Playing the Cape Breton fiddle | Natalie MacMaster

Natalie MacMaster: I'm going to just

quickly start out with

a little bit of music here. (Applause)

(Music)

(Applause)

Thank you! (Applause)

I took my shoes off to dance,

but maybe I'll get at that later.

Anyways, I... where to start?

Well, I'm really excited

to talk a bit about

my own upbringing in music

and family and all of that,

but I'm even more excited for you people

to hear about Donnell's amazing family

and maybe even a little bit about

how we met,

and all that sort of thing,

but for those of you that may not

be familiar with my upbringing,

I'm from Cape Breton Island,

Nova Scotia, eastern Canada,

which is a very, very musical island,

and its origins come from Scotland

with the music and all the traditions,

the dancing, the language,

which unfortunately is dying out

in Cape Breton.

The traditional language is Gaelic,

but a lot of the music came

from the Gaelic language,

and the dancing and the singing

and everything, and my bloodline

is Scottish through and through,

but my mother and father

are two very, very musical people.

My mom taught me to dance

when I was five, and my dad

taught me to play fiddle when I was nine.

My uncle is a very well-known

Cape Breton fiddler.

His name's Buddy MacMaster,

and just a wonderful guy,

and we have a great tradition at home

called square dancing,

and we had parties, great parties

at our house and the neighbors' houses,

and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs.

Well, cèilidh first of all is Gaelic for party,

but kitchen party

in Cape Breton is very common,

and basically somebody drops into the house,

and no matter what house you go to

in Cape Breton, there's a fiddle there,

guaranteed, and I'd say,

well there's first of all more fiddlers

per capita in Cape Breton than anywhere

in the world, so ten chances to one,

the fellow who walked in the door

could play it, so you'd have someone come

into the house, you'd invite them to play

a tune, and lo and behold

a little party would start up and somebody would dance,

and somebody would sing, and all that sort of thing,

so it was a wonderful, wonderful way

to grow up, and that is where

my beginnings in music come from:

my surroundings, my family,

just my bloodline in itself, and, oh,

I've done lots of things with my music.

I've recorded lots of CDs.

I was nominated for a Grammy and

I've won some awards and stuff like that,

so that's awesome,

but the best part was meeting my husband,

and I've actually known Donnell

for probably 12 years now, and

I'm going to get into a little bit of, I guess,

how music brought us together,

but I'm going to introduce you

right now to my new husband

as of October 5,

Donnell Leahy. (Applause)

(Applause)

Donnell Leahy: Thank you. I'm kind of new to the TED

experience and I'm glad to be here,

but I'm just trying to put it all together,

trying to figure all you people out, and I've

been here for a short while, and I'm starting

to understand a little bit better.

So I asked Natalie, what do I do?

And she said, just talk about yourself.

It's kind of boring, but I'll just tell you a little

bit about my family. I'm one of 11 brothers

and sisters from Lakefield, Ontario,

an hour and a half northeast of Toronto,

and we grew up on a farm.

Mom and Dad raised beef cattle,

and I'm the oldest boy.

There are four girls a little bit older than me.

We grew up without a television.

People find that strange,

but I think it was a great blessing for us.

We had a television for a few years,

but of course we wasted so much time

and the work wasn't getting done,

so out went the television.

We grew up playing—

Mom's from Cape Breton, coincidentally.

Mom and Natalie's mother

knew each other. We grew up playing,

and used to dance together, right, yeah.

(Laughter) We grew up playing a bunch of,

we played by ear and I think

that's important for us because

we were not really exposed to a lot of

different styles of music.

We learned to play the instruments,

but we kind of had to come from within

or go from within, because we didn't

watch television, we didn't listen to a lot of

radio. We went to church

and to school sometimes,

and farmed and played music,

so we were able, I think,

at a very critical age to develop

our own style, our own self,

and my mother plays, my father plays,

and the style that came

from the Ottawa Valley in Ontario,

we call it French-Canadian style

but it originated in logging camps.

Years ago, hundreds of men would go

up for the winter to the camps

in Northern Ontario and in Quebec,

and they were all different cultures,

and the Irish, the French, Scottish,

German, they'd all meet, and of course

at night, they'd play cards

and step dance and play fiddles,

and over the course of many years,

the Ottawa Valley fiddling kind of evolved

and the Ottawa Valley step dancing

evolved, so that's, I kind of started out

with that style and I quickly

started doing my own thing,

and then I met Natalie, and I was

exposed to the great Cape Breton fiddling.

That's how we met. (Laughter)

You tell them. (Laughter)

NM: You want to or no? (Laughter)

Well I guess I have to now.

Well, it's just so interesting that

Donnell's upbringing was very similar

to mine, and I actually saw Donnell play

when I was about 12 years old,

and he and his family came to

Inverness, which is about 45 minutes

from where I lived, and I was just

blown away, like, it was just amazing,

and you'll find out why pretty soon here,

but I couldn't believe the fiddling

and Mom was there with me,

and she was saying —

Donnell's mother came up on stage

and danced with her children, and Mom

was saying, "That's Julie MacDonnell,

I used to dance with her when we

were kids. Little did I think our children

would be playing instruments, you know,

playing music, yeah."

Twelve years, er, 20 years later little did she think

her kids would be getting married,

but anyway, so, then I got

a phone call about, I dunno,

seven years later. I was 19,

first or second year of college,

and it was Donnell, and

he said "Hi, you probably don't know me

but my name is Donnell Leahy."

And I said, "I know you.

I have a tape of yours at home."

And he said, "Well, I'm in Truro,"

which is where I was,

and he asked me out for supper.

That's it. (Laughter)

(Applause)

Then — Will I keep going? (Laughs)

(Laughter)

Then we dated for two years,

broke up for 10, got back together

and got married. (Laughter) (Applause)

DL: So anyway, we're running out of time,

so I'll just get to it.

I'm going to play a piece of music for you.

It's actually a Scottish piece I've chosen.

I starts out with a slow air.

Airs were played in Europe

at burials, as a body was carried out

from the wake site to the burial site,

the procession was led by a piper

or a fiddle player.

I'll quickly play a short part of the air,

and then I'm going to get into

kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult

to play when you're not warmed up,

so, if I mess it up, pretend you like it

anyway. It's called The Banks.

(Tuning)

(Laughter)

(Music)

(Applause)

NM: Well, we're gonna play one

together now. (Applause)

We're laughing, like, because

our styles are totally different,

as you can hear.

And so, you know, Donnell and I

are actually in the process of

writing new pieces of music together

that we can play,

but we don't have any of those ready.

We just started yesterday. (Laughter)

So we're gonna play something together anyway.

DL: With one minute.

NM: With one minute.

(Audience reaction)

DL: You start. NM: No, you have to start,

because you've got to do your thing.

(Music)

NM: I'm not tuned. Hold on.

(Tuning)

NM: I feel like I'm in the duck or

the bird pose right now. (Laughter)

(Music)

(Audience claps along)

(Applause)

Announcer: Great news,

they're running late downstairs.

We've got another 10 minutes.

(Applause)

NM: Okay. Sure.

All right, okay.

Let's get her going. (Applause)

(Tuning)

DL: What do you want to play?

NM: Well, um...

(Music) (Laughter)

NM: Uh, sure.

DL: How fast?

NM: Not too fast.

(Music)

(Audience claps along)

(Cheering)

(Audience claps along)

(Music)

(Applause)

DL: We're going to play a tune

and Natalie's going to accompany me on the piano.

The Cape Breton piano playing

is just awesome. It's very rhythmic

and, you'll see it.

My mom plays piano, and she learned

to play before they had a piano at home

in Cape Breton. Before Mom's family had

a piano in Cape Breton, she learned to play

the rhythms on a piece of board,

and the fiddlers would all congregate

to play on the cold winter's evenings

and Mom would be banging on this board,

so when they bought a piano,

they bought it in Toronto and had it taken

by train and brought in on a horse,

a horse and sleigh to the house.

It became the only piano in the region,

and Mom said she could basically play

as soon as the piano arrived,

she could play it because she had learned

all these rhythms. Anyway, we found

the piano last year and were able to

bring it back home. We purchased it.

It had gone through, like,

five or six families,

and it was just a big thing for us,

and we found actually an old picture

of somebody and their family years ago.

Anyway, I'm blabbering on here.

NM: No, I want you to tell them about Leahy.

DL: What about Leahy? (Laughter)

NM: Just tell them what—

DL: She wants me to talk about—

We have a band named Leahy.

There's 11 siblings. We, um—

What will I tell them? (Laughter)

We opened—

NM: No surgeries.

DL: No surgeries, oh yeah.

We had a great opportunity.

We opened for Shania Twain for two years on her international tour.

It was a big thing for us, and now

all my sisters are off having babies

and the boys are all getting married, so we're

staying close to home for, I guess,

another couple of weeks.

What can I say? I don't know what to say,

Natalie. We, uh... (Laughter)

(Laughter)

NM: Is this what marriage is about?

(Applause)

I like it. (Applause)

(Laughter)

DL: Oh yeah, okay,

in my family we had seven girls, four boys,

we had two fiddles and one piano,

and of course we were all fighting to play

on the instruments, so dad and mom

set a rule that you couldn't kick anyone

off the instrument. You had to wait

until they were finished, so of course,

what we would do is we'd get on the piano

and you wouldn't even get off to eat,

because you wouldn't want to give it up

to your brother or sister, and they'd wait

and wait and wait, and it'd be midnight

and you'd be still sitting there on the piano,

but it was their way to get us to practice.

Will we play a tune?

NM: It worked. DL: It worked.

Sorry, I hate to carry on...

So this is our last number, and we'll feature Nat on piano.

Okay, play in, how about A?

(Music)

(Applause)