Experiencing Celtic Culture Through Music Practice on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia
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TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH GLOBAL TOURISM: EXPERIENCING CELTIC CULTURE THROUGH MUSIC PRACTICE ON CAPE BRETON ISLAND, NOVA SCOTIA Kathleen Elizabeth Lavengood Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Indiana University (April, 2008) Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee ______________________________ Dr. Ruth Stone, Ph.D ______________________________ Dr. Richard Bauman, Ph.D ______________________________ Dr. Jeffrey Magee, Ph.D ______________________________ Dr. Daniel Reed, Ph.D Date of Oral Examination November 20, 2007 ii © 2008 Kathleen Elizabeth Lavengood ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii Dedication This work is dedicated to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Whom through all things are possible (Phil 4:13). My deepest thanks to Dr. Ruth Stone, Dr. Richard Bauman, Dr. Daniel Reed, and Dr. Jeffrey Magee. Your love for discovering the ways human beings understand themselves, each other, and the world through musical performance is terribly infectious, and I will be forever grateful for the tools you have given me to communicate those ideas to the world. I am forever indebted to Mairi Thom, Adam Chiasson, David Papazian, Sarah Beck, Paul Cranford, Winnie Chafe, and Doug MacPhee, for opening your hearts and homes to me in Cape Breton. You have changed my path in life, for now I will always be seeking ways to make a place for you as musicians and artists here in the states. To Sheldon MacInnes, Hector MacNeil, Paul MacDonald, and Janine Randal, I thank you for your help in research at the Beaton Institute, the University College of Cape Breton, the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts, and the Ceilidh Trail School of Celtic Music. To all those extremely talented musicians, artists, and writers who participated in my study, I am grateful for your time and consideration. iv Thanks to the US-Canada Fulbright Program, the Canadian Embassy, the Indiana University Office of International Programs, and the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, whose guidance, support, and resources have helped to make this research possible. And to my husband, Nicholas Lavengood, I owe my deepest and sincere appreciation for standing firm every time I wanted to turn back. Mom and Dad, thank you for giving me the courage to follow my dreams and instilling in me the meaning of hard work and perseverance. Kathleen Elizabeth Lavengood v Kathleen Elizabeth Lavengood TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH GLOBAL TOURISM: EXPERIENCING CELTIC CULTURE THROUGH MUSIC PRACTICE ON CAPE BRETON ISLAND, NOVA SCOTIA. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, is currently the heart of the North Atlantic Celtic music revival. Fueled by a booming tourism industry, efforts in cultural preservation, and claims as a last stronghold of Gaelic speakers outside Scotland, Cape Breton Island is an international gathering place for tourists and performers to encounter the larger community of Celtic musicians. This ethnography of a transnational music community explores the ways in which geographically disparate peoples encounter the transnational Celtic music community, learn what it means to belong, and through participation, become full members in the community. I argue that the transnational Celtic music community is best described as a community of practice, where members are active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities. The role of international tourism, traditional arts schools, festivals, and interactive websites are examined through the lens of phenomenology and performance theory. Issues raised in this case study are cross-disciplinary in nature and can be applied broadly to research on globalization, international relations, and diasporic communities. More specifically, this research contributes directly to the field of ethnomusicology, folklore, performance theory, and tourism studies. vi TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH GLOBAL TOURISM: EXPERIENCING CELTIC CULTURE THROUGH MUSIC PRACTICE ON CAPE BRETON ISLAND, NOVA SCOTIA TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Acceptance Page ii Copyright iii Dedication iv Abstract vi Table of Contents vii List of Illustrations ix INTRODUCTION 1 1. COMMUNITY-BASED TOURISM IN CAPE BRETON 25 Tourism and Cultural Commodification 26 AWR MacKenzie, Helen Creighton, and the National Film Board of Canada 27 Fiddle Festivals as Cultural Performance 31 The Effects of Cultural Tourism on Cape Breton Fiddling Traditions 42 Notes 47 2. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE 48 Communities as Practice 52 Naming the “Celtic” Community 62 Boundaries, Overlaps, and Peripheries 71 Apprenticing Community 76 Boundary Encounters 86 “Experiencing” Community 92 Notes 102 3. TOURIST PERFORMERS 104 Tourists at Play 105 Two Traditional Art Schools 116 Three Student Ceilidh Performances 122 Student Ceilidh Aesthetics 129 Student Ceilidhs as Cultural Performances 139 Legitimate Peripheral Participation 146 Notes 156 vii 4. LOST IN TRANSLATIONS 158 Rollie’s on the Wharf 162 The Baddeck Gathering Ceilidhs 167 A Universal Language? 169 Celtic Constellations 176 Channels of Communication 185 Slippage 207 Translations: Two Case Studies 216 Notes 222 5. TRANSNATIONAL HORIZONS 223 Cape Breton’s Diasporic Communities 224 The Wanderjahr 236 The Festival Circuit 238 The Dating Scene 246 Experiencing a Transnational Community 249 Locating Horizons in Practice 253 Notes 262 REFERENCES CITED 265 APPENDIX A: Annotated Bibliography of Selected 287 Tune Collections from the Beaton Archives, University College of Cape Breton APPENDIX B: Sample Transcription of the 292 Baddeck Gathering Ceilidhs APPENDIX C: Curriculum Vita 300 viii List of Illustrations and Tables 1. Celtic knot representing the transnational Celtic music community (diagram) 4 2. Number of Countries posting session advertisements on www.thesession.org, followed by number of sessions posted per country (Chart) 63 3. The sign marking the Ceilidh Trail School on Route 19 (Photograph) 68 4. Three students rehearsing together at the Ceilidh Trail School (Photograph) 119 5. Robert Woodley and his accordion-bagpipe (Photograph) 125 6. A highland dancer at the Gaelic College (Photograph) 126 7. An informal student jam session at the Ceilidh Trail School (Photograph) 130 8. A formal student ceilidh performance at the Gaelic College (Photograph) 130 9. “The Great Dispersal” on display at the Gaelic College (Photograph) 143 10. Two students teaching each other at the Gaelic College (Photograph) 144 11. An afternoon student jam at the Ceilidh Trail School (Photograph) 151 12. Proxemics of an afternoon jam revealing peripheral players (Diagram) 152 13. A session at Rollie’s on the Wharf in North Sydney (Photograph) 162 14. Solo dancer performs among Rollie’s sessioners (Photograph) 163 15. Mairi Thom playing her fiddle for tourists in Sydney (Photograph) 182 16. Scales and modes of the Highland Bagpipe (Chart) 194 17. Work for gamelan and string quartet by Barbara Benary (Transcription) 217 18. Festival Club round-up at the Celtic Colours Festival (Photograph) 244 19. A green room session at the Celtic Colours Festival (Photograph) 245 ix Introduction On March 17th, everyone seems to have a wee bit of Irish in them, but as for me, I’ve been a late bloomer in finding my ‘inner shamrock.’ My grandmother was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1921 to Irish immigrants, who settled in the Blue Mountains of eastern Washington State. She grew up to become a pianist, teacher, and writer, and chronicled our family’s travels to the New World in a series of self-published novels. Reading her stories about our family instilled in me a life-long love of music, history, and culture. While earning Bachelors and Masters degrees in violin performance, I began to learn about Irish folk music through independent research projects. I stowed guitars and pizza boxes (make-shift bodhrans or Irish frame drums) under my violin teacher’s studio duvet to share with my music appreciation classes as a graduate teaching assistant. In between rehearsals with the Reno Symphony, the Round Top International Festival-Institute and the Aspen Music Festival, I practiced Irish fiddle tunes and began to pick up melodies by ear. After my Masters degree in violin, I chose to return to graduate school to study ethnomusicology, specializing in Celtic music, in order to share my love of world music and culture with １ students of my own. What I found in my doctoral research, however, took me far beyond my own family roots into the inter-connected, international Celtic music community. I heard Cape Breton fiddle music for the first time at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music. I was listening to a field recording made by Laura Boulton, a contemporary of Helen Creighton and other ethnomusicologists interested in Nova Scotia in the 1940s. Boulton recorded fiddler Sandy MacLean, and the pianist accompanying him was his childhood friend, Lila MacIssac. What I heard at first—in all honesty—did not fit neatly into my idea of what Celtic music was supposed to sound like. The jagged rhythms of the strathspeys and the ragtime piano together were not what I was expecting to hear after listening to a heavy dose of Martin Hayes, the Chieftains, and Cherish the Ladies. It took another year before I returned to listen to the recording again and challenge my assumptions about what “Celtic” music should sound like. I knew that although my Irish great-grandparents emigrated to the United States via New York, many more Irish landed in Cape Breton before moving on to Boston. In my mind, Cape Breton was the perfect place to hear “Celtic” music because the island was home to Scots, Irish, French, and English, all communities who were now contributing great “Celtic” music to the international recording industry. I kept trying to hear something else in Sandy MacLean’s recording, some sonic marker of the Celtic music melting pot I imagined that must have happened on Cape Breton Island over the past century.