2017 Gala Concert
Each year, the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association, presents a two-day festival of Cape Breton Fiddling, now held at the Gaelic College in St Anns. This festival is the present day successor of the first Festival of Cape Breton Fiddling, held in 1973 in Glendale. Quoting from the Association’s history web page:
In February, 1972, a CBC documentary entitled The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler was produced by Ron MacInnis. The premise of this film was [that] the traditional Cape Breton violin music was in a state of decline, and that it would soon disappear entirely! Reaction to this documentary was swift and disbelieving. The most notable achievement of the film was that it shook Cape Bretoners out of their complacency, and it made them aware [that], quite possibly, the Cape Breton Fiddle was facing extinction.
Father John Angus Rankin was one of the key people who vowed that this would never happen! A group composed of Frank MacInnis, Father Eugene Morris, Burton MacIntyre, Archie Neil Chisholm, Father John Angus Rankin, Rod Chisholm, Judge Hugh J. MacPherson, Anne Marie MacDonald, Jeannette Beaton, Joey Beaton, and Ray MacDonald met as a result of a letter sent out by Frank MacInnis. This group discussed the possibility of forming some kind of a fiddlers’ festival. This dedicated group of people decided to proceed with the concept; thus, the very seed of the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association began. Because of the efforts of this determined group, the first Festival of Cape Breton Fiddling was held in Glendale in July 1973. Over one hundred and thirty proud Cape Breton fiddlers arrived in Glendale that weekend and gave one of the greatest concerts ever witnessed in Cape Breton. Several thousand people made up the audience.
Preparation for the successful 1973 festival gave birth to the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association, and its work continues today. The Association’s main mandate has been to preserve and promote traditional Cape Breton fiddle music. Since its inception, it has provided workshops and opportunities for its members to learn new tunes and techniques, it has published tunes written by its members, and it has provided venues for musicians to perform for thousands of people. It has nurtured and supported its members to excel; as a result, many of our wonderful members are now performing worldwide. Our membership has increased to include both local, national, and international members. We have been included in several publications, and we have some wonderful recordings to our credit. Cape Breton fiddle music is alive and flourishing both on the Island and throughout the world; and the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association is proud to have played a significant role in this resurgence.
Now held on the week-end containing the third Saturday in August at the Colaisde na Gàidhlig / The Gaelic College in St Anns, in 2017, the 44th edition of the Festival of Cape Breton Fiddling took place August 19-20. The concert this year celebrated the 150th year of Confederation, known as Canada 150—a significant milestone for Canada. In honour of this important anniversary, Kinnon Beaton composed a tune named Canada 150, which was added to the repertoire of the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association and played during the Gala Concert.
The schedule for the Canada 150 Festival was as follows:
- On Saturday afternoon, workshops in fiddle, piano, and step-dance were conducted by some of the Association’s finest performers and instructors: Ashley MacIsaac, Dara Smith-MacDonald, Lawrence Cameron, and Cheryl MacQuarrie.
- A concert and square dance ran from 19h-21h.
- On Sunday from 14h-19h, the Gala Concert, the highlight of the festival, took place inside the Great Hall of the Clans. It featured a rich line-up of local, national, and international fiddlers, piano players, bagpipers, singers, step-dancers, and highland dancers.
Like so many on Cape Breton, this Festival could not have been mounted without the commitment and perseverance of the many volunteers, whose support is crucial to this Festival’s continued success. To the Association’s directors, stage managers, emcees, canteen crew, chaperones, those staffing the ticket tables, maintaining the membership lists, selling merchandise to raise funds for the Association, ferrying youth players to and from practice sessions and concerts, preparing instructional materials, and carrying out the many other functions all year long that are necessary to make this Festival and the Association the success it is year after year—to all of them we owe a huge vote of thanks and appreciation for their time, work, and dedication. Cape Breton’s fiddle music would not be the same without them!
Sunday afternoon, though mild at +21 (70), was alas, very foggy and damp, with the fog descending down to the road level at the higher elevations north of Baddeck. The concert was therefore held inside the Great Hall of the Clans, rather than in the outdoor amphitheatre overlooking St Anns Harbour, the first time since 2012 that the weather had been so uncoöperative.
The canteen, in addition to the usual cold drinks, tea, and coffee, featured hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, and home-cut fries; ice cream and fresh stawberry shortcake were available for dessert. CD’s, DVD’s, books, tee-shirts, and similar materials were also on sale during the concerts. Staffed by volunteers, the proceeds from all of these activities help support the work of the Association.
The thrilling sound of massed fiddles is reason enough to hold this Festival. But it is also important as it provides opportunities to many of the members to demonstrate their skills as fiddlers and pianists and dancers. Moreover, the Festival provides a gauge of the health of the music, featuring, as it does, the upcoming youth players and many of Cape Breton’s finest players. This Gala Concert again revealed that the music is in very fine shape, though the number of very young players in attendance was smaller than one would like: the youth of a few years ago have now taken their rightful rôle as sought-after, experienced performers of the music.
The Gala Concert concluded the 44th Anniversary celebrations at the Festival. Emceed jointly by Wendy Bergfeldt, hostess of CBC Radio’s Mainstreet Cape Breton, and by Bob MacEachern, owner and manager of 101.5 The Hawk in Port Hawkesbury, the Gala Concert began shortly after 14h on the stage in the Great Hall of the Clans. In spite of it being held inside, this was musically one of the finest Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association concerts I have ever attended, a very fitting tribute to Canada 150 indeed!
I am not a professional photographer, so take the photos for what they are: my best attempt to capture what was going on at a live event. I had an excellent seat in the front row below the stage; I also occasionally walked about the Great Hall, attempting not to distract from what was happening on stage, in order to get views from other angles. The group numbers posed a number of challenges: my lens was not wide enough to capture the whole stage and those below it in a single shot when I was in my seat and necessarily included audience members when I was further back in the hall; the lighting highlighted those on stage, leaving those below it in the shadows and my efforts to correct for that were inadequate; the stage was crowded, and I found no way to get good shots of those in the back rows hidden by those standing in front from any angle. Inevitably, microphones and sound equipment intruded into all of the photos, casting shadows on faces. With those caveats, I hope you will nevertheless enjoy the photos presented here.
Personal Note
When I returned home in September, I was aghast to discover that the memory card on which the photos of this concert were stored had gone missing. After days of frantic searching, during which I dumped out the contents of my camera bags at least once a day and searched the car all over multiple times, I finally gave up and, on 12 September, 2017, I posted the following note on the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association Facebook page:
I have some unfortunate news to report: so far as I have been able to ascertain, I do not have in my possession the photos taken with my Nikon D5100 from the start of my second trip through August 30, which includes those taken of the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association both in Glengarry and at the concert in St Anns. On August 30, I swapped out the by then nearly full 128K memory chip for an empty one in preparation for a boat trip that afternoon. I remember placing the full chip in its plastic case, which I put inside the small black SanDisk zippered bag intended for carrying memory chips that was attached to my camera bag. After returning home Thursday, I was exhausted and, once somewhat recovered, had a lot of things to take care of, so it wasn’t until Sunday that I first discovered that the small SanDisk bag was missing. I have since searched high and low in my camera equipment bags and in the car, under the car seats, and in any other possible places I could think of, but I am forced to conclude I do not have the chip. I have no recollection of when the SanDisk bag disappeared and no idea how it might have become detached from my camera bag—in fifteen years, this has never happened before. I do have several photos taken with my iPhone at Glengarry and will provide them to Betty, but their quality is considerably less than those produced by the Nikon; I have no iPhone photos of the St Anns concert, as I relied on the Nikon exclusively for that event. I am devastated to have lost all of these photos and am extremely sorry to have let the Association down in such a major way. I offer my abject apologies for this dereliction.
I was humbled by the many responses to this post, thanking me for the photos from the years past, and especially by Mary Macneil’s most gracious comment. At that point, I effectively gave up the search, which is why the coverage of this concert has not heretofore been forthcoming.
You can therefore imagine my shocked surprise and complete delight when, on my first 2018 trip to Cape Breton, on 22 June, as I was on Black Point leaving Meat Cove after a wonderful stay there, the chip suddenly reäppeared. As I recounted in my Facebook post for that day:
It is so hard to pass by Black Point without stopping for photos and, since “Big Bertha” was already to go from yesterday’s hike and St Paul Island was clearer than earlier in the morning, I pulled over and took a whole raft of telephoto shots of Cape St Lawrence, Meat Cove, Cape North, the Cape North Massif, and St Paul Island. I then decided to switch to the smaller 18-105mm lens for some wider-angled views that “Big Bertha” can’t produce and had to shake the drawstring bag holding it a bit to get it to disgorge the lens. I was just completely and totally flabbergasted when a SanDisk pouch fell out from the lens bag onto the car seat after the lens came tumbling out: that is the pouch containing the camera’s memory chip with nearly all of the photos I took last August, including those of the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association concert at St Anns, which I believed I had lost. When I discovered I didn’t have that chip upon returning home last September, I had examined every nook and cranny of that carrying case, including its lens bags, multiple times, dumping everything in the case out on the table to be sure. And I had taken shots using both lenses when I returned to Cape Breton in October without coming across it, using a larger memory chip I got after the loss so I would never have to change chips again during a trip. Yet, there it indisputably was on the car seat! I put it back in the camera and sure enough, there were all of the photos on the camera’s small screen! I have no explanation for how it came to be there this day; it wasn’t where I remembered putting it when I changed chips at the end of August and I would be willing to swear in a court of law that it wasn’t there when I searched for it very carefully a half dozen or more times before reporting its loss. I am now carrying that precious chip in my wallet, where it will remain until I get its photos off-loaded to a hard drive.
So, the photos you see in this coverage were lost and then found. Since I posted the 2018 concert photos earlier, this is my first opportunity to get these photos up on the web site. I apologize once again for the long delay.
