Irish Music or Pure Laine? The (Un)Quiet Revolution of Ti-Jean Carignan
Résumés
Salué comme « le plus grand violoneux d’Amérique du Nord » lorsqu’il a été reçu au sein de l’Ordre du Canada en 1974, Jean Carignan était un personnage doué et controversé au Québec francophone, où sa musique a été acceptée et rejetée au cours de sa vie. Musicien de la rue qui a grandi dans une famille pauvre, Carignan est devenu l’un des virtuoses les plus célèbres du violon traditionnel au monde. Son répertoire et son style proviennent des maîtres québécois, irlandais et écossais Joseph Allard, Michael Coleman et James Scott Skinner et d’une foule de violonistes classiques. Il a porté le nom et la renommée du violon traditionnel canadien en Amérique du Nord et en Europe de l’Ouest au milieu du XXe siècle. Pourtant, à sa mort en 1988, il était devenu une bête noire qui bousculait la campagne pour la création d’un Québec souverain avec sa propre musique, sa propre culture et ses traditions de « pure laine ». Cet article examine le paysage sonore « trilingue » de Carignan et la « troisième voie » qu’il a occupée dans l’évolution de la culture québécoise dans les années 1970.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
musique québécoise, musique traditionnelle irlandaise, violon traditionnel, styles régionaux, industrie de l’enregistrementKeywords:
Québécois music, Irish traditional music, traditional fiddling, regional styles, recording industryPlan
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- 1 Seán Donnelly, “Maurice Lenihan’s Account of Some Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Dancing Masters (...)
- 2 After watching Napoleon passing by on horseback at Iena on 13 October 1806, the philosopher Georg W (...)
- 3 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Richard Mayne (trans.), New York, Penguin, 1995, p. 36 (...)
- 4 Gerard Moran, Sending Out Ireland’s Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Ce (...)
1Ireland has enjoyed a long sonic relationship with the Francophone world. Ever since the Normans brought amour courtois songs and carol dances to mediaeval Ireland, cultural flows emanating from France have brought music, songs, instruments, and dances to Irish audiences. As the curtain closed on the Ancien Regime, dancing masters plying their trade between Ireland and France brought quadrille sets from the Bourbon courts to the dance halls of the rich and the cabins of the poor in Regency Ireland.1 Later still, Napoleon Bonaparte who in Hegel’s words carried the soul of the world on horseback2 inspired heroic ballads, set dances and dance tunes that continue to enliven Ireland’s soundscape in the 21st century.3 Sonic connections between the Irish and French worlds found enduring space however in Canada – in particular, Francophone Québec – during the past two centuries. As Irish emigrants crossed the Atlantic with the massive surge of emigration that brought 60 million Europeans to North America between 1815 and 1914, their music, song and dance travelled with them and were shared with all who wished to listen, dance, or play.4 While Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans were key entrepôts for Irish exiles in the 19th century, the St. Lawrence was the cheapest gateway to the New World for thousands of Irish immigrants.
- 5 René Jetté, with the collaboration of the research programme on historical demography at the Univer (...)
- 6 Robert J. Grace, The Irish in Quebec: An Introduction to the Historiography, Québec, Institut québé (...)
- 7 The Irish-French Connection: 1578-1978, Liam Swords (ed.), Paris, Irish College, 1978; Liam Swords, (...)
- 8 Robert J. Grace, The Irish in Quebec…, p. 59.
2The Irish presence in Québec has been well documented since the 17th century. The first archival reference to an Irishman living in New France can be found in the census records for 1672.5 Tec Cornelius Aubrenan (Tadhg Cornelius Ó Braonáin) was the first known Irish-born immigrant in Canada – discounting 16th-century fishermen. He arrived in New France in 1661 and remained there until his death at age fifty-five in 1687. He was buried in Pointe-aux-Trembles on the eastern end of the island of Montréal. During the French cosmopolitan period (1608-1763), Hibernois family names like McCarthy and Sullivan were listed in military, municipal and trade records.6 There were one hundred Irish families in New France by the early 1700s, two of whom held important seigneuries near Montréal. Given the vast network of Irish colleges in France during the Penal era (1695-1829), when Irish Catholics were denied access to education at home, it is not surprising that Irish priests made their way to New France, as did their Wild Geese contemporaries in the Irish brigades that sold their services to the Bourbons and other European kings.7 After the transfer of power to Britain in 1763, Irish Protestants became prominent in the political and economic life of Québec. In 1765, they organised the province’s first ever St. Patrick’s Day celebration. England’s twenty-year war with Napoleonic France and its attempt to regain its lost American colonies during the War of 1812 reduced Irish emigration to Canada to a trickle. However, by the 1820s, Irish emigration rebounded vigorously. In 1844, the Irish accounted for 6.3% of the population of Québec. This infusion was augmented by an influx of destitute famine Irish in the late 1840s. By 1871, the Irish accounted for 10.4% of the population of the province.8 This was their optimal point, after which the long Irish diaspora to Québec, or Lower Canada, as it was then, began to decline.
- 9 The last recorded Irish speaker in Québec was Jack Scallon from Sainte-Agathe-de-Lotbinière who was (...)
- 10 Sherry Olson, Patricia Thornton, Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840-1900, Montréal – K (...)
3While the Irish formed the second largest ethnic group in Canada after the French in the 1880s, their situation was paradoxical in Québec where they shared the religion of the majority and the language of the minority – although there were considerable numbers of Irish speakers in the province until the early decades of the last century.9 Evidence suggests that Montréal’s Irish community was far from homogeneous. It was a mosaic of people from different social classes, language groups, religious denominations and political affiliations. Their influence was felt in all segments of the British North American colony, from civil service to banking and mercantile innovation, city government, journalism, education, factory work, and trade union activism. These eclectic Irish were as divisive in their politics as they were united in their commitment to Canada in the decades following Confederation in 1867.10
- 11 Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, “The Place of Sound – The Sound of Place: Irish Music and Cultural Memory in (...)
- 12 The largest corpus of Anglo-Irish ballads in the province were collected by Canadian folklorist Edi (...)
- 13 Jean Duval, Porteurs de pays à l’air libre: jeu et enjeux des pièces asymétriques dans la musiqu (...)
4Despite these fissures, the Irish were willing to share their music and dance with their new hosts in Québec.11 While sean nós (literally “old style”) songs in Irish did not survive in a world dominated by vernacular songs in French, pockets of ballads sung in English endured in Irish enclaves, especially in Pontiac in Western Québec.12 Dance tunes and dance styles however needed no linguistic conduits to survive. These were openly sourced and musicians drew freely from whatever new influences arrived on their shores. Throughout the 19th century, traditional dances (solo gigues and sets carrés) and their accompanying melodies were drawn from Scottish, Irish, English and American sources – both printed and oral. Tunes were naturalised and refashioned to suit regional dance dialects – in “straight” (regular) or “crooked” (irregular) meters that aligned with the length of social dances.13 Québécois fiddlers were also partial to mixing and matching different tune parts to suit their preferences – as in the case of the three-part dance tune La Ronfleuse Gobeil that ends with the second part of the Irish reel The Maid Behind the Bar.
- 14 Toby Faber, Stradivari’s Genius, New York, Random House, 2006; Lisa Ornstein, “Quebec”, in Bellows (...)
- 15 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in N (...)
- 16 Elaine Keillor, Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity, Montréal – Kingston, McGill-Que (...)
- 17 Breandán Breathnach, “An Italian Origin for the Irish Jig?”, Béaloideas, no. 39-41, 1971-1973, p. 6 (...)
- 18 Tunes in duple meter – also referred to as duple time – have two beats per measure. These include s (...)
5While Québec was home to generations of anonymous musicians, most lived and played beyond the fringes of written history until the 1920s, when the age of recorded sound finally arrived in the province. The violin, or fiddle took pride of place in this traditional milieu. Shortly after it emerged from the workshops of Cremona and Brescia in Italy in the early 17th century, the violin found its way to the New World.14 People in New France were dancing to its music at a wedding in Québec as early as 1645.15 By the early 1700s, social dancing to fiddle music was an integral part of festival gatherings in urban and rural communities. The most popular dances of the period were cotillions, minuets, and contradanses. After the transfer of power from France to Britain in 1763, music and dancing continued to flourish in Lower Canada. Balls and social entertainment for the colonial elite brought new repertoires and dances, while regimental bands introduced jigs, reels and hornpipes from Ireland, England and Scotland.16 In 1810, urban society in Québec was introduced to the quadrille, a dance that originated in France and became popular all over Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout the 19th century, settlers from Scotland and Ireland brought steps, dance tunes, songs and instruments to what was then an emerging transcultural soundscape. The gigue québécoise, for example, has its origin in Ireland, where the 6/8 port, or jig can be traced to the Late Middle Ages.17 Percussive foot-tapping also became a hallmark of Québécois fiddling, especially for the playing of duple-meter dance tunes, a practice that still distinguishes the genre today.18
6While early collections were published and used by a musically-literate elite, the world would have to wait until the age of commercial recordings to hear Québécois music played in its vernacular context. An eclectic genre that fused French, Irish and Scottish repertoires to create a dialect that was unique to French-speaking Canadians, Old World players from Oceanic Europe would hear echoes of their own traditions in this New World sound. Franco-American fiddler, Arthur-Joseph Boulay (1883-1948) is credited with making Québec’s first commercial recording for the Victor label in 1922. His example was followed by other Québécois masters; notably, Isidore Soucy (1899-1962), Joseph Allard (1873-1947) and Louis Boudreault (1905-1988), all of whom left rich musical legacies in their wake.
- 19 Lina Remon, Steve Normandin, Madame Bolduc: paroles et musiques, Saint-Basile, Éditions du Monde or (...)
- 20 Harry Bradshaw, Michael Coleman 1891-1945: Ireland’s Most Influential Musician of the 20th Century, (...)
7The two most celebrated recording artists in Québec during the 20th century were Mary Travers (1894-1941) – who was widely known by her stage name, Madame La Bolduc – and Jean Carignan (1916-1988). Releasing a record a month during her heyday, Travers was famous as the song bird of Depression era Québec. She composed and sang in the Joual dialect of Montréal.19 Carignan who lived a generation after Travers was a flamboyant fiddler and dancer, whose reputation is still sacrosanct in the pantheon of Canadian masters four decades after his death. What made Carignan unique was his ability to showcase the music of his own native place and yet surpass it by incorporating the music of Irish and Scottish masters in his playing – notably, the recorded music of Michael Coleman (1891-1945) and the complex fiddle tunes composed by James Scott Skinner (1843-1927), both masters of their traditions.20 Carignan’s achievements were made more extraordinary by the fact that he was not a trained or literate musician. He devoted his entire musical life to in-depth oral learning, using 78 rpm flat discs and LP recordings of his favorite performers to learn their repertoires, bowing styles, and melodic techniques. Emigrant fiddler Michael Coleman from Sligo who lived in New York City was an encyclopedic fountain of music for the young Francophone north of the border.
- 21 David Gutnick, It Sounds Like the Fiddle Is Laughing, Montréal, CBC Radio, September 2019. See also (...)
8An undisputed maître violoneux, Carignan’s career spanned the period 1955-1987, during which time he issued eighteen 78 rpm discs, twenty-two LPs, four 45 rpm discs, and three CDs published in Canada and the United States. He was the subject of three documentary films; he received two honorary doctorates, a Jubilee Medal, and several music awards. Years after his death, Ti-Jean continues to inspire fiddlers and music audiences worldwide – from twenty-one-year-old student Maxim Bergeron who studies Carignan’s music online in his Berlin apartment to eighty-six-year-old Gilles Losier, Carignan’s piano accompanist who continues to promote his colleague’s music from his rural home in New Brunswick.21 While Carignan’s working life was a precarious roster of dead-end jobs, his musical life was singularly focused on the fiddle. He was constantly expanding his 7,000-piece repertoire, improving his technique and bowing, and seeking out new alliances that would take him further into the inner sanctum of the music. This allowed him to appreciate regional nuances in Irish fiddling, the differences between Scottish and Irish repertoires, and the standards that were expected of recording artists in a highly competitive music industry.
Musical wealth and material poverty
- 22 “Joseph Allard”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, last edited 16 December 2013, online: https://www.theca (...)
9Despite his Irish-sounding surname, Jean Carignan had no ethnic connection to Ireland. He was born into a working-class Francophone family in Lévis, Québec in 1916. His father was a mason and a fiddler, his mother a housewife. Inspired by his father, Jean began playing fiddle as a four-year-old and at age seven, he was busking in the street to support his family. By then, his family had moved to Sherbrooke in the Eastern Townships in search of work. After spells there and in Trois-Rivières, the Carignans moved to Montréal in 1926 when Jean was ten. There, he learnt music from the renowned Châteauguay fiddler, Joseph Allard who heard Carignan playing for set dancers at a wedding and was sufficiently impressed to take him on as a student. Allard had spent time living in New England in the early 1900s and was familiar with Irish and Scottish music, especially the 78 rpm recordings of Michael Coleman and his fellow Sligoman, James Morrison. He was one of the first Québécois fiddlers to record commercially and during the course of his career, he recorded seventy-five 78 rpm discs and wrote sixty original songs.22
- 23 Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”, Bulletin Mnémo, vol. 12, n (...)
- 24 Christian Rioux, Richard Green, “Jean Carignan”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, last edited 4 March 201 (...)
- 25 Martine Billette, conversation with the authors, L’Épiphanie, Québec, 24 June 2002.
10Carignan was equally fascinated by the classical violin, especially spiccato style bowing (where the violinist bounces the bow across the strings). As a child, he first heard the classical violin played for silent films in a cinema in Trois-Rivières.23 He would nourish that passion throughout his career. His record collection contained several albums of classical masters like Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin. Despite this high art fascination, poverty still forced him to play in the streets until he was harassed by the police and, at age twelve, he decided to become a shoemaker’s apprentice. His professional music career began when he was a teenager. His first engagement was with George Wade and the Cornhuskers, a Toronto-based country band with whom he played fiddle, clarinet and saxophone.24 Wade (1895-1975) was a dance “caller” from Manitoba who enjoyed a successful radio and orchestral career in Ontario. After five years with Wade, Carignan returned to Montréal to perform with other dance bands to augment his meagre earnings as a shoemaker and a riveter. In 1956, he decided to abandon the dance music scene to focus on the concert and festival circuit. His initiation into this milieu came from Michel Cartier, director of the Feux-Follets Ensemble, the first professional folkloric dance troupe in Canada. Comprising seventy dancers, singers and musicians, the Feux-Follets had major engagements in Montréal during Expo 67 (Universal Exposition), as well as in London (Commonwealth Arts Festival), Paris (Olympia) and New York (The Ed Sullivan Show). As well as playing for their dances, Carignan was also their dance teacher. His final commitment was to teach them the French-Canadian waltz-clog, which has since passed into the annals of North American dance as a Carignan creation.25
- 26 Alan Mills, Jean Carignan, Songs, Fiddle Tunes and a Folktale from Canada, Washington, Smithsonian (...)
- 27 Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”.
11Carignan’s collaboration with singer and animateur Alan Mills (1913-1977) in the 1960s brought him to the attention of international audiences. He played at the Newport Folk Festival, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Mariposa Festival, and Carnegie Hall in New York. He and Mills made a highly-acclaimed recording for Smithsonian Folkways in 1961 that brought Québécois fiddling, singing and storytelling to international folk audiences.26 Despite his growing fame, his music was not enough to survive on. In 1956, he became a taxi driver in Montréal, a job he kept until 1973. Over the years, his cab was a haven of classical music that Carignan listened to on the radio in between clients. He was also famous for knitting in his taxi during his downtime. This helped to keep his fingers nimble when he was not fiddling.27
- 28 Matthew Barlow, Griffintown: Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood, Vancouver, Uni (...)
- 29 Reinhard Goerner, conversation with the authors, Deux Montagnes, Québec, 14 May 2002.
12In the 1960s and 1970s, the city of Montréal was marked by intense out-migration as old ethnic communities left the city and new arrivals took their place. Expo 67 and the Olympics in 1976 radically changed the topography of the city, especially the “City Below the Hill” along the banks of the St. Lawrence. The Irish in Griffintown left this run-down area and moved to the West Island and Laval in the aftermath of slum clearances.28 Soon the new highways and overpasses of the modern metropolis were crisscrossing their old neighborhoods. Irish traditional music also migrated beyond its ethnic boundaries. The most gifted performer to fill the after-space of this out-migration was Jean Carignan who was considered the crème-de-la-crème of the Irish music community in Québec in the 1970s.29
- 30 André Gagnon, Petit concerto pour Carignan, Montréal, Chant de mon pays, 2016. See also Heather Whi (...)
- 31 Christian Rioux, Richard Green, “Jean Carignan”.
13Carignan’s creative life reached a crescendo in 1976 when the Québécois composer and pianist André Gagnon (1936-2020) honoured him with Petit concerto pour Carignan. A work for two soloists – a classical violinist and a traditional fiddler – it draws an analogy between the violin compositions of Vivaldi and Bach and Carignan’s dance music (in this case, Coleman’s Morning Dew and The Woman of the House). It was performed to critical acclaim by Carignan and the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin for the CBC series The Music of Man in 1979.30 Carignan entered the world of ballet in 1978 for Suite Carignan, written by Donald Patriquin and choreographed by Brian Macdonald for Les Grands Ballet Canadiens de Montréal.31
14While national and international accolades came to Carignan in the 1970s – the Order of Canada, two honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Toronto, a Jubilee Medal from Queen Elizabeth II, Prix de musique Calixa-Lavallée – deafness (caused by exposure to heavy machinery when he was a young man) eventually forced him to retire from public performing. Despite his incessant struggle with poverty, the creative genius of his music earned him a revered place among his peers that would live on long after his death. Describing his cohort in 1978, American composer Yehudi Menuhin said:
- 32 Quoted in Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”, note 1.
What I love about Jean Carignan is that, in his hands, the violin is not, as with me and most of my literate colleagues, a studied and learned instrument serving the interpretation of musical scores from our five hundred years of European civilization – but a universal folk-instrument with a creative vitality, a dynamic expression of its own, released by masterly hands however unschooled – music, hands and violin, born of and driven by the dancing feet and beating hearts of Scotland, Ireland and Quebec, and shaped by Jean Carignan’s own lively, inventive intelligence.32
- 33 Philip Donnellan, The Pilgrimage of Ti-Jean, London, BBC Documentary, 1978. Ironically, this film l (...)
15In 1977, Carignan fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit Gurteen, the ancestral home of Michael Coleman in south Sligo. Hosted by the Coleman Society, the trip was filmed by Philip Donnellan for the BBC and shown the following year as The Pilgrimage of Ti-Jean. Carignan was accompanied on his travels by singers Dolores Keane and John Faulkner who introduced him to the West Clare fiddler, John Kelly in Dublin. Kelly invited them to the session in the Four Seasons pub in Capel Street before the group set off for Sligo.33 Recalling his trip for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Carignan recalled that:
- 34 Dane Lanken, “Farewell of a Genius”, Globe and Mail, 23 November 1977.
I had a concert to myself on the Saturday night. I played half an hour, only Michael Coleman tunes. They brought me over because I’m the only one in the world who can play the tunes exactly as Coleman did. When I finished, there were tears in the people’s eyes. The chairman of the Coleman Society got up and said he planned to make a speech, but he only had one thing to say: “We haven’t seen bowing like that in a long time”.34
16Fifty years later, Carignan memorabilia, especially Bernard Gosselin’s documentary Jean Carignan: Violoneux, produced for the National Film Board of Canada in 1975, as well as more recent YouTube clips, continue to inspire admiration and commentary. To his fans, these videos are sites of musical pilgrimage. To people who have just discovered him, these clips are shock encounters filled with extraordinary moments of skill, style and dexterity. Rising above the limits imposed by place and language, Carignan’s memory continues to thrive in the most universal of all languages – music.
Oral learning and the mechanical reproduction of sound
- 35 Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p (...)
17Unlike music in Ireland and Scotland that is often artificially sustained by political, economic and cultural brokers, the music the Irish and Scots brought with them to Canada enjoyed no such scaffolding. While their music is rooted in families and communities, it absorbed new repertoires and styles, instruments and dances for generations after arriving in the New World. This viscous after life of diaspora involves constant musical morphing, from exile to integration, from ethnic fade to transculturation and hybridity – an esperantic process that continues to reshape Québec’s soundscape. Other than direct oral transmission, there were few prescribed methods of learning music in this pre-mechanical age. All this changed with the arrival of recorded sound and radio. A technoscopic pivotal swing occurred when Thomas Edison invented sound recording in 1877 and the first recordings were made at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.35 Now music entered what archivist Nicholas Carolan called its “Second Age” during which:
- 36 Nicholas Carolan, “Re-Imagining Irish Traditional Music”, in Re-Imagining Ireland, Andrew Higgins W (...)
[…] the link between performance and the old lived reality was broken. Now it became possible to put a musician in a box, to listen to the dead, to make the piper on the record play the tune over and over and over – and now, he played it exactly the same every time. Space had been abolished along with death, time and human interaction.36
- 37 Scott Spencer, Wheels of the World: Irish Trad Recordings. How Recordings Changed Irish Music, Tale (...)
18In the late 1890s Irish musicians in the United States entered this world of technology and began to record their music on wax cylinders. Flat discs and gramophones took over from cylinders and in 1916, the Golden Age of Irish Music in America began. The earliest Irish recordings were made by studio violinists who had no ethnic connection to Ireland. The first non-Irish player to show familiarity with Irish music was German American accordionist, John J. Kimmel, whose career lasted from 1904 until 1920. His music found avid converts in Québec – including Carignan and his melodeon playing cohort, Philippe Bruneau (1934-2011). Irish-born musicians were eventually admitted thanks largely to Ellen O’Byrne de Witt, a New York City music seller and travel agent who arranged to have Eddie Herborn and James Wheeler (on tenor banjo and accordion) recorded by Columbia Records in 1916.37 The success of this recording convinced the American recording industry that a huge Irish-American market lay right on its doorstep. As the Roaring Twenties hit their stride, New York was buzzing with Irish recording companies like Celtic, Emerald, Gaelic, and the New Republic. This nascent industry attracted celebrities like Michael Coleman, James Morrison and Paddy Killoran – all from Sligo. Their fiddling would change Irish music forever. Their records were sent home in emigrant parcels and their tunes learnt ad nauseam. Their music also made its way north to Québec where it was learnt ad nauseam by Jean Carignan.
- 38 Robert Albrecht, Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media and Cultural Change, (...)
- 39 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University (...)
19The communications industry and the globalisation of mass media that was set in motion by these pioneers preoccupied thinkers from Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault for much of their intellectual lives. Their work subsequently inspired others to focus on the symbiotic relationship between music and electromechanical reproduction. Media ecologist Robert Albrecht, for example, has argued that mass media disembodies music by separating performers from listeners and – unlike live music performance – it undermines older conceptualisations of time and space in the transmission of recorded sound.38 The history of recorded music in Québec confirms Albrecht’s hypothesis. Since 1922, its soundscape has been transformed by multiple technoscapes – from wire, wax, shellac, vinyl, radio, TV and magnetic tape to digital recordings.39 Carignan was in the vanguard of this mechanical revolution. It defined, framed, and ultimately preserved his own music.
- 40 In his pioneering study Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong described secondary orality as the oppo (...)
20The various learning stages in Carignan’s career mirror the shifts that occurred between primary and secondary orality in the transmission of music during the past century.40 If his first music was learnt by ear at his father’s knee and played on the street corner, his “homework” on Coleman and Skinner required much more time and patience at the turntable, playing, listening to and replaying their records in an effort to unravel their melodic techniques, rhythms and bowing. By his own admission, Carignan played music in three languages – Québécois, Irish and Scottish – by which he meant the styles and sources that shaped his music throughout his career. While access to his father’s music allowed him to take advantage of primary orality to learn Québécois music, without commercial records – secondary orality – Irish and Scottish music may have eluded him. It was luck that placed a Coleman record in his twelve-year-old hands on the streets of Montréal in 1928. As a child of the recording age, Carignan had much more access to gramophones and records than most of his predecessors. As an autodidactic teenager, his path was already set in stone at an early age. It was only a matter of time before Coleman, Skinner, and the classical violinists would augment (and replace) the music of Carignan’s father, Willie Ringuet, and Joseph Allard who had guided him into the world of fiddling. His obsession with commercial records was his raison d’être and fueled his uncompromising search for excellence. His ambition knew no bounds, as he tackled Irish and Scottish masterpieces like The Mason’s Apron, Lord Gordon’s, The Hurricane Reel and The Laird of Drumblair. Without disc, stylus and turntable, none of this self-driven pedagogy would have been possible. Carignan’s strings may have sounded quite different – if they sounded at all.
Carignan and Coleman compared
- 41 “Postmemory” is memory that is acquired second hand from the recollections of people who were prima (...)
- 42 Bernard Gosselin, Jean Carignan, violoneux, documentary film, Montréal, ONF/NFB (National Film Boar (...)
- 43 Jean Carignan, “French Canadian Fiddle Songs, Legacy LEG 120, 1970s”, online: https://www.backtothe (...)
- 44 Liam Swords, In Their Own Words: The Famine in North Connacht 1845-1849, Dublin, Columba Press, 199 (...)
21Jean Carignan never met Michael Coleman, nor did he see him play. His knowledge was based not so much on direct memory as on postmemory and prosthetic memory.41 Coleman belonged to a near virtual aural world that Carignan carried in his head and fingers.42 Apart from voicing strong opinions about Coleman’s whip – his bow was his fouet (whip), according to Jean – and his rich palette of tunes, we have no idea what Carignan knew about Coleman’s life in Ireland, his reasons for emigrating, or the rough life he lived after he arrived in America. There are thematic focal points that link both lives and that Carignan could undoubtedly identify with. Material poverty plagued both men, Carignan more so than Coleman. The Colemans were tenant farmers and enjoyed some stability on their small farm at the turn of the century as Home Rule ramped up (yet again) only to be postponed by the Great War. The Carignans had no such stability. They were journeymen craftsmen; masons who owned no property. They followed the work whenever and wherever they could find it. Wanderlust too found converts in both fiddlers. Coleman moved to Manchester in 1914 to live with his brother Pat before going to America. Carignan, after moving around Québec as a penniless child, left for Toronto to play with George Wade in 1933 for the princely sum of $60 a week.43 Living on the margins of linguistic power was also an impediment for these music makers. Coleman was the first generation of his family to speak English in a world where access to English was a ticket to social and economic success. His parents grew up in Irish-speaking north Connacht in the years after the Great Irish Famine (1845-1850), a catastrophe that decimated Gaelic culture in the region.44 A Francophone with little to no formal education, Carignan spent his entire life living below the breadline in a society that was deeply divided between the inherited wealth of the Anglophone elite and the inherited poverty of the French-speaking proletariat.
22But what of the music played by both fiddlers? How did their styles align – especially the style of the student with that of his distant maître whom he only met on the gramophone? The following transcriptions compare and contrast Carignan’s version of The Woman of the House (fig. 2) with that of his mentor (fig. 1). Coleman recorded this well-known Irish reel along with The Morning Dew for the Victor label in New York in March 1927. It was played in a formal studio setting and issued as a 78 rpm disc. It has been reissued in multiple formats since and continues to enjoy worldwide patronage. Carignan’s informal version of The Woman of the House (where he starts on the second part or “turn” of the tune) was recorded on film by Bernard Gosselin at a veillée (house party) in rural Québec in the early 1970s and subsequently published by the National Film Board of Canada.
Fig. 1 – Michael Coleman’s The Woman of the House.

Transcription by Dr. Kate Bevan-Baker, Montréal, 2022.
Fig. 2 – Jean Carignan’s The Woman of the House.

Transcription by Dr. Kate Bevan-Baker, Montréal, 2022.
- 45 See fig. 1 (measure 33) and fig. 2 (measure 39) for specific examples.
- 46 See fig. 1, measures 9, 42 and 73 for examples of this ornamentation.
- 47 Each player utilises D string drones at the beginning of each A part; and, in the B section, the me (...)
23Both players’ splendid technical abilities are displayed in these recordings, as demonstrated by Carignan’s abundant use of spiccato bowing and Coleman’s more frequent use of rolls.45 The melodic variation employed by Coleman showcases the use of slurred triplets, often in a descending pattern.46 Carignan, on the other hand, appears to have taken a more improvised approach to his interpretation of this tune. Whereas Coleman would have been under pressure from the record label to produce a viable product in minimal time, Carignan’s casual environment at a house party gave him the freedom to take musical risks that were not afforded to Coleman. It is evident that Carignan absorbed Coleman’s 1927 recording, especially in the use of open D string drones and melodic variation, which in many instances is identical in both versions.47 Teetering on the edge of losing technical control of his instrument, Carignan’s skill is showcased in the rapid speed at which he plays this reel – a tempo that would rarely be heard today at a Québécois session.
A legacy of controversy
24Challenges and controversy seemed to stalk Jean Carignan from cradle to grave. In his childhood years, he was constantly assailed by fears of poverty and challenged by the need to keep the wolf from the door. As he matured into adult life, his musical choices marginalised him from new trends in popular culture that were moving away from traditional genres towards crooners and rock ‘n’ roll in the postwar years. His defiant decision to continue playing Irish and Scottish music in the 1960s and 1970s alienated him from Québécois contemporaries pioneering the Quiet Revolution and the sovereignist movement – to a point at which he was considered unpatriotic. Finally, towards the end of his life, his deafness rendered him musically powerless – an ultimate act of deprival in a life that was defined by music.
25The changing trends in popular culture – and in particular music – did little to impress Carignan as he struggled to raise a young family in the 1950s. Neither did the continued success of fiddlers whom he judged to be less talented than himself. In an article published in the Montreal Gazette in 1973, Jack Kapica wrote:
- 48 Jack Kapica, “Fiddler in a Taxi (Who’ll Never Be a Rich Man)”, Montreal Gazette, 3 February 1973, p (...)
It’s still an uphill battle for Carignan, who doesn’t meet with too much demand for his talents. He gets jobs frequently enough – country fairs, dances, political rallies and the like. […] Yet, there’s no steady demand for the pure stylist. Young musicians in rock and pop fields burst on the field like super-novas, and leave the serious musician behind.48
26Elsewhere in the same article, Carignan shared his sharp opinion on Don Messer, the star Canadian fiddler of the day, who had enjoyed decades of success on Maritime radio and national television showcasing fiddle music, piano solos, parlor songs, and step dancing in his signature “Down Home” style. Unimpressed by Messer’s threadbare fiddling, Carignan quipped:
- 49 Ibid.
There are people picking potatoes in Prince Edward Island who can fiddle better than Don Messer. But people like Messer are good businessmen. They know what the people want and how to give it to them.49
- 50 Graham Fraser, René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power, 2nd ed., Montréal, McGill-Queen’s Un (...)
27Carignan’s maverick stance on Québécois music – and the artistic autonomy of his own music – fell afoul of Québec’s sovereignty movement in the 1970s. The origins of this movement go back to the Quiet Revolution in Québec in the 1960s, when the province emerged from the moral shadow of the Catholic Church and the conservative politicians who served it. In 1967, the Liberal Party cabinet minister René Lévesque shocked the nation when he left the Liberal Party after it refused to discuss sovereignty for Québec. Within a year, he and others had formed the Parti Québécois (PQ) that decided to campaign for sovereignty and contest elections throughout the province.50 The following decade was marked by political agitation, civil disobedience, language rows, and culture wars as Francophones reclaimed their rights in a province that was historically under the thumb of an Anglophone elite. Like other creative arts, music became a prime target of cultural (re)invention and (re)construction in Québec – real and imagined. As ranks and borders closed around certain acceptable genres, others were condemned as foreign and unacceptable. Those who failed to comply with sovereignist norms were considered suspect and unpatriotic. Carignan fell into this latter category because he refused to abandon Irish and Scottish music, or focus exclusively on pure laine music from Québec (that was considered “pure” and unblemished by external influences) – unlike many of his peers.
28Carignan was in his forties when the Quiet Revolution hit its stride. By 1970, when the PQ launched its election campaigns, he was fifty-four. Another decade passed before the issue of Québec sovereignty was brought to a vote only to be defeated by 60% of the electorate. Carignan died eight years later, long before the second referendum had its voice shattered by half a percentage point in 1995. He was too old and too cynical to be swept up in the enthusiasm for an independent Québec, or even acknowledge the need for “independent” Québécois music. Unlike Isidore Soucy and Ti-Blanc Richard who towed the sovereignist party line and played Québécois music, Carignan was not a man of compromise. He was not going to abandon Irish and Scottish music for the sake of political correctness, or deny the roots of a genre that was not nearly as sophisticated as its Celtic founders. Carignan would pay for his cynicism – even in death. Writing in the Québec history journal, Cap-aux-Diamants in 2001, Québécois ethnomusicologist Jean-Pierre Joyal wrote:
- 51 Jean-Pierre Joyal, “Ti-Jean Carignan: le grand parmi les grands”, Cap-aux-Diamants, no. 67, 2001, p (...)
On ne peut cependant ignorer que l’art de Jean Carignan n’englobait pas toutes les facettes du violon traditionnel québécois. Jean Carignan a souvent boudé le répertoire québécois parce qu’à ses yeux celui-ci ne représentait pas un assez grand défi technique. Il s’agit bien là du seul reproche que l’on puisse adresser à Jean Carignan.51
29Rebuking Carignan for not defending “our music” as he had the music of Ireland, Joyal could not resist another shot across the bow before closing with a back-handed complement:
- 52 Ibid.: “Jean Carignan could have revolutionised the musical heritage of Québec, if he had defended (...)
Jean Carignan aurait pu révolutionner le patrimoine musical québécois s’il avait défendu notre musique avec l’ardeur qu’il mit à défendre la musique irlandaise. Sa technique d’archet hors du commun aurait pu enrichir le répertoire local de façon indélébile. Mis à part ce bémol, Jean Carignan laisse un héritage important qui a influencé plusieurs générations de violoneux au Québec.52
- 53 The members of Barde (1975-1983) were Richard Chapman (mandolin, banjo, guitar) and Ed Moore (bodhr (...)
30This curt synthesis unveils the Gordian Knot in Carignan’s legacy and how his music is still regarded by many in Québec: “Brilliant but not Québécois enough!” – a myopic rant about missed potential that would undermine his memory and culturally boycott his music for years after his death. While new Celtic ensembles like Barde (comprising Irish, American and Québécois musicians) became icons of the folk revival in the province in the 1970s, there seemed to be no way in from the cold for Carignan.53 A bête noire, he has never been accepted – unreservedly – back into the collective fold of Québec’s patrimoine musical. Despite his huge output of Canadian and US recordings, his fiddling has been consigned to the specialty lists – eBay auctions, collectors’ catalogues, bucket bins in obscure outlets. There have been no commemorative re-issues in fancy CD bundles and no music schools dedicated to him.
31Carignan deeply regretted the unwillingness of his native place to accept and celebrate the universal and the other in its multicultural soundscape. Using his deafness (at the end of his life) to contextualise his frustration, he remarked to journalist Nathalie Petrowski:
- 54 Nathalie Petrowski, “Jean Carignan, musicien”, Le devoir, 2 june 1978: “That’s Québec. Do you know (...)
C’est ça le Québec. Savez-vous pourquoi je suis sourd? Je suis sourd parce que j’habite au Québec et que j’ai été obligé de gagner ma vie, de travailler à la shop avec les machines et les marteaux pilons. Maintenant, c’est trop tard. Ça fait 50 ans que je me tue à leur passer le message et rien n’a encore changé. […] C’est une situation qui finalement s’endure, dans mon jardin, chez moi. Ce qui me fait le plus de peine, c’est le sort que l’avenir réserve à mon peuple.54
32As the boundaries of linguistic and cultural apartheid continue to fluctuate and harden in 21st-century Québec, the schisms between the local and the universal, the insider and the outsider, the real and the imagined will continue to present challenges to artists driven by a desire to create art unencumbered by political agendas. The salutary lesson from Jean Carignan’s musical life is as real today as it was fifty years ago: “Brilliant but not Québécois enough!”.
Notes
1 Seán Donnelly, “Maurice Lenihan’s Account of Some Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Dancing Masters”, Ceol na hÉireann: Irish Music, no. 1, 1993, p. 75-81. See also Tim Collins, Mapping the Local: Place, Identity and Memory in the Regional Music of Sliabh Aughty and Its Diaspora, PhD dissertation, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2013.
2 After watching Napoleon passing by on horseback at Iena on 13 October 1806, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) wrote: “I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Correspondance, t. I, 1785-1818, Jean Carrère (trans.), Johannes Hoffmeister (ed.), Paris, Gallimard, 1962, p. 114).
3 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Richard Mayne (trans.), New York, Penguin, 1995, p. 361, cited in Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape, Oxford – New York, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 50.
4 Gerard Moran, Sending Out Ireland’s Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Century, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2004.
5 René Jetté, with the collaboration of the research programme on historical demography at the University of Montréal, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec des origines à 1730, Montréal, Les Presses de l’université de Montréal, 1983, p. 28.
6 Robert J. Grace, The Irish in Quebec: An Introduction to the Historiography, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1993, p. 21.
7 The Irish-French Connection: 1578-1978, Liam Swords (ed.), Paris, Irish College, 1978; Liam Swords, Soldiers, Scholars, Priests: A Short History of the Irish College, Paris, Paris, Irish College, 1985.
8 Robert J. Grace, The Irish in Quebec…, p. 59.
9 The last recorded Irish speaker in Québec was Jack Scallon from Sainte-Agathe-de-Lotbinière who was eighty-four years old when he died in 1952. See Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Lost Children of the Carricks, documentary film on the Great Irish Famine in Québec, Montréal, Celtic Crossings, 2020.
10 Sherry Olson, Patricia Thornton, Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840-1900, Montréal – Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.
11 Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, “The Place of Sound – The Sound of Place: Irish Music and Cultural Memory in Rural Quebec”, in Ireland and Quebec: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on History, Culture and Society, Margaret Kelleher, Michael Kenneally (eds.), Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2016, p. 183-196.
12 The largest corpus of Anglo-Irish ballads in the province were collected by Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke from O. J. Abbott in Hull, Québec, between 1957 and 1962. Abbot was born in Enfield, England, in 1872 and emigrated to Canada to work on Irish farms in the Ottawa Valley and lumber camps in Northern Québec, where he learnt a vast store of songs from Irish farm workers and shanty boys. He recorded 120 of these for Fowke in the last five years of his life. Some were published by the Smithsonian Institution. Abbott enjoyed much notoriety in his senior years performing on CBC radio and singing with political activists like Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival. See O. J. Abbott, Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley, Washington, Smithsonian Folkways, FM 4051, 1961.
13 Jean Duval, Porteurs de pays à l’air libre: jeu et enjeux des pièces asymétriques dans la musique traditionnelle du Québec, PhD dissertation, University of Montréal, 2012.
14 Toby Faber, Stradivari’s Genius, New York, Random House, 2006; Lisa Ornstein, “Quebec”, in Bellows and Bows. Historic Recordings of Fiddle and Accordion Music from across Canada, Sherry Johnson (ed.), St. John’s, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012, p. 65-75.
15 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, vol. XXVII, Hurons, Lower Canada, 1642-1645, Reuben Gold Thwaites (ed.), Cleveland, Burrows Brothers, 1898, p. 13.
16 Elaine Keillor, Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity, Montréal – Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, p. 64-66.
17 Breandán Breathnach, “An Italian Origin for the Irish Jig?”, Béaloideas, no. 39-41, 1971-1973, p. 69-78. See also Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, A Short History of Irish Traditional Music, Dublin, O’Brien Press, 2017, p. 101-102.
18 Tunes in duple meter – also referred to as duple time – have two beats per measure. These include simple double rhythm tunes in 2/2 and 4/4 time, as well as tunes in compound rhythms such as 6/8 jigs.
19 Lina Remon, Steve Normandin, Madame Bolduc: paroles et musiques, Saint-Basile, Éditions du Monde ordinaire, 2018; Christine Dufour, Mary Travers Bolduc, la turluteuse du peuple, Montréal, Éditions XYZ, 2001.
20 Harry Bradshaw, Michael Coleman 1891-1945: Ireland’s Most Influential Musician of the 20th Century, Dublin, Viva Voce – Gael Linn, 1992; Mary Anne Alburger, Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music, London, V. Gollancz, 1985.
21 David Gutnick, It Sounds Like the Fiddle Is Laughing, Montréal, CBC Radio, September 2019. See also “The Fiddle is Laughing: How this Teen and 83-year-old Keep Ti-Jean Carignan’s Music Alive”, The Sunday Magazine, CBC Radio, 15 September 2019, online: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-september-15-2019-1.5282280/the-fiddle-is-laughing-how-this-teen-and-83-year-old-keep-ti-jean-carignan-s-music-alive-1.5282342.
22 “Joseph Allard”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, last edited 16 December 2013, online: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joseph-allard-emc. See also Paul Wells, record reviews of Jean Carignan rend hommage à Joseph Allard, Henri Landry, Danses Pour Veillées Canadiennes, Ethnomusicology, no. 21/2, May 1977, p. 351-353.
23 Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”, Bulletin Mnémo, vol. 12, no. 1, 2009, online: http://mnemo.qc.ca/bulletin-mnemo/article/la-vie-et-l-univers-de-jean.
24 Christian Rioux, Richard Green, “Jean Carignan”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, last edited 4 March 2015, online: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jean-carignan.
25 Martine Billette, conversation with the authors, L’Épiphanie, Québec, 24 June 2002.
26 Alan Mills, Jean Carignan, Songs, Fiddle Tunes and a Folktale from Canada, Washington, Smithsonian Folkways, FG 3532, 1961.
27 Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”.
28 Matthew Barlow, Griffintown: Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood, Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2017.
29 Reinhard Goerner, conversation with the authors, Deux Montagnes, Québec, 14 May 2002.
30 André Gagnon, Petit concerto pour Carignan, Montréal, Chant de mon pays, 2016. See also Heather White Luckow, Benoît L’herbier, “André Gagnon”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, last edited 8 December 2020, online: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/andre-gagnon-emc.
31 Christian Rioux, Richard Green, “Jean Carignan”.
32 Quoted in Pierre Chartrand, Lisa Ornstein, “La vie et l’univers de Jean Carignan”, note 1.
33 Philip Donnellan, The Pilgrimage of Ti-Jean, London, BBC Documentary, 1978. Ironically, this film languished in the BBC archives for forty years and received little airplay on either side of the Atlantic.
34 Dane Lanken, “Farewell of a Genius”, Globe and Mail, 23 November 1977.
35 Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. XIV-XV; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945, Oxford – New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.
36 Nicholas Carolan, “Re-Imagining Irish Traditional Music”, in Re-Imagining Ireland, Andrew Higgins Wyndham (ed.), Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2006, p. 138.
37 Scott Spencer, Wheels of the World: Irish Trad Recordings. How Recordings Changed Irish Music, Talent, FolkWorks, 2020, online: https://folkworks.org/article/wheels-of-the-world-irish-trad-recordings. See also Aileen Dillane, The Ivory Bridge: Piano Accompaniment on 78 rpm Recorded Sources of Irish Traditional Dance Music – America c.1910-1945, MA dissertation, Ollscoil Luimní, 2000, p. 113.
38 Robert Albrecht, Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media and Cultural Change, New York, Hampton Press, 2004.
39 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 33-34.
40 In his pioneering study Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong described secondary orality as the opposite to the primary orality of pre-literate cultures. It is predicated by the existence of literacy and writing, and the availability of electronic technology to allow these media (literary and writing) to transmit their messages (Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London, Methuen, 1982).
41 “Postmemory” is memory that is acquired second hand from the recollections of people who were primary witnesses to the events they describe. “Prosthetic memory” is derived from experiential encounters with mass media (films, records, radio, Internet, etc.) that allow people – regardless of ethnicity, gender, or background – to assimilate events that they did not live through and treat them as personal memories. See Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012; and Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004.
42 Bernard Gosselin, Jean Carignan, violoneux, documentary film, Montréal, ONF/NFB (National Film Board of Canada), 1975; Bernard Gosselin, La veillée des veillées, documentary film, Montréal, ONF/NFB, 1976.
43 Jean Carignan, “French Canadian Fiddle Songs, Legacy LEG 120, 1970s”, online: https://www.backtothesugarcamp.com/Carignan.html.
44 Liam Swords, In Their Own Words: The Famine in North Connacht 1845-1849, Dublin, Columba Press, 1999.
45 See fig. 1 (measure 33) and fig. 2 (measure 39) for specific examples.
46 See fig. 1, measures 9, 42 and 73 for examples of this ornamentation.
47 Each player utilises D string drones at the beginning of each A part; and, in the B section, the melodic ornamentation that Carignan employs (from measures 41-48) is virtually identical to Coleman’s recording (from measures 57-64).
48 Jack Kapica, “Fiddler in a Taxi (Who’ll Never Be a Rich Man)”, Montreal Gazette, 3 February 1973, p. 41.
49 Ibid.
50 Graham Fraser, René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power, 2nd ed., Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
51 Jean-Pierre Joyal, “Ti-Jean Carignan: le grand parmi les grands”, Cap-aux-Diamants, no. 67, 2001, p. 22: “It cannot be ignored, however, that Jean Carignan’s art did not encompass all facets of traditional Québécois fiddle. Jean Carignan often ignored the Québécois repertoire because, in his eyes, it did not represent enough of a technical challenge. This is the only reproach that can be addressed to Jean Carignan” (authors’ translation).
52 Ibid.: “Jean Carignan could have revolutionised the musical heritage of Québec, if he had defended our music with the passion he used to defend Irish music. His unique bowing technique could have enriched the local repertoire forever. Putting aside this flat note, Jean Carignan leaves an important legacy that has influenced several generations of fiddlers in Québec” (authors’ translation).
53 The members of Barde (1975-1983) were Richard Chapman (mandolin, banjo, guitar) and Ed Moore (bodhrán, bones, flute, concertina) – both American; Chris MacRaghallaigh (Crilly) (fiddle, vocals) and Toby Cinnsealach (flute, whistle) – both Irish; Elliot Sellick (fiddle, banjo) and Pierre Guérin (accordion, vocals) – both Québécois. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barde_(groupe).
54 Nathalie Petrowski, “Jean Carignan, musicien”, Le devoir, 2 june 1978: “That’s Québec. Do you know why I’m deaf? I am deaf because I live in Québec and I have been forced to earn a living, to work at the shop with machines and steam hammers. Now, it’s too late. It’s been 50 years since I’ve been trying to get the message out to them and nothing has changed. […] This is a situation that finally endures, in my garden, in my home. What pains me the most is what the future holds for my people” (authors’ translation).
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Titre | Fig. 1 – Michael Coleman’s The Woman of the House. |
Crédits | Transcription by Dr. Kate Bevan-Baker, Montréal, 2022. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/15146/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 316k |
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Titre | Fig. 2 – Jean Carignan’s The Woman of the House. |
Crédits | Transcription by Dr. Kate Bevan-Baker, Montréal, 2022. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/15146/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 218k |
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Référence papier
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin et Kate Bevan-Baker, « Irish Music or Pure Laine? The (Un)Quiet Revolution of Ti-Jean Carignan », Études irlandaises, 48-1 | 2023, 127-143.
Référence électronique
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin et Kate Bevan-Baker, « Irish Music or Pure Laine? The (Un)Quiet Revolution of Ti-Jean Carignan », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 48-1 | 2023, mis en ligne le 20 avril 2023, consulté le 11 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/15146 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.15146
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