From stride to regional pride? Cape Breton piano accompaniment as musical and cultural process

ABSTRACT

During the twentieth century, piano accompaniment was introduced into the Scottish-based Canadian style of fiddling on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. This dynamic and fast-evolving form of extemporised accompaniment developed a distinct style and has influenced fiddle accompaniment elsewhere in North America. This article offers a brief history and stylistic analysis of Cape Breton piano accompaniment, and locates it within the tradition–innovation dialectic which remains important in Cape Breton’s fiddle scene. Through ethnographic interviews and archival work, I theorise the style as an outcome of ‘glocalisation’, where endogenous and exogenous elements are mixed and balanced both in the piano style itself and the discourse around it.

KEYWORDS:

• Cape Breton
• fiddling
• Canadian fiddling
• accompaniment
• piano
• glocalisation
• traditional music

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the research assistants who helped with this project, including Ian Hayes and Jasmine McMorran (music transcriptions) and Maile Graham-Laidlaw, Carl Getto, Meggan Howatson, Connall MacKinnon and Anita MacDonald (interview transcriptions and archival research). Thank you to Heather Sparling and Richard MacKinnon for feedback on drafts of the article. Musical transcriptions in this article are by Ian Hayes, edited by Chris McDonald.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Chris McDonald is assistant professor of music at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Indiana University Press, 2009) and conducts research on popular music, singer-songwriters, folk music and fiddling on Canada’s east coast.

Notes

1 Barbara LeBlanc’s research from the mid-1980s included interviews with Cape Breton musicians and dancers born in the early decades of the twentieth century. Some recall the availability of accompaniment being quite sporadic, and unaccompanied fiddling and dancing being common.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Insight Development Grant Program [grant number 430-2011-0216].