New Booklet on Maud Karpeles, Folksong Collector

MMaP is pleased to announce the release of Maud Karpeles (1885-1976): A Retrospective of Her Newfoundland Fieldwork, 1929 and 1930, written by Dr. Anna Kearney Guigné, a member of MMaP’s Community Advisory board.

In 1929, Londoner Maud Karpeles arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to “prospect” for British folksongs, fulfilling the wishes of her mentor and colleague, folklorist Cecil Sharp (1859-1924). During that year and her return visit in 1930, she spent a total of 14 weeks visiting various regions of the province collecting close to 200 songs and dance tunes from over 40 communities. Karpeles later published her findings in two key works: Folksongs from Newfoundland (2 vols, 1934) and Folksongs from Newfoundland (1970).

“Karpeles is often depicted as a colonialist collector, driven to find English folksongs in Britain's oldest colony,” says Guigné. “I prefer instead to view her as a woman adventurer who faced many challenges in her folksong quest. As she quickly learned,

travel in Newfoundland was complicated, and the living conditions were harsh. She made her way by foot, ferry, open boat, car, and train, often being dumped off in places late at night to find her way. Having spent

46 weeks in the Appalachians, where living conditions and heat were also a challenge, undoubtedly she could speak from experience regarding flies, food, and sanitary conditions. And yet, she seems to have been a good sport singing to crowds, playing cards and visiting, all of which comes out in the diaries.” Originally prepared as an exhibit

for the 2011 world conference of the International Council for Traditional Music, this beautifully illustrated booklet tells the story of Maud Karpeles’ fieldwork adventures, mapping out her travel routes, excerpting portions of her diary, and tracing her local and international connections.

Maud Karpeles (1885-1976): A Retrospective of Her Newfoundland Fieldwork, 1929 and 1930 is available for $10 through the MMaP website or by contacting Maureen Houston.

Gamelan Sagara Asih: Harbour of Love On March 21, 2013, the School of Music officially welcomed our new gamelan degung with a gamelan naming ceremony. It is Indonesian tradition to give a new gamelan its own special name through a ceremony called a selametan (“thanksgiving”). The ceremony involves sacred songs and special offerings of food, especially nasi tumpeng – rice with saffron – drinks, fruits, and incense. Master gamelan artist Ade Suparman, who hails from West Java, led the ceremony and performed with gamelan expert and Evergreen State College professor Dr. Sean Williams.

The event was also the debut of the MUN Gamelan Ensemble under director Bill Brennan, who taught a World Music course with a focus on the gamelan during the Winter 2013 semester.

The gamelan was officially named Sagara Asih (Harbour of Love) to a packed crowd on the concourse of the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre.

During her opening address at the ceremony, Sean Williams described the name of the gamelan thus:

“Sagara is a Sundanese word that means harbor, a sense of home, of confidence, place, a cosmology, a way of locating yourself in the world, your thoughts, your spiritual beliefs; all that is important to you. So it is not just a physical harbour, it is a spiritual harbour.

Asih is one of many, many Sundanese words for love. Beyond love, though, it’s a symbol.

It’s a very profound kind of love that also locates you in your worldview. So everything we’re doing today is about locating this gamelan – and you – right here, in a safe harbour, that engages your way of understanding the world and also engages your deep affection, and confidence, and love.”

Gamelan Sagara Asih

Food offerings as part of the selametan

Ade Suparnam plays the kacapi

Suling players Sean Williams and Marc Finch

Ade Suparman and Sean Williams

Aubrey Maks plays saron

Kyle Andrews, kendhang, and Marc Finch, suling

Crossing the Divide By Joshua Green

Sean Williams' (Evergreen State College) MMaP lecture on Tuesday, March 19 was the final in the 2012-2013 series. Entitled "Crossing the Divide: Hinduism and Islam in

Sundanese Music," the talk focused on the music of the Sundanese people of the west of the Indonesian island of Java. Specifically, Williams spoke about her experience with tembang Sunda, a genre of music that typically features one (or more) singers accompanied by a bamboo flute (suling) and boat-shaped zithers (kacapi). Incidentally, the zithers' boat-like shape related to a key theme of the lecture: the relationship between the music of tembang Sunda and movement, particularly movement of journeying backwards in time. At the heart of the lecture was an exploration of the emotive and transportive power of tembang Sunda via its powerful evocation of images and feelings associated with the pre-modern, rural past. Williams offered an insightful examination of the interaction between Muslim, Hindu, and animist beliefs and histories that occur in tembang Sunda performances and texts. Specifically, she discussed the capacity of performances to bring listeners and participants back in time to the quasi-mythical historical kingdom of Pajajaran. As Williams’ lecture detailed, by evoking the idealized ancient rural past through Pajajaran, the music and texts of tembang Sunda are able to metaphorically transport the predominantly Muslim Sundanese performers and listeners back through history to the time of the old Hindu kingdoms, and further still to the hazy pre-modern period of animist beliefs and practices.

MMaP is pleased to announce our lineup for the 2013-2014 season of our Music, Media and Culture lecture series. Saturday, September 28 (part of the Expanding Ecomusicology: Exploring Sonic Culture and Environmental Change Symposium – see page 9 for details) Dr. Andra McCartney, Communications Studies, Concordia University 10:45-12:30 Memorial string-of-pearls soundwalk 5:00-6:00pm “Listening Filters and Standpoints” Wednesday, October 23 Dr. Line Grenier, Communication, Université de Montréal 7:30pm “Moments of music in action: Exploring the effectivity of Québec’s Étoile des Aînés/Senior Stars” Tuesday, January 7 Dr. Ivan Emke, Social and Cultural Studies, Memorial University Grenfell 7:30pm “From Outports to Netports: Community Media and Shared Identity in Rural Newfoundland and Beyond” Tuesday, March 4 Dr. Louise Meintjes, Music, Duke University 7:30pm “Dancing Around Disease: Zulu ngoma in a time of AIDS”

Accolades and Accomplishments Some of MMaP’s Research Associates and Ethnomusicology graduate students have received prestigious awards in recent months.

Dr. Meghan Forsyth, SSHRC Posdoctoral Fellow at MMaP, has been awarded a SSHRC Connection Grant for her project "Dansez! Acadian Dance Traditions on Prince Edward Island, Past and Present." The Connection Grant supports a three-part, bilingual exhibition project on Acadian vernacular dance and music on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.). Meghan will produce a web-based multimedia exhibition, a live museum installation at the Musée acadien de l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard in Miscouche, P.E.I., and an accompanying public program of lectures, workshops and demonstrations. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and collaborative field research conducted between 2006 and 2013, the exhibitions will document traditional dance forms and oral histories of P.E.I. step and set dancing traditions and will present this research in an engaging, accessible format to a broad audience.

Dr. Kristin Harris Walsh, Project Coordinator at MMaP, has received (with collaborators Dr. Sherry Johnson, York, and Dr. Heather Sparling, Cape Breton) a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (IDG) for her

project, “Dancing Across the Diaspora: Style, Context and Practice of Three Canadian Step Dance Styles.” The project is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary investigation into the contemporary and antecedent manifestations of three distinct but interrelated percussive dance forms in Canada (Newfoundland-Ireland, Ontario-England, Cape Breton-Scotland) that will collect, document and analyze these three dance forms through the shifting lens of tradition and heritage, as well as the interrelationship between these dance styles and their accompanying music.

Dr. Evelyn Osborne, recent graduate of the PhD program in Ethnomusicology, has received a research grant from the Association for Recorded Sound Collection (ARSC) to study recordings of the McNulty Family held at New York University. The McNultys, known as the "First Family of Irish Music," had a profound impact on the development of "Irish Newfoundland" music in the 20th century, the subject of Evelyn's dissertation research.

Marion MacLeod, who successfully defended her dissertation in June, has been awarded not one, but two postgraduate fellowships: a one-year Fulbright Fellowship and a two-year Fellowship from SSHRC.

Marion will be working with Philip Bohlman at the University of Chicago in their Ethnomusicology Department, with connections to the Music Department and the Divinity school.

She describes her project thus: “Many American vocal genres are defined by their timbral signatures—that is, the colour of their sounds. Timbre is a stylistic marker, but is often seen as a lifestyle marker as well, and is often described in socially suggestive terms. My research focuses on the timbral distinctions of several American vernacular genres that range from mountain music to Motown, and concentrates on the ways genres that originated in the early and mid 20th century have subsequently been embraced and rearranged by contemporary classical choral ensembles. Musically reincarnated, these genres are taught, scored and performed in ways that reveal curious and often contradictory timbral and ideological nuances.”

At the Spring 2013 convocation ceremony, Dr. Evelyn Osborne received her PhD with her dissertation “The Most (Imagined) Irish Place in the World? The Interaction Between Irish and Newfoundland Musicians, Media and the Musical Construction of Place.” Emeline Dehn-Reynolds was awarded her MA with a Major Research Paper entitled “’How Can I Keep from Singing?’: Interactions of Faith, Practice and History in the Music of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in New England,” and Jasmine McMorran received her MA with her Major Research Paper focusing on “Cape Breton Piano: The Progression and Passing on of Innovation and Tradition.”

PhD candidate Joshua Green has published his first book, Music-making in the Faroes in June 2013.

Based on three months of MA research in Tórshavn and around the rest of the Faroes, this book examines contemporary Faroese popular music and focuses particularly on the experience of being a musician in the Faroes. The author also explores the relationship between aspects of the islands' musical history and more recent developments in the Faroes' music scene. Drawing on extensive interviews with prominent and up-and-coming figures in a variety of genres from country music to heavy metal, this book presents a snapshot and analysis of several areas of Faroese musical life as it existed in late 2011.

Music-making in the Faroes is currently available as a book, soon to be followed as an e-book.

Thanks to Dr. Kati Szego for her leadership of MMaP over the past two years and congratulations on her election as the Editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music, journal of the ICTM.

Creativity and Acadian Music By Toshio Oki

Dr. Meghan Forsyth, SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in Ethnomusicology at MMaP, presented an informative and entertaining talk, entitled “Creative

Currents: Innovation & Tradition in Island Acadian Music,” the third of MMaP’s 2012-13 Music, Media and Culture Lecture Series on February 6th, 2013. She spoke about creativity as a central element in how Acadian communities in Prince Edward Island and the Îles de la Madeleine talk about their music, identifying a spectrum of creativity that exists within and between three different performance communities.

Dr. Forsyth opened with the French community of Wellington on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), where the weekly “Friday Jam” attracts many musicians from the surrounding Région Évangéline and acts as an informal practice place. There, compositions are newly created and disseminated within a vibrant amateur musical community, revealing the complex interplay of identity politics among cultural groups in the region. Through audio examples, she highlighted the various influences brought to bear on the musical practice of the area, noting those factors that kept a tune within the repertoire.

Dr. Forsyth focused on the band Vishtèn, whose members hail from both the Région Évangéline and the Îles de la Madeleine. She pointed to the stylistic changes they have applied to traditional Acadian music, especially regarding their instrumental choices, and timbral effects. In demonstrating Vishtèn's links to traditional Acadian music-making, Dr. Forsyth engaged the entire audience in a performance of podorhythmie foot tapping and turlutte mouth music.

In the Îles de la Madeleine, or "the Maggies," creativity is also evident in improvised tune variations and is believed to be the mark of a true fiddle performer. Dr. Forsyth identified oral tradition as a contributing factor to tune variability, suggesting also the isolation of communities and the building of distinct family-based variations. The result is a growing recognition of younger players from the Maggies who are renowned for their ability to vary tunes on the fly. The audience was treated to recordings of virtuosic Madelinot fiddling, demonstrating improvisatory skill.

Dr. Forsyth concluded by exploring how the performers in her three case studies negotiate and navigate the tensions between localization and globalization, tradition and innovation, inclusion and exclusion along a complex spectrum of creativity.

Recent Happenings in the MMaP Gallery

Notes from the Field: MUN Ethnomusicology Student Research By Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw

Unlike many of the previous contributions to this column on fieldwork, I don’t have tales of high adventure and chance encounter to relate as my “field” exists only in the ether and in the bits, bytes, and IP addresses of the internet. My research is about how people use music to perceive, encounter, and reconcile difference in their understandings of themselves in relation to Canada at large – about how we construct our social reality. Using a case study of programming produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) during the first decade of the twenty-first century, I’m trying to understand how producers and musicians responded creatively to policies about multiculturalism and broadcasting that exist in federal law and are distilled through the public broadcaster before being transmitted to audiences. Programming for CBC Radio comprises shows produced and broadcast by regional stations as well as content created for consumption by a national audience, that is, shows that are broadcast all across Canada. This structure means that there’s no one centralized record of the programming created by the CBC – no one place to go and do fieldwork. This reality has dictated how I am conducting my research. Last spring I went on the CBC website and started to compile a list of personnel working at each CBC station across the country with the goal of “mapping” the programming response to multiculturalism initiatives. Emails were

Women’s Accordion Circle. They practice Monday nights at 7pm and welcome new

members!

Tombolo Multicultural Festival, July 12-14, 2013

Feile Seamus Creagh public lecture by Matt Cranitch, July 25, 2013. (Photo by

Con Kelleher)

sent out explaining my project and detailing the type of policies and programming in which I was interested. The response I received was mixed, reflecting the diversity of personalities, situations, interests, and stresses of the individuals working at the CBC. Some producers were quick to offer suggestions of programming they had created over the years or the names of other people who were involved with projects of interest. Others wanted to set up interviews to discuss my work. And still others politely declined speaking to me, usually because cutbacks had left them working alone in their departments and without a moment to spare.

By the end of the summer I had interviewed 12 producers from 8 different stations, received email responses from representatives from 7 other stations, and compiled a reasonably complete overview of music programming produced as a response to multiculturalism initiatives. The availability of a good high-speed internet connection has been essential to the work I’m doing, enabling me to talk to individuals in locations as widespread as Yellowknife, Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax – conversations that simply would not have been possible if I were reliant on flights, trains, and buses to take me to all of these

places – and to compile data for which there is no written or recorded record.

And while I am excited by the opportunities that new communication technologies have afforded me, I do wonder what I’m missing by conducting my research in cyberspace instead of a physical place. I frequently meet people only once and often without the benefit of real proximity or faces to associate with voices. People are generous with their time and frequently trusting of my intentions, yet I’ve also been told outright that I’m a stranger and so will only ever hear the official story. Perhaps by conducting my fieldwork in the spaces of the internet I won’t ever see the inner workings of the CBC, but then again, the partiality of this form of fieldwork is maybe essential to my project, serving to highlight the role of mediation in creating and constructing a multiplicity of meanings and messages.

Expanding Ecomusicology: Exploring Sonic Culture and Environmental Change MMaP Gallery on September 28 This one-day event will include presentations by scholars from Memorial, York, Cape Breton and Concordia Universities. The topics include non-human sound production, industrial soundscapes, environmental issues in musical instrument manufacture, and musics that imitate place-based sound. For more information, contact Kate Galloway. 8:30am Coffee, Welcome, and Opening Remarks

9-10:30am Panel: Music, Place, Environment

Josh Green (Memorial University) Viking Metal and Rainbow Warriors: Faroese Popular Music, Whaling, and Conflicting Epistemologies

Raj Shobha Singh (York University) Katajjaq: Between Vocal Games, Place and Identity Ellen Waterman (Memorial University) Sounds Provocative: The Ecology of Experimental Music Performance

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-12:30 Memorial String of Pearls Soundwalk

12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm-2:15pm The Sound of Weather Heard from Under the Water: Can We Tell if it’s Snowing? Len Zedel and Richard Alonge (Memorial University)

2:15-3:45pm Panel: Acoustemologies of Atlantic Canada

Meghan Forsyth (Memorial University) C’est moi, la mer: Sonic Intimacy in les Îles-de-la-Madeleine

Janice Tulk (Cape Breton University) Regulating Bodies in a Company Town: Industrial Soundscapes, Everyday Life, and Expressive Culture

Kate Galloway (Memorial University) Composing Atlantic Acoustemologies: Voicing and Listening to Place and the Acoustic Heritage of Newfoundland

3:45pm-4pm Break

4pm-5pm Panel: Perspectives on Musical Encounters with Environment

Andrew Mark (York University) Melancholy and Metaphor: Musicking for Loss, Mourning, and the Hope of Reparation

Greg Bruce Sound Practices: Ethical and Environmental Issues in the Woodwind Manufacturing Industry

5-6pm, Andra McCartney (Concordia University) Listening Filters and Standpoints.