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Margaret Hair: MacMaster brings island music out of isolation

Friday, July 18, 2008

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By Margaret Hair (Contact)

Margaret Hair

Margaret Hair's column appears Fridays in the 4 Points arts and entertainment section in the Steamboat Today. Contact her at 871-4204 or e-mail mhair@steamboatpilot.com.

Steamboat Springs — It’s not often that a writer gets the chance to ask a well-established, almost-three-decades-in-the-making musician a question she has never heard before.

That this was possible with Natalie MacMaster — who in 25-plus years of playing has popularized and preserved the traditional fiddle music of Cape Breton, an island off of Nova Scotia, Canada, — likely has more to do with MacMaster’s unique musical upbringing than it does with any level of journalistic insight.

“I grew up with fiddle music. That was my life and that was what I was surrounded by, and also all of my family members played it, and it was kind of a natural way of life for me,” MacMaster said on the phone earlier this week.

Because she started playing fiddle when she was 9 years old, because she started traditional step dancing four years before that, and because her uncle is hallmark Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster, Natalie MacMaster acknowledges, “There was never any doubt in my mind that I would stop, even from the first day, that’s what I was going to do.”

Those elements likely come into play in MacMaster’s serious contemplation of the question: “Do you think bringing Cape Breton music to a wider audience helps to preserve it?”

Now, this is a question that I ask often, substituting the blues or American roots music or old-time string bands or Beethoven piano concertos. It’s basic, it’s open-ended, and it usually offers a decent jumping off point to finding out why any musician does what he does.

But for MacMaster that question is not basic, because preservation was never the goal — for almost 30 years, she has simply played the music she knows, understands and loves. And so her answer is philosophical:

“Sometimes when you introduce more people to a type of music, then it’s open to people of other cultures learning it. And then when people from other cultures learn it they might not play it as authentic,” she said, allowing that other cultures can play a traditional music authentically, but are by nature more likely to bring in outside elements.

“I see lots of people who aren’t from Cape Breton playing Cape Breton music, and it’s never the same as Cape Bretoners. ... In that regard, I guess it’s open to — it becomes susceptible to change, the more people who aren’t from there that learn it,” she said.

So the question is not “Are you preserving this music?” The question for MacMaster is, “How do you preserve this music? And if you keep it pure, is that a good idea?” It could go either way, but MacMaster is fairly certain sharing traditions is a more likely route to keeping them alive.

“On the same hand, to shelter something, it’ll die. If you just don’t share it with the generations, it ends. Wouldn’t it? You have to pass it down. And in order to pass it down you have to pass it around,” she said, pondering what might have happened if Cape Breton music had never left Cape Breton.

“Maybe it would die out, too, because if you just keep it on its own island, you never know,” she said about holding traditional music in isolation. “Sometimes it takes popularity in other areas to make your own appreciate your own.”

Seven solo albums after her introduction into the recording world, it’s too late for MacMaster to act on the implications of sharing the sounds of her family and her island with the world. All she can do — and all she’s ever done — is briefly look back, and keep playing the music that “was like learning to speak.”