Music on the margins: fiddle music in Cape Breton

C ape Breton is an extraordinarily creative place.It's a place that is, in several ways, on the margins.But it's also a place where cultural creativity is remarkably vital and where music is driving a developing sense of renewal.Cape Breton is an island, part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, north of mainland Nova Scotia and east of most of North America.Since 1955 a causeway has connected the island to the mainland.About 147,000 people live on the island, the majority of them in the vicinity of the de-industrialized urban region around Sydney, the largest city.Rural Inverness County, the hotbed of the music, and the place I know best, has a population of about 21,000.For the island as a whole, and for Inverness County in particular, the population is declining.The island's economy simply can't support its population, and, for much of its history, people have had to leave.Two of the island's economic mainstays, the steel industry and coal, are nearly gone, and a third, the fishery, is, like most fisheries in the world, experiencing significant change.On the edge of North America, isolated by distance from markets, as are many other parts of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, Cape Breton is a geographically and economically marginalized place.It's also, by the way, a terrifically beautiful place.But, as a couple of people have said to me when we've spoken about the economic predicament of the island, 'You can't eat scenery'.Perhaps 25,000 displaced Scots from the Highlands and islands seled in Cape Breton in the first half of the nineteenth century, displaced by the decline of the kelp industry and the Clearances.These were poor, Gaelic-speaking, Catholic Scots who crossed the Atlantic to Cape Breton, where they joined native people and descendants of earlier French fishermen.Industrial development abeed cultural diversity in Cape Breton, but the island, especially Inverness County on the western side, is very strongly inflected by that Scoish emigration.Many people would agree that Inverness County is both the centre of the Scoish culture and the heart of the music.Once I telephoned a shop from which I'd been mail-ordering CDs.When I gave my name to the woman taking my order, I said, 'Feintuch', and asked out of habit if I should spell it for her.She said no; then she spelled it for me.When I told

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