PLAIN FOLK

by Les Pearson
Electronic Ties Are Binding the Folk Music Village!

What do Eric Kean, Dennis Muldrew, and Maria Dunn have in common? In a word, electronics.

Marshall McLuhan’s amazing “incite” was that modern technology has shrunk our world. We know about Iraq’s latest explosion in a satellite delay second. Our empathy and apathy are drained equally by flood victims in distant Thailand or nearby New Orleans.

If you listen to Jean Vanier—and I do—you may believe that television and all electronic media have corroded human relations in society.

Vanier suggests that our emotions are aroused by the electronic media. Yet, isolated in our electronic cocoons, we only absorb. The human impulse to react is blunted. We turn inward and forget instinctual responses to help our neighbour. But this is philosophy.

How do electronics impact traditional folk music?

Eric Kean plays the electronic chanter in Drew Darley’s local Celtic band. It has fascinating features, especially for those who shrink from the screech of traditional bagpipes.

First, because it is electronic, it can be muted. Eric can chant with earphones on and speakers off. It transposes keys on command. And it can emulate the chest-rattling drone of highland pipes at the flick of a switch. Best of all, the musician does not need the lung capacity or breath control of an Olympic athlete. There is no necessity to wind the bags. There are no bags! The sound is synthetic, but effective.

Most Celtic bands these days play amplified guitars, accordions, and fiddles. But the purist will argue that something of the true and traditional has been lost. After all, bagpipes, least of all, lacked amplification! Are electronics rusting our appreciation for—even our memory of—traditional acoustic folk music?

While you ponder, here is a medical moment. Just before the pain, a physiotherapist requested my musical preference. Then, with only a computer, she locked into an internet station with my kind of music.

A festival friend, Dennis Muldrew, shared this startling refinement on internet music selection. The developers of the Music Genome Project have created www.pandora.com. This site enables any fool to create a personal, on-line, broadcasting system. Yes, the musical equivalent of blogs! Personal choice transcends. (DJ’s should consider career changes now.)

Maria Dunn is nearly a traditional balladeer. Her songs record Alberta’s history like few others. Yet when Maria, Fiona Coll, Andreas Illig, and Terry Morrison arrive for a sound check at Crescent Heights High School on March 31, there will be electronics involved.

Maria’s “Troublemakers” show, an afternoon gift for students from the Folk Music Club, is a musical history of Alberta’s labour movement. The show’s video screens and special effects are the right media for a youthful audience. The evening show, however, features only live musicians. And, yes, the guitars will be mixed and voices balanced electronically.

Am I ready to smash the electronic looms? Yes—until I remember that the internet’s fibres connect me to friends and limitless folk music.