Fiddlers, fans gather at North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in St. John’s, N.L.

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This article was published 04/08/2008 (6586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – For New Brunswick fiddler Ivan Hicks, the bow is as important to his music as his violin, if not more so.

“What gets the music to the violin? It’s the bow,” Hicks says.

“That comes through you, out through that bow, onto those strings.”

The master fiddler is one of hundreds of performers and enthusiasts attending the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in St. John’s this week, the first time the event has been held outside Europe.

The convention began in 2001 in Scotland, the brainchild of musicologist Ian Russell of the University of Aberdeen. The goal was to mix academic discussion of fiddle music and its traditions with song and dance performances.

Five years later, it was held again in Aberdeen, but Russell harboured a desire to take it across the Atlantic to reflect the mosaic of cultures that play and appreciate fiddle music.

“It was always the intention that it should be an international event,” Russell says.

Russell says the convention is the only one of its kind in that it provides a showcase for performers of all kinds of fiddling traditions along the North Atlantic rim.

“The whole point about the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention’s ideology, its philosophy, is that all of these traditions can stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and they all are as worthy, if you understand, of our interest and research,” he said.

The fiddle’s relatively small size made it an instrument of choice for generations of English, French, Irish and Scottish immigrants who moved to Canada’s East Coast over the last couple of centuries.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the fiddle is an integral part of the province’s musical heritage.

“When you think of Newfoundland culture, when you think of how we are presenting ourselves, the fiddle is there, it’s always been there,” says Anna Kearney Guigne, the convention’s artistic director.

Guigne says this week’s convention will give fiddlers from the province a rare opportunity to interact with performers from Europe and elsewhere in North America.

“It puts our fiddle tradition on a world stage in a way that you possibly wouldn’t have been able to in any other normal circumstances,” she says.

During one of his instructional sessions, Hicks walks a class of about 20 toe-tapping fiddlers through the elements of his brand of “Down-East” style of music.

“It’s a simpler style, a simpler bowing,” the 68-year-old says after his session, accompanied by his wife, pianist Vivian Hicks.

“We stick to the melody. We don’t go outside the melody too much and do a lot of different ornamentation with the music. But it’s danceable, it’s quick.”

After 62 years of setting bow to string, Hicks still has an unmatchable enthusiasm for the music he learned from his father.

“It’s a love affair,” he says.

The convention, which features workshops, concerts, panels and lectures, began Sunday and runs until Friday.

The next convention will be held in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 2012.