errors, neither was there a perceived disassociation, in a communicative sense, between the composition and its achieved expression. The tenor around the wool was one of sharing, communicating a broader aspect of continuity in the language and the tradition. There was meaning in the narrative, but also an inherent recognition that there was generic meaning in the fact that the narrative is being performed in this way. At the milling frolic during the week of the twentieth annual Féis an Eilein we set a new running record of songs sung. We achieved this by singing, with virtually no breaks, continuously from 8:00 PM until just about 3:00 AM, accumulating a total of eighty-six songs sung. It was a rather invigorating experience for me, and the more I reflected on the process the more I started to see a generic connection. The milling frolic (as a traditional process) engenders continuity of language and cultural expression by virtue of its performance. The competitive way in which it is performed against the measure of itself in a meta-narrative sense engenders continuity of the milling frolic, both as a metaphor of its generic form and in the meaning it holds culturally for the group. Like all things dialogic, it is a continuum of experiences that cannot be finalized; it has no beginning and no end. It can only be realized through realization and narratization of its various generic forms. And at least for me it seems to have done its job in creating a sense of continuity, since I look forward to going back there.

Identity as the Focal Point in Social Interaction at the Milling Frolic Sharing is evident in the tradition of the milling frolic, as well as in the song and storytelling traditions of Gaels throughout recorded history. The taigh céilidh (“house gathering”) was a common arena of exchange that the settlers in the New World brought with

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them from Scotland. Historically, the taigh céilidh was a primary form of entertainment in early Gàidhealtachds (Gaelic-speaking regions) on Cape Breton Island. This practice continued throughout the Island, though it diminished in the mid-twentieth century due to industrialization and outmigration. Certainly stories continue to be told regularly; such is the way of social interaction. But storytelling in Gaelic is less prevalent in recent years, by way of the obvious. The milling frolic, in many areas on the island, thus, has taken a vital role in a position of Gaelic language exchange on a local, casual level. Likewise, it centers “authentic” (as perceived and actualized) Gaelic traditions in a dynamic way. That is, it links Gaelic traditions to meaning and identity by bringing together numerous different people into a casual environment of immediate exchange. In this exchange a social hierarchy is evident. Those community elders and visitors at the table who have spoken Gaelic their entire lives, and have sat at the milling table more times than one could count, are awarded an important position at the top of that hierarchy. But to understand the hierarchy in the context of the milling frolic requires one to abandon their linear sense. Bourdieu wrote: To account for the infinite diversity of practices in a way that is both unitary and specific, one has to break with linear thinking, which only recognizes the simple ordinal structures of direct determination, and endeavor to reconstruct the networks of interrelated relationships which are present in each of the factors. (1981:107)

Anyone at the milling table can share in the songs, regardless of their particular position as initial learner or tradition-bearer; the songs flow as part of the musical-social interactive event-of- being. Thus, in the milieu of a milling frolic the most unifying element of the event is one of Gaelic identity. Certainly, participation in the milling frolic is not necessarily done out of an active attempt to establish a “Gaelic identity,” per se; indeed, it is a musical-social interactivity that is fun and communicative and any number of other actualized aesthetic adjectives, and contributes to the perceived preservation of cultural wealth. But in the event, exchange of song is a matrix of complex interrelationships of language and meaning that fosters a diverse interaction of selves, each contributing to the tradition in a memorable and dynamic way. Events like the milling frolic and other cultural festivals bring people together in meaningful ways. The milling frolic as a chronotope of Gaelic culture in Cape Breton demonstrates its position of cultural importance, but more than just a need to preserve a

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particular stylized generic form or historical narrative, it is interactive and provides a vehicle that transports its participants to meaningful spaces of identity. Turino wrote: These [musical-social interactive] events bring groups of people together for extended periods of time through intense participatory activities where people experience each other in heightened physical-sonic ways that provide a powerful sense of identity and unity beyond normal social interactions. (Turino 2008:188)

The milling frolic is a sharing of language and song, but more than that it is a sharing of subjects. Each participant is a complex and dynamic person performing a conscious identity, expressing genres through musical-social interaction in a chronotopic event, the result of which articulates the meaningful self/other actualizations of dialogic existence. In addition to linearity, another hinderance to understanding authorship in the dynamic sense is Aristotelian relation. According to Aristotle, identity is established wholly by form. In recognizing generic forms (indeed, he was one of the first “published” thinkers on genres), he conceived of his environment as reducible to a collection of constituents, and in those essential components he theorized that the life of a thing rests in its relationship to other things. There is little motion in this sense, since reducible forms are necessarily wedded to the cultural sensibilities (by whom and) in which they were constructed. For example, early ethnomusicological accounts of indigenous musics were rather Aristotelian in their underlying philosophy in that the generic forms encountered were considered to be “music” in the sense of its (logically) basic components. The reduction of the musical-social interactive event to a constituent of stylistics strips away vital aspects of identity and forces a dialogic and dynamic human activity into a monologic realm. Generic forms are indeed recognizable but they cannot exist outside themselves. Genres are typified forms that live irreducible lives between polyphonic subjects. They allow the world to take shape in spaces of shared meaning through their performance. In their existence are all the dynamic forms of polyphony of the self. Frow wrote: A central implication of the concept of genre is thus that the realities in and amongst which we live are not transparently conveyed to us but are mediated by systems of representation: by talk, by writing, by acting (in all senses of the word), by images, even by sound. Whereas the “realist” genres of philosophy or history or science, and indeed of everyday common sense, tend to assume that reality is singular and external to the forms through which we apprehend it, the notion of genre as “frames” or “fixes” on the world implies the divisibility of the

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world and the formative power of these representational frames. (Frow 2006:18- 19)

Embodied, deterministic notions of texts, presuppose a kind of fourth wall upon which we can build concrete relationships in an Aristotelian sense. This is because from the moment we acquire language, “[our] perceptions are mediated by forms, collections, collocations, associations; we have learnt, even, that we learn so naturally by forms and formulae that we often entirely fail to recognize them for what they are” (Colie 1973:5). Once establishing that genres cannot exist (in a lived sense) outside of the subjects who utilize them, the dialogism of subjective relations can change the nature with which we attribute identity to our narratives, and narratives to our identity. Generic association is at the core of who the subject is, since it rests at the median of the narrative of subjects and the shared space of their interaction. In modern-day Cape Breton, genres are readily apparent in the identity of the geographical locale as it pertains to the construction of a “place” in varying dimensions—the who, what, where, and why of geography and musicality in historicity, ethnicity, nationality, and temporality. Those Gaels who settled in this region profoundly left their mark, establishing an enclave of Celtic peoples who continued to struggle against a larger English hegemony. Just as this dynamic existence has attributed to centuries of marginality and negativity with regard to a broad notion of what it means to be Gaelic—or more accurately “Celtic”—it also allows for an authorship. Constantly reimagining identity employs the generic appropriation of identity markers to give voice to change. The milling frolic first shifted from the realm of musical labor into a broader genre that allowed musical-social interaction much like that of the taigh céilidh for a changing Gaelic climate in an increasingly industrialized and politicized geography. At present, it provides these generic aspects and more, as it fosters in a more broadly-encompassing sense an authorship that can challenge the loss of language and musical-social interaction. Essentially, it serves as a grassroots reclamation of cultural identity, in that the generic forms as performed and understood by participants must be felt and contemplated in their dialogic existence. For critical thought in music and social interaction, the milling frolic provides us with a fundamental case study for how we might view polyphony and authorship as genre, and, moreover, explore dynamic aspects of identity built on those generic forms, such as ethnicity and nationality.

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On the Growing Notion of Celticity As Kenny Mathieson notes in his Celtic Music introduction, “formally identifying what Celtic music is… remains a musicologist’s nightmare. And arriving at wide ranging technical definitions for a music which often developed in highly individual fashion in isolated ‐ communities is well nigh impossible” (2001:7). Yet, in the modern world of commodified music, when one states “I enjoy listening to Celtic music,” there is a generic, connotative understanding of what is meant. Even after making the above concession in his book, Mathieson still attempts to narrow down Celtic music to a survey of influential locations, sounds, instruments, and practices which represent the popular marketed placement of the Celtic soundscape. Recording artists appropriate “Celticity” in their music as a ploy to increase the attractiveness and application of their music. When Irish music is listened to as Celtic music, its Irishness is not lost, but generalized under an older, more authoritative, albeit ambiguous, Celtic identity. No longer contained by national boundaries, it can be freely appreciated by a wider audience and linked to a tradition much older than the nation from where its performers originate. This marketing ploy is certainly not a new concept, as the Celtic past and Celtic identity have been appropriated throughout the history of the British Isles as a political, social, and economic tool. Even in continental Europe, there is a growing invocation of Celtic connections as a means to universalize and transcend the boundaries of nation state:

As continental European states move towards‐ a supra national economic, social and political system in the hope of making divisive nationalisms less likely and future wars less possible, archaeological rhetoric has ‐sometimes evoked the Celtic past as precedent, because Celts are not exclusively associated with any single modern nation state, and thus are “safe” from nationalistic connotations. (Megaw 1996:180) ‐ The uniformity of Celticity is potentially paradoxical, in that while it pulls down walls of national difference, it creates new walls of inclusion and exclusion. In the British Isles, the growing Celtic ethnic awareness can be a potential deconstruction of national unification. When Scottish music is listened to as Celtic music, its Scottishness is not lost, but generalized under an older, more authoritative (albeit ambiguous) Celtic identity. Yet, while Irish music has “gained its independence,” and can warrant nationalistic sentiment, Scottish music is more likely to appropriate its Celtic roots in order to establish that it is not British, and thus not linked to England, its national sovereign.

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Regardless of any one particular motive in actively appropriating the Celtic meta genre, the effect of this genre category is evident in that it broadly links musical practices (of at most ‐ the past three centuries) to an ancient origin, constructing a Celtic musical cultural identity that at once can stand as a singular regional practice and as the entire folk sentiment of several ‐ nations. The politics mentioned above provide a rather convincing argument for what Angela Piccini refers to as “already both Other and Same, opposite sides of the same coin” (Piccini 1996:S93). The enigmatic exotification of cultural tradition has been critiqued for many decades in both anthropological and ethnomusicological literature. The Celt still occupies that “Keltoi” space, an exotic Other in which people can identify while at the same time remaining separate, all without losing the reverence that accompanies perceived purity and ancient mystical truth. The modern “Celtic” is an exotic Other that is a meta genre alienated from the local self. This alienation is the same, conceptually, that Bertrell Ollman describes as the “splintering of human ‐ nature into a number of misbegotten parts” (Ollman 1976: 135). This interaction, or rather lack of interaction, between the severed aspects of “human specificity” lies at the core of a social transaction in our modern world system. What happens by design within the capitalist system influences the appropriation of ambiguity in Celtic music as a result of its own internal discontinuity of historical past, present and future. This alienation is a direct reflection of the social economy that created it—a micro conglomerate of a macro structural social reality. The successful consumption of Celtic music depends on the mystification of soundscape, ‐ ‐ much in the same way that history has romanticized and exoticized the ideoscape of Celtic culture. June Skinner Sawyers remarks, “…the quality that the music of the Celtic lands most commonly shares is something a lot more intangible and certainly less quantifiable [than technique]—a feeling or quality that evokes emotions of sadness or joy, sorrow or delight” (Sawyers 2000:5 6). She goes on to note, “Some of Celtic music’s qualities, it is true, derive from the modal scales of [Western] traditional music, but others are hard to pin down. All share, ‐ for lack of a better word, a Celtic spirit, a unique bond with one another that transcends time, distance, and political units” (Ibid 6). This telling assessment of “Celtic” music demonstrates the ambiguous rhetoric that ties together disparate practices from various Celtic speaking regions of the world. Why go to great lengths to unify broadly the musical practices of various ‐ Celtic speaking populations, when the practice and technique of said musics are also seen by

‐

156 many to differ greatly? In other words, why create a meta genre of Celtic music? The answer is rooted in economic power exchange—value. ‐ Primarily, we can draw a parallel with C. A. Gregory’s notion of “territoriality.” Gregory conceives of territoriality as an integral component of value, indeed, as value itself: Territoriality is a form of consciousness that binds people together…. Territoriality… is the union of consanguinity with contiguity that defines an ethnic space, a domain that is much larger than the physical boundaries defined by the supreme good, the inalienable farmland under the guardianship of a particular branch of a family. (Gregory 1997:165)

Gregory places far more emphasis on the human element of value than what the Marxist notions, even popular notions of exchange and use would imply. In Gregory’s view, value cannot exist simply in terms of its structure or function; rather, since it is a social interaction, it tends to be accompanied by all the complexity people ascribe on their surroundings, the dimension he calls “ethnic space.” “Each ethnic space is defined by a notion of home, by rules of endogamy, and by forms of commodity specialization” (Gregory 1997:165). Home, in Gregory’s sense, is the center of territoriality. In the world of market exchange, home is the context of exchange through which the goods themselves are produced and distributed. The unifying nature of Celticity joins various musicultural practices under a blanket of consanguinity. Music provides an adequate representation of the social reality of home territoriality, in that music is first and foremost shared socially. Commodified music capitalizes on that same expression exchanged as a good, and under Gregory’s model, territoriality influences the flow of goods within a domain of profit.

Celticity: Transcending Nationality for a Broadly-Encompassing Notion of Tradition Tradition, I have noted, in various conceptions has the ability to link origin and invention in such a way as to engender continuity. For performers of traditional “Celtic” music, importance often lies in the local affiliation through familial and regional identity through composition, performance, and contest of music. These musicians utilize a social network that relies on concepts such as authenticity and historical tradition. The local domain can be seen as exclusive in this sense, as the composers and performers of these traditions are seen as creators and keepers of the music, which engenders a sense of ownership and status. This is a powerful identity that solidifies boundaries and forms community within an affiliated group (traditional Irish musicians, for example). Such an identity is unattainable for producers of Celtic music

157 compilations, and perhaps even counterintuitive to their desires to draw the largest crowd of consumers. Thus, the continuity and authenticity of such traditions are appropriated from other sources through generic forms. An example of such a compilation is the Celtic Colours International Festival’s “The Routes of the World,” featuring artists such as Mary Jane Lamond, Susana Seivane, Danú, Haugaard & Hoirup, Maybelle Chisholm,Tony McManus, Patricia Murray, Liz Doherty, Howie MacDonald, J.P. Cormier, Chris Norman, Cameron Chisholm, Paul Cranford, Beòlach, Cliar, Suroit, Phil Cunningham, and the Cape Breton Fiddlers' Association. The genres represented are from Cape Breton, Galacia, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Québec, and Ontario, all operated under the blanket descriptor, “Celtic.” Ultimately, beyond the apparent power of the transmission of music as large-scale capital, the local domain of musical-social interaction is where authorship can be fully realized in its dynamic social reality. “Many critics contest the use of the term Celtic because it erases the boundaries between Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Breton traditional musics.” Most Irish traditional musicians and those people connected to the traditional music community do not recognize Celtic as a musical category, referring to it as a ‘noncategory,’ or ‘the C word’” (Reiss 2003:145). Some musicians even see the appropriation of Celticity as a negative image, one that muddies the perception of their people’s traditions. Still, others use the genre label when it suits them, and this is a telling power that the appropriation of Celticity has had in the modern musical world: “Martin Hayes, a recording artist and fiddler from Co. Clare currently living in Seattle, has a travel story that illustrates this eloquently: ‘If somebody sees my fiddle case on an airplane, say, and asks me what I play I say ‘Celtic Music.’ If I were to say Irish music he likely wouldn’t know what I was talking about’” (Reiss 2003:146).

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CHAPTER 8 MOVING BEYOND METHODOLOGY: INTERDISCIPLINARY THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

“A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, “Well, it means a person who’s always active and never pauses to reflect—” No, that didn't sound right. I tried again. “That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won’t grow stale.” He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, “I mean, a man who’s active and doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, he’ll get ahead in life.” Doctor Nisea said, “I see.” And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder. “What does it mean?” I asked. “Did I get it backward?” “Yes, I’m afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you’ve given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who—” “You don’t have to tell me,” I broke in. “I remember—I really knew it. A person who’s unstable will never acquire anything of value.” (Philip K. Dick 1972)

The Malagawatch Union Church rests at the top of the hill located in the Highland Village Museum in Iona. Like most things, it comes with its own story. Malagawatch takes its name from a Mi’kmaq word said to mean “lake of full islands.” It was built in 1874 on the shores of the River Denys Basin in the contemporary Scottish style. It is (or was) a Presbyterian church that in its initial setting served a primarily Gaelic speaking population. In 1925, the church became a part of the newly formed United Church of Canada. In 2003, the church was relocated to the Highland Village Museum, to represent the authentic architecture of the time. In a Publication of Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia magazine titled, The Griffin, Highland Village Museum director Rodney Chaisson wrote: Early Tuesday morning the church left its former home and was transported 1.5 km down the Marble Mountain Road to meet a barge waiting in the River Denys Basin. That journey took under one-and-a-half hours. By midafternoon the church

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was loaded on the barge and then set sail for Iona to the delight and applause of almost 300 onlookers. Many residents of the Malagawatch area were there to say goodbye to an old friend and wish it well in its new home. Some two hours and 15 nautical miles later, the church arrived in the Barra Strait, where it circled for over an hour while waiting for the falling tide to slacken. While waiting for safe passage through the two bridges spanning the Strait, a large light from the barge was shone on the side of the church, providing an incredible silhouette of the building in the middle of the Strait. Shortly after 6:30 pm, the tug pulled its precious cargo through the bridges to the former government wharf in Iona, where it was tied up shortly after 7 pm. A couple of hundred residents lined the bridges and wharf to welcome the church and get a nighttime glimpse of its arrival. (2004:3)

In the days following its arrival, the church was hauled up the long hill and settled in its current resting place. The Gothic-style steeple, that had been removed years previous to the move under the pretense that it had weakened due to age and weathering, was replaced some years later. While I stood in front of the church taking a picture, I asked someone near me to tell me about it. They related the wonders of floating the building down the lake on a barge, the difficulty of hauling it to the top of the mountain, and then added, “They brought it here hoping it would bring more people to the museum, you know, thinking that people would want to be married in an authentic Gaelic church. But, see, the problem with that is that it’s a Presbyterian church. This is a Roman Catholic community.” I gave an affirmative “Hmm,” and let the matter rest there while I snapped a few more pictures. Weddings at the Highland Village Museum are not a huge moneymaker, but they do happen several times each season. The draw of the church, though, for many people who visit the Village, is that the church was home to an active Gaelic-speaking congregation for many decades. More than the authentic architecture, a conglomeration of European styles formalized in the late nineteenth century, the church represents a direct connection to the Gaelic language in Cape Breton. In a way, that is what is being preserved on top of the hill at the Highland Village Museum. In that moment, I could not help but view the whole transition of the church here as some sort of dramatic undertaking that rested, in my mind, as a metaphor of initial Gaelic immigration to the Island, how social change was the impetus for the movement from one locale to another; once there, it served as a testament to “what once was,” representing a literal museum piece of “tradition.” Obviously I was thinking about it way too much. Or was I?

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Interdisciplinary Imaginings of a Discipline Ethnomusicology, especially in recent years, has begun to adopt a more social approach. In an article published in the 1994 Annual Review of Anthropology, titled, “Music and Language,” Aaron Fox and Steven Feld wrote, “From a cross-cultural and ethnographic perspective, the main positions in the musical meaning debate oversimplify the communicational complexity and interpretive density of real verbal and musical experience” (Feld, Fox 1994:28). The article outlines particular advantages of trends in ethnographically approaching socialized performance as well as noted critiques of musical linguistics that point out the experiential differences between music and language. Overall, in the studies they review, a theme seems to emerge, that in either polemic—music and language as performed, or music or language—each retains a phenomenologically different yet importantly interdependent position in terms of human interactivity. For Bakhtin, life—the experiential event-of-being—is dialogism. With dialogism, life becomes expression. “Expression means to make meaning, and meaning comes about only through the medium of signs. This is true at all levels of existence: something exists only if it means” (Holquist 1990:49). In music and language, regardless of finding generic ways to hammer down “what,” exactly, each of these categories are, a dynamic awareness begins to emerge when we focus on how people cast meaning within them through dialog. Is it not enough to realize that they are narratized generic forms, and move on from there? “Meaning comes about in both the individual psyche and in shared social experience through the medium of the sign, for in both spheres understanding comes about as a response to a sign with signs” (Holquist 1990:49). A sign cannot exist in and of itself; it is socialized, connected, linked and narratized in what Bakhtin referred to as a “great chain” (Vološinov 1986:28). Signs and utterances of any kind are expressions, potential texts in that they are performed, given meaning, and genericized. Music studies have often overlooked these generic forms, taken them for granted in their quest to document and theorize taxonomies as laws that govern how the forms provide stability, linearity, and repeatability. Indeed, the very nature of structural meaning in music has only been possible based on the dialogic struggle between genres wherever they are expressed. Much in the same way, Bakhtin wrote: Unfortunately, historians of literature usually reduce this struggle between the novel and other already completed genres, all these aspects of novelization, to the actual real-life struggle among “schools” and “trends.” A novelized poem, for

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example, they call a “romantic poem” (which of course it is) and believe that in doing so they have exhausted the subject. They do not see beneath the superficial hustle and bustle of literary process the major and crucial fates of literature and language, whose great heroes turn out to be first and foremost genres, and whose “trends” and “schools” are but second- or third-rank protagonists. (Bakhtin 1981:7-8) All genres—including musical genres—bend and twist in time and expression, finding forms through expectant performance and interactive entextualization. Their features as formalized are snapshots of dialogic meanings, but these glimpses in and of themselves are not able to capture the dynamic meanings of the genre as a whole, nor can they access the complex interrelationships through which they were, in fact borne. They must be shared, narratively and conceptually, to establish their potential worth. By “imaginings,” I mean a series of structured ideas communicated through a shared dialogic space. Such interaction emphasizes the emergent sense of realities constructed with generic forms. In the milling frolic, this is done through the sharing of song. In graduate seminar classes, it takes place in the form of spoken discourse. In my dissertation I wished to capture this same emergent experience by having just such a dialog with another ethnomusicologist regarding interdisciplinarity—a dialog that would resonate with issues engaged both in the document and in the larger theory and practice of ethnomusicology. I first saw this dialogic technique in print in Charles Keil’s and Steven Feld’s Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogs. I used a similar approach in the following dialog between myself and Frank Gunderson of Florida State University.

Dialogic Interaction

BW: So, I wanted to dialog about interdisciplinary imaginings in the discipline...

FG: Right away we could query your use of the term “discipline.” Not everyone who works under the umbrella of the term ethnomusicology thinks that it’s a discipline. If anything, it’s more like an “approach.”

BW: I think anthropology gets a lot of that too. Cultural anthropology. Mainly because they’re always sort of the weird, free-thinkers of a university campus. And they certainly never get the funding that other departments do, and from a pragmatic sense in the university they’re not researching “hard,” material issues. But in a sense, you can’t really be a cultural anthropologist without also being a historian, and a sociologist, a culturalist in a specific area...

FG: With a touch of humanism as well.

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BW: Right. Humanism...

FG: That is to understand the arts not just from a scientific, or a pseudo-scientific point of view, but understand the art, you can actually reach out and touch the object, and it becomes real to you, and you can experience things in the way that others experience things, or at least think you can do that, or try to do that, or imagine you can do that.

BW: I took a lot of inspiration from some of Bakhtin’s writings, in terms of interaction, in terms of narratives, and I apply those to what we do in the field, and--that’s one of the reasons why areas like stylistics to me become just one aspect of our interaction. We can certainly have scientific studies done--on the question of stylistics--to define why something is the way that it is; I think that skews our ability to carry on a conversation on why something, maybe, doesn’t seem so self-evident.

FG: Right, this becomes most evident in my own thought with a piece of writing that I read this past week where the writer is trying to rationalize why they are only looking at two or three years of history of a genre, and they base it on a style. He says that when the style changes, he stops his framed discourse. If he were actually talking about genre in the way that we’re talking about genre, he would have maybe two or three years before that bracket, and two or three years after, but he’s hung up on the fact that the style changes, so his category or his subset would be somehow impure in that regard, and that what he’s talking about would be too hard to grapple with. And so, the issue had to do with American Hardcore Punk Rock music. All the bands that were playing this music, and continuing to play this music beyond this two-three year period sort of branched off into heavy metal and other things, yet they didn’t really lose their fan base. In fact they gained more fans. The genre of this music is not about the stylistic signifier, as much as it is about the sociality of it. As much as it is the conviviality of it, and the liminality of the performances, and the identification that one creates with those bands and the line notes associated with the label that puts out these bands together with the show itself, the experience itself. That’s all a part of the genre. That didn’t stop at all just because they changed their style. So the genre doesn’t end there and becomes something else, the genre is much wider and has a multiple dimension to it. It isn’t about the speed at which you play a guitar riff. Right? I think I’m reading you correctly in terms of how Bakhtin would talk about genre.

BW: Yeah, definitely. Bakhtin was serious about focusing in on the structure of things, for sure. Paying attention to one aspect of stylistics can be very important, because if you really want to look at how something works in an effort to describe its repeatable forms, in the boundaries of one particular system, then sure, flush that out. But, “it” can’t exist without being next to and embedded in all these other genres of existence. That’s what Bakhtin is referring to with the “event-of-

163 being.” Being as event, everything we do--it’s social expression. It’s the actualization of the self with the other. If we’re thinking structurally , all human activities are a part of that. It’s how we create narratives to define the things we experience, things that have happened. But there’s a misleading sense of objectivity in there, because even when we talk about a specific realm, a genre, we have to use a subjective medium--an expression, essentially--to do so. So, that’s the interesting paradox of realizing a definitional, strict, enforceable boundary around a genre that can’t move or bend. In that you’re losing sight of how the genre came to be in the first place. From my perspective, that’s what makes a story--just a typical story--so much more powerful, because embedded in all the narrative are all its genre descriptors.

FG: You mean a story about moving a church from one place to another?

BW: Right. The Malagawatch church.

FG: Or a story about a buzzard attacking a rider on a motorcycle.

Laughter

BW: Right. From my perspective, the buzzard is in his own world, and the driver of the truck in his cabin is in his own world. He can’t see into the sky the way I can, and he can’t see down over the road the way the buzzard can--neither can I-- and all of us are interacting in that place in our own way. The truck driver may or may not have been oblivious to the buzzard. The buzzard is playing a game. I thought the buzzard was going to crash into me. And so on. These are all elements... they’re genre boundaries. Dimensions of our social existence, really. Now, in terms of the field, stylistics is a part of what happens, but it is also implicit in the narrative, in the stories that people tell. We can talk about stylistics until we’re blue in the face, but it can’t communicate the effective nature of how those elements exist in the event of being. From the moment we’re born to the moment we die, our entire existence is constantly defined--in the “definite,” objective sense as we understand it--by a subjective medium, an expression. And, every time we express something, it becomes a potential text. Texts as texts are continually recontextualized. As a process, it belongs to the social group, it doesn’t belong to the individual any more. So, that’s the sort of realm that I think is poignant about our field, because we have the potential to bring interdisciplinary ideas to bear on a specific social focus--musical expression--that is a part of pretty much everything we do, and it allows us maybe to see things not just from a stylistic standpoint, but in the various different ways we experience them.... That’s my take on it, anyway. So, talk to me about film.... How does film inform your work?

FG: Well, my interest in film has to do with the kinds of stories we can tell about life, about music, about love, about art, and human experience that you can’t do in other media, like contextualization through writing, or painting, or other kinds of

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formal academic discourse, presentations. There’s something about the filmic environment that in not all cases but in many cases you can do things that you can’t do in those other areas. For example, a film that I did just see this past week called, Awake to Zion, which is a film about a Jewish woman who has an intuition, based on listening to Reggae music, that there’s something in those texts, something in the experience of Jamaican Rastafarians that’s akin to her experience as a Jewish woman growing up in New York City that she wanted to explore. Now, if she were to do this work and have this approach in a monograph, or in writing, the evidence that she had come up with would seem both scant, and frivilous, and inconsequential. But the immediacy of film provides a kind of context that is real, and tangible, and believable, and emotional, and beautiful in the ways that a piece of writing would not do justice. That’s one of the reasons why I have an interest in film. It’s because we can do things with film that we can’t do with other mediums that can convey aspects of human experience, and disseminate aspects of human experience, and tell stories about aspects of human experience, that fall short in other places. Perhaps a novel would be the way to go with this woman’s experience, but I think that what she did with film was right on the money. It was quite brilliant, and if I were a funding agency, I would love to give her more money just to continue to do what she does. But if she were writing about what she were thinking and experiencing I don’t think I would, because it would seem silly to me. Maybe she could crank an article out, but not much more than that. The film really captured it.

BW: You brought up the word “novel,” and, just from my experience in Bakhtinian studies, that’s really the emphasis on novel forms, really it’s what the genre of the novel does, is basically create a new reality or dimension that you can visit or experience sort of empathically, and I think film does the same thing, but on a different level. Instead of reading and creating realities in your mind, you are actually experiencing in an auditory and visual sense this new objective experience that you recontextualize within yourself.... It’s sort of the next “novel” experiential being, and I think--especially in ethnomusicology--we’re poised to be interdisciplinary.... I really think that film is where we should go. In ethnographic writing, and novels, you can read and empathize with the protagonist and “be” there in that space, but film sort of does that on its own--it already creates that space for you. You sit down to watch a film and you’re already there. It provides an empathic place where you can become a voyeur into this other world and empathize with the protagonist in that way. And so, there are the same elements at work when we’re watching that are at work when we’re reading a novel, it’s just that we have more sensual stimulus while we’re doing it. For me that’s what makes filming musical practices so poignant. I mean, music is something that you do have to listen to... you can’t really just read about it. So I think that’s why I would like to incorporate more film in the type of research that I do.

FG: Right. Let me ask you a question. Do you think that when we talk about film and music that this is an example of interdisciplinarity?

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BW: Definitely.

FG: I’m almost thinking that film, and ethnomusicology, is--or should be-- something that you just do naturally, that you shouldn’t have to qualify it or justify it by calling it anything.

BW: Fair enough.

FG: It’s something that we should just do.

BW: Right, well, now you’re touching on my notion of interdisciplinary thinking in general. I mean, I call it “Interdisciplinary Imaginings,” because I am approaching scholarship understanding that there are delineated disciplines and fields in which people can journey into their path of research, but I don’t see the divisions between those genres as solid. I try to incorporate many “defined” fields into the research that I do because in every single one of these fields people are writing about the research that they do. It’s narrative, it’s explanatory, it exists in a social realm. Even the basic elements of our biology as understood are socialized. So, when I think about interdisciplinarism in film--and yeah I think you’re right it; just should be naturally the place that we go in today’s day and age, to incorporate film into our studies--but really it’s only been the past couple of decades in which we are using film in the way that I’m envisioning it---

FG: Right, because of the nature of the technology itself, and the practice thereof. I mean, twenty years ago, to make a film, you needed to have a hundred thousand dollars. And now, for three, four, five, six thousand, you can get a pretty decent digital camera, and do all the work yourself. And it’s portable enough that you’re not as intrusive as you might have been previously when you had to have an entire crew. And now, it’s nice if you can have a crew, but you don’t need to have a crew to make a film sound good, so...

BW: Definitely. And even beyond that, we’re far more aware now in terms of our own experience; we don’t have to go and spend a lot of time to study how to craft a movie. We’re far more able to create films on our own. A collection of pictorial, media representative texts, that we can turn into a story. We can craft a story through the medium of film. And that’s not something that we’ve seen very often in the “field” of ethnomusicology.

FG: Right, or when you do see them, these initial attempts, it’s like so many of us don’t really understand what we can do with the filmic medium in the ethnomusicology approach. It’s still sort of limited to, “Oh I have to document this thing,” and it’s not about telling a story, or it’s not about using the medium to its full advantage, it’s that there’s this thing that I have to do, and it would sort of look great if we could all sit down and watch it...

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BW: It’s the same thing as creating five hundred wax cylinders that end up in the Smithsonian.

FG: Point.

BW: But we’re more able now, with the software that we have and the access that we have to this creative medium, so I really think we can be visiting this space more--even in the curriculum of ethnomusicology--teaching people how to create a story. We’re familiar with how to tell a story, to sort of craft a narrative that can make people laugh or cry or whatever, to make a meaningful connection. We’re not just going to plop a camera on a tripod. You can use film to create novelistic space. It’s a space that in my opinion, the dialog of cultural interaction comes through that space.

FG: Certainly now, also, to further this justification for using film is that the subjects who we’re working with are more cognizant and they’re more a part of the broader filmic environment in terms of their understanding that they have that expectation to the point that, if you’re not pulling your camera out and shooting something, it’s almost like an insult... it’s almost like “We’re playing music here. Don’t you think this is important enough for you to be documenting?” I mean the expectation is there, where twenty years ago that may not have been the case. And in this we’re still sort of caught up in the sense that we’re violating the sacred space of the performance by pulling our cameras out and documenting it in this way.

BW: Right, that’s kind of a nice segue to...

FG: Where?

BW: Ethnomusicology and geography. Really I want to talk a little bit about this dialog of “space” and “place.” The way that we approach things from a geographical standpoint--plot points on a map--and when we get to that geographical place, something else is happening. For example, identity is comprised not so much of where we are, but what we do when we are there. So, in ethnomusicology... take most ethnomusicology text books that divide the world up into specific areas, and cast a narrative idea about this world, where and how things exist. But then when you actually go there, it’s not quite so simple. It’s a more dynamic existence. There’s more at work there....

FG: Yeah, there are a hundred different strands of thought that we could unravel in what you just said... I’m not even sure where to begin. I’m thinking about my master’s thesis. When I wrote my master’s thesis I went to Kenya for two years to teach high school before I went into a master’s and doctoral program, and I had the expectation that I would somehow find all the things that John Miller Chernoff was writing about in his book about African rhythm and sensibility, and I was somehow shocked and aghast to see how fully Christianized the rural areas

167 in Kenya, in the areas where I was teaching, had become. And, I didn’t go through any kind of prolonged, disjunctive sensibility or depression, but it took me a while to kind of get on my feet and just sort of realize, “Well...” intuitively, “...even though I’m not trained as an ethnomusicologist yet, I think that this is what I need to be looking at.” So that’s what I did, I wrote my master’s thesis on the history of Christian gospel music in Kenya, even though I wasn’t a Christian; I was there experiencing it. And it became quite clear to me very quickly that this was not only a thing that I could do, but it was extremely fascinating and really evocative the more I talked to people, the more I could get into the story, and answer questions like, “What is this doing here?” “How did this get here?” “Why is this done the way it’s done?” “Why is it performed the way it’s performed?” “How is this experienced?” “How has it transformed, in numerable ways, in the past hundred and twenty-five years?” I mean, all these questions came up really quickly, so I was able to turn all of those thoughts into a narrative when it came time to write one. Now I don’t know if that’s one of the strands that I picked up on in your discourse, I mean, there’s kind of a million things that we can play with there. Certainly it’s following the old school notion of a faraway place, and bringing something back from a faraway place. And certainly I kind of played into that senseibility, but I also often to this day think that there’s something to that, in the old Margaret Meadian sense, or the Malinowskian sense, of really living, and breathing, and soaking up temporally the sights and sounds and smells and cultures that are embedded in the area where you’re doing your work. That experience in and of itself temporally will affect the way you write about it, and talk about it, and teach those materials. I think that I still... I won’t say “cling,” but I still adhere to that principle only because that’s what I’ve always done. Though, things are changing. They’re changing because of politics, they’re changing because of economics, they’re changing for a number of reasons where the places and spaces where we go to do our research are nearer and closer, one; and they’re changing because of the fact that the nature of fieldwork itself is being questioned and queried to the point where most of us are quite explicit and understanding of the sense that fieldwork never really stops. The “field” work in and of itself may be the wrong linguistic connotation. Maybe we can come up with another word somehow to call what it is that we do.

BW: Thinking.

FG: Sure, critical thinking. So, I mean, when I did my most recent “fieldwork,” by day I was sitting in an archive, poring through newspapers, and by night I was going out to clubs and bars, experiencing music, and taking part in music, and in some cases playing music and talking to musicians about the things I was reading in the archives. And I was always asking myself, when I step into the archive or out of the archive is there some kind of demarcation where I’m no longer doing fieldwork, and somehow now I’m doing historical research. I mean, it’s so absurd when you think about it like that.

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BW: When I was in Sydney doing research in the library there, then I would leave the library and head over to Governor’s Square Pub to listen to some local musicians play... it never stops....

FG: It never stops. And now I find out that on facebook that the topic that I’m currently writing about is undergoing a radical transformation. It just happened yesterday, and so because of this cue on facebook, I’m now going on youtube so I can find videos to see what really happened. The bringing together of these two bands that I’m writing about, they’re now one band. So, I’m certainly going to that place in my imaginary because I experienced it, and I spent some time there. And the importance of what has happened becomes more evident to me because of the time I experienced there, but it’s not to say that would not have taken place if I just found out about it on youtube and went to it without having been there--I don’t know that. But I’m thinking having gone some place, and experienced, and talked to people, and listened to people, and played music with people... that adds to that dimension as well. So, let’s hear it for facebook.

BW: The globalizing social force.

FG: Social networking, social media has as much potential impact towards changing how we relate to each other as the world wide web seemed to when it first became available to the public. It changes our ideas about where…

BW: …about communication and interaction... Yeah. To me a lot of these aspects of geography have a lot to do with that since they are issues of hypertextuality. The internet’s social networking is almost an entropic force, in that it sort of cascades all over the initial boundaries that have been put between everything, and we are starting to see how everything melts together in the way that it is experienced. I think social networking is one of those mediums that allows us to say, “Wow, everything is connected,” and it also makes you aware of how exposed you are to everyone else around you when the boundaries don’t seem so clear. So, for me, issues of geography in terms of where our music culture exists, and also where the field is... if we’re thinking in a critical sense and we are imagining interdisciplinary, then there is no field, or there is all field.

FG: So, ethnomusicology as discipline, as a field, as an approach, as a modality of discourse... Where do you see yourself in that regard?

Laughter

BW: Well, one of the first things that attracted me to ethnomusicology was the notion that music is not a specified genre that exists in one progressive way. Now, when I was growing up, this was just intuitive to me. Music was just something that we did. You know? We interact musically. We play music; I’ve been playing the guitar since I was thirteen. We sing songs that we hear on the radio, we make up songs of our own. I started piano lessons at a young age. I’d

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play some of the music that the teacher taught me, written on the page, and then I’d make up stuff of my own. The stuff I made up on my own was more fun. Later, I got my undergrad degree in music. Then I noticed that I have an aptitude for pedagogy, so I really wanted to teach, so I got my certificate in education. It’s amazing, when you’re studying music in a classically trained school, the popular notion of what music is. You spend so much time on the stylistics of music, and there are so many people around you talking about what it is at any given time. I used to get this a lot: “Oh, so now that you’ve got your professional degree in music, can you even listen to music on the radio anymore without analyzing it?” It was sort of the running trope, the fact that once you study something or become an certified “expert” in something that you lose the ability to appreciate it. That always rubbed me the wrong way, and I always rebelled against that notion. Stylistically speaking, the music that I was made to teach was always like the music that I played from the book; it taught me something that I could then later go and do something new on my own. It was only part of the experience. What attracted me to ethnomusicology, as a musician, was just sort of the liberating notion that there is never only one way of doing something. That’s why I got into this field. Thinking about music as a thing born in stylistics, and then studying music as culture, culture itself, really, and understanding various geographies of how music exists around the world, it opened up these ideas in my mind about the dialog between these two ways of doing things. After a while I started to appreciate more how the field historically structured itself in the same way--the stylistic way--this progressive notion of how music moved from primitive to civilized. It became apparent that the field went through its own developmental epiphony, and engage with relevant discourse in related socio-cultural fields. Before long it became evident to me that it’s not just the study of music in the world, it’s the exploration of people using music throughout the world, creating various social texts and moments... I think that since I am a musician and I interact in and through music in many ways, that it was sort of the right field for me to enter this emerging interdisciplinary scholarship, where I can basically just go and talk to people about what they are doing musically. What they learn, and what they do. I don’t know if that makes any sense....

FG: Sure.

BW: Actually, I don’t even know if I answered your question, to be honest.

FG: No, it answers my question. I think that what drew me to ethnomusicology personally was similar to you. In my childhood and my teens, and my playing guitar, and being attracted to blues, and listening to my dad talk about the blues. Using my dad’s seventy-eight, and thirty-three, and forty-five collection of blues, as he was a bonafide blues aficionado. A professional amateur, in the sense that he collected thousands of recordings and just had them around the house and played them all the time, and was encouraging me to understand and listen to these songs and to talk with him about them. Then when I began to take classes, when I began to study music formally with a guitar teacher, and then taking

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classes at the community college, I began to find out that somehow that what I enjoyed most about music was not in the music theory that I was reading. The music theory somehow by its very nature at that time and place was somehow reducing the value of what I was experiencing in the sense that it didn’t explain things like how to bend a note, or how a semi-tone or a microtone can be a part of one’s musical experience can still be valid and not be dissonant, and not be somehow not harmonic. And the whole language of music theory as it was taught to me, it rubbed me the wrong way, so I began to intuit to myself, “Well there has to be a way to think about music beyond this kind of reductionary sensibility that is so tied to the history of Western thought.”I realized to myself that there has got to be a way that this is done, so I took an anthropology class at the local community college, and even asked my teacher, “Is there a way that we can talk about this music anthropologically?” And my teacher said, “Oh yes, there is a way you can do that. It’s called ‘ethnomusicology,’ and there’s this guy named Bruno Nettl who does that.” And so, that led me to reading Bruno Nettl, to the point where I even wrote him a letter.

BW: That’s great.

FG: A handwritten, cursive letter. “Dear Bruno Nettl, I am a big fan of your work. I want to be like you. Where can I learn about how this works, how to do things, blahdee blahdee blah?”

Laughter

FG: And he wrote me back, within like a few weeks he wrote me back. So whenever I see Bruno Nettl, I always tell him the story. And he says, “Yeah, I remember that.”

Laughter

BW: I had an interesting similar experience. I had been teaching in Colorado for about eleven months. I went out there to develop a music program for a K-12 school in a little town in the southeast plains. It’s basically like western Kansas; it’s just flat, you can see over twenty miles in any direction. I note the landscape, as it was, because of the way I had started thinking about my job--bleak. Everything had become so monotonous in that the state has specific standards that must be taught, and there were specific expectations about wind ensembles and music competitions. I tried incorporating different ways of teaching music, for example I created a folk music unit for certain grades, where they learned all the historic songs of the region, as well as some indigenous music. We would all basically meet and sing folk songs at certain times during the day. But that was something extra I did--the standards just didn’t have room for much beyond clarinet lessons. I mean I also did lessons, for the band, but the highlights for me in that music program was that we were using music far more outside of the band setting than in it. Essentially, there was a disconnect between what used to

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provide so much interactive expression through music for me, and what was expected that the students learn. I was doing research during a planning period on the internet, and I came across some graduate programs in ethnomusicology.... I had heard the word before, but it was already filed away in my mind as “world music,” so it did not occur to me that it was an emerging approach with which to engage music in the way I wanted to. I looked around and I noticed a couple of places that had ethnomusicology programs. I literally sent an email to Michael Bakan, and asked “Can I call you to talk about this?” And he responded with his office hours, so I called him from my office in Colorado, between classes, and we spoke for an hour. He basically told me that I should apply, and that was basically it.

FG: Very good. Returning now to this discussion about fields and disciplines and approaches--after being accepted to graduate school, the intellectual discourse in the territory of ethnomusicology that I really responded to most in the writings were the pointed discussions in the journal Ethnomusicology, during the seventies, between Alan Merriam, Bruno Nettl, and David McAllester, where, they were, I was imagining at the time, simply continuing the conversations they were having at SEM meetings, in print discourse. They were position papers about, “What is this that we’re doing.” Deeply philosophical discussions about the nature of music, the nature of ethnomusicology. Is it a field? Is it an approach? Is it about anthropology? Is it about bi-musicality--Mantle Hood is sort of in that discussion but actually not as much as those three. And David McAllester especially was the sort of unvalued persona who we need to re-think about in terms of his role in that discussion. I think that he is somehow difficult to put in a box and say, “Okay, McAllester brings this to the table.” But his sensibility was one of humanism, and of having an artist’s soul, more than the other three--I thought. An extremely witty persona who was not a... I don’t want to say rational thinker, but was not well-organized and scholarly, but he just shot from the hip and told it like it was, and had just really great stories also. Anyway, those three, persona and discourse, was what really drew me further into the field and ensconced me in the field and made me really want to be a part of it. But at the same time, even though I use the word “field,” because of that discourse in the seventies, I still to this day don’t think of ethnomusicology as a field; I think of it more as an approach. The more that I think about it as a field, it lessens its connections to other fields and other approaches and other territories. It becomes this, potentially, this ossified place. And in my experience in going to conferences and seeing things published in ethnomusicology, every now and then I can see that is happening; it becomes a trend that is most important that everyone kind of has to jump in on and weigh in on and talk about in these increments of ten to fifteen years. And if you look at our history you can see where this is going. If you look at the nineties, there’s this preoccupation with identity, so if you don’t have the word identity in your discourse you’re somehow not towing the line. Well, who said we have to tow a line? That’s always been what drew me to this approach, or into this area. Though, again, when we talk about what it is we do, we can’t help but, you know, the word “field” will slip in...

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BW: For me, what attracts me to this field also is the nature of the discourse that historically has been evident. Definitions are important, when you get right down to it--we need to talk about things. That seems to be the difficulty that many people have is that it’s very nebulous, the nature of how or why people do what they do in this field.... Approaching it first from an anthropological standpoint, understanding that there are different ways of doing things in different parts of the world, then brings up its own complex set of interrelated issues. My sense of it is that this interdisciplinary imagination really exists in every moment, but everyone goes through this codependent relationship with what it is we do. So, the nature of the definition of the genre can’t just remain unresolved... we have to legitimize it in our speech.

FG: Certainly legitimize it in terms of the ability to have the wider discourse of conferences, and have employment, and the ability to get jobs, and so forth.

BW: Definitely. And what’s always amazing to me about that experience is that it’s still just sharing. The only answers are that there are no answers, just a sharing of ideas. What is poignant to me about the field, in that sense, is that you can’t go into it, and enter a moment a learning where you are documenting a thing. It’s all just experience. You’re already there. I really do stand by the notion that ethnomusicology is poised to approach that existential existence of scholarship. We are all approaching “the field” with our own mindset, everything we’ve experienced up to this point, but it’s dialogic. It’s not definitional. Even though we create definitions of things, when someone asks about that definition there is never just one answer, because language belongs to the social group. And I think that the same process is readily evident in the discovery and invention of what ethnomusicology is. There’s never one answer.

FG: So, ethnomusicology is a genre?

BW: Yeah, sure, it’s a genre. It takes on generic forms, but at the same time it’s nebulous because it’s emergent. It exists as a way in which we can discuss things that we do. When you think about it in this sense, fields and disciplines are genres--they’re elements of interaction. Or at least I think so....So, when you engage in fieldwork, in a dialogic sense, that is when you’re in a moment where you realize you want to write about this topic, and learn more about it, and you’re talking to somebody about something topically relevant to that moment, what does the dialog do for you?

FG: Well, most of the time it’s not open-ended, in the sense that there’s a free exchange of information that follows one topic to another in association, the way that you would do with friends over coffee. As a researcher I have a selfish intent in the sense that I want to talk to practitioners about a notion that I’m having, or the specificities of a topic that’s growing, and I want people to respond and express themselves in a relational sense to what I’m coming up with, and most

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often I have revelations, or I’m led in this way or that way as a result of those conversations. I have in mind an end result on how to use that material in the classroom, or in the article that I may or may not publish at some point.

BW: So, basically you set a list of ideas that you want to approach, but usually the conversation in its normal dialogic sense often takes on a turn that often brings with it revalations.

FG: And the act of turning on the digital recorder formalizes, in my mind, and in the mind of the person who I am talking to, that, “Okay, we’re going there now.” So, I guess it has a disciplinary function.... I have this deep historical dimension in relationship to my work, and I’m often times, in my questions, asking specific things, like, “What were you doing in 1967?” and it’s a call and response. Often this question will go all over the place, but it’s based on a cue, a temporal cue, or it’s a performance cue, or it’s a linguistic cue, “What does that phrase mean?” “What does that text mean?” So, the cueing approach comes in a lot in my work. Cued by texts, cued by my understanding of historical occurrences where I want some sort of explanation or memorial process to occur.

BW: Are the cues the things you plan before hand?

FG: Yeah... it’s how I play it.

BW: I find myself doing cues as well, based on the way I feel motivated in the moment.... It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in that we know once the digital recorder is recording us, so we know that there’s a different type of text being made out of our conversation. So, pragmatically we try to gear the questions and the conversation toward that end, but ultimately it ends up taking unexpected turns anyway. So, when I think about dialog, I think about the fact that it’s not just a 1:1 group of relational utterances, it’s a dynamic interaction. It’s just as much about what I’m saying, and what you’re saying, and about what I’m going to say or you’re going to say based upon what we just said, all within the boundaries of the digital recorder.

BW: With regard to boundaries and disciplines, definitions…

FG: My sense, is, that these pragmatic moments to define themselves are growing longer and longer, temporally, and it’s becoming more and more evident that those who think, or dip their feet into ethnomusicology, or do ethnomusicology, think of this as a discipline, in the way that biology is a discipline, or physical anthropology is a discipline, and that there are certain practices, and certain canons, and certain ways of being that one needs to envelop and make a part of their toolbox....

BW: To be legitimate...

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FG: To be legitimate. Right. I’d like to think that I resist that, but then I know that I don’t. It’s part of playing the game, and it’s part of who we are, and it’s getting tenure, it’s a part of publishing...

BW: It inevitably takes on the generic forms that we sort of perform as a part of our identity. It’s funny because the moment that you stop to define something it sort of doesn’t exist in that moment.

FG: Right.

BW: When I initially had this idea of dialog, it was because I was writing about interdisciplinary imagination, which from one sense of the dialogic standpoint is the same thing as disciplinary imagination. You have a discipline that both is and is not a discipline, it needs to be defined as such for its own legitimacy, but ultimately for its own efficacy needs to be interdisciplinary. In my opinion, the only really way to access talking about that was literally to have a conversation about that phenomenon. I didn’t want to interview fifty scholars from various walks of the discipline, I wanted to get my take with one other person on this notion.

FG: So, are we doing that?

BW: I think so. We can’t not be doing that. So, yes.

Laughter

FG: If Bakhtin were here, how would he chime in?

BW: Oh, well, I don’t know really. I mean, Bakhtin had a really strict sense of how he thought things worked, and of course I’m only guessing based on the way I think, and his work that I’ve read....

FG: How can we evoke a sense of him from some of the things he’s written?

BW: He had a structural sense—not a stucturalist one—of how things fit together. He wove together various philosophies, Marxist, critiques on Freud, critiques on linguistics, to approach the nature of expression and what it means “to be.” For Bakhtin, everything exists within the social realm. It was his architecture of movement and being in space and time….

FG: His critique of Freud comes at a number of levels, the primary among them being, at least what I got from your dissertation, his critique of the subconscious and whether it even exists or not.

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BW: Right. And I think I say in the dissertation that I don’t want to make the blanket statement that Bakhtin claims such a thing does not exist, nor do I want to say that myself. It’s a very useful narrative.

FG: The unconscious, or the subconscious.

BW: Right. But when you think about the subconscious form, your imaginings of what exactly that is, is a social performance, and that belongs just as much to the group as anything that you believe is coming from deep within yourself. Freud used subjective language to access a free association notion of deeply embedded elements, and he interpreted it based on what he knew of various repeatable forms. But you can’t boil down language’s individual self-other actualization into a quantity of symbols, because the symbols are inherently different for everybody. Everyone is accessing it in their own unique way.

FG: So, on a pragmatic level, then, if someone has a neurosis, how do you explain it or help someone in that regard without talking about the existence of a subconscious?

BW: Well what Freud did was create a model for approaching issues of the mind. And the model became so widely adopted that it began to be indoctrinated, so now, that is what people visualize they experience. So, when I say I don’t wish to say “yea,” or “nay” on such a useful narrative, that’s because we perform the things in which we are indoctrinated. We believe a specific idea about our biology or our neurology and we can do laboratory tests to find repeatable results of various experiments but at the end of the day those were socially created and they are socially performed. So, if there is somebody with a neurosis, the best way to help is find some agency to connect with them in a shared space of understanding where they can learn ways not to be a threat to themselves or others.

FG: If you were to take Bakhtin with you to the milling frolic on your motorcycle, what would you talk about?

Laughter

BW: On the road?

FG: On the road to the milling frolic.

BW: We’d talk about buzzards....

Laughter

BW: My own take on Bakhtin is that I recognize the seriousness and the passion with which he approached his work. It’s fascinating to me because it has to do with tearing down the canonic and disciplinary boundaries that existed to define

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what, exactly, “this” was. What is “this?” Bakhtin understood that the nature of language was the narrative that created a subjective account of “this.” We all understand what paper is to a point, we can feel it, and we have different forms in our mind of what could constitute paper. But if I hold this up and I say, “What is this?” there are several correct answers (and no correct answers). I mean, it’s a magazine, it’s a periodical, it’s a paper....

FG: It’s trash.

BW: It’s trash, it’s recyclable. And, not only that, but there are words on it. Things that people said, that I can repeat back, though being repeated they can’t exist in the way that they did before. It’s very chaotic; it’s almost too much to think about, because it’s too nebulous. There’s no one issue to define, understand, and talk about. But for Bakhtin, all of that stuff is important, because the moment you stop paying attention to all the variables and focus in on one aspect of “this,” you’ve created something new. And you’ve discarded something, you’ve shaped the nature of the dialog, and you’ve changed the experience. Another thing that draws me to Bakhtinian thought is that I’ve always shared his view on binary opposites. I really appreciate that in his work, is that Bakhtin always was really good at pointing out these binary dualities, in an indoctrinated Cartesian sensibility of the mind, were never about either-or. So his answers to these questions were always “both” and “neither.” Or he would use the either-or as both and come up with a third, unique way of approaching the question that still remained relevant, just glossed over the mutual exclusivity of the polarity, and I appreciated that. If you’re looking at interaction, specifically, that’s the way you have to look at it; otherwise it’s not a dialog.... There’s never a closed loop around a definitional approach. You can’t just look at something one way..... The point is you have to look at it, and then you have to talk about it. The definition is implicit in that discussion, and in the sharing of that experience. Sharing is what engenders generic forms, a connotative sense of the thing. But it’s never about just defining it, like, “This is a coffee mug,” and then you understand what that means from now on. It’s not a representational thing, it’s not a symbol in and of itself, just as the icon of the mug, it’s so much more than that, so many more things. Your first experience with the coffee mug is never the same as mine. Early on, we all learn the generic forms for the symbolic relationships of the words that we share. But, language is always socialized, and those generic forms shift over time. That’s why we start using symbols as ways that become parodies of themselves, or discarded over time. And I think the same is true of any disciplinary approach. If you want to be a rigorous scholar in an ethnographic sense, you have to embrace the dialogic approach of things, and not just the one thing that is stylistically expectant and delivered....

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CONCLUSION

“Here’s a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron’s Terminator movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies’ premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as ‘conscious,’ as having interest and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it’s no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon.” –David Foster Wallace (1993)

For Bakhtin, the various ways to approach meaning in relationships between and among subjects, with categories such as ethnicity, tradition, heritage, with their infinite texts, and their current struggles, are all dialogic. Specifically, with regard to the notion of musical-social interaction, immediate experiences of any reality must be part of an ongoing dialog borne out of a semantic purpose. Genres function as the bond within spheres and subjects, the specific forms through which subjects have agency to construct spaces of shared understanding. In the milling frolic, the sharing of songs in a particular chronotopic space becomes the dialogic sharing of subjects in a dynamic interaction that reifies the meaning of the self and of the social group. Freud’s reductive interpretation of the self paid a lot of attention to the inner self, and while much of his later work focused on cultural influence on the conscious and subconscious mind, the interactive processes through which one develops a sense of personhood and defines and articulates deeper emotional responses with social cause and effect receives little attention. The development of personhood is the development of a subject, a dialogic, emergent process that is simultaneously a unique, unified expression of being through the semantic realities of the social whole. This process utilizes interaction between subjects as its efficacious form. Generic forms (genres) are necessary for meaning and understanding, but their definitions are never wholly contained. The indoctrinated fallacy of tradition in today’s technological, commodified world presupposes a positivistic type of preservation, an alienated performance of texts, a purist, mechanistic reproduction, devoid of life yet true to the formal features of the genre. But in the interactive expression of a text, such performances fail to provide a communicative framework unless they are transformed in some relevant way. The forms that fit one social link can be re-cast to fit the needs of the new chronotope in the social moment.

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The stability of definitions and formal features depend on subjective elements in the social dimension. Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony allows us the framework with which to approach experiences and create meaning and understanding while remaining aware of the dialogic reality of the genres implicit in our social existence. Gazing beyond the boundaries into the “forms of combinations of forms,” we still recognize their implicit worth without artificially hierarchizing them, and in the shift of their expectant worth we actualize them in a different, more dynamic way. In the human activity of musical-social interaction, all experience is dialogical. Participation in musical acts re-imagined as musical-social interaction accesses all interactive qualities of musical expression as well as the dynamic narratives that emerge from its dialogic life. To approach ethnographic research in this philosophical light is to engage the running fictions of identity in a polyphonic way. And as we cannot cease to be existent in this dialogism (until we eventually cease to be), the attention to the fluidity of generic forms within a shared musical space gives voice to every subject, every “one” we encounter in a dynamic discourse that is inclusive and emergent.

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APPENDIX A VISUAL NARRATIVE

Figure 10: Meandering the Backroads of Central Cape Breton

Figure 11: Little Narrows Ferry

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Figure 12: Finding Fuel

Figure 13: MacKenzie’s Little Narrows Country Store

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Figure 14: Entering Christmas Island from Grand Narrows

Figure 15: Cross Lines on the Corner of Dorchester and Esplanade, Downtown Sydney

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Figure 16: A Street Sign in Sydney

Figure 17: Dimensions of Identity: The Nova Scotian, Canadian, and Gaelic Flags

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Figure 18: St. Columba Catholic Church, Iona, Cape Breton, N.S.

Figure 19: Sydney Waterfront, Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

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Figure 20: Hillside view of the Waterfront and the Giant Fiddle

Figure 21: Sydney’s Giant Fiddle

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Figure 22: Coastline at Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Figure 23: Glace Bay Coastline

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Figure 24: Local Birdlife in Glace Bay

Figure 25: Central Cape Breton

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Figure 26: Malagawatch Church on the Bras d’Or Lakes on the way to Highland Village Museum (The Griffin 2004)

Figure 27: Malagawatch Church en route to its new location (The Griffin 2004)

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Figure 28: The Barra Strait Train Bridge

Figure 29: Coal train, having just crossed the Barra Strait from Grand Narrows to Iona

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Figure 30: Road to the Black House, Highland Village Museum

Figure 31: A view from the Black House overlooking Bras d’Or Lakes

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Figure 32: The Finished Malagawatch Church at Highland Village Museum

Figure 33: View of the Malagawatch Church from Grand Narrows

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Figure 34: Looking out from a house over a lake

Figure 35: A glimpse of Piper’s Cove in the distance

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APPENDIX B HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL

Human Subjects Application - For Full IRB and Expedited Exempt Review

PI Name: Bret David Woods Project Title: DIMENSIONS OF GENRE: MUSICAL-SOCIAL INTERACTION AT THE CAPE BRETON MILLING FROLIC

HSC Number: 2009.3535

“Your application has been received by our office. Upon review, it has been determined that your protocol is an oral history, which in general, does not fit the definition of ‘research’ pursuant to the federal regulations governing the protection of research subjects. Please be mindful that there may be other requirements such as releases, copyright issues, etc. that may impact your oral history endeavor, but are beyond the purview of this office.”

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APPENDIX C FÈIS SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND: A MOVEMENT

Fèis Air An Oir, North Sutherland A variety of instruments and Gaelic language are taught by a committed team of tutors who ensure that the young people of the area receive an excellent program of tuition. In 2008 Fèis Air An Oir began an archiving project and the started a local Mod.

Fèis Alba, Plockton Fèis Alba 2010 provided a high quality training opportunity for up to 48 young musicians from across Scotland participating in Ceilidh Trail projects throughout the Highlands and Islands.

Fèis Arainn, Isle of Arainn The main Fèis was held during the last week of July 2010 and saw record numbers attending. This continues to attract attendents and employ numerous tutors. Over the following winter, new classes were held in fiddle and were well attended.

Fèis a’ Bhaile, Inverness Fèis a’ Bhaile has been in existence for 19 years and offers tuition in: Fiddle, Clàrsach, Chanter, Tin Whistle, Mandolin, Bodhran, Step Dancing, Accordion, Gaelic Drama, Gaelic Singing, and Gaelic Conversation. The society is specifically aimed at non-Gaelic speaking children in the P4- S6 age range, from in and around the Inverness area. The Fèis deals primarily in the music medium with the accent always on fun. Opportunities are provided for the beginner and more experienced learner to develop their skills in a friendly and informal setting.

Fèis Bharraigh, Isle of Barra Fèis Bharraigh began in 1981 when Father Colin MacInnes, along with the piper Angus MacDonald, came up with the idea to promote, encourage, foster, and develop the practice and study of the Gaelic language, literature, music, drama and culture in the Islands of Barra and Vatersay. The celebratory festival is comprised of a week of local events, games, concerts, and dances. This was the first Fèis society to be developed in Scotland, spawning the Fèis movement throughout the nation and the diaspora. http://www.feisbharraigh.com/

Fèis a’ Bhealaich, Applecross Fèis a' Bhealaich are currently running a series of follow-on classes in Drama and Chanter.

Fèis a’ Chaolais, Bonar Bridge Fèis a' Chaolais is the new gaelic-medium Fèis which takes place on the third Saturday of every month in Bonar-Bridge Primary school offering lessons in whistle, singing, fiddle, accordion, guitar and drama. This Fèis gives pupils an opportunity to learn their instruments while also speaking, listening to and learning more Gaelic.

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Fèis Cheann Loch Goibhle, Lochgoilhead A growing Fèis committee that runs a series of workshops throughout the year, in and around the area of Lochgoilhead. They continue to work toward expanding their tutors and offered language classes.

Fèis Chataibh, Golspie Fèis Chataibh holds their annual five-day Fèis from July 5-9 with a variety of disciplines to choose from. Additionally, Fèis Chataibh are involved in a number of year-round activities, including Saturday workshops over the winter months and a Ceilidh Trail during the summer holidays.

Fèis Cholla, Isle of Coll The Fèis cholla was first held in 2008 and currently locals hope to broaden the committee’s abililty to hold future and year-round events. The annual event takes place in mid-July.

Fèis Dhùn Bhreatainn, Dumbartonshire Fèis Dhùn Bhreatainn deliver their main programme of activity through a series of workshops in the spring. In addition, they run ten-week blocks of classes in bodhrán, whistle, accordion, fiddle, clàrsach, Gaelic language and Gaelic song. Future plans include the proposed establishment of a Gaelic choir for children in the area.

Fèis Dhùn Eideann, Edinburgh Fèis Dhùn Eideann run classes in Gaelic Singing, clàrsach, step dancing, fiddle, guitar, percussion, chanter, tin whistle, accordion and group work. The classes meet at regular semester intervals annually and throughout the year.

Fèis Dhùn Omhain, Dunoon A relatively new group serving Dunoon, the annual meetings are planned for May.

Fèis an Earraich, Skye and Lochalsh A week-long annual festival with the aim of offering young people an enjoyable opportunity to receive intensive tuition in a range of subjects or instruments related to traditional music, Gaelic language and culture.

Fèis Eige, Isle of Eigg Fèis Eige were successful in securing a grant to undertake storytelling and drama projects in the small isles, delivered by Meanbh-Chuileag in January 2010. The Fèis hold their annual event on Eigg in July, in order to draw younger people from the island and further inland.

Fèis Eilean an Fhraoich, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis Operating for nearly a decade, this group offers tutelage in traditional Gaelic singing, drama, fiddle, melodeon, drumming, clàrsach, accordion, guitar, keyboard, bagpipes, or Highland dancing. There are classes for croileagan for children between five years of age and seven.

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Fèis Eilean na Hearadh, Isle of Harris Fèis Eilean na Hearadh has been in existence since 1992. It is a tuition-funded Fèis for children ages 8-18. The group encourages the playing of chanter, clàrsach, drums, guitar, accordian, keyboard as well as Highland and Hebridean dancing. This is particularly valuable in a community like Harris. The Fèis takes pride in the fact that there is now in Harris a nucleus of developing young musicians who would not have taken an interest in traditional music if not for the Fèis movement.

Fèis Farr, Inverness Fèis Farr runs on a monthly basis from November to April and is open to all age groups to encourage family participation. Evening sessions consist of two, forty-five minute sessions where participants have a choice of different instruments. The group also allows language and music tutoring for all levels of experience.

Fèis Fhoirt, Falkirk A small, weekend Fèis held for the first time in 2009, which has since grown into a community project for children between 8 and 18 years old. http://www.feisfhoirt.org.uk/

Fèis Ghallaibh, Thurso Fèis Ghallaibh held their first Fèis in March 2009 which was a huge success with 68 young students in attendance.

Fèis Ghlaschu, Glasgow Fèis Ghlaschu is a week long Fèis of Gaelic Arts for children ages 3 and 14. This year’s Fèis will be taking place from April 4-8 at Hutchesons’ Grammar Junior School – 44 Kingarth Street, Glasgow, G42 7RN.

Fèis nan Garbh Chrìochan, Moidart, West Lochobar Over the last year, Fèis nan Garbh Chrìochan has been working closely with Mallaig-based Fèis Òigridh na Mara to hand over some of their classes to this new Fèis. The local committee continues to run a number of classes in their own area, in addition to their annual Fèis in July.

Fèis Gleann Albainn, Fort Augustus Fèis Gleann Albainn is a Company Limited by Guarantee, recognized by the Inland Revenue as a Scottish Charity, and is also funded by The Scottish Arts Council, The Highlands Council and Highlands and Island Enterprise. http://www.feisgleannalbainn.co.uk/

Fèis Inbhir Nàrann, Nairn This committee is a community based charity promoting traditional Scottish music and song to all age 8 to adult through the provision of high quality teaching. They provide classes for children and adults (of all abilities) throughout the year in fiddle, guitar, accordion, whistle, keyboard and chanter. http://www.feisinbhirnarainn.co.uk/index.asp

Fèis Innis an Uillt, Bishopbriggs This Fèis is run by the local Comunn nam Parant, with all the children attending the Gaelic medium department at the school. During the year a number of new parents were elected to the

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committee and a few new ideas have begun to emerge, e.g. more after school Fèis activities and shinty coaching.

Fèis Lannraig a’ Tuath, North Lanark Fèis Lannraig a’ tuath has now been running as a four-day Fèis for six years, with attendents of fifty-sixty students. Classes are offered in Gaelic in guitar, clàrsach, accordion, singing, drama, stepdance, shinty and arts and crafts. In past years, the Fèis culminated in a family ceilidh on its final evening. Children from throughout Lanarkshire and all surrounding regions are welcome.

Fèis Latharna, Oban Throughout the school year, lessons are offered on Saturday for tuition. Each Easter, a week-long festival is held, tuition and registry required, tutoring in instruments, dance, drama, and crafts culminating in a concert at the close of the week. http://www.feislatharna.org/

Fèis Lochabair, Lochaber This Fèis committee also holds their annual main Fèis during the Easter holidays. The close working relationship and dedication within the committee plays a large part in their continued success. Additionally, Fèis Lochabair runs a program of year-round activities for the young people from Lochaber, including (for the past several years) their Cèilidh Trail, which is a hit with tourists and locals in the area.

Fèis Mhuile, Isle of Mull Fèis Mhuile is a committee that began in 2010 with a two-day workshop in Tobermory in August. In cooperation with Argyll & Bute Council, Fèis Mhuile has placed a piping tutor into the local schools. The Fèis are now focusing on providing classes over the winter in both Tobermory and Bunessan.

Fèis Mhoireibh, Morayshire Launched in 2007, the Fèis offers ongoing classes in guitar, harp, clasarch, fiddle, accordion, chanter, dance, and language activities for the Morayshire community.

Fèis Naomh Chonbhail, Inverclyde This Fèis covers a large area to the West of Glasgow, holding their annual event in Neilston. They provide classes in clàrsach, fiddle, Gaelic song and whistle. The scattered nature of the area covered makes it hard to promote this Fèis, but a series of school-based workshops are planned to raise the profile locally.

Fèis Obar Dheathain, Aberdeen The committee held their sixteenth annual Fèis 18 – 20 February with 85 young people taking part. Of these, 35 were fluent Gaelic speakers. Fèis Obar Dheathain chose to employ the Sgioba- G to assist with their Gaelic language input. This involved extracting participants from the other classes for a 45 minute session per day, the times determined both by their Gaelic ability and their age. In all, there were 5 classes, 2 for fluent speakers (older and younger) and 3 for learners (8 -10, 11– 12 and 13+). The Fèis took place at Harlaw Academy, which proved to be an excellent venue, with lots of class spaces and a large assembly hall where the final concert was held

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Fèis na h-Òige, Inverness Fèis na h-Oige was launched in 1992 to give Gaelic speaking children the opportunity to learn and develop skills in traditional music, song, dance and crafts. The Fèis is open to Gaelic speakers between the ages of 8 and 18, and there is a "Fèis Bheag", for primary school children under 8.

Fèis Oigridh Glaschu, Glasgow This Fèis focuses wholly on drama, offering a series of workshops to Gaelic medium schools in Glasgow and central Scotland prior to a final performance night in a professional theatre.

Fèis Òigridh Ìle is Dhùira, Islay and Jura Fèis Ìle has been going through something of a revival in the last couple of years and the last twelve months have seen more developments. A two day Fèis was held in Islay in February 2005, and from that, a great deal of new enthusiasm has been generated and a new committee formed. A second two day Fèis, based at Ionad Chaluim Cille Ìle was held in February 2006 and year round classes in fiddle, guitar, whistle, pipes and chanter were organised. Most of the tutors are locally based and some of the classes extended to the neighbouring Island of Jura.

Fèis Òigridh na Mara, Mallaig Fèis activities continue to develop for the Mallaig, Morar and Arisaig area. Fèis Oigridh na Mara run a series of music classes in Mallaig. As well as this, we're planning on holding a weekend Fèis event at a date to be confirmed later in 2010. Please don't hesitate to contact either of the numbers opposite should you need more information.

Fèis Rois, Ullapool The first ever Fèis Rois took place 1986. The committee expanded its efforts during the mid- 1990s, and now takes place year-round and extends well beyond RossShire. In addition to an extensive program of music tuition in Local Authorities across Scotland, their local young musicians have toured across Scotland, the UK and internationally. http://www.feisrois.org/

Fèis Spè, Badenoch & Strathspey For the last 20 years, Fèis Spè has been providing traditional music tuition for young people in Badenoch and Strathspey through membership and with the support in the organization Fèisean nan Gàidheal. In 2009, received funding from Cairngorms Leader and the Cairngorms National Park Authority to extend their area of operation throughout the Park area and have adopted the new title of Fèisean a' Mhonaidh Ruaidh to reflect this. http://www.feisspe.org.uk/

Fèis an Eilein, Isle of Skye Since 1991, this festival has served the Skye region in Gaelic language and music. In 2009, their committee launched a new program in conjunction with the Short Courses at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Scotland’s Gaelic College, near Armadale, that teaches Gaelic in a number of class settings.

This list continues to expand. All information is referenced in Fèisean nan Gàidheal, http://www.feisean.org (the organization that supports the development of community-based Gaelic arts tuition festivals throughout Scotland), unless otherwise noted.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Bret Woods, a native of Utica, NY, earned his Bachelor of Music degree from Nazareth College of Rochester in 2001. After teaching in New York for two years, he taught and developed a music program for the McClave school district in McClave, CO, before moving to Tallahassee, FL, to pursue his graduate degree. He received his Masters of Music in Ethnomusicology in the summer of 2007. His thesis, “Industrial Music for Industrial People: The History and Development of an Underground Genre,” examines elements of the broadly-encompassing genre of industrial music with regard to communication about music-stylistic elements, genre classification, influences, history, and sound–generalized speech, all of which become part of a dialogue which consists of creating a shared understanding about issues of text and context concerning the music among its fan base. It has been cited in several blogs, zines, and encyclopedias on the internet and continues to be used as a reference in current popular music studies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Woods began his doctoral work at Florida State University in the fall of 2007, where he taught Music in World Cultures and Modern Popular Music for the College of Music over the course of four semesters. Working with Trevor Harvey and Elizabeth Clendinning, he co-developed the curriculum for the University’s online Music in World Cultures course to accompany the textbook by Michael Bakan, titled World Music: Traditions and Transformations. In addition he designed the back-end code and maintained the functionality and security of the site. He served as online instructor and liason for the course for two semesters. Woods has served as peer review editor for the British Journal of Culture, Health, and Sexuality. He is also co-directing a documentary film project on the post- apocalyptic hardcore punk rock phenomenon, the Human Skab, for whom he also plays drumset. He currently resides in Tallahassee, FL, where he also works as a Library Associate for the Florida State University Libraries.

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