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This talk is based on some of the preliminary findings of my research into folk music that is played on the viola in Britain. There is little or no research or writing in this area, for various reasons. One reason is that audience and reviewers frequently confuse the viola with the violin. Secondly the musicians under consideration are not famous. They play a supporting role in a music with minority appeal and are just not mentioned in books and newspaper reports. Finally the academic literature of the viola is often subsumed under the literature of the violin, and what little there is to be found about the viola concentrates exclusively on classical music.
But there are plenty of folk musicians who use the viola in their music. Because of the absence of historical documents or a tradition of folk viola teaching or performance, I am using ethnographic methods in order to investigate the playing of folk music on the viola. Semi-structured interviews, coupled with video and sound recordings are used to answer questions such as just who exactly is playing folk viola? What music are they playing? How they are using the instrument? And what do they think about the viola in relation to the violin?
Great Britain is a complex, cosmopolitan, multifaceted and wealthy society, and in it a variety of different types of folk music are performed, danced and listened to. Commonly found styles include Irish traditional music, Scottish folk music, English folk music, Klezmer, Scandinavian folk music and French dance music. There is also overlap with Samba, African drumming, and newly created songs in the style of 1960’s pop music which are seen by many as a form of folk music. Each national style contains regional variations. A few musicians play only the music of their own region or country, most playing a variety of styles to suit different performance contexts or times in their life. All of these styles are linked with and to an extent defined by tradition, that is to say a specific musical history (or at least story) linking the present-day performer with the past by the sharing of repertoire, techniques and performance styles.
So here is an interesting question: where does a so-called traditional musician, playing a non-traditional instrument such as the viola, begin to find their repertoire and inspiration?
This paper will look at some of ways in which folk viola players answer this question. It will find solutions to the contemporary problem outlined above, which is exacerbated when players are isolated from each other, as folk viola players usually are. It will also give a glimpse of the creation and evolution of a new instrumental tradition, because, according to Philip Bohlman in his book The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World,
The folk music of the past was not substantially different - functionally or aesthetically - from the folk music of today. [...] The origins of folk music in the present are just like those of the past(1).
This means that we will be considering tradition as a process, not as a description or a set of rules.
First we need to explore further the role of tradition within the context of folk music. It is a word of elastic meaning, to the point where scholars such as Mark Slobin in his 2001 book about Klezmer entitled Fiddler on the Move, have attempted to replace it with heritage(2). I find this substitution uncomfortable because of the somewhat dubious reputation and policies of the organisation English Heritage, not to mention the equally dubious heritage tourism which seems to be yet another way in which the developed world rips off the less developed. Slobin, from his professorial chair at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut, shares neither my experience of English Heritage nor my misgivings about the word.
For some writers, such as Jan Ling in his book A History of European Folk Music, tradition is unproblematic, being merely the continuation of ancient musical practices from pre-industrial times into the present day(3). For others, such as Bohlman, tradition is continuously inventing and reinventing itself in an almost self-conscious manner, rather like the singer Madonna. It belongs primarily to the category of fiction rather than history, its creation motivated by financial (tourism) or political (nationalism, patriotism) interests. There are many well-documented examples to support each side: the folk music of Ireland illustrates the first, supported as a national institution and strictly governed in terms of what is acceptable as ‘traditional’. The folk music of Israel is an example of the second. This was created by enthusiastic scholars and musicians soon after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, from elements of Eastern European Jewish music and Southern Mediterranean folk dance, and used in Kibbutz’s and elsewhere to create national feeling in a country consisting of disparate immigrants.
A third understanding of tradition relates to an imagined construction of the past by performers and enthusiasts of folk music. The opportunity to imaginatively reconstruct an idealised past arises precisely because folk music’s historical origins are not documented and thus shrouded in uncertainty. This interpretation was developed from Max Weber’s concept of enchantment in social theory. For Weber, enchantment was a condition of pre-modernity, ultimately to be replaced by rationality and the ‘icy darkness and hardness’ of modernity(4). For most contemporary folk musicians and audiences, the enchantment aspect of tradition can be a welcome opportunity to alleviate or temporarily escape from the mundane irritations of everyday life and to participate in a more equal and caring society. Thus it functions continuously and in parallel with modernity as a means of making modernity bearable.
Musicians themselves normally have a clear idea of where they stand in relation to these differing interpretations of tradition, but their ideas don’t always tally with the current scholarly pigeonholes. For example, here is an illustration from the introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs by John and Alan Lomax:
Only this summer a Negro on a large cotton plantation we visited, misunderstanding our request for ‘made-up’ songs, composed a satire on the overseer. This song, Po’ Farmer, was greeted with shouts of approval when the author sang it that night at the plantation schoolhouse. It is the type of song that may grow into a genuine ballad(5).
For these writers it is clear that a ballad is only genuine if it is not new; that is to say if it has a tradition attached to it. This raises the possibility of the existence of many genres of fake ballads, such as ballads that seem to be old because of their stylistic characteristics, but are really quite recent.
Let us return to the subject of where folk viola players find their repertoire and inspiration. I will look briefly at five responses offered by the musicians that have been interviewed. These are:
1. Adaptation from the repertoire and techniques of traditional violin playing.
2. Adaptation from a parallel folk viola tradition found in Hungary and Romania.
3. Emulation of the sound of other folk instruments such as bagpipes and accordions.
4. Emulation of the human voice.
5. Invented material based on abstract exploration of the sound of the viola, without reference to other folk traditions, (but this falls very much into the tradition of contemporary classical music).
Here is an extract from an interview with Gina le Faux, which took place on 21 November 2000 at her house in Halifax. Gina is a professional fiddler and singer, who also makes and repairs violins. Gina defines herself very much a traditional musician. She is largely self-taught and barely reads music, but knows thousands of tunes and stories and is extremely articulate in both playing and talking about them. She talks quite specifically about using a violin technique on the viola, and the difficulty presented by the viola’s larger size.
Gina: a lot of what I do is like the old Donegal style of playing music, you use the little finger as a drone on the lower string than the one you are playing on. And it’s a bit of a challenge on the viola, but I can do it. It’s unusual to get people to do it on the viola I think, but I have long fingers and quite a spread so I can do it.
Lindsay: Do you want to show me?
Gina: Yes. I don't know what it will sound like though! You're just going to double your note. Its fiddle technique, but you get a bigger sound, you're playing your own accompaniment. Because you're playing two strings, it means that rhythmically you can bow offbeats and stuff you can't on one string. You can cross the strings and it gives you another kind of rhythm(6).
This approach was take by Nancy Kerr, another professional fiddler and singer. She was interviewed at Roy Bailey’s house in Sheffield after performing at a local folk-club the previous evening. Nancy also considers herself to be a traditional musician, but she had two teachers, one of the traditional Northumberland fiddle and the other of classical violin. The East European folk viola tradition that she talks about is quite separate from the English and Irish music that she normally plays, but it clearly made a big impact on her.
Nancy: I went to Eastern Europe, and I went to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and all round, playing with those wonderful cymbalom bands and things, and that was the first time I heard the viola playing a traditional music. It was that sitting in the middle there with those three strings, I can't remember what they're called, that was a real turning point for me because I'd always thought of bowed strings in traditional music as being very melodic and very trebley, and suddenly there was this fruity, almost farty sound! Percussive sound, and that really excited me. And then I forgot about that for a bit, and with my fiddle playing I started to try and cultivate quite a percussive, fruity sound on the that as well, and I liked using the bottom strings very much.
Lindsay: you do an awful lot of double stopping.
Nancy: yes, I do. It was the viola as a percussion instrument that I first heard in eastern European music. And then I left that alone for a bit, because I didn't feel ready to try that actual repertoire, you know I do now play quite a lot of Eastern European music. But at that time I didn't feel ready for it so I kind of took the sound and stored it away somewhere and put it into the music I was playing(7).
The instrument that Nancy remembered is a three stringed viola known as the contra or braci. It features in the village bands of Maremures, an area of Romania with strong Hungarian cultural connections. It is used exclusively to play driving rhythmic chords, which accompany the wild improvisations of a fiddler or clarinettist.
Nancy also talked about mimicking the sounds of other instruments.
Lindsay: Yes, you were talking last night about imitating bagpipes
Nancy: Exactly! That's a big thing for me. My dad was a piper, and a lot of the decorations that I use in the left hand on the fiddle and the viola are bagpipe decorations. You know, fiddlers don't, or in Northumberland fiddlers do that because they learn tunes from pipers. Its like in Ireland, a lot of decorations in the music have come from the Anglo concertina, and the way that the Anglo concertina is constructed, being diatonic, decorations are, they are just a very distinctive structure, and its all the Anglo concertina can do. When it comes to the fiddle, you can do other things but actually people stick to those structures. So it’s all kind of mimicry, and I've always been really into that.
Emulation of the human voice has long been a goal of classical violin players, but it sometimes occurs amongst folk musicians as well. One young woman likened playing the viola to singing pagan or Christian chants, in particular some French chants called Teze.
Mandy: I've been learning some Teze recently which is quite about long notes and being able to think the words through and really do it quite meditatively. And I like that when you're playing the viola it's... when I'm playing my viola, I'm paying attention to all the notes and just... it's fine to be playing a simple tune on my viola. It doesn't sound childish to me to play a simple tune on the viola because I'm really paying attention to how I'm making the notes.
Mark Emerson is the viola player, violinist and pianist in the band 1651. In 2001 he released a CD to celebrate the 350th anniversary of John Playford’s book The English Dancing Master, which is a famous early collection of tunes and dance steps. Mark was interviewed at his house in Knighton on the border of England and Wales on 13 December 2001(8). He is a classically trained violinist who dropped out of college to play folk music, but who doesn’t consider himself to be part of any particular musical tradition. His use of the viola is inventive and based on what he has found that the instrument will do, rather than on any external source.
So to conclude, folk viola players use a variety of sources for their playing, derived from their training, imagination and musical experiences in the world. In the absence of a folk viola tradition, one is promptly invented, and it seems that the application of the word folk or traditional is indeed based on stylistic rather than historical considerations.
1. Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 2.
See also the review by Abigail Wood in British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 10 (2001), 127-29, (p.128)
2. Jan Ling, A History of European Folk Music, (New York: University of Rochester Press, 1988), chapter 1.
3. Philip V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
4. Borrowed from an unpublished paper by Suzel Ana Reily, Enchantment: Musical Performance in Brazilian Popular Catholic Ritual, given at the University of Sheffield in 2001, p. 3.
5. FV/DAT/2000/#3, (2000), pp.7-8.
6. FV/DAT/2000/#5, (2000), pp. 2-3
7. FV/DAT/2000/#5, (2000), pp. 3-4.
8. FV/MD/2001/#19, (2001).