Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec

About the Book

This monograph follows traditional music in Quebec across five pivotal moments in the early and mid-twentieth century. Through a close study of key performances and recordings, Laura Risk documents how traditional music and dance earned a place in the national imaginary of Quebec and how performers and listeners have negotiated that imaginary. Central to this history are what she terms public veillées, or commercial stagings of idealized rural lifeways. This book begins with the first public veillée in Quebec in 1919 and follows this performative framing onto radio, recordings, and ultimately television. Risk argues that public veillées functioned as sites for the collective working-out of the meaning and boundaries of tradition in Quebec and, by extension, associations of sound and nationness. At the same time, the commercial success of public veillées generated a productive creative space for musicians that altered performance practice and expanded the repertoire. Public veillées fundamentally redefined the genre of folklore in twentieth-century Quebec and their framing of traditional musicians and repertoire continues to impact the performance and reception of this music today. More generally, Performing Tradition interrogates the association of traditional music with ethnic nationalism through the lens of a North American minority language community. By taking a long view of traditional music in Quebec and critically reflecting on the nature of tradition itself, this book proposes a way through—rather than a way out of—the challenges of playing a nationally-identified music today. Ultimately, this book brings to light the ways in which fiddle and accordion tunes, square dancing, step dancing, call-and-response songs, and a host of extramusical associations thread though century-long conversations around nation, culture, and identity.

* Publication supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Fund and General Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.