Musical Trees
Boot Camp – November 7
The German-Swiss poet Hermann Hesse once wrote, “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
I have always had a great appreciation and fascination for trees. As a child, my favourite thing to do was explore the “Fairy Glen” in Scotland, listening for the fairies hiding in the trees and waiting to hear or see some form of life within the forest. My love for trees and their powers led me to name my most recent musical project “Tree Talk” . For this week’s boot camp I decided to make a tree diagram from a collection of Newfoundland and Labrador Fiddle Tunes by Newfoundland musician Kelly Russell.
His collection took place between 1970-1980 with Canada Council funding. Russell concentrated his collecting on the west coast of Newfoundland and Labrador because he knew there were many fiddlers living on the West of Newfoundland and Labrador. He makes note in the introduction that he does not claim to have visited every fiddler, but he believes his collection is an accurate representation of the music being played in these areas at that particular time.
Most fiddlers were between 50-70 years old, and many passed away before the publication of the book (2003). He would show up to towns and ask, “Does anyone around here play the fiddle?” Being a well-known personality gave Russell easy access and welcomed attitudes in each new town and village he visited.
He believes that there was once a broader musical tradition that has died out in most areas of Newfoundland and Labrador, and feels as if his collection documents the last remains of this tradition. The difficulty in tracing sources of tunes was a challenge, and Russell is unaware of many sources of tunes he collected, as were the players themselves. Many also did not know the names of tunes they played, which resulted in titles printed in the book such as “Old Reel #3.”
Mapping out this collection could have gone in many directions. Did I want to visualize the amount of tunes from a particular region? Or perhaps specify the particular types of tunes found in each region? Did I want to focus on the individual fiddlers and their contributions to the collection? Or the keys that the tunes were played in? I drew my tree diagram to first show the six geographic areas Russell collected from, and then broke it down into the different fiddlers from those regions, and finally to the amount of tunes they contributed to the collection by type of tune (reel, jig, waltz, etc.).
Another factor making this collection difficult to graph is the fact that many fiddlers played the same tunes, but he only published them once under one fiddler. It is not specified which other fiddlers shared the same tunes, so the most popular ones are not noted. If one were graphing the music by geographical region, the data would not be accurate due to the lack of specificity of players and tunes. Depicting the shared tunes in a tree diagram would be a wonderful method of showing the interweaving of tunes from one place or person to another.
Moretti says, “A tree can be viewed as a simplified description of a matrix of distances,” and that they are “a way of sketching how far a certain language has moved from another one, or from their common point of origin” (46). I would propose taking Russell’s collection further and finding the original rooting places of fiddle tunes and tracing how they moved geographically from one place to another over time. Simply tracing what was being played at one point in time in particular areas is an interesting snapshot, but the interesting data behind it would be very useful information. Plotting out this tree diagram resulted in me having more questions rather than feelings of satisfaction.
I have drawn on a blank map of Newfoundland and Labrador the six areas Russell collected from, and indicated the number of tunes published from each region. Seeing the actual geographic space each region takes up on a map makes me realize how much of the province he did not collect from, and how varied the areas are in size and location. For example, he collected fifty tunes from the tiny area of Stephenville/St. George, but only forty tunes from Labrador, which is massive in comparison. Russell collected from four fiddlers in both of those regions, but is there a reason that the repertoire is larger in Stephenville/St. George than in Labrador?
Just for fun, I graphed the number of tunes by geographic location, matching the colours from my map and tree diagram. NL graph
I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s boot camp and readings, and being able to critically examine this collection, which has been a major part of my musical life. I hope to take the investigation further and to find answers to some of my many unanswered questions.
Works Cited
Moretti, Franco. “GRAPHS, MAPS, TREES: Abstract Models for Literary History – 3.” New Left Review 28 (Jul-Aug 2004): 43-63. Print.
Russell, Kelly. “Kelly Russell’s Collection: The Fiddle Music of Newfoundland & Labrador, Volume 2, All The Rest.” Trinity, Newfoundland: Pigeon Inlet Productions Ltd, 2003. Print.
