Colton, Glenn

Diamond, Beverley

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

Introduction: Music in Newfoundlandand LabradorBEVERLEY DIAMOND and GLENN COLTONTHE STUDY OF MUSIC IN Newfoundland and Labrador has come a long way sincethe pioneering song collections of Maud Karpeles, Elisabeth Greenleaf, and GeraldS. Doyle in the early decades of the last century.1With the post-Confederation de-velopment of programs in folklore and music at Memorial University of New-foundland and the establishment of a Centre for Newfoundland Studies at the sameinstitution, the past several decades have witnessed an explosion in scholarship per-taining to the province’s music traditions,2a trend that promises to continue withnewly founded graduate programs in ethnomusicology and continuing fascinationwith the province’s music worldwide.Yet in certain respects, music in Newfoundland and Labrador has only re-cently begun to attract the scholarly attention long accorded the musical traditionsof mainland Canada and the United States. The historical studies of authors such asLouise Whiteway,3Sr. Kathleen Rex,4and Paul Woodford5sparked renewed inter-est in the province’s long-standing traditions of formalized music, a heritagelargely ignored until the late twentieth century, and while the life stories of many ofthe province’s finest musicians are still waiting to be told, there has been a modestincrease in focused biographical studies in recent years (among them the compel-ling tales of opera diva Georgina Stirling and fiddling legend Émile Benoit).6Evenrecent Canadian Idol contestant Rex Goudie has had his young life chronicled inprint, a striking illustration of just how dramatically the intellectual climate haschanged in a relatively short period.7First Nations music, sacred music, secular art music, jazz, and popular musicremain underrepresented in the literature, although the fresh treatment of several ofthese topics in this volume may give cause for guarded optimism. Slowly but un-mistakably, stereotypes of the past are being cast off and the musical world is awak-NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR STUDIES, 22, 1 (2007)1719-1726ening to the reality of a Newfoundland and Labrador music scene of remarkablediversity and imagination. As the first issue of Newfoundland and LabradorStudies devoted exclusively to music, one of the aims of the present volume is to un-derscore the extent of this diversity while at the same time presenting new ap-proaches to the study of one of the richest repositories of traditional music in thewestern world. As Cory Thorne reminds us, “it’s not all about the jigs and reels,”8although, we might add, the jigs and reels are pretty amazing.SCOPEIn response to our call for papers, we were delighted to receive articles that repre-sented a wide range of scholarly styles and approaches. Among the papers areclose, intertextual readings of musical texts (Gordon, Rosenberg, Hewson and Dia-mond, Smith, Chafe), media studies (Guigné, Klassen, Osborne, Colton, Borlase),oral history (Flynn), performance ethnography (Thorne, Tulk, Gordon, Rosenberg,Osborne, Narváez, Best), and sociocultural analysis (Colton, Thorne, Chafe,Narváez, among others). Most research presented here relied to a greater or lesserextent on fieldwork and ethnography.We consciously include work that is cast in different writing styles. Most papersuse the full apparatus that we associate with scholarship: careful documentation ofsources, crafting of themes, and development of issues with careful substantiationof each point. Others are personal reflections, often with a degree of auto-ethnogra-phy, a valuable tool to enable understanding of the author’s social positioning.The papers are grouped roughly according to genre, but ordered so that thereader can doubtless detect certain narrative “threads.” The subject of Newfound-land and Labrador identity is central in the opening two papers: Colton’s “Imag-ining Nation: Music and Identity in Pre-Confederation Newfoundland” focuses onthe developing tradition of patriotic music, while Thorne’s “Gone to the Mainlandand Back Home Again: A Critical Approach to Region, Politics, and Identity inContemporary Newfoundland Song” introduces two contrasting diasporic commu-nities.The next five papers concern traditional music, two on song and three on fid-dling. Both Rosenberg’s detailed account of a song he labels an “icon” andGuigné’s study of the mutually constitutive relationship between two collectors in-dicate the interactivity of print and oral sources and suggest the ideologies underly-ing song collection. The three fiddling articles are nicely complementary, diversein approach and focus. Smith explores the discourses of asymmetrical tunes. Flynnpresents one fiddler whose career bridges genre worlds, as well as community andcommercial realms of music-making. Osborne similarly demonstrates that tradi-tion is not separate from commoditized practices as she examines the role of record-ings in two outport communities. Klassen’s “I Am VOWR: Living Radio in2 Diamond and ColtonNewfoundland,” in turn, documents the fascinating story of one of the idiosyncraticbroadcasters in Newfoundland and Labrador history.A convergence of identities as well as the intersection of oral and print tradi-tions is explored in Hewson and Diamond’s “Santu’s Song” and Gordon’s “Foundin Translation: The Inuit Voice in Moravian Music.” A third paper pertaining toFirst Nations traditions, Tulk’s “Cultural Revitalization and Mi’kmaqMusic-Making: Three Newfoundland Drum Groups” offers a glimpse into ascarcely documented musical culture.A group of papers on popular music follow. Best explores the nascent hip-hopscene in St. John’s and Grand Falls, demonstrating a number of regionally specificpractices in a genre that has not usually been associated with Newfoundland andLabrador. Chafe unfolds the intertextual references in repertoire that some mightargue is centrally representative of the province’s identity (but of whom?), teasingout themes of “revolution” and “humour.” With a folklorist’s ear/eye for vernacularnarrative, Narváez offers a snapshot of a fascinating moment in which music andpolitics intersected.Two additional shorter submissions are included. Borlase offers a fascinatingretrospective on the life of an object: the Labrador song anthology that he compiledand published decades ago. His story bears comparison with Guigné’s account ofearlier collectors or Osborne’s study of recorded media and oral tradition. Finally,Dunsmore compiles a useful list of recent recordings by the province’s numerouschoirs, many of them award-winning.The diverse papers in this issue demonstrate that “Newfoundland music” can-not be essentialized; it is not one thing, neither one genre, ethnic practice, nor style.Nonetheless, a single volume cannot cover all of the richness of music in New-foundland and Labrador. There are many topics not addressed, including composi-tion and innovation, country music and bluegrass, or the music of many non-European immigrant groups, to name a few. Furthermore, while the authors in thisissue worked in a number of locales — on the island of Newfoundland, in Labrador,and in “diasporic” mainland communities of Newfoundlanders — there are manyregional traditions that get no attention here.MAJOR THEMESA number of papers connected thematically in exciting ways that we could not haveentirely anticipated. These themes include the concept of “culture as emergent,”the role of music in nationalist projects, the significance of individual agency, therelationship among various types of media, and the place of Newfoundland andLabrador culture vis-à-vis the rest of Canada and the global community.“Culture as emergent” is a phrase that has prevailed across disciplines for atleast several decades. It is useful in that it conveys not only the ongoing develop-Introduction 3ment of social practices but the way in which values are discursively negotiated byindividuals. While many traditions often associated with Newfoundland and Lab-rador might seem to have emerged some time ago and to have considerable stability— traditional fiddling, narrative song, Moravian hymns in Inuit communities, orthe pervasive combination of country and folk styles in outport popular music cometo mind — the culture-as-emergent theme is relevant in many of the studies here.First, with regard to Inuit, Métis, and First Nations, the complex intertribal and in-ternational family histories of Aboriginal people in the province are only now beingsorted out. Periods of cultural denial that emanated from various forms of systemicracism, and many official narratives of decline or extinction that have often ham-pered Aboriginal groups in their efforts to represent their modernity are no longertenable. In their place are exciting projects of reclamation, including many aspectsof traditional knowledge, language, and song. Tulk sensitively documents a mo-ment in this reclamation and cultural invigoration. She gets well past notions thatculture is somehow “invented” in modern circumstances to examine the ways inwhich borrowed traditions map onto older local forms and practices. The momentsof creative energy such as the period Tulk describes are exactly the important mo-ments to heed if we are to understand how culture is emergent.Similarly, when Thorne looks at diasporic Newfoundlanders and the waysthey selectively recreate a sense of Newfoundland and Labrador identity in new lo-cales, the value of a culture-as-emergent approach is again demonstrated. The verycrises of identity, enforced changes of context, are the exact points where the forg-ing of community through music is often the most useful. In the case of Newfound-landers who left the province for work-related or other reasons, Thorne demon-strates, however, how locally variable attitudes toward what he describes as kitschmay ultimately impact community development.Hip-hop culture as studied by Best is another domain where a culture-as-emergent approach is fruitful. This genre that has moved from its African Amer-ican root communities has captured the imagination of youth the world over. Beststudies how Newfoundlanders have recently localized the traditions of rap, MCing,and breakdancing through choices of dialect, subject matter, and references toplace. A fourth example of a culture-as-emergent approach is Narváez’s short pieceon the political uses of a song by the popular band Great Big Sea. As a folklorist, hepays attention both to evidence and opinion, the latter a mainstay of interpretivework and a significant component of culture-as-emergent research.The role of music in articulating nationalist sentiment and indeed in nation-building is central to the papers by Colton, Chafe, and Thorne. They pay attentionto different time periods. Colton explores nineteenth-century and pre-Confedera-tion (early twentieth-century) popular music; Chafe looks at “narratives” of na-tional identity, ones that implicate music; and Thorne studies recent diasporiccommunities formed when Newfoundlanders moved to find work or to accompanyAmerican partners to other homes. They each approach the study of nationalist pro-4 Diamond and Coltonjects differently: Colton by reviewing historical discourses, including decisionmaking concerning the provincial anthem (among other repertoire); Chafe by fo-cusing on song texts and media to discover how the narratives of “music as revolu-tion” or “music as goofy” are constructed and used; and Thorne by assemblingidentity artifacts (including music) that ex-pats use to construct a sense of placeaway from home. Also related to the theme of nationalism and nation-building arethe papers on traditional song. Just as Colton tells us that a piece such as “The Banksof Newfoundland” is an icon of the nation for many Newfoundlanders, soRosenberg considers “She’s Like the Swallow” as an icon, implicitly supportingthe position that (a) we have songs we regard as identity icons and (b) their variousarticulations teach us why and how icons are configured as they are. He leads us toask “for whom” is a specific song an icon. Similarly, Guigné’s exploration of thedialogic relationship between Kenneth Peacock and Gerald S. Doyle demonstrateshow an insider and a mainlander co-created a musical canon that arguably repre-sents Newfoundland. The production of “icons” begins to be unpacked.Guigné’s study also alerts us to the significance of individual agency, anotherimportant theme in this issue. Many of the individuals featured in articles in thisvolume, however, are arguably not the usual suspects. Rather than choosing ac-claimed fiddling stars Émile Benoit or Rufus Guinchard, for instance, Flynn fo-cuses on the steady contributions of sideman Don Randell, while both Smith andOsborne look to a variety of locally known fiddlers in small communities. Simi-larly, Gordon uncovers the work of little-known Inuit organists on the Labradorcoast in addition to the Moravian missionaries, and Hewson and Diamond revisitwhat is known about a Beothuk woman, Santu Toney, whose claim to fame was asingle recording made by the prominent American anthropologist Frank Speck.Narváez comes close to satirizing a prominent politician’s misuse of a music refer-ence. While he would hardly admit it, Borlase himself is the individual who hadcentral agency in the story of the Labrador songbook that has been so widely usedand appreciated. One might argue that this group of music scholars has a certainanti-heroic bent while simultaneously arguing for the significance of individuals.Taken as a corpus, the articles in this volume speak to the differences and rela-tionships among the media that have an impact on the transmission of music in theprovince. Radio is a primary focus for Klassen but also implicated in articles byChafe, Best, and Thorne. Osborne assesses audio recordings. The mediation ofprint is central for Colton, Rosenberg, Chafe, and Guigné, while Gordon exploreshand-written manuscripts, and Smith and Hewson/Diamond comment on the ideol-ogies that underpin transcription, another means of visualizing sound. Visual ico-nography on artifacts ranging from posters to T-shirts are considered by Thorneand Chafe. The variety of media raises questions about the different social implica-tions of each. An image draws viewers to one place, while an audio source can fill aspace and move through barriers. The intersensory modalities of images that repre-sent sound (whether published scores, manuscripts, or transcriptions) each haveIntroduction 5their own biases, their own ways of manipulating attention to one dimension or an-other, and their own partial capacity to convey aural performance. The disjuncturesbetween the oral/aural and what we might call sound objects (print, recordings, arti-facts) is a challenging dimension of all music scholarship.A final theme is the relationship of music in Newfoundland and Labrador toother parts of Canada and beyond, a theme anticipated by Rosenberg (1994) someyears ago. In some articles, such as Thorne’s, this is a central theme. In other cases(Guigné, Narváez, Hewson and Diamond), the play between Newfoundland-basedindividuals and mainlanders is a major component of the story. The full investiga-tion of Newfoundland and Labrador’s inter-relatedness with the rest of Canada andbeyond, however, remains understudied and would make a great topic for a futureanthology.It is hoped that the range of topics, methodologies, and multi-disciplinary for-mat of the present volume may spark further discovery and rediscovery of the cen-tral place of music as a living expression of Newfoundland and Labrador culture.Notes1See Maud Karpeles, Folk Songs from Newfoundland (London: Faber and Faber,1971); Elisabeth (Bristol) Greenleaf, Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland, with a newforeword by Neil V. Rosenberg and Anna Kearney Guigné (St. John’s: Memorial Universityof Newfoundland, Folklore and Language Publications, 2004); and Gerald S. Doyle, OldTime Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland (1927, 1940, 1955, 1966; St. John’s: Gerald S.Doyle Limited, 1978).2Eighteen of the theses in the graduate program in Folklore at Memorial Universityconcern music cultures of one sort or another.3Louise Whiteway, “History of the Arts in Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Govern-ment Bulletin (January-March 1953), 3-16.4Sr. Kathleen Rex, “A History of Music Education in Newfoundland,” M. Mus. the-sis, Catholic University of America, 1977.5Paul Woodford, “We Love the Place, O Lord”: A History of the Written Musical Tra-dition of Newfoundland and Labrador to 1949 (St. John’s: Creative, 1988).6See Amy Louise Peyton, Nightingale of the North (St. John’s: Jesperson, 1983); andColin Quigley, Music from the Heart: Compositions of a Folk Fiddler (Athens, GA: Univer-sity of Georgia Press, 1995). Nightingale, a dramatized interpretation of Stirling’s life byRobert Chafe and Jillian Keiley, was premiered in the summer of 2006 in conjunction withthe Magnetic North Theatre Festival and Sound Symposium XIII.7Kim Kielley, Rex Goudie: Idolized (St. John’s: Creative, 2006).8See Cory Thorne, this volume.6 Diamond and ColtonReferences CitedDoyle, Gerald S. Old Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland (earlier editions 1927, 1940,1955, 1966). St. John’s: Gerald S. Doyle Limited, 1978.Greenleaf, Elisabeth (Bristol). Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland, with a new fore-word by Neil V. Rosenberg and Anna Kearney Guigné. 1933. St. John’s: MemorialUniversity of Newfoundland, Folklore and Language Publications, 2004.Karpeles, Maud. Folk Songs from Newfoundland. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.Kielley, Kim. Rex Goudie: Idolized. St. John’s: Creative, 2006.Peyton, Amy Louise. Nightingale of the North. St. John’s: Jesperson, 1983.Quigley, Colin. Music from the Heart: Compositions of a Folk Fiddler. Athens, GA: Univer-sity of Georgia Press, 1995.Rex, Kathleen. “A History of Music Education in Newfoundland.” M. Mus. thesis, CatholicUniversity of America, 1977.Rosenberg, Neil. “The Canadianization of Newfoundland Folksong; Or, The Newfound-landization of Canadian Folksong.” Journal of Canadian Studies 29.1 (1994): 55-73.Whiteway, Louise. “History of the Arts in Newfoundland.” Newfoundland Government Bul-letin (January-March 1953): 3-16.Woodford, Paul. “We Love the Place, O Lord”: A History of the Written Musical Traditionof Newfoundland and Labrador to 1949. St. John’s: Creative, 1988.Introduction 7

Introduction: Music in Newfoundland and Labrador

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