The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to an understanding of the changing relationship between collectivist ideals and individualism within dispersed, transnational, and heterogeneous cultural spaces. I focus on musicians working in professional folk music, a field that has strong, historic associations with collectivism. This field consists of folk festivals, music camps, and other venues at which musicians from a range of countries, affiliated with broad labels such as ‘Celtic,’ ‘Nordic,’ ‘bluegrass,’ or ‘fiddle music,’ interact. Various collaborative connections emerge from such encounters, creating socio-musical networks that cross boundaries of genre, region, and nation.
These interactions create a social space that has received little attention in ethnomusicology. While there is an emerging body of literature devoted to specific folk festivals in the context of globalization, few studies have examined the relationship between the transnational character of this circuit and the changing sensibilities, music, and social networks of particular musicians who make a living on it.
To this end, I examine the career trajectories of three interrelated musicians who have worked in folk music: the late Canadian fiddler Oliver Schroer (1956-2008), the Irish flute player Nuala Kennedy, and the Italian organetto player Filippo Gambetta. These musicians are all notable for their taste for transnational collaboration and their reputations as mavericks and boundary-pushers. Through case studies of their projects, relationships, and collaborative networks, I explore transformations in the collectivist folk ideal by focussing on how these musicians are implicated in three phenomena: transnational festivals, new folk music sensibilities, and touring as social practice.
This research is based on multi-dimensional, multi-sited fieldwork undertaken in Toronto, Genoa, Edinburgh, and at various festivals in Europe and North America between 2007-2013. I conclude that Schroer, Kennedy, and Gambetta experience transnational folk music space as a field of intersecting transnationalisms that are imaginaries and collectivities of varying size and scope. While festivals in this space increasingly celebrate a transcultural ideal and foster the formation of transnational networks, stable, heterogeneous transnational relationships are proving more difficult to attain. I argue that touring on this circuit generates a desire for community continuity that becomes part of the poetics of new instrumental folk music.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/43588 |
| Date | 09 January 2014 |
| Creators | Hillhouse, Andrew |
| Contributors | Kippen, James R. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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